Originally appeared in the artsfuse.org
12/28/12
Bad movie.
The plantation South, in which cotton was king, becomes a
boxing arena.
Leonard Dicaprio, major Mississippi plantation owner, is in
effect, Don King. (The guy with the big hair, onceTyson’s manager.)
His fortune rests, so far as you can tell, on “Mandingo
fighting” — slave v. slave matches, which spring out of Tarantino's imagination
and his addiction to all manner of genre movies.
Spike Lee is right not to have seen it.
It does insult and defame his past.
Not only his, all pasts.
Too bad this movie (a la a long Henry Louis Gates interview
with Tarantino) is garnering serious attention.
For all those n-words.
That’s faux controversy.
Django Unchained doesn't merit attention.
It merits avoidance.
It stinks.
Later, with more thought, I wrote this:
I’d like to qualify my view about *Django Unchained* in one
way, namely by acknowledging that Tarantino is consciously trying to counter
the racist polemic of D.W. Griffith’s *Birth of a Nation*. Hence the scene of
buffoonish Ku Klux Klansmen complaining their hoods don’t
fit right; they can’t see through the eyeholes. No matter that there was no
Klan in 1858 when *Django Unchained* is set — the Klan arose after the end of
Reconstruction in 1876 — Tarantino wants to mock its portrayal in the hugely
influential D W Griffith movie, which treated Klansmen as heroic, the only
force between the South and black savagery.
That scene reminds me of the Nazis tromping around in *The
Great Dictator*, idiotically singing, “We’re Aryans Aryans Ary Ary Ary Ary
Aryans.” Of course, the Chaplin movie was made in 1940, when there were still
plenty of Nazis marching around.
None of this makes me fundamentally revise my initial pan of
the movie. There is so much of a certain kind of violence — the kind you’ve
seen in
Tarantino movies before, but unimproved — that it in a sense takes the violence
out of violence. But some violence has to remain effective, has to gain
purchase, in movies that are essentially revenge fantasies. There’s plenty of
effective violence in *The Godfather*, for instance, a revenge masterpiece of
film.
There’s another problem with Tarantino’s revenge
fulfillments, as enacted in *Inglourious Basterds* and *Django Unchained*. The
revenge climax in both is too total. In *Inglourious Basterds* the whole
leadership of the Nazi party is annihilated in one fell unconvincing swoop.
It’s a smug and simplistic conclusion. So much for Hitler, the Holocaust, World
War II. That was fun, let’s move on. Same thing in *Django Unchained*: Django
wipes out — with a combo of bullets and bombs similar to the armament in
*Inglourious Basterds* — not only one huge Mississippi plantation, leaving none
of the whites connected with it alive, but by extension the whole plantocracy.
How neat. To what will Tarantino turn his exterminationist fancies to now? What
has he pegged for annihilation?
By the end of Tarantino’s *Kill Bill*, the Bride (Uma
Thurman) has revenged herself on an entire cast of enemies, working through
them over the course of the two-part film one by one, in individualized
encounters. The violence, however stylized and cartoonish, is innovative and —
dare I say so? — brilliant, in the way it joins and customizes genres. There
are parts of *Kill Bill* I admit to fetishizing just the way Tarantino, that
supreme fetishist, wants me to. But the plot of *Kill Bill* makes no pretense
of being historical.
History seems to dumb Tarantino down, dull his imagination.
The revenge, unfortunately, is on history, which in the process gets painfully
dumbed down.
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