Director Quentin Tarantino Exploits Django Unchained in Comic Strip
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Vengeance?
© Copyright 2012 Quentin Tarantino
-- The Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures
Director, Spike Lee, was hammered mercilessly by critics of every stripe in December 2012 after he stated his unpopular feelings about the blockbuster film Django Unchained. During a Vibe TV Presents interview he said, "I'm not seeing it. It would be disrespectful to my ancestors to see that film. That's the only thing I'm going to say."
In the wake of the December 2012 launch of Quentin Tarantino's film and subsequent Django Unchained comic strip, Spike Lee's rather reserved comments seem discerning. Of course, he is visiting a subtext here. That subtext is that there are dishonorable elements to the Spaghetti Western genre in which Tarantino posits his hyper-violent tale set against the atrocious backdrop of slavery. The Spaghetti Western formula works famously when Spaghetti Western stories showcase rugged, vengeance-seeking gladiators, traveling the wide, open spaces of primarily the Western frontier, looking to settle gun-slinging scores of epic proportion with villains who arise more from mythology than reality.
I surmise that Lee's knowledge of the genre provoked him to draw his line in the sand. In relation to the history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in America, no Spaghetti Western formula could do justice to the systemic evils perpetrated against actual black people, who miraculously survived under the oppressive weight of legalized slavery that was maximally effective when the dehumanization of black people was thorough and complete. A moral contradiction arises when an honest portrayal of slavery slams up against the ideal noble and courageous black gunslinger intent on rescuing his wife from the jaws of one of Louisiana's cruelest plantation owners.
But I saw the film and loved it! I loved that it didn't try to sanitize the horrors of slavery, nor the wildly narcissistic and mentally depraved views of white society, at the same time that it made me laugh hysterically at the hypocrisies of the white gentility and social morays of the times. I pulled apart every nuance of the story that Tarantino doled out. I examined every aspect of injustice, even if the story itself did not. Likewise, I was excited about the prospect of a black male becoming a black MAN and then rescuing his black wife from the bondage of hell on earth. I was uncomfortably glad that routine sex abuse and violence against black women was shown, though not courageously explored the way I had hoped.
Still, I didn't want to touch that moral contradiction that festered in every scene. Tarantino magnanimously slammed us over the head with it at one point, having the Calvin Candie character ask the overly-simplified question, "Why don't niggers just rise up against whites?" The answer? Many blacks did but each uprising was quelled by "the crooked arm of the law" and led to tougher laws, increased unnecessary violence and the further degradation of the black family unit at the hands of the master who could legally buy or sell his slaves as he saw fit. Only someone outside the black community would actually believe that this idea of vengeance could be considered a viable course of action inside of a terribly unjust legal system that cemented slavery as a way of life.
I willingly suspended disbelief concerning the story's hidden judgment against the lack of black courage and humanity in the common slaves of the time, making a one in 10,000 nigger like Django so necessary and plausible. It wasn't until I watched old press interviews for the movie and witnessed Tarantino glibly promote the Django Unchained hardcopy companion comic strip book that I revisited what I had ignored, wondering if he had lost his mind. This is slavery we're talking about here right? WRONG. This was his nod to the Spaghetti Western despite the sacred and historic struggles of slavery that are the lynchpin of black history. With little regard for the history that Tarantino carefully honored while on the set of the movie, he cross-bred the heartfelt story of Django with "Blaxploitation," and comic book super-heroism at its worst. And for a tortured moment I identified ghoulish delight in his eyes at the prospect of reducing his own artful symbolism down to a cartoon.
Vengeance drives comic book art which is the classic superhero retribution theme for most comic strips geared toward male audiences. My heart sank when I fully appreciated that in Tarantino's world, whites were exposed as hateful villains at the expense of blacks being turned into cartoons. He takes away Django's miraculous response to brutal reality by turning him into a super-human caricature with a bloodlust rather than a human with a passionate need to recover his wife and establish his own experience of justice and liberty.
To report a balanced view of Lee's motives, it should have behooved mainstream media to investigate the genre simply because Tarantino, who is known for his highly stylized approach to film production, made it clear that Django Unchained was indeed a throwback to the Spaghetti Western genre that saw a meteoric rise from 1957 to 1978, with films like Clint Eastwood's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
If they had been interested in reporting about the stylistic impact the genre had on the re-imagining of slavery's horrific blight on American life, they may have had the integrity to mention that Django Unchained is a part of a trilogy of hybrid films of the 80s, Django Strikes Again and Django Rides Again starring a gun-toting Italian named Franco Nero. These two internationally released, Italian-language films were produced by a European production company in Colombia, South America.
Remember, Lee didn't criticize the use of the "N" word. He didn't take pot shots at the quality of the narrative nor say that he had a problem with a white man directing a film that features slavery.
As a massive fan of Kerry Washington, who played Broomhilda VonShaft, Django's beloved wife, I was resolutely in love with her admission that her role as Olivia Pope, a self-actualized shot caller on the hit TV show Scandal, is the answer to Broomhilda's prayers. As a culture critic, I observe, with the same level of resolution, that Tarantino walks a razor-thin line between an auteur approach to shaming slavery and an exploitative bent for violence and escapism as the answer to slavery.
