Quentin Tarantino is a man with perhaps one great film to his name and who has managed to coast on the strength of that beloved opus for the better part of two decades; he does, however, have more than one very good film to his credit, and the gorgeously realized Django Unchained can, happily, be added to that list. His love letter to the spaghetti western and blaxploitation genres, it is also his rabble-rousing death threat to civilization and as such is something of a triumph of self-loathing.
Jamie Foxx is affectingly earnest in his portrayal of Django, Rousseau’s chained man, suddenly presented with the opportunity of achieving his liberty and reuniting with his enslaved wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). Christoph Waltz is no less charming as the German dentist (who, in a gratuitous irony, has been named Dr. King Schultz) who offers Django his freedom in exchange for a profitable partnership in tracking bounties. Leonardo DiCaprio, who shines most brightly as a villain, plays Calvin Candie, the handsome, debonair slavemaster in possession of Django’s woman.
The fabulous cast is, typically for Tarantino, filled to the brim with familiar character actors and pop culture favorites of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with Michael Parks, Russ Tamblyn, Bruce Dern, Don Johnson, James Remar, and Franco Nero, star of the original Django, all putting in appearances. Samuel L. Jackson, meanwhile, has probably the funniest role of his career in Stephen, Candie’s loyal but sassy domestic slave – the representative Uncle Tom, in other words – who resents freeman Django at first sight and who, in the race-baiting theology of Django Unchained, embodies what may be the worst of evils: the complaisant betrayal of his own long-suffering people.
That Django Unchained is so successful and involving is proof of writer-director Tarantino’s dangerousness as a filmmaker. Tarantino, who bears major responsibility for foisting the torture porn genre on humanity through his endorsement (“Quentin Tarantino presents . . .”) of Eli Roth’s execrable anti-human hit Hostel, continues his desensitization of the American public with his obsessive fetishization of the splattered blood and played-for-laughs agony of bullet-riddled unprogressive white men.
With humor but also an unintentional irony, Tarantino has cast himself in a cameo as one of the slavers revolutionarily liquidated by Django. It is ironic because what what the man is peddling is in effect hatred of himself – of successful whites and of the rich – as an unwitting accomplice in what Yuri Bezmenov describes as the systematic demoralization of Americans by useful idiots through cultural Marxist contamination. Exhibit A: the critically heralded oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino.
This reviewer can sympathize with Django’s violent impulse to liberation and even the pleasure he takes in killing the men who obstruct his enjoyment of natural rights. Where the film flies off the ethical rails is in celebrating the shooting not only of those directly imperiling Django’s liberty, but all of their associates, including Candie’s unarmed and mild-mannered sister. Her crime is one of complacency and, one suspects, of blood relation to the oppressor – of having inherited slavers’ genes.
This is particularly reckless in a film that makes a point of alluding constantly to the contemporary – with hip-hop music, “fuck”-sprinkled dialogue, joking reference to the Holocaust, characters named after Martin Luther King and an Italian western hero, and Tarantino’s endless self-referential postmodern hipsterism – and through these conscious anachronisms advertises some imagined relevance to the race relations of today. Designed with the express purpose of ripping open and poking the synthetic psychological wounds of crimes not experienced by anyone alive in America today, Django Unchained is nothing if not a wholly superfluous incitation to racial hatred, genocide, and redistribution of wealth. It is all the more egregious for being so good.
4.5 stars with accompanying whip-scarred stripes. Goodbye Uncle Tom remains the most incendiary and entertaining treatment of slavery on film, but Tarantino’s new contribution is certainly no slouch. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Django Unchained is ominous in its flippancy and:
9. Anti-Christian. White slavemasters return from a funeral singing a hymn. Religion that allows for such injustice is a fraud.
8. Anti-tobacco. Monsieur Candie smokes from a cigarette holder like the bourgeois swine he is. Rank-and-file southern hick psychos chew and spit.
7. Anti-police. A racist sheriff turns out to be a wanted criminal.
6. Anti-science. Study of human biodiversity is represented by pseudoscientific phrenology. Science = racism.
5. Pro-miscegenation. A Texas woman eyes Django with interest from her window as he rides through her town. Black love is described as a tar pool that refuses to let go its hold on the fancy of those who enter (i.e., once you go black, you never go back). The camera seems to want to lick Foxx’s nude physique.
4. Anti-business. Thoroughly hostile to private property, the film’s representative forms of commerce are vengeful bounty hunting, the slave trade, and mining – the latter utilizing slave labor, naturally. Wealth is accumulated through cruelty and murder. A saloon keeper who objects to Django’s presence is chased out of his own establishment. Private property = slavery. “I’m runnin’ a business here,” Candie says during one of the most savage scenes of meanness.
3. Anti-South/anti-white male. While critics will complain of what was previously the “whitewashing” of American history in films, Django Unchained demonstrates that, if anything, brownwashing and brainwashing are at present the order of the day. Southerners are without exception vile sadists with bad teeth who live to beat, whip, humiliate, muzzle, brand, and castrate blacks. The effeminate swagger of Billy Crash (Walton Goggins), the most vicious of Candie’s toadies, suggests that white loathing of and desire to neuter blacks is a function of white sexual inadequacy and salivating, latently homosexual penis envy. Those not participating directly in these activities remain equally guilty for tolerating the status quo and therefore must receive equal punishment. The conventional incestuous southerner smear receives a nod with what may be hints of Candie’s overly enthusiastic affection for his sister. Black-on-black violence results from white manipulation.
2. Anti-slavery/anti-racist (i.e., pro-yawn on both counts). Django Unchained perpetuates the myth that slavery existed not as an economic expediency, but principally as the plaything of whites’ sadism. Where anti-racist films have previously presented viewers with the “sacrificial Negro” archetype, Django Unchained breaks new ground by inventing the sacrificial honky, the man who absolves the sins of his racial inheritance by dying to liberate blacks.
1. Black supremacist/genocidal. They mo betta.
icareviews 
I applaud the balance deployed in this critique of Tarantino’s latest film, which I agree is a work of considerable brilliance, and I likewise deplore gratuitous violence in general. However, my last statement only goes so far towards agreement with the reviewer, and requires further comment. To be brief, the manifest cruelty and perversion of the historical time and the cultural setting chosen by Tarantino are a very appropriate choice for a melodrama of revenge. Nobody – surely – will strain themselves to defend such an ethos of unchecked and undiluted evil, any more than anyone complained that ‘Inglorious Basterds’ was unfair to the Nazis? (As Noel Coward sang during the last war, with scathing irony, ‘Let’s not be beastly to the Hun’.) No doubt serious historians will preserve an academic balance in their analyses of the deplorable conventions of such an age. And that is only right and proper. But this is a film intended for popular consumption, and so it will naturally engage the emotions. Moreover, Tarantino has ensured that no decent viewer can reasonably say that those victims, who suffer at the hands of the slave – Django – who ultimately comes to represent the vengeful defender of an oppressed people, have not brought this disaster upon themselves. The situation and the events are of course deplorable; but they are equally inevitable, for what we are shown here on the eve of the (white) Civil War are the battle-lines drawn up in that War of Liberation that never was, until much later: The witty and pointed interpolation, into the early stirrings of ‘black consciousness’, of the iconography and attitudes of the much later revolutionary ‘Black Power’ movement is a perfectly legitimate and even informative cinematic ploy. Surely it shows a sense of human fellowship and decency to be moved to indignation and anger at the plight of the underdog, and to feel a sense of identification with Django (in the dramatic arc of whose character there is little difference from the plight of the protagonists in either ‘Gladiator’ or ‘Spartacus’)? I am by no means sure that it is wrong of the director to have given expression to the sense of outrage which was inherent in the situation, and which the plantation-owner Candie himself openly admits would have occurred, had the opportunity ever arisen,This eventuality is of course the ever-present danger to which every plantation owner must address himself, admitting thereby the extreme insecurity inherent in all illegitimate authority, for whom ever-increasing terror is the only defence. Carlyle certainly deplored the excesses of the French Revolution – and this bespeaks a squeamishness that does his humanity credit, but at the same time it exposes the extreme naivety of an historian who can believe that the downtrodden and brutalized populace of Paris were in any position to act with the rationality of a contemporary Victorian! As to the graphic vividness with which Tarantino portrays the ensuing violence, this is only graphic by contrast with the conventional renderings available to earlier film-makers: Even to state mildly that ‘many were violently done to death’ is to open up the possibility of that imaginative spectacle of horror whose frisson haunts the ancient DNA which is the personal record of our individual survival, out of the violent wreckage of ages in turmoil. To express even so little of life’s horror would have been enough to send a sheltered maiden of earlier ages off into a dead faint! And to be fair to Carlyle, his description of Revolutionary horrors is shockingly and intentionally vile, and sometimes graphic – even by our own standards. He obviously considered, in despite of his instinctive revulsion to such barbarism, that the reality of violent events must be transcribed and communicated in their full horror. Tarantino, notoriously, rather enjoys creating spectacles of ultra-violence, and this has brought many detractors. But his Senecan joy in piling horror upon horror is the authentic style of a violent society: Like the old dramatist of Imperial Rome – or indeed the Homeric ‘Iliad’ of ancient, war-torn Greece – the material he has to hand is bloody. But at least neither his bloodthirstiness, not that of his audiences, is slaked merely by a spectacle of universal death and horror, since it is vindicated by a classically cathartic pity for those who suffer unjustly, and a cleansing celebration of the survival, and indeed the triumph, of a much-abused individual. And – dare one say it – our perspective is kept sanitized and sane by an objectifying sense of humour (often gallows-humour) which allows us to rise above the reeking scenes of death into that most balanced and reasonable realm of all: the consciousness that we are only watching a film, one in which, moreover, the director himself can explode his own image, as if to say ‘None of this is real – this is not life, but the exercise of imagination.’
“But at least neither his bloodthirstiness, not that of his audiences, is slaked merely by a spectacle of universal death and horror, since it is vindicated by a classically cathartic pity for those who suffer unjustly, and a cleansing celebration of the survival, and indeed the triumph, of a much-abused individual.”
I would argue, rather, that the bloodlust of Tarantino’s audience is vindicated not by classically cathartic pity, but by their indoctrination by public institutions of learning, demagogic politicians, and news and entertainment media outlets to believe that hostility toward whites is justifiable and necessary on ethically bankrupt grounds of historical redress. I would argue, furthermore, that plentiful elements if not a majority of the target audience would applaud Django’s killing spree even if no trouble had been taken to depict the whites as cruelly oppressive. The evidence of this is the vocalized sadistic enthusiasm I personally heard expressed by audience members at the comical demise of Candie’s sister, a character who appears to be in no way culpable for the suffering of Django or his wife except as a familial accessory.
Your further comments are most interesting. I think that we mainly differ insofar as, whilst I was trying to appreciate the strict dramatic function of violence in ‘Django Unchained’, you yourself appear to be more concerned with the likely effects the film will have – or does have, in your experience, as you claim – on a critically-illiterate audience (if I understand you aright). I’m trying to do critical analysis, while you are more sociologically inclined. And since I deplored gratuitous violence from the outset of my note, I know you must realise already that I do understand your difficulty with the sort of dubious audience reaction you describe. I freely acknowledge that Tarantino’s chosen subject-matter and sensationalist style are ‘strong meat’, and do present certain ethical quandaries where particular audience members may not, or cannot, bring a basically humane and responsible attitude to such material. (One thinks in particular of children and the criminally abnormal.) However, I would seriously demur from your sweeping characterisation of ‘plentiful elements if not a majority of the target audience’ as being entirely bereft of any sense of humanity, with the clear implication that they are likely to view such ‘Grand Guignol’ as a vindication of the enactment of such extreme behaviours as their preferred and normal mode of human interaction. I really thought that Scorcese’s ‘Taxi Driver’ had already gone over that ethical ground pretty thoroughly, in showing the terrible consequences that arise from a brutalized sensibility being unleashed upon the world. And the deep irony of Travis Bickle’s tragedy is that he acts out of a confused perception of honourable and decent behaviour: he really does mean well! But we are aware – and here we intersect with the sociological influences on behaviour – that Travis has been betrayed by society, resulting in a psychotic alienation expressed in terms of that notoriously modern phenomenon of the romantic loner on a terrible killing spree. John Hinckley Jr. was of course the disturbed fantasist who has already realized your worst fears of copycat violence, stalking Jodie Foster just as Travis Bickle stalked her fictional character in the film, and subsequently plotting – also like Travis – to assassinate the US President. But such insane and dangerous minds acting out in reality the dirty little secrets we all harbour within us from our appallingly bloody and savage evolutionary pre-history, does not mean that most of us, most if not all of the time, do not actually continue to behave as our decent cultural norms dictate. That perhaps more fantasist violence is actually visited upon the present age (as regular news bulletins suggest) is surely due to the current crisis in Western education and the public morality of our leaders? Were any general outbreak of savagery ever to occur, it would – I presume – be more usefully explained in terms of Revolution, where the populace at large had been driven mad with rage against the manifest injustices of an increasingly hypocritical system. This scenario – at least in embryo – is clearly presented in ‘Taxi Driver’ by the astonishing public support the people of New York show for the violent actions of Travis, who is made a hero by the press for his vigilantism. Tarantino’s scenario of the appalling injustice of the southern slave-owning states of ante-bellum America is surely at least as authentically pre-Revolutionary as any such, where a downtrodden underclass is mercilessly exploited and brutalized. Unfortunately these volatile social and political situations are not merely the figment of violently sensational imaginations – whether of dramatic presentation in a film, or personal action in the real world. In real terms, the mild-seeming sister of the ruthless slave-owning Candie is a knowing collaborator, and thus inextricably caught up in the disaster which overtakes the entire bloodsoaked ‘House of Candie’. Such a fate is inevitably visited on all those who supported that obviously abominable dispensation, including the sinister black ‘Uncle Tom’ figure. All this is dramatically quite classical in all aspects but in its showing the violence rather than just relying on the graphic report of it at second-hand. In other words, I would strongly insist that, were I actually to make any such sweeping general claim as that ‘hostility toward whites is justifiable and necessary’ I would merely be expressing an opposition to racism directed towards black people in terms of a racism towards white people; and I must therefore insist that it is not only Tarantino’s view, but indeed any decent person’s view, that the very particular white people shown in ‘Django Unchained’ who are directly implicated in such unspeakable and institutionalized cruelty towards black people, are richly deserving of every horror that is shown being visited upon them – but only that which is directly visited upon them by those whose sufferings at their hands have driven them to such an extreme. This is no more than old-fashioned dramatic empathy and catharsis. I see no need whatsoever to fear that ordinary onlookers to the drama, however they may shout their enthusiastic support and approbation from the safe sidelines of the spectacle – caught up as they are in the natural emotional reaction it must stir up – , will rush out of the cinema to indulge in unbridled manifestations of violence! Unless, naturally, the society to which they return after their fictional interlude happens to be a particularly unjust (or gun-crazy) one, and their position within it particularly intolerable. One is reminded of a time when even operatic performances were banned from being staged because of the propensity of audiences to be inspired by a spirit of heroic resistance by political suggestions raised by certain scenarios … Historically, such artistic bans and censorship in general are a sure indication of thoroughly weak and corrupt regimes, whose Candie-like fear of their own helotry leads inevitably to violent redress for injuries long endured. Scorsese and Tarantino alike have ruthlessly nailed certain extremely dangerous and repellent tendencies in America’s history and culture; in this, they may well be prophets of disaster for that great Republic. And were even the USA ever to sink so low as to invoke against its leaders and institutions the general hatred of its population, then its fall would be as salutary as that of ‘Candie-land’. But since I cannot believe that you are seriously regarding this film as the precursor of any such debacle, I must say that, were authority to act on your implication that the film amounts to a public danger, that demands some form of external restraint or suppression be applied to it, then that would be most undesirable. The audience with whom I shared the experience- at least – were guiltless of any offensive behaviour. There are in existence – one hears – films in which extreme representations of violence are utterly gratuitous, and which nastily pander to nothing but a morbid taste for all things disgusting and anti-human. The stylistically complex and intelligent film which I saw was most emphatically not one of those objectionable assemblages of pornographic violence lacking in any redeeming qualities whatsoever: Its strongly sympathetic central characters and its witty puncturing of its own portentously bloody action were precisely those aspects of the drama which the people I sat amongst to see ‘Django Unchained’ most enthusiastically responded to. I would have been uncomfortable in any other company, and had I found the atmosphere to be as you describe I do assure you that I would not have kept my seat for a moment longer, but would forthwith have left the cinema. And I simply do not see how, by sympathising with the terrible historical predicament of black people (often very movingly portrayed here by Tarantino), I am thereby guilty of perpetrating some kind of hate-crime against white people?!! So my enjoyment of and admiration for this film demonstrates that I have been indoctrinated into vile bloodlust against all white-skinned people, does it? Thankfully, my only indoctrination has been against the sort of logical error which has led you to such an untenable conclusion. You do not mean to be offensive, but unfortunately your view is – extremely so. And for someone so easily offended, as your reaction to this excellent film unfortunately shows you to be, it is rather ridiculous of you to suggest that I harbour a potentially murderous antipathy to every single white-skinned man, woman and child upon God’s earth! On what possible basis can you conclude that I am offended by the colour of my own skin?!I hope you will in future consider your words more carefully, and thereby avoid the pain of embarrassment, which you ought by now to be experiencing. One learns by experience, so they say.
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