Django Unchained

Tarantino seems to care more about his place in pop culture than history or morality

Tarantino has never had the slightest interest in social history. He is a comic book artist who turns the Holocaust into a joke (Inglourious Basterds) and comes up with similar gags in Django Unchained, in which he shows slavery in the American South of the late 1850s. When Charles Dickens created the character Fagin in Oliver Twist, he referred to him as ‘the Jew’ hundreds of times in the first 38 chapters of his serialised novel. But once it was pointed out to Dickens that this was racially offensive, he stopped using the reference.

The use of the word ‘nigger’ is equally prolific in Django Unchained, with the difference that here, with Tarantino, it is a conscious stylistic choice to dramatise his cult movies and aggrandise his ‘hip’ image of a White man encroaching on sensitive Black territory and doing a ‘camp’ version of it.

His African American hero, Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx), is a slave who is rescued by a bounty hunter of German origin, Dr Schultz (Christoph Waltz). The two first work together as a team and later travel to the deep South to look for Django’s wife, who, earlier, had been forcibly separated from him.

In Mississippi, we meet a plantation owner jokingly called Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) who uses slaves in horrific gladiatorial fights and lets dogs attack and kill fighters who lose. In fact, slave labour was the backbone of the economy in the South and it would not have been financially prudent to have them kill each other, nor is there any historical record of it.

Satire is one thing, but there is something obscene about getting cinema audiences across the world sniggering at the word ‘nigger’ and seeing the ‘Ku Klux Klan’ as funny men with white bags on their heads. Clearly, this is a director who is more interested in consolidating his aura in pop culture than he is in history, morality or even film aesthetics.

About The Author

Ajit Duara