After holding myself into my seat to get to the end of Quentin Tanrantino’s Inglorious Basterds several years ago I said to my self, ‘Self, don’t go to this guy’s movies again.’ Cartoon violence for me is the Road Runner heading over the cliff and after the splat, pulling himself together to run another mile. Carving a swastika in a man’s forehead is not that. It is grotesque, not comic, and I don’t have to watch it being done to think so.
Even so, I was somewhat tempted to ignore my conversation with self when I saw the trailers for Django Unchained, again Tarantino, late in 2012. Hmmm… horsemen, slaves rebelling against the owners, a love story, an easy to hate bad guy… might be worth a try. The reviews have made me think otherwise. No need to jump off the wagon back into the narcotic of screen violence again, getting high on the adrenaline and feeling disgusted with self and others when it was over. Of the dozen or so reviews I’ve looked at, this by Sady Doyle in “In These Times,” using as a starting point Dana Stevens at Slate, hits closest to the way I think about Tarantino and his festivals of blood.
…there’s the lingering sense that Tarantino is more interested in the thrill (and viscera) than in anything else [revenge, political statements.] His movies were violent long before they were political, and there’s the sense that his recent films depicting the righting of history’s greatest wrongs may just be a convenient excuse to showcase the wrongs themselves. In Basterds, Tarantino provided us with a long close-up of Christoph Waltz having a swastika carved into his forehead; in Django, he provides us with a close-up of Kerry Washington (as Django’s wife, Broomhilda), having a red-hot brand pressed into her cheek. While one of these shots is nominally about the triumph of the oppressed, and the other is nominally about the inhumanity of the oppressor, they’re both really about the same thing: what it looks like when very, very bad things happen to a person’s face.
Scars of whipping. National Archives, College Park.
And why does Tarantino make the story in this way? A paucity of imagination? A fascination with gore? A determination that ‘if it can be done it must be done?’ Surely there are many ways to tell such stories, many of which would bring the audience to the feeling of being a slave, would reveal the viewers’ own revenge fantasies, would show moral action and ambiguous result, without the prurient interest in mayhem and its effect on the human body. [The whipping of Frederick Douglass’ mother in PBS “The Abolitionists” did all this in a 60 second scene.] An interest which, in its close-up intensity, distracts from the wider, and more important view, the deep and urgent questions. Interestingly, the original cut was even more ghastly — and Tarantino himself realized it. He knows he is making a movie he expects people to watch, and come along with. It was too terrible. He made cuts:
“I realized that I had traumatized [the audience] too much to go where I needed them to go.”
The question is of course: where does he need them to go? And how is the movie getting them there? Or, perhaps, is it getting them somewhere else?
But even if we are getting the most restrained version of Django possible, the place Tarantino wants us to go looks like … well, like a Tarantino movie. The violence is, as always, executed with a true fetishist’s [wk bold] attention to detail: A Klansman’s death is represented by a gorgeous shot of pure crimson blood, spattered over a riderless white horse. One slaveowner is shot in the gut so hard that she is blown across the house. These violent images are indelible, beautiful, even funny. But mostly, they’re cinematic. Despite the horrific brutality onscreen, Tarantino’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge style of directing keeps the audience in a state of ironic remove, always at least somewhat aware that they’re watching a bunch of actors roll around in corn syrup.
Maybe some viewers find the ironic distance necessary, in order to make the movie cathartic instead of traumatic. But I keep coming back to the shot of Washington’s face. While watching a woman being mutilated that badly and for that horrific a reason, should I have been noticing the lighting? Should I have been aware that I was watching a movie? Should I be able to talk about how that looked? Worst of all: Should I be worried that how it looked was Tarantino’s chief concern?
See Doyle in In These Times for full review
See Steven in Slate for a related review.
Note to myself. Both reviewers are women. The ‘funny’ part of the violence doesn’t strike them quite like it does Mick Lasalle, who while condemning movie violence of some kinds, gives Django a pass: “…the moral universe of “Django” is reasonable – right and wrong, that is, are clearly discernible – and most of the violence is intentionally excessive to the point that it’s funny.”
Not funny to me. Narcotic. And as with narcotics, last year’s dose no longer satisfies. Serve up more, and stronger, and more refined. Next year flaying. Then, drawing and quartering. Whatever it takes to keep ’em coming in for a satisfying hook.
No thanks. I’ll stay on the wagon a while longer.
The automatic, innate knowledge of Django, obviously, is that slavery was terrible, and so Tarantino doesn’t want to spend too much time reteaching us that broad fact. We do see brutality and we know that Candie is a rancid villain, but everything else is sort of talked around or, uncomfortably, treated as commonplace given the context. People have long criticized Tarantino for his liberal use of the n-word, but it would seem he remains undaunted. By the time we get to Candyland the word has choked up much of the air — it’s not that the word in this historical context is so shocking, it’s just that watching Leonardo DiCaprio and other cushy modern actors throw it around becomes ultimately distracting to the story at hand. Though, in truth, there really isn’t that much to distract from. The film stalls and sputters badly when it gets to Candyland, plodding through a squirmingly long dinner scene and then giving us about three different Final Acts of Revenge that seem increasingly redundant. The bloody denouement of the film is supposed to produce giddy catharsis the same way the sight of Hitler getting machine-gunned into Nazi tartare did for Inglourious Basterds, and there is a stab or two of that bloodthirsty satisfaction here, but Tarantino has not really honed his story finely enough by this point to make his climax the true payoff he clearly intends it to be. By the end we’ve spent a lot of time at Candyland, and we know these are some bad dudes (including Samuel L. Jackson as a Candie-loyal house slave), but all the violence ultimately feels sloppy, arbitrary, inexact. It turns out you can’t make a glancing dark comedy about slavery and then redeem your blitheness about the topic with a “See, I want to kill these monsters too!” ta-da finish. Shocking, I know.
[on the time spent watching old World War II movies that gave him the confidence to embark on “Inglourious Basterds”] – It wasn’t that I needed permission. But what really struck me was that these were films made by directors who’d had to flee their country because of Hitler, and yet the movies they made weren’t all terror or horror. In fact, while they definitely showed the Nazis and their cruelty, they were adventure films, whether you’re talking about ‘Hangmen Also Die’ or ‘Reunion in France’ or ‘To Be or Not to Be’ or ‘O.S.S.,’ an Alan Ladd film that’s like a prequel to ‘The Good Shepherd.’ They were fun and thrilling and exciting and, most amazingly, they had a lot of comedy in them, which really made an impact on me. I mean, for every movie with a sadistic Nazi, there’s one with a Nazi who’s more of a buffoon or a figure of ridicule.