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For The Love Of Movies... Can We Talk?The Slave Revenge Narrative Many Hoped For... And It's Not 'Django Unchained'
I don't know if I've ever seen so many white people this excited about a slave movie.
And from reading the thoughts of many others, a common belief seems to be that you're apparently *uncool* if you aren't damned excited about Django Unchained.
Well, I guess I'm *uncool.*
Since the trailer was officially released earlier this week, several folks have asked me for my thoughts on what we've seen thus far of Quentin Tarantino's revisionist slave revenge pic Django Unchained. I thought I'd already been clear about all that, sharing concerns I've had since first reading a draft of the script about a year ago, and posting my thoughts here.
To summarize, based on all I've seen thus far, this isn't the slave revenge movie I (and I know countless others) were hoping for.
And no, it has little to do with the fact that the director is not black, which I know has bothered many others. But that's not the point of contention for me.
I think I speak for a lot of you when I say that, when we first learned that Tarantino was making a slave revenge movie, we immediately thought, Inglorious Basterds Part 2, except the Basterds this time would be slaves, and the villains whose scalps are sliced off in full 35mm color glory, would be the KKK (or any supporters/enforcers of the face of white supremacy during that era).
I'd say there was some excitement about the possibilities. And then I read a draft of the script, and realized that it wasn't at all anything like what many of us hoped for; instead, call it the frivolity of slavery - superficial, exploitation cinema that would've likely been an easier pill to swallow 35 - 40 years ago. A blend of spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation cinema.
And any excitement I previously had for the project almost entirely vanished.
So what were many within the black audience hoping for?
Recall when I had Wendell B Harris Jr (Chameleon Street) on the Shadow & Act Livecast 3 years ago, in 2009, and he relayed a time when he pitched a contemporary lynching retribution film to studio execs, who, not-so-surprisingly weren’t interested. And in a later post, I made connections between Wendell's idea and another Tarantino movie (which hadn't been released at the time), Inglorious Basterds - the revisionist history movie on how WWII ended, set in Nazi-occupied France. It’s a revenge flick; as Jeffrey Wells put it: “a Jewish payback movie in which all kinds of brutal and sadistic killings of Germans are presented as not only righteous but delicious, because “them Nazis”… are viciously anti-Semitic and deserve it all to hell.”
Now repeat that last sentence replacing "Jewish" with "slave," "Germans" with "white supremacists," "Nazis" with "KKKs," and finally "anti-Semitic" with "racists."
Revenge in Basterds, unlike Wendell Harris’ lynching retribution idea, does not take place almost a century after the crime. It happens synchronously, in the era it references – essentially one man’s fantasy about what could have been, and not what actually was.
So, it got me thinking further - what if Wendell B Harris’ lynching revenge flick followed a similar storyline? Again, revisionist history, set during the days in which the lynching of black people were de facto commonplace.
Thus, like Tarantino’s Basterds, two story lines converge. Borrowing almost verbatim from the Basterds synopsis, with some obvious alterations made with purpose: One story would follow a ragtag group of black men (escaped slaves) whose mission is to take out as many offending whites as they can get their hands on. They ambush and kill white men responsible for the lynchings of blacks (whether members of the KKK, officers of the so-called law, and members of any white supremacist mobs usually found at the center of lynchings), unabashedly desecrating their corpses, always leaving one alive, so that he can tell others. And the second storyline follows a young black woman (also an escaped slave) who seeks to avenge the death of her family at the hands of white supremacists, by sabotaging the premiere of some supremacist group’s latest propaganda film release, by luring all the guilty parties and their leaders into her theatre, with the intent to seal them all in, and burn the building down, killing them all. And given the time the movie will take place, we’ll make the propaganda film within the film, D.W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation.
The title of Wendell Harris’s version can stay the same – Inglorious Basterds. It still works, right?
But that’s not quite the kind of film you’re going to see here, with Django Unchained. It’s not Inglorious Basterds with black Basterds, and white supremacists getting their skulls crushed with baseball bats.
Unless the script has changed drastically since the draft I read (and I hear Tarantino has rewritten parts of it). But all I can go on is what's been revealed so far, which doesn't appear to be very different from what I read. Specific sequences may have have changed, but the overall idea that Django exists in a white protag's shadow, before being able to eventually come into his own and "claim what's his in the end," still appears to be at the heart of the story.
Therein lies the problem I believe many of us have with the film, and which some still don't seem to quite understand. That and the fact that Django's bride, Broomhilda, reads like more of a prop in the draft of the script I have seen. For all intents and purposes, she’s the lead female in the film, but, returning to the Inglorious Basterds comparison, she’s no Shosanna. The black female "lead" here doesn’t get the same kind of stately treatment that Tarantino gave Shosanna in Basterds. Not even close.
And in anticipation of those who will comment on how true to life the story is, and how representative it is of the time it takes place, my response will be - what part of the term "revisionist history" don't you quite understand? Last I checked, Adolph Hitler didn't die from gunshot wounds, in a Paris movie theater set ablaze - a plan orchestrated by a Jewish woman calling herself Emmanuelle Mimieux (after assuming a new identity in France, to protect herself).
Tarantino had countless options with Django; but he went with the most obvious, uninventive choices here, in my humble opinion. American history is littered with black slave rebellions and insurrections that took place during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and most of them didn't require a white mentor figure to essentially teach them and show them way.
Unlike Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, Django doesn't get to call up on a few "hard, pipe-hittin' niggers" to go to work on their plantation masters "with a pair a pliers and a blowtorch." There are seemingly no obvious opportunities to "get medieval" on whitey's ass here, because, given all he and Broomhilda are put through in the film, I think some of us would prefer if he (or rather THEY - enslaved women did also rage against the machine) went all id, in psychoanalytic terms.
I've obviously not seen the entire film; no one has - a fact that makes it all-the-more strange that there are some who seem intent on suppressing the voices of those with concerns about the upcoming film, as if they themselves have already seen it. Let's face it, we're all basing our thoughts on available data, and every opinion, as long as it's adequately supported, is valid at this point.
And no, I'm not a Tarantino "hater," but I wouldn't call myself a "fanboy" either. This is simply not the slave revenge narrative I hoped for; and given the likelihood that we'll see another one - especially of this scale - is quite slim, it's too bad.
Aside from this seeming thus far be more of a fanboy's wet dream, I'll certainly still see Django Unchained; I have to, given the work I do here on Shadow And Act. Maybe plenty has indeed changed from script to screen (or at least, since the draft that I read last year), and I'll be pleasantly surprised. And if that happens, I'll eat crow.
But if you're asking me (as many have) what I think of what I know of the project so far (again, based on the script I read, the trailer that's been released, the bits and pieces revealed by the cast and crew over the last many months), these are my thoughts.
148 Comments
Donella | June 14, 2012 4:17 PM
"...there are some who seem intent on suppressing the voices of those with concerns about the upcoming film..." Yes, indeed.
Melanie | June 12, 2012 5:41 PM
Honestly, I'm not a film buff or historian. My opinion on the trailer is just that it looks weak. The film looks weak and I don't think I watched it in its full entirety before my mind started to wander.
I understand the author's points on the film's lack of gravity when it comes to slavery, but honestly I think I could have gone with that if the concept itself seemed better executed, but it doesn't feel like it is. A big part of what turns me off is that Jamie Foxx feels very wrong for this role. Very, Very wrong. It just doesn't resonate, at all.
If it's going to be absurd, let it be absurd....but somehting just felt off.
NameYsaye | June 11, 2012 5:23 PM
I don't take anything Tarantino does seriously; his films are meant solely as entertainment. He is purposely irreverent and takes artistic license to the extreme. He is not a historian. He takes stories and events from history, culture, and myth and creates something on the screen for people who like his work. Don't expect factual data out of Tarantino's films not to be skewed. Every last one of his pics has been retarded, yet brilliant. Django is not going to be any different. He won't be re-writing history with this film. He will be feeding the imaginations of people whose lives would be otherwise bland. For 2 hours Django will be an escape, a way out, for people living quietly desperate lives, who are looking for adventure, a story, and some way to enliven their world through a fiction too ridiculous to be real. If I were looking for a movie to be on point and true about the condition of the enslaved in America, or to give me a history lesson about the numerous acts of heroism of Afro American women and men and children during that period of time, that has never ended only morphed into something new and improved, I would not expect it from Tarantino. He is not in it for the glory of having made a contribution to the knowledge about any event in history, no matter where it happened or when or to whom. He is in it for the gore, for the shock, for the talk, for the money. Sure, there needs to be some form of media that depicts true images of what truly happened and how Black people freed themselves, but that will only happen when we control the media and the message, and the form and distribution of that form. Until then, I will buy my ticket and sit in a crowded theatre to watch the action and adventure and artistic talent of those on screen, with full knowledge that this ain't real and it don't mean a thing. We put absolutely too much energy into finding meaning where there isn't any. Tarantino makes that point every time he makes a movie. It is his own failure to be unable to rise above his conditioned mind, his personality and the limits of his brilliance, to use the power he has earned to make a movie true to the reality that Blacks were their own saviors and inspirations because that is the truth. That he would bring to screen a film that does not allow his characters to be true representatives of Black life in telling this story indicates how immature his mind remains. We should remember he is still just a man, not a god with a camera. Let's not make this failure our remorse.
Dr. Phil Valentine | June 11, 2012 3:13 PM
Excellent analysis. This type of controlled and marginalized "Black fury on screen" is in keeping with the not-too-publicized Khazaarian racism that is awash in Hollywood. Here we are in the 21st century putting white people into other dimensions and distant planets in outer space, and you can't find 2 or more black people of authority anywhere in the same screen-shot! The writer and director of the movie "Sankofa" had to re-do the story-line and re-edit some 16 times because the Khazaarian owners of Hollywood didn't want as much "violence" being shown against whites in the film. Thus we saw the black female lead take her revenge on her rapist master OFF-screen, while Mutabaruka, the ONE man with the heart of a Nat Turner, slink back into the shadows (with a readied machete), while his woman is being abused by slavers. But the rape and brutality of Black women by the whites was VIVID and EXPLICIT, as was the on-screen emasculation of the Black males. Look at the film "Panther". Mario Van Peebles was refused funding by the Khazaarian elite of Hollywood because he wouldn't put a few whites into the "Black" Panther Movement. All this is quite in keeping with the psycho-political subtext of a not-too-well-known movie starring Marlon Brando entitled "Burn". The main gist of the movie (regardless of what Wikipedia says) is that on an island in the Lesser Antilles, whites had achieved "god-like" status among the enslaved population there; so much so that the natives were made to believe that whites could not be killed or harmed in any way. Whites were never to show that they were vulnerable to the majority population, and any affront to them was met with lethal retribution. The idea was to never let the slave population know that they possessed the ability kill and remove these maggot parasites from their homeland, if they only had the WILL to do so. Of course, as is the down-low racist policy of Hollywood, a "white" savior must be there to "show them the way". Brando literally kills a white man in front of the natives and gives the black men of the island their "balls back". And we've seen the same "massa-messiah" bulls#*t perpetuated in the movie "Avatar".
So what else is new...???
jenny lansing | June 11, 2012 3:10 PM
CareyCarey, if you don't see AVATAR as a "white Savior" film you're just not seein.' Just sayin.' Django may be all that you describe. But AVATAR?! They're even "White-savin'" the indigenous on other planets now in Hollywood!
Mark Dudley | June 11, 2012 1:57 PM
I applaud your thorough examination thus far of the thematic realities of this, yet to be released film. However, I make the same challenge to you critics as I would to any artist, " You don't like where a film has gone or is likely headed? Make one yourself".
Charles Judson | June 11, 2012 1:53 AM
Misha, as Carey rightfully points out the Savior in White Savior has tended to have a more figurative than a literal connotation and it shows in the most well known examples. Jake in AVATAR is resurrected from the dead. Dunbar in DANCES dies a metaphorical death and is given a new name, then lives among the natives for so long that when he returns to his fort he's unrecognizable and his fellow soldiers shoot at him. Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW is treated as a God. Tarzan is a demigod like figure, a man born mortal with preternatural abilities along the lines of Hercules. Speaking to Fred's points about the technology, even in films like DANGEROUS MINDS, Michelle Pfeiffer's teacher is a Prometheus surrogate, bringing "fire" (aka knowledge) to her students. Same with THE BLIND SIDE. Even based on true stories, there are still elements of the Prometheus portion of the White Savior trope that are evident. Without the Savior's knowledge, the primitive people the Savior is helping will not progress, they will not evolve, and as a result they won't be protected. Remember, it's Jesus Christ's death and his teachings that were to change the world. Moses gave the 10 commandments to the Israelites. In STAR TREK: TNG the Prime Directive is a subversion of the Prometheus myth. The Federation holds back knowledge for the "benefit" of the primitive civilizations they encounter, placing TNG's Federation in the role of a benevolent White Savior. To quote Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." TNG's crew are basically gods making decisions on behalf of the people below them. It's been interesting over the last few years to see how much the White Savior Trope has been stretched beyond its original use to encompass so much.
CareyCarey | June 10, 2012 8:58 AM
CHECKMATE! The wicked witches are dead. "Also, I always assumed white saviors saved just because they are so wholesome and white...not because they have their own devious intentions". Great insight Ali. The noun phrase "White" saviors, as utilized by blacks in this context, has traditionally been applied to someone above reproach/saintly. Their rewards are based solely on the spirit of helping a person in dire consequences, not personal gain! Dr. King Schultz ( Christoph Waltz) is not a savior nor a "saint". Django and Schultz have a reciprocal relationship... each needs each other.~ by WOW | June 10, 2012 8:40 AM (after the dust settled and the kneejerks were asleep). GAME-SET-MATCH.... they all fall down.
Mark & Darla | June 10, 2012 12:06 AM
This blog are full of narrow-minded narcissists who lack tolerance to another person like or dislike or their perception of art. The narcissists believe their perception of art is the "holy grille" that can't be disputed, examine, scrutinize, study, inspected or analyze. They also believe the longer their post are the more valid their argument. This blog reminds of the show "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
Moonraper | June 9, 2012 10:46 PM
CareyCarey is a plot to destroy black people.
misha | June 9, 2012 9:10 PM
Jug, no surprise that people are focusing on Waltz's race. If Tarantino didn't want folk to do so then have shouldn't have introduced the aforementioned trope. Or is he oblivious to the fact that in such films, race becomes much more of a factor than it would otherwise? I certainly ain't buying that!
Curtis | June 9, 2012 5:20 PM
I gotta say it's Interesting to me that folks are rushing to defend Quentin Tarantino so fiercely, yet when Spike gets criticized on this blog I don't see the same kind rush to defend Spike. Instead, it's the opposite. More love for Tarantino than Spike Lee on a black film blog.