Beginning with the opening screen card, which informs us that
people in Texas in 1858 were living “Two Years Before the Civil
War,” the historical errors and anachronisms in Quentin Tarantino’s
Django Unchained come thick and fast. As in
Inglourious Basterds (2009) there is even an
orthographical mistake inserted into the title to indicate the
author’s contempt for conventional ideas of, well, convention, at
least as it relates to linguistic or historical accuracy. In the
film we are told that the “D” in the name of the film’s ex-slave
superhero, Django (Jamie Foxx), is silent. But the spelling of the
name, presumably taken proleptically from the great French jazz
guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) of the Quintette du Hot Club
de France by way of Sergio Corbucci’s spaghetti western
Django (1966), was invented in the first place in order to
signal to French speakers that the name was to be pronounced not in
the usual French way but comme en anglais, avec un “D”
avant (like Jim of Jules et Jim). In other
words, the D is not silent but otiose.
So, too, we have ante-bellum Klansmen and Jim Crow laws out of
their time, an account of Wagner’s Siegfried eighteen
years before its premiere, and a lurid amalgam of “Mandingo
fighting,” Wild West-style six-gun shootouts and “Wanted, Dead or
Alive” bounty-hunting all taken straight from the movies.
Furthermore, we must listen to an elaborate theory of “scientific”
racism based on an idiosyncratic version of phrenology from a
slave-owner named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) — the sort of
thing that really belongs to the 20th century eugenics movement
which did so much to launch the “progressive” era in America. In
slave days, nobody felt the need to demonstrate the inferiority of
the Negro. The world in which Django teams up with a German dentist
named King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) to hunt down and murder
dead-or-alive fugitives for the bounty on their heads and, then, to
rescue the former’s wife, named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from
bondage, is clearly as fantastical as “Candyland,” which not
coincidentally is the name of Mr. Candie’s Mississippi
plantation.
Mr. Tarantino’s contempt for history extends even to his
defense, in the wake of the Newtown shootings, of the usual
gore-fest that this movie, in common with its predecessors, quickly
becomes. He modestly compared himself to Shakespeare whose plays,
he supposes, were like his own movies in containing lots of
“violence” and who was, like himself, thus blamed for inciting
“violence in the streets.” This is no more historically accurate
than anything else about the movie, but for some reason critics and
commentators have not thought it worth their while to mention the
fact. I suppose this is because Django Unchained is so
obviously cartoonish throughout that no one ever expected of it so
much as an approximation of historical accuracy. As with Pulp
Fiction, the author advertises up front that he is speaking to
us with no serious purpose but merely as a connoisseur and
pasticheur of pop-cultural trash which he has found amusing.
Here, he imitates the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 1970s,
as will be clear from the opening frames, but he grafts onto his
ever more fantastical tale of frontier honor, as he did onto the
World War II story in Inglorious Bastards, what is
obviously intended as a sort of politico-social commentary.
Slavery, it seems, like Nazism, was a very bad thing — who knew? —
and therefore anyone in any way associated with it must have been
almost unimaginably evil. Certainly Mr. Tarantino is unable to
imagine it except in the most luridly unrealistic fashion. As a
result, we have absolute license to delight in anything that is
done to such people — first, because they have made the fatal
decision to get involved in slavery (or Nazism, in the earlier
film) and, second, because they are so unlike real people that they
have already been robbed of their humanity in any case. Like the
victims of Dr. Schultz’s dead-or-alive bounty-hunting, they must be
regarded as beyond the pale of civilized movie-making and therefore
fair game for Mr. Tarantino’s sick fantasies of violent death.
Those, too, would doubtless have passed unnoticed — just Quentin
being Quentin — but for the Newtown massacre, which actually caused
the movie’s premiere to be delayed. Could there have been a twinge
of conscience there, or only advice from a PR guy? But there was
more criticism of the auteur for his script’s casual use
of a well-known racial slur — where, of course, it suited him to
plead that this, at least, was historically accurate — than there
was for his graphic portrayal of hecatombs of human slaughter, the
victims being slave-owners and their lackeys. Spike Lee, for one,
criticized his frequent use of “the n-word” as a form of
“disrespect” to his own ancestors, though if they were my ancestors
I would have found much worse disrespect in seeing them presented
as one-dimensional figures in an unashamedly anachronistic cartoon
that made light of their sufferings by making them, like their
deliverance from them, merely fantastical.
Why has there been no critical complaint about Mr. Tarantino’s
disguising the real evils of slavery under a thick impasto of
exaggeration? For the same reason, I guess, that there has been so
little, and that little mostly muted, of his obvious delight in a
counterfeit presentation of what bullets and high explosives can do
to the human body. However distorted the pulp fiction and B-movies
on which Mr. Tarantino relies for his model, they nearly always
retained some tether to reality — on which, therefore, they could
shed some light, however dim. Django Unchained, like
Inglorious Bastards and Kill
Bill before it, has none. Distortion and
therefore falsity is of its very essence. And that should also tell
us something, too, about the nature of the thrill some if not all
the Taranteenies are getting from the supposedly “true to life”
blood and guts that here and there, even in the media, people have
lately complained of. When that’s the only truth you care about,
it’s a pretty sure bet that that isn’t true either.
