Identity and Race in Django Unchained:

Question:

Discuss the concept of film/memory in context of ONE of the following titles:

1. Mind, Matter, Memory: …
2. History, Memory, Trauma: …
3. Mind Games: …
4. Childhood Memories: …
5. (Post)Colonial Memory: … Lapsing, Latent, Lost: …

• You may cover any films discussed on the course
• If you would like to write an essay on the films not discussed in the course, ask your tutor
• You must complete your essay title, reflecting your focus
• A minimum of 10 sources in total, of which at least 5 academic/scholarly. Films are also a part of your source count – non-academic obviously, and have to be referenced in Harvard style.

Choose your topic (1-6)
Decide your approach: argument, films, scholarly texts
Complete your title, emphasising your argument. I.e. ‘Childhood Memories: Use of fantasies in Pan’s Labyrinth’, or ‘History, Memory, Trauma: Recollection in Shoah and 12 Years a Slave’, or ‘Mind Games: Deception as a visual trope’, etc. (these are examples only, complete your own according to interest)

Answer:

Abstract

Quentin Tarantino’s stated ambition for Django Unchained was to create a film that grapples with “America’s horrible past with slavery . . . but do them like spaghetti westerns.” This article considers the implications of those priorities—a serious treatment of slavery on one hand, and reference to genre tropes on the other. It concludes that, although the spaghetti Western may be particularly well suited to depict the nihilistic and dehumanizing violence that undoubtedly characterized chattel slavery, the genre’s resistance to the representation of human subjectivity mirrors the relative silence around the psychological dimension, not only of slavery, but also of continuing crisis of structural racism in the post–civil rights era. As such, through the specific narrative and aesthetic strategies he employs, Tarantino unwittingly undermines his own pretensions to social consciousness, producing instead a film that reflects and reproduces the ignorance, strategic silence, and White guilt surrounding America’s ongoing history of slavery and racism.

Keywords

Tarantino, Django Unchained, spaghetti Western, race, slavery, identity

¹Portland State University, OR, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jarrod Dunham, Department of English, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751, USA.

Email: jdunham@pdx.edu

Consider a slave on the auction block, awaiting sale. Imagine the slave being seen, indeed examined, by the potential bidders. Imagine what she felt. Think of her trembling and crying, breaking down, even fighting back. Such attempts to imagine looking in on the auction block and to empathize with those for sale have found a hard-won place in the mainstream of American culture. But little prepares us to see her as looking out . . .

—David Roediger (1998)

The 2012 release of Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti Western slavery epic, Django Unchained, smack in the middle of the Christmas blockbuster season, prompted an immediate slew of praise and criticism, becoming not only one of the most talked about, but also most divisive and controversial films in recent memory. Django has been the subject of numerous studies, a 2013 issue of the journal Transition, and a 2014 anthology edited by Oliver Speck; it provoked sharp criticism from Ishmael Reed (2012) and earned kudos from Louis Farrakhan (quoted in Watkins, 2012b), who praised it both for its relevance and the sense of empowerment it fostered with its hyper-cool Black gunslinger. From Spike Lee (2012), one of the most articulate and outspoken voices on the subject of the Black experience in America, it elicited nothing more than a refusal to see the film and a single plainspoken tweet by way of explanation: “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.”

Not least among the concerns of Lee and other skeptical commentators was Tarantino’s well-established penchant for campy genre meshing, routine deployment of racial epithets, and the fetishization of violence, all of which found fertile ground on an unprecedented scale in a project in which Tarantino aspired to “deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff, but do them like spaghetti Westerns, not like big issue movies” (quoted in Hiscock, 2007). The undertaking of such a sensitive topic by such a controversial filmmaker was, to put it mildly, the perfect recipe for a very hotly contested exchange of ideas. And while there has been no shortage of commentary on the insensitivity or ingenuity—depending on which side of the issue one stands—of approaching slavery through the lens of a spaghetti Western, neither the immediate responses to the film, nor any of the many critical analyses published since, have engaged in the work of theorizing the relationship between slavery as lived historical experience and the specific epistemological affordances of the lens employed by Tarantino in his cinematic depiction of that experience.

It is, however, by no means the case that scholars have neglected the implications of genre for a filmic representation of slavery. Chris Vognar (2013), for instance, acknowledges that “a spaghetti Western homage would seem to trivialize the horrors of slavery. However, I can’t think of a major Hollywood movie that takes more pains to show the damage slavery inflicted on the human body” (p. 30). In a largely favorable analysis, Yarimar Bonilla (2013) begins with the question of whether “certain filmic genres, such as comedy, [are] inherently inadequate for capturing the experience of enslavement?” (p. 69), concluding that, while Tarantino is able to offer a cogent critique of contemporary racial issues, ultimately “his fantasy belies the true stakes of black revenge in the present” (p. 74). Heather Ashley Hayes and Gilbert Rodman (2014), meanwhile, draw attention to the creative contributions of Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson, and Kerry Washington in characterizing Django as a “black film” and an “articulate condemnation of structural racism” (p. 187).

Against this current, Samuel Perry (2014) contends that “Tarantino’s provocations and garishness concerning violence forgo critical reflection necessary to carry the weight of the historical events referenced and the subject matter incorporated in his films,” concluding that “those of us who have no prior history of public feuding with Tarantino and did not refuse to see the film as Spike Lee did might need to evaluate it in the terms that Lee put forth” (p. 206). Perry’s apprehensions about Tarantino’s spaghetti Western aesthetics have to do with the violence committed against the identity of the leading characters when submitted to the aesthetic prerogatives of the spaghetti Western. Specifically, he maintains that “Black characters successfully appropriating an archetype unusually available to them should not cede aspects of their racial identity in order to embody the character appropriated” (p. 209). In Perry’s assessment, this is precisely what happens to Django, who, in appropriating the archetypal traits of the spaghetti Western hero—a typically White figure, but also a figure outside time, place, and concrete sociohistorical conditions—ceases in meaningful ways to reflect the historical circumstances he is supposed to embody.

The concerns expressed by Perry dovetail with those raised by other critics, regarding previous Tarantino films with less inflammatory subject matters. Paul Gormley (2001) has noted that the characters in Tarantino’s 1994 classic, Pulp Fiction, “are all constructed as citations of generic movie characters, without either psychological or bodily depth. There is nothing to be discovered beyond their intertextual surface” (p. 161). The violence exhibited by those characters thus functions as little more than aesthetic performance. However, as Henry Giroux (1995) observes, “‘real’ violence comes from somewhere; it is not innocent, neither does it emerge outside existing historical contexts and social relationships.” Put another way, if one agrees with Paula Moya (2002) that “it is precisely because identities have a referential relationship to the world that they are politically and epistemically important” (p. 13), then there are very significant hazards attendant to the undermining of that referential relationship.

The central importance of identity to making sense of and confronting social injustice has been foundational to cultural studies and identity politics at least since the Combahee River Collective (1979) Statement, which declared that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity” (p. 365). In this formulation, identity refers not merely to the product of one’s formative experiences, but also, dialectically, to the position from which one theorizes, and endeavors to assert oneself against, the forces that shaped those experiences. Accordingly, Satya P. Mohanty (1997) proposes “that we see identities as complex theories about (and explanations of) the social world, and the only way to evaluate such theories is to look at how well they work as explanations” (p. 238). The problem with Django, by this standard, is that, having ceded their racial identities, the film’s black characters are no longer able to (re)present any kind of explanation of the system of oppression that the film aspires to address.

Thus, by subordinating the African American characters of Django Unchained to spaghetti Western archetypal referents, Tarantino strips them of the subjective experiences—the personal and communal histories of humiliation and brutalization that would register not only in the physical but also in psychological and social realms—that are shared by those who have been victims of slavery and state-sponsored racism, and that can become the foundation for “knowledge about how fundamental aspects of our society . . . operate to sustain matrices of power” (Moya, 2002, p. 38). This has the insidious consequence of downplaying those aspects of slavery that have persisted beyond the formal abolition of the institution, namely, the unmitigated injustice and inhumanity of a mode of social, political, and economic organization that systematically devalues the culture, intellect, and very humanity of a large portion of the populace. The result is a film that, radically alienated from its historicist pretenses, distorts or neglects the very issues it presumes to address. As such, Django Unchained tends instead to reinscribe the assumptions of the quietly racist dominant narrative that downplays the contribution of systemic racism to the continuing social problems confronted by African Americans, naively absolving White America of any complicity and placing responsibility for those problems squarely on the shoulders of African Americans themselves.

Although low-budget Westerns had been filmed in Italy and other European locations for decades, the spaghetti Western genre was symbolically inaugurated, and came to be defined, by the spectacular success of Sergio Leone’s (1964) radically low-budget A Fistful of Dollars. That film introduced Clint Eastwood, whose emotionless carriage, blank stare, and carefully chosen words would set the standard for the genre, serving as the basic model for, among others, the title character of Sergio Corbucci’s (1966) Django, an obvious referent for Tarantino’s film. Christopher Frayling (1998), in his comprehensive analysis of the genre, notes that “the hero-figures are usually identifiable by a collection of external gestures, mannerisms, ‘stylish’ articles of clothing, or even motifs on the soundtrack, rather than by anything remotely to do with the ‘inner man’” (p. 61). Indeed, the silent protagonist of the spaghetti Western is an extreme iteration of the archetypal Western hero who, according to Peter Homans’s (1968) structural analysis of the American

Western,

rides into town from nowhere . . . We know nothing of any past activities, relationships, future plans, or ambitions . . . There are no friends, relatives, family, mistresses—not even a dog or cat—with the exception of the horse, and this too is a strangely formal relationship. (p. 264)

However, even these heroes have names, and abide by a discernible moral code, however simplistic or antisocial it may be. For Leone and Corbucci, however, the hero is not merely anonymous, but even, in a significant way, empty.

The aesthetic prerogative of the spaghetti Western is, in large measure, the deconstruction of the mythical Western narrative in which the hero stands for a rigorous, if often brutally unforgiving, code of frontier justice. Heroes and villains alike signify on the codes of the American Western, without in fact embodying the moralizing messages of those codes. Rather, what is being endeavored is the “undercutting [of] the idea of any moral code” (Mitchell, 1996, p. 225). The justified, idealized violence of the American Western becomes, in the hands of the likes of Leone and Corbucci, violence for violence’s sake. The dichotomy between good and evil remains and is easily discernible, but, stripped of its moral foundations, becomes little more than the performance of style and aptitude. Both heroes and villains become “mere empty shells, and issues of right and wrong, appropriate behavior, and honorable acts are either disregarded or self-mockingly reduced to questions of skill, puncturing the 1950s ideal of the high-minded man with a gun” (Mitchell, 1996, p. 225).

This is not to suggest, as early critics did, that the resulting product is bereft of artistic merit or social commentary. However if, as Mitchell (1996) argues, the spaghetti Western functions by displacing violence, if its fundamental operation is the exploitation of the premise that “as long as violence can be decoded comfort can still be found” (p. 231), it does imply the genre’s fundamental inadequacy to the task of historicizing violence, of expressing and comprehending violence as an identifiable response to specific causal factors. What such an endeavor produces, I want to suggest, is not a historically accurate depiction of a violent society, but rather a gratuitous presentation of extreme violence alongside, but disarticulated from, a depiction of that society, however historically accurate it may be.

Django Unchained begins in 1858 as a number of slaves are driven through a barren landscape by two slave traders on horseback. The party encounters a German bounty hunter, the conspicuously named Dr. King Schultz, who expresses an interest in purchasing a certain slave in the “inventory”— Django. Schultz requires Django’s assistance in locating certain fugitives, and informs him that he will free him once the job is completed. However, Django turns out to have a knack for bounty hunting, and Schultz offers instead to employ him throughout the winter, and to help him free his wife, Hildi, in the spring. After a profitable winter, the two head to Mississippi to rescue Hildi, who has been purchased by a sadistic plantation owner named Calvin Candie. When their elaborate rescue plan goes awry, Schultz kills Candie and then dies in the subsequent gunfight, and Django is taken captive, to be sold off to the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company. He escapes, however, and returns to the plantation where he systematically massacres its White inhabitants and the evil head house slave, blows up the mansion, and makes a triumphant exit with Hildi.

In spite of this seemingly spectacular success, though, Django’s status as a “serious black hero” is problematized from the moment he is introduced. When Schultz first speaks to him, Django exhibits precisely the demeanor one would expect of a slave: He responds to questions promptly and succinctly, he does not elaborate, and he does not make eye contact. His body language makes evident that he comprehends his subordinate position in the interaction. This is the early Django, before he has undergone the trials that will cause him to develop into the gunfighting action hero of the spaghetti Westerns. As Tarantino notes in an interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “we don’t have a story if Django is already this magnificent heroic figure who just happens to be in chains” (quoted in Gates, 2013, p. 48). Nevertheless, Django undergoes a rapid transformation, dramatically throwing off his cloak to reveal the lash scars across his back, the moment Schultz frees him from his shackles. Thus, as Django takes the first tentative steps toward his destiny, Schultz would seem to be figured as an enabling White savior. In his interview with Gates, Tarantino responded to precisely that charge, characterizing the scene as merely a reference to the typical Western genre trope of apprenticeship, involving an “older guy teaching the younger guy and sending him on a vengeance journey” (p. 62). In this early instance of intertextual citationality, then, the actual historical context of such an encounter, along with the sociocultural conditions in which these characters are supposed to exist and according to which they have supposedly been shaped, are immediately suppressed by Tarantino’s fidelity to genre tropes. If Schultz cannot be construed as a White savior, it is because, according to Tarantino’s logic, his Whiteness and Django’s Blackness alike are merely incidental to their more significant archetypal roles.

This suppression of race and historicism perhaps accounts for one of the most understated and troubling aspects of the film: the fact that, though he has symbolically been freed from captivity, Django continues to be a slave, now in the possession of Schultz. Although Schultz offers Django a share of the bounty in exchange for helping him track down the fugitive Brittle Brothers, whom Django is uniquely positioned to identify, he does not hesitate to make the strength of his bargaining position clear: “I’m at a bit of a quandary when it comes to you,” Schultz tells Django.

On the one hand I despise slavery. On the other hand, I need your help. If you’re not in position to refuse all the better. So for the time being, I’m going to make this slavery malarkey work to my benefit.

Thus Schultz, the self-proclaimed despiser of “this slavery malarkey,” seems not to object to the system so long as it works to his material benefit. One wonders what distinguishes his position on that point from that of the typical plantation owner, but the film leaves the exploitative nature of the relationship unexamined. It is perhaps a testament to the signifying power of the genre archetypes that one scholar, Margaret Ozierski (2014), erroneously claims that Schultz, “having purchased [Django] . . . declares him a freeman” (p. 42). The ease with which the film and Ozierski alike are able to disregard the ownership of one human being by another highlights the contradictions inherent in Tarantino’s project: As an iteration of spaghetti Western citationality, this arrangement is simply a continuation of the trope of apprenticeship mapped onto the historical backdrop of the antebellum South; as a treatment of real historical conditions, however, it can hardly claim such innocence. In Tarantino’s presentation, slavery, stripped of its racist justifications and physical cruelty, would seem to be nothing more than an innocuous business arrangement between mutually amicable parties.

That Django himself does not object to the terms of Schultz’s arrangement may be explained by the unquestionable improvement the arrangement represents in his material condition; it is rather more difficult to comprehend his acceptance of the scheme Schultz devises for the rescue of Hildi. Schultz’s plan is notable for its needless complexity: He and Django will pretend to be business partners interested in purchasing a fighting “Mandingo” slave for the exorbitant price of US$12,000, with Django playing the role of Mandingo expert; the high stakes of the proposal, it seems, are meant to get Candie’s attention, although Django and Schultz will ultimately “settle” for the much more modest purchase of Hildi. The justification for the subterfuge, that only such an overwhelming sum will suffice to get Candie’s attention, seems altogether unconvincing. The rather obvious possibility that they could simply make a relatively generous offer for the German-speaking Hildi on the available and credible pretense that Schultz desires a conversation partner is not entertained, and Django, like the spaghetti Western gunslingers on whom he is modeled, throws caution to the wind and agrees to the plan without reservation. However, if Sergio Leone’s blank-slate hero can disregard personal safety to undertake such risky schemes, that is precisely because “Leone seems interested in the form of the Western hero’s personality as a series of gestures signaling little other than sheer absence, psychological lack, emotional diminishment” (Mitchell, 1996, p. 231). To reduce Django to such “psychological lack” is not only to compromise the credibility of his backstory and motivation—both seemingly crucial to the plot—but also of anything that might be recognizable as his identity within the historical context of the film and the issues it endeavors to address; whereas Eastwood’s Man With No Name is a solitary drifter, a man without attachments who makes his living by involving himself in dangerous situations, Django is a freed slave who wants only to rescue and be reunited with his wife. His amenability to Schultz’s harebrained plan, then, runs contrary to his own most obvious interests, underscoring the film’s larger project of subordinating narrative considerations to aesthetic exigencies. What is forfeited, however, is not merely coherent storytelling—a virtue that is regarded as expendable by Tarantino and Leone alike—but the viability of the very character upon whose shoulders the film’s ethical pretensions must necessarily be borne.

The plan is launched when Django and Schultz meet Candie at a mansion in Greenville, Mississippi, where well-dressed female slaves carouse, apparently freely, with Whites, and half-naked male slaves engage in gladiatorial combat to the death on a stage framed by sofas and a fireplace. Having enticed the skeptical Candie with their offer, they travel with him to Candyland, along with his entourage and a large company of newly purchased slaves. While Schultz is invited to ride in the carriage with Candie, Django is afforded the same status as Candie’s hired men, riding horseback behind the carriage and alongside the slaves, who are made to walk. As they proceed, Django makes a show of demonstrating his elevated status, first by assaulting one of Candie’s men who insults him, and then by verbally abusing the slaves. “You niggers are gonna understand something about me,” he yells. “I’m worse than any of these white men here. You get the molasses out your ass, you keep your goddamn eyeballs off me.” Although the outburst is ostensibly performance, it is conspicuous enough to catch Candie’s notice and provoke a rebuke from Schultz, who is concerned that Django’s overzealousness is endangering the mission.

A similar dynamic is at play in the following scene, where the party encounters d’Artagnan, a runaway Mandingo from Candyland who has been tracked down by dogs and is cowering in a tree. He insists that he cannot fight anymore, but Candie, who has paid US$500 for him and only received three fights in exchange, theatrically insists that he must be “reimbursed.” The scene is rife with tension, as d’Artagnan’s life evidently hangs in the balance. Finally, Schultz stands up and produces his checkbook, offering to cover the reimbursement. However Django, apparently in character, vetoes the offer: “We ain’t paying a penny for that pickaninny. Ain’t got no use for him. Ain’t that right, Doc?” The veto condemns d’Artagnan to his death, as Candie makes clear, “Seein’ as you won’t pay a penny for this pickaninny here, you won’t mind me handlin’ this nigger anyway I see fit?” “He’s your nigger,” is Django’s cold reply. With that tacit endorsement, Candie orders the dogs to be released, and d’Artagnan is brutally torn apart as the traveling party looks on.

What must be noted here is that in neither scene is Django’s behavior in any way necessitated by the exigencies of the situation. Gregory Kaster (2014) has suggested that “allowing Schultz to proceed would have undermined his and Django’s credibility in the eyes of Candie, endangering (perhaps fatally) their mission” (p. 83), although no aspect of the scenario supports such a conclusion. In fact, the slave in question is used for Mandingo fighting, ostensibly the business endeavor of Schultz and Django; a pretense for purchasing him would not be difficult to devise, nor would it compromise their scheme. Likewise, Django’s rough manner with Candie’s slaves is well in excess of what the masquerade calls for, as evinced by the reactions it provokes in Schultz and Candie alike. Rather, the function of both episodes within the larger project of the film seems to be an extra-narrative strategy to further distance Django from the Black slaves in the eyes of the White audience. That distinction will be crucial in the violent scenes to come, when White people become targets of Django less for their obvious complicity in slavery than for the simple fact of their Whiteness. That racist turn in Django’s quest is effectively obscured by—and perhaps only palatable to White audiences on the basis of—this preemptive strategy of effacing Django’s racialized sociocultural positioning. Rather than a Black man indiscriminately killing White men, the well-dressed, horse-riding, slave-abusing Django emerges as a White action hero fighting for an abstract, deracialized, spaghetti Western brand of justice against an undifferentiated mass of underdeveloped villains.

Beyond the White Gaze: The Psychological

Arriving at Candyland, the party is confronted with the creaky head house slave, Stephen, who is alarmed to see Django mounted on a horse. “Who this nigger up on that nag?” he asks, before launching into a short litany of lighthearted jokes at Candie’s expense, apparently for the entertainment of the White guests. But then he repeats his question, becoming increasingly perturbed at the presence of Django. “Let’s keep it funny,” Candie warns, but in fact, the humor would seem to be just beginning. Ordered to prepare a guest room for Django, Stephen is incensed:

Stephen:	He gonna stay in The Big House?
Candie:	Stephen, he’s a slaver. It’s different.
Stephen:	[increasingly agitated] In The Big House?
Candie:	Well, you got a problem with that?
Stephen:	O h, no. I ain’t got no problem with it, if you ain’t got no problem with burnin’ the bed, the sheets, the pillowcases, everything else when this black-ass motherfucker’s gone!

The virulent and seemingly hypocritical racism of Stephen’s diatribe is, paradoxically, one of the most overtly comedic elements in the film. Roxanne Gay (2013) notes that when she saw the film in theaters, the largely White audience delighted in Stephen’s rant, but, “when the movie’s dark humor focused on people who looked like them, the audience was quiet.” However, Stephen’s attitude toward his own race, perverse though it is, is not simply a slapstick invention of Tarantino. The existence of hierarchies among slaves, particularly those privileging “house slaves” over “field slaves,” is well documented (Russell, Wilson, & Hall, 1992, p. 18). In many cases, as Gay observes,

In order to survive, some black people did what they had to do. Sometimes that meant becoming a part of the slavery system so that said system wouldn’t break them all the way down . . . slaves only had impossible choices, when they had choices at all.

Although less visible, such dehumanizing circumstances and “impossible choices” constitute some of the more insidious ways that racism and slavery victimize human beings, and are precisely the dynamics behind the “Uncle Tom” phenomenon that Stephen appears in this scene to represent. However, subsequent developments serve to undermine any such basis for Stephen’s actions, and strip him, not only of a legitimate basis for his characterization, but also of his own dignity and the sympathy that a film aspiring to “deal with America’s horrible past with slavery” ought to afford him.

The first event that complicates Stephen’s apparent representation of the Uncle Tom stereotype comes when an innocent comment at the dinner table leads him to suspect that Hildi and Django are previously acquainted, a revelation that would blow Django’s cover as a Mandingo expert. Having confirmed his suspicions at precisely the moment he overhears Schultz proposing to purchase Hildi, Stephen interrupts and, convincingly playing the part of the bumbling and servile slave, requests a word with Candie under the pretense of a problem with the dessert.

When Candie walks into the library, he finds Stephen sitting in a plush chair by the fire swirling a glass of brandy. The exchange that follows is crucial, both to the development of Stephen as a character and to the systematic effacement of racial identity that undermines the stated project of the film. As such, it is worth quoting at length:

Candie:	What is the matter?
Stephen:	Them motherfuckers ain’t here to buy no Mandingoes. They wants that girl.
Candie:	[chuckling] Stephen, what the hell are you talking about?
Stephen:	They playin’ your ass for a fool, is what I’m talkin’ about. They ain’t here for no muscle-bound Jimmy. They here for that girl.
Candie:	[incredulous] What girl? Hildi?
Stephen:	Yeah, Hildi! Her and Django? Them niggers know each other.
Candie:	He . . . he just bought Eskimo Joe . . .
Stephen:	Did he give you any money?
Candie:	No! Not yet, but . . .
Stephen:	Then he ain’t bought diddly, not yet, no how. But he was just about to buy what he come here to buy when I interrupted you. [Indicating the response he expects from Calvin:] “Thank you, Stephen.” “You’re welcome, Calvin.”
Candie:	W h-wh-where you getting all this? Why would they go through all that trouble for a nigger with a chewed up back, ain’t worth three hundred dollars?
Stephen:	T hey doin’ it ’cause that nigger Django’s in love with Hildi. She probably his wife. Now why that German give a fuck who that uppity sonuvabitch is in love with, I’m sure I don’t know.
Candie:	I f she’s who they want, why this whole snake oil pitch about Mandingoes then?
Stephen:	Y ou wouldn’t pay no nevermind to no three hundred dollar. That twelve thousand? That made you real friendly now, didn’t it?
Candie:	Y es it did. Wife huh? If it had been a snake, it would have bit me. Those lyin’ goddamn time wasting sons of bitches.

In his comments on the film, Louis Farrakhan (quoted in Watkins, 2012b) singled out for praise Samuel L. Jackson’s portrayal of Stephen as the ultimate Uncle Tom; for Kate Temoney (2014), this scene, “vividly and scarily, convey[s] Stephen’s duplicity, and one cannot help but wonder about the psychology behind it all and appreciate the complexity of the dynamics of victimization” (p. 133). Both observations seek to situate Stephen within existing (if perhaps competing) models of the psychological constitution of the slave. However, it is precisely Stephen’s psychological foundation—and with it any possible construal of him as a victim—that is radically undermined in this scene. By exposing Hildi without any suspicion having befallen either her or himself, Stephen reveals that it is something other than mere intimidation or fear of reprisal that motivates his actions; neither would he seem to merely be seeking approval, because the dynamic between himself and Candie in the library, a private space rather than a space of performance, shows no sign of Stephen’s earlier subservience whatsoever. Comfortably seated as Candie enters the room, his attention focused on his glass of brandy, Stephen greets his master as a host greets a socially inferior guest—a manner that neither surprises nor offends Candie. Moreover, Stephen speaks to Candie with an air of familiarity and intellectual superiority. His tone becomes condescending, and the formally deferential “Monsieur Candie” is dropped in favor of the impudently familiar “Calvin.” What is on display, if the readings of Farrakhan and Temoney are any indication, is not the dynamics of victimization with which a historicist treatment of such an encounter would have to grapple, but rather a stark example of the extent to which historical fidelity and psychological realism can be neglected without compromising the narrative force of the particular kind of story Tarantino has chosen to tell.

Two consequences of this scene emerge. Most obviously, Stephen undergoes a transformation within the context of the plot. Initially a peripheral character serving primarily as comic relief, he now supplants Candie as the film’s archvillain. As an unambiguous embodiment of evil, his character is consistent both with the body of film that provides the stylistic precedent for Django Unchained and Tarantino’s own appreciation for camp. More importantly, a critical reading of the film must now grapple with the fact that Stephen possesses far more agency than his demeanor heretofore has suggested. In demonstrating his own mastery over his supposed master, Stephen can no longer be read as a victim of slavery. As such, the audience is thereby relieved of any moral responsibility to sympathize with or think critically about Stephen as a product and victim of slavery. The problematics of this situation become clear when the identity the film proclaims for Stephen is put to the test Mohanty proposes, that we view “identities as complex theories about the world,” and evaluate them on “how well they work as explanations.” It is clear that no valid explanation of the social conditions and operations of slavery can be derived from this revelation of Stephen’s “true” identity. Indeed, to the extent that the film compels the audience to sympathize with Django as a victim of slavery, it simultaneously compels the audience not to sympathize with Stephen—a paradox that can be easily, though not productively, resolved by a consideration of the film’s aesthetic and narrative strategies: gratuitous exhibitions of physical violence, coupled with deliberately limited character development. Both moves are in keeping with Tarantino’s oeuvre, but in Django Unchained, the perhaps unanticipated consequence is the necessary privileging of one form of suffering over another, producing among the film’s characters a hierarchy of pathos in which Stephen and other allegedly coddled house slaves rank near the bottom, well beneath the threshold of the audience’s sympathy. Put more succinctly, the film tends to reduce the evil of slavery to what can be apprehended by the voyeuristic gaze—shackled limbs, scarred backs, and forcibly separated families—and to neglect the far more pernicious and, not coincidentally, persistent effects of slavery that consistently elude that gaze.

Characters Deferred: Stephen and Django as

Both Stephen and Django are constructed, quite deliberately, as allusions to the archetypes of the spaghetti Western. Their motivations, therefore, are not derived from the characters themselves as they have been developed within the film, but from the tropes of other films; they are subject to extratextual mediation, and as such, their desires, actions, and indeed, the whole structure of their decision-making become detached from the sociohistorical environment in which the film has placed them. As a direct consequence, from the moment that Stephen reveals his true character and unseats Candie as the film’s archvillain—incidentally, the same moment at which Django’s apprenticeship ends and he emerges as a fully formed, gunslinging, avenging hero— Django Unchained ceases to be a film about race, or slavery, or indeed anything at all besides violence and vengeance, and devolves entirely into the spaghetti Western type that it has been signifying on all along.

This process is made evident after Schultz’s plan goes badly awry, leaving Schultz and Candie dead, Hildi still enslaved, and Django disarmed and captured. In what might be the most disturbing scene of the film, Stephen interrupts the impending castration of Django, and informs him that he will instead be sold to the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company, where he will perform the most abject and arduous labor imaginable before dying an ignoble and anonymous death:

And as a slave of the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company, henceforth until the day you die, all day, every day, you will be swingin’ a sledgehammer, turnin’ big rocks into little rocks. Now, when you get there, they gonna take away your name, give you a number and a sledgehammer, and say, “Get to work!” One word of sass, they cut out your tongue. And they good at it, too. You won’t bleed out. Oh, they does that real good! They gonna work ya all day, every day ’till your back give out. Then, they’re gonna hit you in the head with a hammer, throw your ass down the nigger hole. And that will be the story of you, Django!

Stephen, it is clear, has thoroughly transcended his nominal role as head house slave. Although it might be reasonable to imagine he would avenge the loss of a master whom he had known from birth, the sadistic bent he reveals in his handling of Django, and particularly the deferred gratification of his vengeful anger to a time and place at which he will not be present, simply does not follow. Rather, the calculated evil of Stephen’s chosen mode of revenge functions as a signifier of the archetypal role he has come to possess, and the highly delimited manner in which the audience is permitted to understand him.

With Schultz departed from the scene, however, Django is able to graduate from his apprenticeship, while the racial situation in the film becomes less complicated: The Black people are good, and the White people evil, with only Stephen remaining as an exception. That is not to say, however, that the film’s initial concern with racism reemerges at this point. On the contrary, Blackness and Whiteness have become useful but ultimately superficial signifiers of good and evil; Stephen’s outstanding exceptionalism seems less a contradiction of that prevailing order than an ironic twist. Such, in any case, will be the governing principle of Django’s escape from captivity and return to Candyland to rescue Hildi: He quite literally shoots every White person he encounters, including Miss Laura, the relatively sympathetic sister of Candie, whose principal role in the film has been to insist on the indecency of displaying Hildi’s lash scars for the dinner guests. It would seem that Django is violently enacting an absolutist rebellion against slavery, taking vengeance against every White representative of the institution he encounters. However, while the pretense of radical justice remains intact, Django’s flippant murder of Miss Laura, whose complicity in the slave economy is not obviously greater than that of Schultz, his late owner and master, suggests there is something indiscriminate in his violence—or, rather, that he is discriminating on the basis of race, and not guilt. It is this facet of the scene that prompted Louis Farrakhan (quoted in Watkins, 2012b) to characterize the movie as “preparation for a race war,” puzzling over how a White audience would respond to that scene:

He was killing all these white folk. Well, how does a white person see that? How do white people who feel the guilt of what their fathers have done to us, how do they feel? Do you think that they don’t think that if black folk had a chance to do to them what they had done to us . . . that one out of ten thousand will be like that, and maybe more?

However, there seems to have been no popular response to the film that would indicate that White people felt threatened in the manner Farrakhan imagines. That is, the violence that is indiscriminately perpetrated against White people for much of the last half hour of the film seems not to have been widely interpreted by White audiences as anti-White. Gay (2013) begins to formulate a reason why when she suggests that “Django Unchained was a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, and one in which white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental.” Indeed, Django’s revenge sequence highlights the extent to which the film has, by its conclusion, become dislodged from questions of race and slavery altogether. The concluding orgy of violence, that is, constitutes the film’s ultimate capitulation to the tropes of the spaghetti Western, finally realizing the deracialized objectification of Django as a gunslinging action hero, taking vengeance on the homogenized henchmen of the film’s archvillain. If this is in keeping with Tarantino’s broad strategy of intertextual citationality, it also has troubling consequences, not least for the integrity of the film’s narrative itself. That is, the significance of Django’s own compelling and reasonably well-developed backstory, which initially distinguishes him from the heroes of the spaghetti Westerns, is nullified at the moment he is subsumed under a genre type, wherein he emerges as nothing more, and nothing less, than an iteration of a stock character that requires no backstory at all.

Django’s revenge, then, would seem to be little more than a quasi-racist rampage stripped of its most troubling implications by deferral to the familiar spaghetti Western tropes of the shootout and the showdown. Nevertheless, it is the exceptions to the rule that are most alarming. Among White characters, it is only Schultz who is spared the animosity of his erstwhile slave. Indeed, as Scott Schomburg (2013) has observed, although Django is the nominal protagonist of the film, “Tarantino’s script pivots around Schultz’s enlightened white identity.” It is disturbing, but not surprising, then, that a number of commentators (Ozierski, 2014; Speck, 2014; Vognar, 2013; Weber, 2014) have characterized Schultz’s death as “self-sacrifice,” failing to note that the handshake that Schultz refuses would have freed Django and Hildi, while the gunfire he recklessly offers instead achieves nothing but to throw the beleaguered couple back into slavery. In fact, Schultz’s apparent immunity against judgment, from Django and sympathetic commentators alike, cannot be resolved by appeal to anything in the film itself, unless it is seriously to be contended that his decision to keep Django as a slave is offset by his apparent magnanimity as slave owner—a position that is highly suspect, to say the least. Rather, his unblemished reputation remains a contradiction, one that is only made credible by appeal to the commonality of White guilt: Schultz is redeemed, it seems, by having befriended and assisted Django in his archetypal capacity of White savior, and by having stated his opposition to slavery—a strategy not at all unlike that which White America has historically employed to unburden itself of its own complicity in the propagation of a systemically racist society.

The culminating execution of Stephen, the only unsympathetic Black character in the film, is even more disturbing in this light. In a film that has already made a voyeuristic enterprise of the infliction of violence on Black bodies, it is the spectacle of the slow, desperate death of Stephen that is most drawn out, most laden with human suffering. If the scene bears any significance—if, that is, it has a place within Tarantino’s social aspirations for Django—then it is difficult to understand it as anything but the inverse of Schultz’s inculpability: For equations to balance, for social inequalities to be explained, the innocence of White America must imply and be countered by the responsibility of Black America. There would seem to be little else to explain the necessity, or justify the occasion, of a film dealing with these issues taking such evident sadistic delight in the death throes of a geriatric Black slave.

James Baldwin (1965/1998) has observed that what White Americans see reflected in a Black man’s body

is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since in the main they seem to lack the energy to change this condition they would rather not be reminded of it. (p. 320)

Django Unchained functions, to a large degree, by divorcing slavery from the “disastrous, continuing, present condition” that Baldwin identifies. Indeed, the film’s epistemology very conspicuously corresponds to a set of myths that have become increasingly essential for White America, which would rather imagine that the evils of slavery were limited in historical and geographic scope, that they were “merely” physical rather than psychological or sociological in nature, and that they ceased to exercise influence over lives, communities, and societies as a whole when the institution was formally abolished in 1865.

The curious psychological vacancy evident in the character of Stephen, and the delight that audiences are evidently expected to take in his racist rants against “this black-ass motherfucker,” is symptomatic of White subscription to these myths. As Gay (2013) points out, “we should feel as sympathetic toward Stephen as we do toward Django or Hildi, or any of the other enslaved people in the movie. Unfortunately, Tarantino is too heavy handed and selfindulgent to allow us even this.” Of course, insofar as Stephen is merely a variation of a b-movie stock villain, he would seem to be a skillfully executed realization of Tarantino’s aesthetic vision. What beg for interrogation, however, are the consequences of that success: the very startling fact that the archvillain in what is billed as an antislavery movie is not a White plantation owner but an elderly Black slave, that this seems not to have much troubled White audiences and commentators, and that any reading of that situation that might identify in it a productive commentary on slavery is effectively foreclosed by the development of the character along increasingly fantastical and ahistoricist lines.

The film’s unacknowledged moral agenda—pardoning White people for their complicity so long as they express remorse or reluctance, and condemning Black people for their perceived offenses while suppressing consideration of any underlying social factors—constitutes a reductive, White-centric, and essentially racist take on the institution of slavery, and bears a striking resemblance to the more subtle varieties of racism that continue to be prevalent in America today. Compounding that is the violence the film performs on its own African American hero by stripping him of his own desires, motivation, and subjecthood, and replacing them with archetypal tropes of a cinematic tradition that is profoundly alien to the historical circumstances he is meant to address.

By emptying its African American characters of the subjective content by which they could, in Mohanty’s (1997) terms, “produce more objective knowledge about a world that is constitutively defined by relations of domination” (p. 232), Django Unchained instead reinscribes the epistemologies of the dominant class—the very prejudices and misconceptions that are the legacy of “America’s horrible past with slavery.” Django may well be a “serious black hero,” as Boyce Watkins (2012a) contends, but the opportunity to address slavery in a manner that would cohere with the experience of such a hero is forfeited by the imposition of 21st-century White guilt as the epistemological foundation of the film. Django Unchained consequently operates according to a narrow interpretation of racism as something that is deliberately done by evil White people to innocent Black people, with no acknowledgment of its more subtle operations, no recognition of its continuing systemic pervasiveness, and no understanding of it as (still) constitutive of the lived experience of African Americans, irrespective of how it may look or function for white people. Positive responses to the film on the part of White critics and audiences may well reflect a legitimate appreciation of the film’s honest grappling with those aspects of slavery with which White America is most familiar, and with which it remains most uncomfortable. However, such reactions are necessarily privileged and incomplete; what they overlook, and what criticism as a social project must attend to, are the operations by which the epistemologies of the dominant class are constantly reified and naturalized, while those belonging to marginalized groups are systematically occluded and the politics they engender delegitimized. The epigraph with which I began this essay illustrates the problem quite effectively: White America’s willingness to confront slavery has advanced to the point that it is able to look at the slave on the auction block without averting its collective gaze; it is not yet prepared, however, to accept the reality that she is also possessed of her own gaze, and that it may not be flattered by what she sees.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biography

Jarrod Dunham received his MA in Literature from Portland State University. He teaches English composition and literature at Portland State University and the University of Portland. His research interests include composition theory; the hidden curriculum and the intersection of race, language, and class in producing structures of knowledge and power in academia; and the construction of identities in educational, social, and cultural contexts.

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