A Brief Note on "Django Unchained"

If summer is when the flashy but trashy movies come out, Christmas season is when the serious ones appear.  We have an impressive crop this winter:  Lincoln, Anna Karenina, Zero Dark Thirty, and Les Miserables.  I have already seen Lincoln (and may find time to comment on it here).  I definitely intend to comment extensively on Les Miserables (both the movie and the novel).  Anna Karenina and Zero Dark Thirty are not quite as high on my list, but both sound good.

One movie I do not intend to see, and therefore (as many have said) should refrain from commenting on is Django Unchained.  I make it my general rule never to watch any movie directed by Quen Tarantino.  Tarantino movies are nothing but general gore fests of so-graphic-its-almost-pornographic violence.  Django looks to be no exception.  The trailer offers what is presumably the movie's leading applause line:  "How do like the bounty hunting business?"  "Kill white folks and they pay you for it.  What's not to like?"

What is significant about Django is the timing.  It cannot be emphasized strongly enough -- Django embodies every antebellum white southerner's worst nightmare.  The fear that the end of slavery would lead to millions of Djangos unchained and seeking revenge was one of southerners' strongest arguments in favor of maintaining slavery.  (Even as they simultaneously argued that black people really liked being slaves).  Haiti was the great living example of what to fear.  In Haiti, the great masses of slaves did, indeed, rise up seeking revenge until all the island's white population were either killed or fled.  But such fears began before the Haitian revolution and persisted long after other colonies ended slavery without war.  Of course, when slavery actually ended, no such race war ensued.  But the Dunning School views that widely prevailed in the aftermath held that even if there had been no race war, order had broken down, general black lawlessness had been rampant, and the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante organizations were necessary to restore order.  This may be considered a milder version of the original white southern fears.

Certainly, when movies first came out, the Dunning School reigned supreme, and showing anything like Django Unchained was unthinkable.  The first full-length movie, after all, was Birth of a Nation*.  By the 1950's and '60's, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing, crude racism was no longer acceptable, but the emphasis was on presenting sterling black characters to encourage a white audience not to fear them.

I do not know much about the Blaxploitation movies of the 1970's.  It may well be that you could have shown a Django-like character in such a movie to great applause.  But by the 1980's and '90's, crack violence was at its height, our inner cities were turning into war zones, and a wave of black film makers were pleading with their audience please not to take the Djangos of the world as role models.

So, it is only now, with the Civil War long gone from living memory, the Civil Rights Movement fading fast, and violent crime receding, that one can get away with a movie like Django.  What does that tell us?

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*I suppose one could call Django the mirror opposite of Birth of a Nation.  In Django, Django is the hero.  In Birth of a Nation, he is the villain.  The nearest Birth of a Nation presents to a positive black role model looks a lot like the despised figure played by Samuel L. Jackson.