Look, we’re going to have to make a decision about Quentin Tarantino.
Is he the genius auteur he gets so much credit for being, maybe the most original voice of his generation? Or is he simply a regurgitator of the cinematic styles and subjects too obscure for most of us to have seen before?
Are his movies rich, layered texts full of meaning and dimension? Or are they skin-deep symphonies of blood, dialogue, and spectacle, style for the sake of style?
Is he the symbol of everything that’s right and distinctive about indie Hollywood, or everything that’s wrong, insincere, and vacuous?
Is he, as a friend recently described him, an unthinking cinema savant, a bundle of impulses that sometimes hits “the cultural soft spot,” but generally by accident? Or is he mindful of every move he makes, a sophisticated writer and cunning storyteller?
Do you love him because he’s brilliant? Or because he’s entertaining?
If you’re unsure of where you stand, Django Unchained, his new Western (or “Southern” as he prefers to call it), won’t help you decide. Because Django Unchained is everything above and more, either further confirmation of his audacious creativity, or another example of his inability to create a whole, mature, and focused movie.
Like most revenge films, Django is built on the simplest (and in this case, flimsiest) conceit: a bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), is trying to find three fugitives, the Brittle Brothers (M.C. Gainey, Cooper Huckabee, and Doc Duhame), but has never seen them. However, a certain slave, Django (Jamie Foxx), has seen them. Schultz buys Django, grants him his freedom, and makes a bargain: you help me identify the fugitives, and I’ll help you find and free your wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). They find and kill the Brittle Brothers with relative ease, and then (somewhat illogically, if we’re to believe that Django and Broomhilda have a great love), they spend an entire winter hunting down unrelated bounties before finally, in the spring, creating an unnecessarily complex plan to rescue Broomhilda from an infamously brutal plantation called Candyland.
If Django’s quest was more focused, the story might have had a building, gradual, Odyssey-like quality, the inevitable showdown with Candyland’s owner, Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), might have had more force, and the characters they encounter along the way might have added up to something more than a who’s who of antebellum stereotypes: slackjawed hillbillies, foppish plantation owners, sadistic slave drivers, preening Southern belles, cowardly townsfolk, and slaves from the mutinous to the comfortably supplicant. To say that Tarantino paints these characters broadly is an insult to cartoons everywhere. They’re not just generalized, they’re parade floats: plantation owner Big Daddy (Don Johnson; who knew he was hilarious?) swaggers and glowers in the whites and vandyke clearly intended to make him resemble Colonel Sanders; Candyland’s head house slave, Stephen (Samuel L Jackson), is adorned with white tufts of hair that make him look like a scowling Uncle Ben. The only one missing here is Aunt Jemima.
This cast of caricatures calls to mind Tarantino’s last film, Inglourious Basterds, with its sociopathic Jews and shrieking Hitler. But if that movie has genius, it’s in its anarchic, precisely timed shuffling off of the strictures of anything resembling historical accuracy. In other words, it worked because it put the broadness of its characters and their quest in service to a bold, satisfying fantasy. Maybe the problem with Django is that it isn’t broad enough.
This is not to say that Django Unchained isn’t entertaining. It is. It’s bloody and it’s funny and it’s tense when it needs to be and explosive when it should be. A Tarantino fan recently lauded his ability to use dialogue to build tension within a scene, and that’s on display here. And when he isn’t busy with ironic, stylized zooms and tiresomely redundant violence, he can pack his frame with beauty and meaning: Big Daddy’s white horse, galloping in slow-motion, shown from the saddle down, suddenly sprayed with blood, Big Daddy’s body tumbling off the far side and crumpling in the dust; Calvin Candie holding a clean, white chunk of a human skull at chest level, so that we can compare it with the white of his boutonnière. Everywhere, Tarantino juxtaposes savagery and civility, beauty and death, and the impression is of a world where human cruelty and violence are wrapped in the brightly colored tissue paper of Southern hospitality and custom that here looks at best absurd and at worst monstrous.
But I want more from Tarantino, especially if I’m going to be asked to accept him as a great filmmaker. He can do all these things, he’s technically skilled, but it’s like being able to rebuild a car’s transmission: it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good driver. Django supposes itself to be a powerful anti-racism statement, but really it’s an anti-19th-century-American-slavery statement, and Tarantino doesn’t seem to realize that these aren’t automatically the same thing. Slavery may be the origin of our national race problem, but it hasn’t been the problem itself for almost 150 years. Tarantino is drawn to it because it offers moral clarity, and, like most adolescents, he’s satisfied by raging against obvious, simplified evils: white people perpetrated it, and black people (for the most part) were the victims; it’s easy to know who to shoot in this scenario. But as we all know, there are generations upon generations of much more subtle and complicated American racial history that have echoed (and continued to echo) out from slavery, and Django isn’t necessarily meaningful to any of that. Vilifying plantation owners and slave traders may be fun, but it isn’t new or terribly useful. If Tarantino is going to give himself credit for creating an important, cathartic movie essential to the black experience of racism in this country (“I think [Django Unchained] could become a rite of passage for young black males,” he told the L.A. Times) he better bring more to the table.
And then there’s Django’s half-baked morality. As Django and Schultz make their way through the movie, gunning down bounties, it’s easy to watch these men die if you don’t stop to think about it. But the movie’s central conceit—that these murders are justified because, by proxy and implication if nothing else, they’re cogs in the machinery of American slavery—is fatally flawed: most of Django and Schultz’s victims don’t die for their complicity in slavery; they die because their corpses are valuable. We’re expected to enjoy their deaths simply because they’re white and southern. This robs the story of most of its righteousness, and many of the film’s images, seemingly ripe with meaning, are nothing more than interesting. For example, one of the Brittle Brothers is shot as he rides across an open field, and Tarantino shows a spray of his blood hit the white tufts of cotton—it’s arresting. But his death has no meaning. The difference between a filmmaker who can create that image and a filmmaker who can make it mean something is the difference between a good filmmaker and a great one.
In another scene, Django and Schultz are perched on the top of a ridge, a bounty in their sights, but Django hesitates because the target is with his son. Schultz makes it clear: these are bad men, and they deserve to die. It’s not pleasant, he tells Django, but in his world, “you have to get dirty.” But this morality remains as distant as the target is from the shooters. In Django, close-range shootings are never conducted with anything but a catchy song, a clever line of dialogue, and a tone of ironic detachment.
In another scene, near the end of the film, after our heroes successfully rescue Broomhilda (albeit not in the way they’d intended), Schultz sits brooding over the failure of his plan, while a genteel Southern woman plays classical music on a harp. For the first time, Tarantino takes us inside Schultz’s character, and we see him tormented by memories of an especially brutal murder of a slave earlier in the film. He jumps from his chair and insists that the woman stop playing—the juxtaposition of man’s high, artistic accomplishments and his savage nature is finally too much for Schultz. Has this loquacious sociopath with a heart of gold developed a conscience? Maybe. But Tarantino doesn’t linger on it, or bring it to any point. He’s onto another entertaining gunfight. He has things to blow up, blood to shed, and white, Southern people to kill with a panache he substitutes for insight.
(Incidentally, forget his famously liberal use of the N-word: Tarantino’s decision to name a white, German murderer “Dr. King” succinctly illustrates the overreaching liberties he feels comfortable taking with African-American history and culture.)
I’ll always see Tarantino movies, because they’re unlike anything else being made; you’re not allowed to simultaneously complain about the sameness of Hollywood product, as I do, and fail to support things that are different. But uniqueness doesn’t equal greatness. Great filmmakers explore big issues in a big way, and Django Unchained is the work of an impulsive, shallow lightweight. His anger toward racism feels genuine, but it’s also generalized and shrill; it’s a wealthy, white man’s anger at something he read about in a book, not something he’s ever experienced. It’s a child’s emotion. I believe Tarantino has a great movie in him, but he’ll be 50 next spring. Will he ever make it?
35 responses
I hadn’t read (nor heard) about the “rite of passage” comment to the L.A. Times. That’s a bit much. He and Spike Lee have something in common in that their movies are frequently better than the PR their makers provide for them. This essay is one of the best critiques of the movie I think I’ve seen, and makes plenty of thought-provoking and fair points about a movie I really enjoyed; well done. I’d only part company with your very first sentence; what will make Tarantino’s catalog of films one that endures is that nobody will ever really be able to settle the debate about where his films “are” on the scale of art or trash. As for a “great” film in him? I think he’s racked up one in “Pulp Fiction” already, but then maybe you and I would differ on what constitutes “great.”
“But the movie’s central conceit—that these murders are justified because, by proxy and implication if nothing else, they’re cogs in the machinery of American slavery—is fatally flawed: most of Django and Schultz’s victims don’t die for their complicity in slavery; they die because their corpses are valuable. We’re expected to enjoy their deaths simply because they’re white and southern.”
I think you’ve got this piece spectacularly wrong. The morality of the their work as bounty hunters comes up directly several times throughout the film, and is never neatly answered – especially not with “oh, well, they’re white racists.” Shultz is extremely clear and direct that he kills them for their value, and it’s clear throughout the film that Django is figuring out how to deal with this.
The idea that the question is still out as to whether or not Tarantino is a great filmmaker is ridiculous. Resevior Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Inglorious Basterds and now Django Unchained answer that question positively. The Kill Bill films and Death Proof are also wonderful, but I can see how tastes may vary on them.
The problem is you’re judging Tarantino’s films by a standard that has nothing to do with him. You keep talking about how his films are empty, but then you go on to dissect all these different ideas and themes in them. The problem sounds like you expect Tarantino to either spell out his ideas so that they’re obvious, or else treat them in a pre-described ‘serious’ manner. But the man is clearly more interested in presenting them in a fast, twisted and bloody manner. That stylistic impulse doesn’t make the films empty though – it doesn’t under-cut the ideas – it simply presents them in a way that most films wouldn’t.
The idea that he needs to make more ‘serious’ films in order to be taken seriously is ridiculous. That’d be like me saying that Bella Tarr needs to make more entertaining films in order to be considered truly great.
I think “Broomhilda” is the cartoon witch from Bugs Bunny. Brunhilda is the folk heroine for whom Django’s wife was named.
Broomhilda is Django’s wife’s name, which is the bastardization of Brunhilde.
I think Quentin Tarantino has a time machine, that’s why his movies come out the way they do. He writes Act 1 and Act 2 as a wise adult and creates compelling circumstance with fantastic dialogue. Then, he goes back in time and gives the script to himself as a 13 year old and says, “Finish Act three and use as many guns as you can.”
Completely agree with the writer; absolutely feel QT is on a disappointing, vacuous trend of style over substance, big time, for a while now.
He kind of lucked-out with this childish approach in “Basterds”, as Fahey said, in using the ‘broad’ characters in the service of the Alternate History fantasy.
But when QT was on Charlie Rose recently, promoting this current Django exercise in b-movie riff collecting, he likened his filmmaking approach to “how they use samples in hip-hop”.
At first I thought, hmm, maybe that’s a valid way of accepting him as an “artist” in his own unique category..who (sometimes) can make solid emotional contact.
Except…after watching this latest ball of collected bloody tinfoil, I’d say this: In music, good sampling is ALWAYS first & foremost, in the service of the _song_. A memorable stolen riff always underlines what the song is _about_. Complete reinforcement of the idea.
But I’m now thinking QT has begun to regularly forsake the essential needs of his stories, while satiating his sampling fever, missing the forest for his precious trees. He’s gotten so obsessed with getting all his fanciful homages (situations, shots, moves, obscure actors & references) of idiosyncratic, masturbatory geek-love all up on the screen, that the stew never flows into anything resembling a resonant narrative that’s woven of any real complementary threads, or subtext.
To me, with this latest, he’s fully just become a branded manufacturer of lightly entertaining junk-food grindhouse spin-art, heavy on the red.
Tony – you’re basing this off of what – 2 movies? Only Django Unchained and Inglorious bastards end in gun fights. And they’re a war movie/western so that’s kind of par the course for the genre.
Death Proof doesn’t end in a gun battle – it ends in an all-time great car chase and beatdown. Kill Bill Vol. 2 ends in an emotional face-to-face conversation between two former lovers. Jackie Brown ends with one man being shot, hardly ‘as many guns’ as possible. Pulp Fiction ends without the guns that are drawn being fired. You’d have to go back to Resevior Dogs to find another movie that ends in a gun fight.
The problem – it seems to me – is that people keep expecting Tarantino to make movies without action and violence, when what he’s interested in, amongst many other things, are action and violence. This isn’t a sign of immaturity or artistic stagnation – it’s his entire modus operandi. If you can’t get beyond that then that’s your bag as a viewer, but you can’t hold it against him as an artist. That’d be like me saying David Lynch needs to make a mainstream, PG-13 comedy – I’m judging an artist based on something they have no interest in doing.
I really wanted to like Quinton Tarentino because I saw an interview with him and he seemed so animated and excited to be alive. But when I watched one of his films, it was so dark and violent it just wasn’t for me. The pastor who lives next door to me suggested I watch a copy of Kill Bill that he had where all the violent scenes had been edited out. It wasn’t very good.
“His anger toward racism feels genuine, but it’s also generalized and shrill; it’s a wealthy, white man’s anger at something he read about in a book, not something he’s ever experienced. It’s a child’s emotion.” Very arresting and thought-provoking observation. Thanks.
Not to be impolite, but I think this essay is a standing pool of viscous bullshit. Let me start with Inglorious Basterds, characterized by Fahey as a broad fantasy. That’s true in the abstract, but it misses out on how remarkably complex Basterds is. Consider that many critics at the time (Dana Stevens and Jeff Wells, for starters) were dismayed that perhaps the film’s most likable character was a Nazi. (Most people have difficulty with that concept, a likable Nazi, or, as the drunk man next to me said at my screening of Django, “that funny Nazi.â€) It’s no coincidence that before the Basterds open fire on the theatre full of Nazis (and civilians), the Nazis watch their own movie about shooting down the enemy. This is Tarantino acting like Haneke, but Tarantino’s moral universe is more complex than something like Funny Games. He doesn’t merely scold us for cheering murder. The Basterds are ending the war, after all, and we’re talking about Nazis, God damn it. Basterds justifies your emotions about its violence, whatever those emotions are; it’s as complex as life is, even if one of Tarantino’s points is that film is great because it diverges from life.
Django is simpler. Tarantino just wants us to cheer Django on. And I like that.
The truth is that we’ve had enough fucking subtlety when it comes to slavery. Millions of children grow up learning to admire Robert E. Lee as a tragic, conflicted hero. We’re still living in an America where you can get a Confederate flag on your license plate in eleven states (because of heritage and shit). Django, and all of its moral clarity, is not only subversive but necessary. There are women of all ages who’ve grown up wanting to be Scarlett O’Hara, and Tarantino gives us a plantation widow who never acts cruelly toward her slaves—she actually stops one act of degradation done to Broomhilda—and still we’re asked to applaud her death, just because she benefited from slavery. (Hell, in our America, “just because she benefited from slavery†still sounds sincere.) My parents (I’m white) liked Django except for the death of Lara Lee. The film’s clear moral outlook—anyone who supports slavery dies—was foreign to people who’ve been watching Gone with the Wind all their lives.
Sasha Stone’s observation that Spike Lee wouldn’t have been allowed to make Django is spot-on. That’s part of why I find Fahey’s last paragraph, and this essay as a whole, so dispiriting. Not only does it misrepresent where I think America is regarding its past, but it implies that the only type of person who’d have been allowed to make a movie this gloriously simple shouldn’t have made it. Fahey says Tarantino’s anger isn’t worthwhile, that it’s a “wealthy white man’s anger†because it is “general and shrill.†I object to the idea that a Southern white man’s feelings about slavery somehow aren’t an interesting or legitimate subject, but, of course, the whole causation there is wrong. “General and shrill� Was Malcolm X’s, Bigger Thomas’s anger specific and, umm, mellow?
Then again, the whole essay’s attitude toward art is troubling, especially the binary it proposes at the beginning between being brilliant and being entertaining. Doesn’t it take some smarts to be entertaining? Not just passing-the-time, watch-some-‘splosions-and-ass-shots entertaining, but rapturously, maniacally entertaining, like Pulp Fiction and Inglorious Basterds? Entertainment goes hand-in-hand with art; it is not an anti-intellectual thing.
@Z
Aside from Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown (although I only saw that one once) I haven’t enjoyed his movies. I think they’re stylish but terrible.
As for Django
Tarentino made a revenge fantasy, which ignores the history of all the Blacks who freed themselves, of Harriet Tubman and the fact that slaves were often freed by sneaking on a plantation and setting them free.
In Tarentino’s mind the revenge fantasy was really about violence towards slave owning society, when for slaves and their descendants, the “revenge” is in escaping, in setting people free, etc.
Harriet Tubman got more revenge than any Black person in history, she liberated her entire family.
She led an armed raid that free 700 slaves during the civil war.
Tarentino could have easily made movies about those things, people like my ancestors who fought on the side of the Brits during the revolutionary war to A) get their freedom B) free others
He could have applied his style towards those stories and I would’ve watched it, even if I don’t like his movies.
But the conceit of this movie, the “Rite of passage comment”, where he describes the Black cast finally “getting the movie we’re trying to make”
Makes me feel a touch ill.
As Black man, I feel he’s telling me that if I don’t like his movie it’s that I’m not “getting” what a huge favor he’s done for me by ignoring actual history and replacing it with cartoonish violence. He’s saying I’m not getting it by his making a movie that’s more about killing than liberating.
If he likes violence than fine, but make the violence matter.
He could’ve easily have made a violent story about Harriet, Nat Turner, a fictional character who frees slaves, etc, hell, leave Schultz out and have Black leads freeing people.
But this movie?
Just more Tarentino cinematic masturbation.
Terrible, just terrible.
-M
He had his big joke; don’t try to tell me he meant anything serious by it.
@David
Here is the problem:
For 99% of the Audience, Django isn’t a conversation about slavery, it’s just a violent Tarentino shlockfest that HAPPENS to be about slavery. People enjoy it because they enjoy Tarentino’s style.
By making a Cartoonish revenge fantasy “if you benefit from slavery, you die”, where a White Character (Schultz) is the most interesting and developed, where the Black Woman to be rescued isn’t even 1 dimensional, she’s 0.5 dimensional – and the movie is more about violence than liberation….
…it’s just another bad action movie.
I don’t care who tells the story…
…just tell one that doesn’t suck.
Harriet Tubman’s story could’ve easily have been re-imagined into making her a stylish Tarentino Heroine, replete with the violence, and you might’ve told a better story, a more engaging and TRUE ONE.
This was just nonsense.
Signed –
The Black Guy descended from escaped slaves who went back to rescue their families AKA REAL Djangos.
Thanks for reading and caring, everyone. There are some great observations and points here.
Z, when you put the word “serious” in quotes, who are you quoting? You seem to have a set list of criticisms about Tarantino against which you’re eager to defend him, whether anyone’s making those criticisms or not.
David, thanks for your comments. I am not in any way proposing a binary view of art, I’m simply pointing out that QT tends to be polarizing. Also, QT moved from the south to California when he was two, so calling him a southern man is a little misleading. He was a southern toddler.
Markham – Yeah, Tarantino could have made those other movies, but he didn’t – he made this movie. It’s not a movie about a slave revolt or Harriet Tubman. It’s a movie about something else. Judging it based on the movie you want to see is terrible film criticism. It’d be like saying ‘Well, Picasso’s blue period isn’t good because he should have used red. I like red better.’
And you not liking the movie doesn’t mean you don’t get it – but you saying he should have done this or that does mean you don’t get it. That’s not the movie he set out to make, so it’s not fair to judge it by that standard. And the violence in the movie does matter: all of the violence inflicted on the slave characters is meant to disturb and horrify us, rather that titilate us. And from the general reaction, that’s what it’s achieved. I was talking to a white friend of mine who was shocked by the movie b/c he didn’t know that slavery was that brutal.
Meanwhile, the other kind of violence in the film – the retribution that Django visits on the slave owners – is cathartic. It’s funny, surreal, shocking – it means plenty. And calling it masturbatory is so goddamn snobby. Get over yourself for Christsake. Extreme violence has been part of stories since before the written word – there’s nothing masturbatory about it. We’re interested by it, we crave it. Rather than acting above that just accept it.
Or don’t go see Tarantino movies since that’s what you’re going to get.
Larry – I used single-quotation marks to emphasize my key term.
And your whole criticism seems to be that Tarantino makes empty, vacuous films: “Great filmmakers explore big issues in a big way, and Django Unchained is the work of an impulsive, shallow lightweight.”
This, despite the fact that this film has garnered more in depth discussion of it’s themes and ideas and intent and reaction than any movie in the last several years, many of which you yourself delve into in this review.
So the conclusion that I am drawing from this is that you are holding Tarantino – and really, art in general- to a standard of pre-determined tonal seriousness. Because otherwise, I fail to see by what other standards you could regard this film as impulsively shallow and lightweight.
Z, much of the discussion this film has garnered surrounds the lightweight way in which it treats its very serious subject matter, so that’s not really a mark in its favor.
But that particular criticism – that Django deals with a serious subject in a ‘lightweight’ way – belies the real topic at the heart of the subject: what kinds of tonal balances are appropriate for what subjects – a pretty deep topic of conversation if you ask me.
Also, those who make the case that this film takes a lightweight approach to the subject matter tend to then delve into a bunch of examples from the film that seem to contradict their judgment, as is the case with this review. They state that the movie doesn’t have much to chew on, and then they go on to chew on the entire movie.
Also, that particular criticism is unfair anyway: Tarantino knew what kind of film he was making; he didn’t set out to Schindler’s List or Roots. He set out to make an adventure film with this very serious subject as a backdrop (that often times comes to the fore). You can say that that confluence is inappropriate, but I think that betrays a narrow, conservative viewpoint in regards to art.
Also – the film never, ever treats slavery in a lightweight or satirical manner. It treats some of the things surrounding it as such – white supremacy is an ethos that it mocks at times (the regulators scene) and holds in deadly serious contempt (the brilliant Alexandre Dumas conversation scene). But never are the actual mechanics of slavery treated in a light or even satirical fashion.
Tarantino’s films too often fall victim to, yes, the binary view of art that articles like this one promote: the idea that taking inspiration from other sources is incompatible with originality (“Is he the genius auteur he gets so much credit for being….? Or is he simply a regurgitator of the cinematic styles and subjects too obscure for most of us to have seen before?”), that entertainment is incompatible with insight (“Do you love him because he’s brilliant? Or because he’s entertaining?”), that a solemn “adult” attitude towards art is superior to a playful or childlike one (“…another example of his inability to create a whole, mature, and focused movie”; “It’s a child’s emotion”).
Artists, from Duchamp to Nabokov to Hitchcock, have been debunking these prejudices one by one for centuries. What critics like you fail to see, what critics like you will ALWAYS fail to see, is what you’re simply not interested in looking for: the wisdom that may be hidden beneath (or in fact unlocked by) humor, violence, and provocation.
And let’s not be coy and pretend that you’re offering an objective analysis of different reactions to Tarantino’s work. You can’t tell me that a passage like, “Are his movies rich, layered texts full of meaning and dimension? Or are they skin-deep symphonies of blood, dialogue, and spectacle, style for the sake of style?” isn’t heavily tilting its hand in one direction.
Also, I believe Tarantino was juggled between his mother’s home in L.A. and his grandmother’s home in Tennessee during his childhood. Plus, he has long had ties to Texas. It’s only so much of a stretch to call him a Southerner.
@Z
1) I criticized his choice to make this particular movie and called it masturbatory, because it simply isn’t the cultural artifact for Blacks that he thinks it is. The “revenge” fantasy or hell, the revenge REALITY for Blacks in those days was liberation not violence for the sake of violence.
Especially since many parts of the story line are just silly.
If you re-read my comment I noted that he could’ve told a different story that would’ve served those cultural aims and had just as much violence, but he didn’t really want to tell that kind of story he wanted to tell his usual story that serves the desires of the movie he wants to make.
If he had just made Django and said: “It’s just a Spaghetti Western set during the slave era, it tackles a few difficult subjects, but it’s really just entertainment”
I wouldn’t have a problem with the movie.
But when you call it a “Rite of Passage” and when you think that you made something cultural important for Black people?
Now I have a problem.
If as an artist I set out to make something cultural relevant to a group of people, I have to consider oh, history, reality, facts and the people I’m trying to address. I can bring my own sensibilities to it, but out of respect to that culture, those people, I have to leave some of my desires at the door.
It’s fatuous to say “Hey Black people, this is the movie you need to see about slavery, this will be a rite of passage for your kids” – when it’s really just a context to set the usual type of movie you like to write.
2) I think it’s ironic you’re screaming at people and calling them “snobby” and to “get over themselves”, for not liking Tarentino’s vision or approach.
I’m a Black man who doesn’t feel that this movie is a rite of passage for others like me, it doesn’t reveal anything Black people don’t know, it’s not a cultural artifact.
It’s just another violent movie, and while I’m capable of enjoying Cinema violence (just look at all the Jason Statham movies I own) knowing that Tarentino thinks this violence has a cultural importance beyond, well, entertainment is what bothers me.
I.e. I’m positive that there are people who deny that modern day racism exists, deny the long-term impact of slavery, etc., maybe even are Birthers, who saw the movie, found it entertaining and didn’t have their opinions changed AT ALL.
In fact I have such people on my FB and guess what: they saw the movie, loved it and haven’t had their worldview impacted at all.
You say he didn’t set out to make Roots or Schindler’s list, here is the thing, when you read interviews with Tarentino when he discusses rites of passage? HE THINKS HE DID.
That’s my problem.
Perhaps you should get over yourself and stop pretending that all criticisms of Tarentino is an affront to art itself.
@ Markham: To be fair, Tarantino made similarly grandiose claims about Inglourious Basterds, i.e. “The Jewish males that I’ve known since I’ve been writing the film and telling them about it, they’ve just been, ‘Man, I can’t fucking wait for this fucking movie!’â€
Not being Jewish, I can’t speak to that specific experience of watching the movie. But what, in part, makes Inglourious Basterds such an extraordinary film (and Claude Lanzmann, among others, would probably hate me for saying this) is the way it realizes that the memory of the Holocaust does not just belong to the Jews. It’s a memory that the rest of us must own, in our own ways, because of how that memory has been passed down to us in story and image. And while I would argue that Inglourious Basterds has the utmost respect for the horrors that took place in World War II, its lack of solemn reverence for that event was mistaken by many (including many Jewish critics and audiences) for a lack of respect.
I think something similar is going on with Django Unchained. What is interesting about Django is that it seems to have been most meaningful to white audiences. There is something undeniably thrilling and transgressive about listening to a largely white crowd cheering for a black hero to gun down his white oppressors. Articles I have read responding to Django Unchained that were written by black authors have tended to be (perhaps necessarily) more cautious, even those that praised the film. But I still don’t think the fact that the movie has been watched, embraced, and picked over mostly by white people invalidates the statement it has to make about race, racism, and slavery.
You say, “I’m positive that there are people who deny that modern day racism exists, deny the long-term impact of slavery, etc., maybe even are Birthers, who saw the movie, found it entertaining and didn’t have their opinions changed AT ALL.” Well, opinions don’t change instantly, if they do at all. I’d counter your vague, generalized assertion with my own: for all those Birthers who saw the movie, there must be some who, while not openly racist per se, nevertheless were forced to confront their own attitudes about racial hierarchies, about the culpability of all bystanders in perpetuating racism, about violent anger as a justifiable and inevitable response to incredible injustice, etc. Hell, I think I see some of those people writing right here.
I swore I wasn’t going to comment again.
Markham, perfectly put.
Z, there’s a difference between honest, spirited debate and simply hammering away at anyone who disagrees with you. You’re issuing a monologue in parts, not having conversations. I think everyone understands: you liked the movie and think people who didn’t just don’t get it. Fine. At this point you’re saying a lot more about yourself than Tarantino. So can we leave it lie now?
@ Larry: I don’t get it. Z is “issuing a monologue in parts, not having conversations”, whilst he has responded directly to many of your and others’ points which he has disagreed with. How is that not a conversation? And his emphatic disagreement with you is “saying a lot more about yourself than Tarantino” – well, YEAH. That’s kind of what movies DO. How is that supposed to be an insult? To me, it just sounds like you’re trying to pick up your toys and go home rather than acknowledge his responses to you.
Thank you Victoria.
I didn’t realize that addressing specific points of the argument was having a monologue, or, as Markham puts it, screaming. I mean, I’m screaming in real life, but that’s due to unrelated psychological problems, so I didn’t think anyone online would be able to tell.
And I don’t think anyone who didn’t like the film didn’t get it. I think, like Victoria stated, the attempt to simply say that because this movie is interested foremost in entertainment that it lacks any depth or insight.
And Markham:
1. I’m not interested in defending the ‘rite of passage’ comment. That’s typical Tarantino bluster, and I wouldn’t take it seriosly, but I get why you would find it bothersome. That being said, he’s talking about the legacy of the movie, not his intent in making it. You’re saying ‘he could have made this movie, he could have made that movie’, instead of judging the movie he did make on its own merits.
2. I’m not calling people who didn’t like the film snobby, I’m calling you snobby, specifically because you referred to dismissing the film (and by proxy, those of us that liked it) as ‘masturbatory’. That’s a lazy, snobby dismissal of – whether you like it or not – an important film with a lot on it’s mind.
Also, Larry, one more thing:
Isn’t the whole reason for articles like this and comment sections to get into detailed discussions/debate? Why should we ‘let it lie’? No one’s being insulted here (granted, I said Markham was being snobby, but that’s hardly a grievous insult, especially by internet forum standards).
What’s the point of putting out an argument if you’re only interested in taking the discussion up to a certain point?
Dear Z Vasquez,
I decided to go watch this Dejango movie and I didn’t think it was very good for most of the reasons that Mr. Fahey described. Then I read all your well-reasoned comments and realized I was wrong. Thanks! Now I’m going to go back and watch the movie again but enjoy it this time.
Your Friend,
Ted
The trick is making movies with big budgets, spectacle, and stars that are not any different than John Waters early films, Japanese B movies like Sanjuro, George Romero gore, Russ Meyer “tit”alation, biker flicks (Peter Fonda) of the 1960’s..etc. with some updated irony along with mixing up high and low culture…it’s just another Pop Culture Cult Movie to me. Serious deep film? naaaaaaa……….. it’s just pushing your buttons, yanking your chain, etc…
See, that’s the crux of my argument: films with those cult movie aesthetics shouldn’t be looked down upon as inherently lesser just because of their surface qualities (the sex, violence and gore). I’m not saying they’re as deep as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andre Rublev, but it’s not fair to dismiss them as excersises in simple juvenalia.
Put it like this: I would make the argument that George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead has more to say about American race relations in the civil rights era than any of Stanley Kramer’s deeply serious message movies.
I honestly think that the crux of your argument translates to ‘films with serious themes need to be presented in a somber and serious tone, rather than an adventurous, fun tone.’ I for one think that belies a conservative and small-minded view of art. It argues on behalf of good taste, which, like Picasso said, is the enemy of art.
By the way, isn’t pushing one’s buttons something that film, and all art for that matter, strive for?
Also, two points of minutia:
1. I can’t spot any John Waters influence on Django or any of Tarantino’s other movies. Lumping him in with the other examples betrays a tendency to lump together all films considered ‘low culture’, which is as prejudicial as lumping together all foreign films or all black and white films.
2. Sanjuro might have been considered a B-movie when it was released, but it’s now rightly considered a classic. There’s a reason bastions of art-house cinema such as Janus Films and The Criterion Collection have keep it in release. Along with countless other examples, here’s a film that has seen its esteem risen from B-picture to classic. I’d wager that time will be just as kind to Tarantino’s films (though admittedly they’re not really considered B-pictures now).
Tarantino will never make a film like Knife In Water. Never. He makes pop exploitation movies. Are you tone deaf? P.S.-That is a statement, not an argument.
How am I being tone-deaf? At what point did I say Tarantino will ever make a movie like that?
And why should he? The man has a personal vision that isn’t at all similar to that example. I don’t understand how that invalidates said vision though. This is the point I keep trying to make: why are only films that have a tone similar to Knife In The Water worthy of greatness. Hitchcock never made a movie like that, does that make him a lesser artist than Polanski?
Why are films that have a ‘pop exploitation’ aesthetic inherently less capable of depth and insight than chilly art-house films (do keep in mind I like plenty of chilly art-house films, including Knife In The Water)?
A number of people have made the mistake of branding this as a Movie About Slavery. It’s not. It’s a revenge fantasy that just so happens to be set during that time period. If you take that into consideration, it might sway your verdict a touch.
Disagreements aside–being a devoted Tarantino fan myself, I do also wonder if he will live long enough to make a Great Film.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.