Django Unchained or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Being a Slave and Love Ma Massa
Franco Nero, right, the original Django from the 1966 Italian film
Photo Courtesy The Weinstein Company
Last night I viewed Quentin Tarantino's biggest ever box office hit 'Django Unchained' of which I am giving a SPOILER ALERT, that is, I will be discussing an action by one of the characters that may ruin watching the film for some of my readers.
However I am not going to discuss whether or not it is historically true that a black man went around Mississippi with a German bounty hunter shooting down white people (it never happened (1)) because I do not believe any film, even one taking place in historically true settings, has to be historically true or accurate in its plot or depiction of characters. For example, I can enjoy watching a WWII flick where the Jews kill the Nazis without crying out in the theater: "But this never happened!".
Movies are meant to entertain, not enlighten. For this reason I consider it a waste of time for panels to debate historical issues within a film. Yesterday, a trio of University of New Hampshire professors led a discussion critiquing the film, some saying Tarantino did not focus enough on the issue of slavery (2).
What nonsense. If I want to be enlightened, I'll watch a documentary produced by a person whose integrity and commitment to truth I respect.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
But I digress. What I want to talk about is the behavior of Stephen, the house slave character played by Samuel L. Jackson. When Stephen learns that Broomhilda, one of the slaves owned by his master, is in love with Django, he deduces that Django and the German are not really there to purchase a Mandingo fighter and informs his master that it's merely a red herring in order to buy the slave-girl for a minor sum and disappear before coming up with a hefty sum for the fighter.
Stephen chooses to help the man who keeps him in bondage rather than a fellow black slave.
At first I thought to myself: What kind of mentality, what kind of depravity, what defect in reasoning could cause a person to identify with his slaver? Then I reminded myself, it happens all the time in America and Europe: thousands of Muslim women happily don the symbol of their oppression, the hijab, proclaiming that it liberates them, that it keeps them from the unwanted advances of men, ignoring the hundreds of millions of Muslim women living behind the Crescent Curtain, under the yoke of Islam, who wear the hijab because they fear being arrested or killed.
Can you imagine free blacks wearing chains on their feet, declaring that they find it liberating, ignoring the fact that chains are symbols of black slavery? How stupid can these women be? Muslim women in America should purposely not wear a hijab or burqa in solidarity with oppressed Muslim women. I don't get it. Maybe they are stupid, perhaps they don't know that Muslim women in Muslim countries would love to be free of the 'liberating' burqa.
There is at least one Muslim woman who believes wearing the burqa in western countries is stupid:
Huff Post, Why I Hate the Burqa -- And Yes, I Wear One
Co-existing with non-Muslims in the West means what we must reconsider our cultural and religious values or we go home. By the same token Muslims rigidly adhering to wearing cultural dress unnecessarily invites trouble. It doesn't take much to compromise and adapt at some level to a new environment.
...
Outlawing the burqa will create a tremendous divide between non-Muslims and Muslims. But wearing the burqa in the West is also just plain stupid.
ENDNOTES
(1):
The Daily Beast, 24 Feb 2013, Django Unchained’s Bloody Real History in Mississippi
It practically goes without saying that Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is not “true history.” No German bounty hunter ever teamed up with a slave to kill wanted men and claim the reward for their corpses. No slave turned gunslinger ever rampaged through Mississippi before the Civil War in a gory quest to rescue his wife from a villainous cotton planter. It can scarcely be compared with Spielberg’s Lincoln, which takes some liberties with the historical record, but remains a movie about events that actually happened.
Yet to describe the plot of Django as absurd and outlandish, as many reviewers have done, misses a crucial point. The true history of the Cotton Kingdom before the Civil War was no less bizarre and bloody than anything the movie has to offer. Two new books by excellent historians, Joshua Rothman’s Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson and Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, reveal that slave owners’ own wild fantasies had deadly practical consequences.
(2):
SeacoastOnline.com, 4 Mar 2013, Professors lead forum on 'Django Unchained'
PORTSMOUTH — A trio of University of New Hampshire professors led a discussion critiquing the Academy Award-winning film "Django Unchained" on Sunday.
The Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail and the Seacoast African-American Cultural Center co-sponsored the talk held at the Discover Portsmouth Center, which was postponed from last week due to a snowstorm. The discussion focused on the controversy surrounding Quentin Tarantino's film, which has elicited a wide range of reactions from viewers and critics.
"Django Unchained" tells the story of Django, played by Jamie Foxx, a slave who is freed by a German bounty hunter and goes on a vendetta to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner in the antebellum South. The film has won a slew of awards, including Oscars for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Christoph Waltz) and Best Writing (Tarantino).
The reactions were varied among the UNH professors and the couple dozen people who attended Sunday's talk. There were fans of the film, such as UNH associate professor of education Joe Onosko, and JerriAnne Boggis, the director of the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail, but others critiqued its lack of strong female characters and perceived failure to remain focused on the issue of slavery.
