Transition 112: The Django Issue

By IU Press Journals

Issue #112 looks at violence and its relation to the history of slavery, featuring pieces on the films Django Unchained and Lincoln.

Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate.

In issue 112, the editors of Transition look at violence, particularly as it relates to the history of slavery, which raises the question of representation. Textbooks and television both grapple with the same fundamental questions: to whom do the stories of slaves belong? How should these stories be told? In this issue, Daniel Itzkovitz talks with Tony Kushner about the controversy that surrounded the making of Lincoln, a serious and sober film about the passage of the 13th Amendment. Django Unchained covers the same time period but uses a wildly different lens. The film is terrifying and topsy-turvy, and has ignited controversy that became a white-hot conflagration. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. speaks with Quentin Tarantino about the making of his film, and a host of scholars and critics, including Walter Johnson, Glenda Carpio, and Terri Francis, set the issue ablaze with provocative and searing commentary that speaks to the controversial film and its potent afterlife.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253018625

Book preview

I Like the Way You Die, Boy

fantasy’s role in Django Unchained

Glenda R. Carpio

And I am taking the story of a slave narrative and blowing it up to folkloric proportions . . . worthy of high opera. So I could have a little fun with it. One of the things I do is when the bad guys shoot people the bullets usually don’t blow people apart. They make little holes and they kill them and wound them, but they don’t rip them apart. When Django shoots someone, he blows them in half.

—QUENTIN TARANTINO

DJANGO UNCHAINED IS not supposed to be experienced or understood as a historically accurate representation of slavery; surprisingly, this point has been lost on many a viewer. It is, as the film critic Chris Vognar rightly notes, a typical Tarantino movie, which is to say that it is more concerned about movies than anything else. At the same time, the film is deeply situated in both the history of cinema and historical fantasy. Tarantino has a little fun telling the story of a slave named Django, a reference to the titular hero of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti Western, himself named after the virtuoso jazz musician Django Reinhardt. Tarantino also makes multiple visual and narrative allusions to the blaxploitation tour de force, the 1975 film Mandingo, and other films in this genre—The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) and its sequels, The Soul of Nigger Charley (1973) and Boss Nigger (1975), as well as direct and oblique references to Norse mythology, to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the novel that inspired it (Thomas Dixon’s 1905 The Clansman), to the slave narrative genre, and a host of other cultural artifacts. But Django Unchained also jolts viewers with scenes of chattel slavery that are so violently horrific that watching without squirming is impossible, as when a slave is torn apart by dogs or when two slaves are made to fight each other to death with bare hands. The combination of Tarantino having a little fun and his subject matter, arguably the mostly explosive and, especially from a contemporary perspective, most earnestly treated topic in American history, risks trivialization. Yet Django Unchained is also a richly allusive cultural text that, through its intertextuality and its arguably excessive use of violence, makes vivid the brutality of American chattel slavery.

Tarantino’s willingness to treat a national wound with pop aesthetics is startling, but it also suggests why popular culture has the potential to get at topics that more highbrow forms can miss. In avoiding the solemnity of polite and earnest forms of expression, as in Amistad or Schindler’s List, for instance, films like Django Unchained confront viewers with the raw brutality of the past—the scene in which a slave is torn to pieces by dogs has historical referents—while giving free expression to fantasies, in this case that of revenge. The seemingly contradictory combination of fun (form) and heaviness (subject) has other effects. Tarantino’s blowing up of the slave narrative to folkloric proportions shuttles viewers between the comic and horrific, keeping them from settling in any one of the two poles for too long. This produces a series of jolts, which heighten the violence represented at times to let viewers enjoy the revenge fantasy, at others to make them witness slavery’s violence. Take for instance the scene in which we are introduced to Big Daddy, the owner of a lusciously rendered plantation where King Schultz and Django are looking for the Brittle Brothers. Played by Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame, Big Daddy is dressed in an impeccable cream-colored suit—a Colonel Sanders meets Miami Vice look, as Sharen Davis, costume designer for the film puts it. The meeting of these three characters is tense mainly because Django rides up in front of Big Daddy’s white house on a horse, a capital sin in antebellum America, but once Schultz mentions big money, Big Daddy welcomes both, though he is markedly less polite to Django. The scene that follows is one in which Big Daddy has to explain to one of his female slaves how to treat Django who, as Schutlz informs him, is free. What is a free black man and how to treat him? Tarantino treats us to a slowed down, mellow comedy in which Big Daddy struggles to explain these concepts and indeed, to understand them. From this scene we cut to Django, dressed as Schultz’s valet in an outfit he picked out himself—a blue jacket and knee britches, a white ruffle jabot, and white stockings—for which a slave makes fun of him: "So you really free? . . . You mean you wanna dress like that? Yet Django, in his blue suit, wreaks vengeance on the same men that brutally lashed his wife and that were about to brutalize another black woman. The slow comedy we enjoy at the expense of Big Daddy turns to the speedy and action-filled drama of Django’s first acts of revenge in the film. He does not blow apart his first body—the first Brittle brother falls like timber after a bullet pierces him through a page of the Bible he has sacrilegiously pinned to his chest. But then Django is just getting started. His blue suit was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough’s 1770 painting The Blue Boy, a highly prized commodity (when the painting was sold to the railway pioneer Henry Edwards Huntington, it fetched a record breaking price). Casting Django in his blue suit nods to the practice in the history of art of ennobling purportedly primitive" people by dressing and framing them after the fashion of noblemen—a title to which Big Daddy, in his fine suit and grand plantation aspires. And yet, in his blue suit Django makes ironic both Big Daddy’s aspirations and the civility and commodity culture that Gainsborough’s painting came to represent. Blue Boy he ain’t.

Popular culture has the potential to get at topics that more highbrow forms can miss.

Excape. Graphite and pastel on paper. 72 × 84.25 in. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. ©2011 Kara Walker.

Django’s first act of revenge is tightly framed around the memory of his wife’s lashing, which Tarantino creates by invoking the opening of Corbucci’s Django. Corbucci’s film opens just after the Civil War when the titular hero, still wearing part of his Union Army uniform, comes upon a bloody scene: a bound woman is being lashed by a group of Mexican outlaws who soon after get shot by a rival gang, a group of southern rebels still fighting the Lost Cause on the Mexican-U.S. border. The rebels, who later in the film take to wearing Klan-like red hoods, free the woman but only in order to crucify her. That is, until Django rescues the lady in distress by shooting all but the leader of the gang, who must remain alive until Django executes his plan to avenge his dead love.

Tarantino’s allusions to Corbucci’s film, which includes such details as the original theme music and the red typography of the initial credits, simultaneously index Civil War America and post-World War II Italy. The two are not as disconnected as it might first appear. As Tarantino notes, in Django, what Corbucci was truly dealing with . . . was fascism—which makes sense, as Italy was getting out from under Mussolini’s boot heel. Austin Fisher, among other film critics, corroborates Tarantino’s view and shows, in his Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence, and Popular Italian Cinema (2011), how it applies to other major filmmakers in the genre—i.e., Sergio Leone. As Tarantino puts it, the violent, pitiless, Corbucci West, a muddy, desolate place that includes scenes of Southern rebels taking sadistic pleasure in killing Mexicans (who are forced to try to outrun bullets), is really fascism just gussied up with cowboy-Mexican iconography. What would be the American equivalent of fascism, Tarantino wondered? The answer takes us back to American chattel slavery, specifically to Django’s wife Broomhilda, whose name, by no small coincidence references the Brünnhilde of Norse mythology (where she is a female warrior) and of Germany’s Richard Wagner in his opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, the plot of which, in a shortened and modified form, Schultz tells Django after he gets over his initial surprise that the latter’s wife is a German-speaking slave named Broomhilda von Shaft. They call me Hildie, she tells us. In Schultz’s story, Broomhilda is a maiden locked in a circle of hell fire who is saved by Siegfried, the hero. Django is thus Hildie’s savior who must free her from the circle of hell fire that is Candie Land.

In his blue suit Django makes ironic both Big Daddy’s aspirations and the civility and commodity culture that Gainsborough’s painting came to represent. Blue Boy he ain’t.

The comedian and activist Dick Gregory cites both the mythical proportions of Django and Hildie’s romance and the sheer pleasure of seeing a black man in the role of a bad-ass cowboy (as an octogenarian he well remembers when both were utterly alien in American popular culture) as two of his favorite aspects of Tarantino’s film, which he claims to have seen a dozen times. Tarantino sets up Django’s initial reunion with Hildie to the sound of Elisa Toffoli’s mournful but beautiful love song, "Ancora Qui (Still Here"), which both reinforces the allusions to Corbucci, since it is sung in Italian, with music by the great film composer Ennio Morricone, famous for his spaghetti Western soundtracks, but also gives you a sense of Hildie’s perspective: a female voice sings of her lover’s return after a painful separation, during which she thinks she sees him in the very nature around her:

She imagines reuniting with her love in some future time in a prayer-like fashion: "Ritornerai, ritornerò/ Ricorderai, ricoderò—You will return, I will return/ You will remember, I will remember. The song plays as Hildie is being led to Schultz’s room for his sexual pleasure though unbeknownst to her it is just a ploy to have her safely, if briefly, reunited with Django. Ancora Qui" thus plays in counterpoint and in synchronicity with the narrative while adding to the mythic aspect of the lovers’ reunion since the song, with its emphasis on loss, memory, and hope, implicitly invokes themes central to love poetry, including that of Dante’s Inferno.

But Django Unchained will not let its viewers stay in this realm for long. The other major filmic influence on Tarantino is Mandingo, a film that, as Chris Vognar writes, is noted not only as a spectacular example of blaxploitation but also as a film that paints a pungent portrait of [American slavery’s] capacity to rot every human relationship in its vicinity. The film is rendered mostly from the perspective of the crippled son of a rheumatic master in a plantation that, in its very surroundings invokes decay. From its first scenes the film highlights the deep libidinal and commercial investment in black bodies that masters and slave traders share. In one scene a trader inspects a slave’s anus to insure he does not have hemorrhoids while in another a white woman fondles a slave’s genitals to test his prowess; later another white woman makes this slave pleasure her. The film is nothing if not sordidly shocking and yet overall the emphasis is indeed on the cancerous nature of slavery, its capacity to twist every human relationship beyond recognition.

The Daily Constitution 1878. Graphite and pastel on paper. 72 × 77.75 in. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. ©2011 Kara Walker.

Tarantino quotes from Mandingo incisively, eschewing the film’s focus on sex or, to be more specific, on rape, in favor of showing other forms of violence that slavery inflicted upon the black body as well as the grief, bitter acquiescence, and resistance it demanded from the enslaved. Unlike Mandingo, Django Unchained does not have any sex scenes, using nudity only to show Hildie’s punishment after she tries to run away: she is locked, naked in a coffin-like iron hot box from where Django, in stunned grief and anger, sees her being taken out when he arrives at Candie Land. In his allusions to Mandingo, Tarantino not only heightens the violence of that film but also complicates it. In Mandingo a slave is punished for learning to read by being forced to hang naked upside down in order to be lashed mercilessly. In Tarantino’s film Django is punished similarly except that the lashing is replaced by the threat of castration. The brutal scene of black on black bare-knuckle combat to the death that Tarantino takes from Mandingo clearly shows the sadistic form of entertainment mixed with pecuniary titillation that the master class enjoys at the expense of black people’s pain. In a similar scene in Django Unchained the viewer is subjected to long and up-close shots of the fighting, to the gory details of battle, and the vociferous sadistic pleasure that the master, Calvin Candie takes. The fighting scene in Tarantino’s film has a selective audience that, unlike the one in Mandingo, includes other slaves: a glamorous woman who is clearly Candie’s lover, a maid dressed in a sexualized but doll-like uniform, a bartender, and finally Django who turns his back on the scene. It also includes a cameo by Franco Nero, the Italian actor who plays the original Django in Corbucci’s film, this time in the un-heroic role of a Mandingo owner betting against Candie. When his man is killed, he walks towards the bar and there, wearing conspicuously white gloves, meets Django and asks him to spell out his name (the ‘D’ is silent—I know, says Franco Nero’s character). The scene thus frames the original and present hero who like the other slaves in the room, are in the compromised position of participating as silent witnesses in a scene of sheer brutality. As critics have pointed out, this kind of fighting isn’t based on historical accounts—it comes from Mandingo. But Tarantino quotes it to highlight the cruelty of slavery, which not only set black people against each other but also made slaves passive spectators to brutality against the enslaved and compromised the position of would-be heroes. In an interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., reprinted in this issue, Tarantino highlights Django’s implicit culpability in the murder of D’Artagnan, the slave who, in sick irony is named after Alexandre Dumas’ hero, only to be made to kill other black men and, ultimately, to be torn apart by dogs.

If Mandingo includes minor scenes of slave resistance as counterbalance, Django Unchained unleashes a spectacular scene of revenge when Django, after almost freeing Hildie, loses Schutlz and must become a hero on his own right. Not surprisingly, the soundtrack for the pinnacle of this scene—when Django comes out shooting with both hands, wasting bodies left and right—is 2Pac’s Untouchable, the lyrics of which in the film’ s official soundtrack are mixed with James Brown’s Payback, a song about revenge if there ever was one. Here they are, in part:

Am I wrong cause I wanna get it on till I die?

Am I wrong cause I wanna get it on till I die?

Get it on till I die

Get it on till I die

Y’all, Y’all remember me

Y’all, Y’all remember me

Only wish to breed

I explode into a million seeds

Y’all remember me

Legendary live eternally

Bury me in pieces cause they fear reincarnation

This time Django does blow bodies apart as he shoots, using dead white men as his shield. He must ultimately surrender but not before he makes blood spurt to high heavens in a violence that is so extreme it is hyperbolic. Blast me but never ask me to live a lie, sings 2Pac, giving voice to the hero who is ready to fight to death but who is also cast as Osiris, god of regeneration and rebirth (I explode into a million seeds), whose body was cut in pieces but who lives eternally if not in body, in memory (Y’all remember me). Here fantasy—the realm of dreams, of comedy, of art—is the star. No doubt the chances of Django outliving his capture, and of returning to Candie Land to blow it up and then run off safely with his love, are nil—but we are in the realm of make-believe. This does not mean that the vicarious emotions viewers experience through Django are immaterial. If, as Freud argued, jokes, like dreams, are vehicles for the expressions of fantasies, of wish fulfillments or repressed aggression, the same may be said of films like Django Unchained and 2Pac’s Untouchable, and much of hip-hop, for that matter.

But, whose fantasy? Is it that of the explosive Tarantino, a boy playing with his toys, who has so much fun doing this film that he makes a cameo in which Django blows him to smithereens with dynamite, which was invented only after the Civil War? At its most trite perhaps it is (needless to say, Tarantino and his film are not above critique). Is it an interracial buddy film-fantasy, with Schultz playing the role of the benevolent savior? Yes, that too. But the film is also a richly allusive, unsentimental fantasy of unfettered black male freedom and power. Django is no rebel leader; he frees his wife and no one else. In fact, throughout the film he has contentious encounters with other black men, especially the despicable Stephen, arguably his most virulent antagonist. And yet, as Scott Reynolds Nelson points out in his article Django Untangled: The Legend of the Bad Black Man, whether intentionally or not, Tarantino has created in Django the incarnation of a folk hero: the bad black man (think Stagolee), legends about which begin to circulate