Is Django Unchained racist?

IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah but there wasn't an Morricone either. Funny how we're so used to that being on Western soundtracks we kinda think it was what cowboys were listening too!
 
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rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
true. but i think theres diff rules for scores and actual songs used in film soundtracks. the john legend one was a good one though. even dobie gray or some black country and western would have made more sense. one thing i thought weird about the film is that it didnt seem as authoritative as the usual QT film. maybe he was REALLY going for that unpolished european western feel, but what i read about him still editing it just weeks before the release makes sense. even the scores used, i know he likes rawness, and they were sourced from his old LPs, but they actually sounded like it! i would have thought it would be beefed up. if he really does do a 5 hour edit for the dvd and blu ray like sam jackson has mentioned, id love to see it.
 
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rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
i keep thinking about this movie for some reason (i might have to see it again). i really enjoyed it but now think perhaps spike lee was right, it is just an awkward fit (though more than the western aspect, its the comedy 'toon element that does that). but then its also a great subversion of the usual race representation in hollywood so its a weird film in that every accusation you try and level at it never quite fits.

crowley is otm about how unusual it is for a black lead (or co lead) in a mainstream movie to kill tons of white guys but how this could have been better is if the killings were more vindictive and slavery specific. the psychological motivation wasnt made clear enough, like it is in a film like once upon a time in the west for example. the shots of blood on cotton fileds were nice touches but im surprised the killings werent more imaginative. barring certain scenes, QT actually made a pretty restrained movie.

im really interested to see steve mcqueens slavery movie now.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
rubberdingyrapids said:
how this could have been better is if the killings were more vindictive and slavery specific. the psychological motivation wasnt made clear enough.
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Starting to think we saw a different movie here. Short of having Django say "this is for my brothers and sisters" every time he offed another trader/slaver I don't see how it could've been more slavery specific. Almost everyone in the film who's involved in the slave trade gets killed. What more do you want?
 
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rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
things involving the tools that were used for whipping, chaining, collaring, lynching, branding, need i go on? all im saying is that QT does violence in a way that makes it look boring in other films but the potential to make it even more twisted was massive here. if you think back to things like the ear scene in reservoir dogs, there was little like that here. unless you count a man getting his penis shot off.
 
e/y

e/y

Well-known member
http://justinstruggles.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/django-deconstructed/

In terms of how racism is dealt with in Django Unchained, I have more of a problem with what Tarantino chooses not to portray than what he does. There are two types of white people in Django, the evil idiotic fools such as who defend and profit from enslavement and the lone noble cultured liberal who would rather die than acquiesce to a racist intellectual pygmy. Check the binary opposition: we have the good and the evil, the educated, self-made European liberal versus the inbreeding psychopathic Southern idiots. The white audience need to identify with our heroes but the enslavement of Africans is explained as a system that only the corrupt and stupid could condone. This simplification performs a very powerful function for white liberal audiences, not only can they see themselves and therefore the present/relative future in Dr King (Schultz) but enslavement and it’s racist logic is explained as something only the “bad guys” do. With Steven we have the Uncle Tom to end all Uncle Toms and is revealed to be the real mastermind of the horrors of Candie-land. He much more than Candie, is the real villain.

In Tarantino’s political polemic, white supremacy isn’t a concept that perpetuates itself by and through the good people that make up America’s laws or enforce them. Certainly not by (shock horror!) liberal minded Americans who love black people. This of course is a myth, racism in America is systemic and structural. “Bad people” doesn’t explain why there are more African-Americans imprisoned now than those who were enslaved in 1850. By obscuring of structural reasoning, the problem is reduced and personalised to Steven, the KKK, Candie and “Big Daddy” of the past and absolves the present from its gory past. The white and perhaps black liberal viewer can easily laugh at these archaic creatures and may struggle erroneously to make any link between that world run by racist psychopaths and their world run by a smooth talking, basketball playing, poetry reading and child killing black President.
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As I said before, the film is enjoyable due to its craft and humour. But well before this film was made, bell hooks stunningly critiqued the Hollywood spectacle and made a very important point. Watch this video presented by her. In the first two minutes it shows an excerpt of Spike Lee’s film, Girl 6, in the clip Quentin Tarantino plays a version of himself and says:

“[it is going to be] the greatest romantic, African-American film ever made. Directed by me, of course.”
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Life imitates Art. No wonder Spike couldn’t watch it, he made a film in 1996 to comment on how Hollywood sees blackness, i.e. an exotic setting or genre, that needs not bear any relation to or autonomy of the community from which it is sourced. This is what kyriarchal culture is about, not a sadistic impulse to denigrate women, Africans or their ancestors, but to prevent the oppressed from telling their own story whilst paternally offering them an alternative. Tarantino, as a creature of his time, is continuing in this long-held tradition. Salon asks “Could a black director have made Django?” Who cares? A structural critique would ask: Why isn’t there even a single African-American director with similar resources to explore the enslaved experience? bell hooks sublimely explains why Spike Lee isn’t. Even if London-born director, Steve McQueen is able to in his upcoming film, Twelve Years a Slave, Emancipation is still a long way off and it won’t come from Hollywood.
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rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
recently saw inglorious basterds for the first time - obv its just like django, though django is a bit more considered. but watching it i just thought the violence was just totally unnecessary most of the time, and really just too exaggerated when it did arrive, and tarantino is such a good director but hes also just a little boy unable to not dumb down (so much nudge nudge signposting in this film just in case people didnt realise who was who or what was what), and really scared that he might not please his audience, cos there are good scenes in IB, where there is something actually emotional happening between characters, but he squanders it either with stupid OTT violence, a stupid joke, brad pitt acting like hes wonderered in from another film, or just his inability to find some comfortable ground between wanting to make a slightly more serious film and his grindhouse weaknesses. i didnt know if this was a film about nazi killers or was it about a girl whose family were all killed by nazis. it was quite awkward shifting between the two. he should get someone else to write for him now. or use other peoples stories at least and adapt them. he also needs someone to edit him a bit better.
 
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catalog

Well-known member
he wrote once upon a time as a book first didn't he? i think hes got a few good films still left in him. i really enjoyed once upon a time.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
craner said:
More evidence that QT is a really great film critic wasted as a movie maker:

http://thenewbev.com/tarantinos-reviews/prophecy/

I wish he'd written the Sergio Corbucci book.
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Cheers, some good quarantine reading for later

I like QT (what a CUTEY) as a dribbling enthusiast for stuff.

Never been a huge fan of his movies but I did like Once Upon a Time quite a bit. I'm sure we've discussed it on here elsewhere.

Revisited Reservoir Dogs and thought it was pretty exciting even after all these years. Totally amoral of course but as others have covered in this thread extensively, if you think that's the point you're being trolled by the giant chinned Enfant terrible.
 
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