Spaghetti Southern (A Django Unchained review)

People have asked me many times, 'Why is Django so successful?' I tell them this: because Django was for the workers. He represents all those guys who've ever said, 'Let me tell ya something. I'm gonna go tomorrow and see my boss and say, "Things are gonna be different from now on..."' - Franco Nero

Released in 1966, Sergio Corbucci's Django is the blood-soaked tale of a lone drifter wandering across the Wild West, dragging a coffin behind him, seeking vengeance in the name of his wife. Often considered one of the most violent films ever made (the title character gets his hands crushed, a man is forced to eat his own severed ear), it found a global cult audience everywhere except the UK, where it was banned for twenty-odd years. Django as a "series" (for want of a better term) has been odd; there's only been one official sequel with lead actor Franco Nero (1987's Django Strikes Again), but characters named Django have appeared in thirty-one films, mostly played by different actors.

So Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's second blaxploitation flick after Jackie Brown in 1997 AND his first stab at making a Spaghetti Western, fits into this weird little canon. And, true to Tarantino form, it might be one of his best yet.

(NOTE: This entry discusses racial slurs in a fair amount of detail, so this may be NSFW.)

In the Antebellum South, young slave Django (Jamie Foxx) is freed by German bounty hunter Dr King (hahaha) Schultz (Christoph Waltz), who believes he can lead him to the Brittle brothers, a group of slavers and killers working on a plantation who previously held custody over Django. Schultz makes an unusual request - if Django can help him find the Brittle brothers, he will give him $75, a horse, and his freedom. Django agrees, but only if Schultz helps him find his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).

I'm hearing all of these complaints about the amount of times the n-word is used in Django Unchained, and my reaction now after seeing the film is the same it was at the time: "So fucking what? It's set in the South during 1858 when people owned slaves, what were you people expecting exactly?" Other racial slurs are used as well, notably "Jimmy" - as in "Jimmy Crack Corn", that popular minstrel song. People getting hung up on that are missing the forest for the trees, and it distracts from the more important question:

"Is Tarantino the right man to be making a film about slavery?"

Spike Lee has already blasted Unchained several times, though he has admitted he hasn't seen the film, saying that American slavery didn't deserve to be treated as a Spaghetti western. As he said on Twitter, "It Was A Holocaust" (the capitals are his, not mine). I can't help but feel that Lee should see the film because the horrors of slavery are not flinched away from here. Indeed, Tarantino takes perverse glee in revealing just how ugly the Antebellum period was.

The Antebellum era, stretching roughly from 1781 to 1860, is often considered the closest America got to royalty. The ballroom dances, the elaborate blooming dresses, the general wealth and luxury of it all, this still has a place in US culture, especially if you live in the South. Unfortunately, people don't often like to discuss the small unpleasant business of it being built on the blood, sweat and tears of millions of Africans. David Brothers points this out quite brilliantly: 

Slave owners are us, meaning Americans and our great-great-great-grandfathers or whatever, in a way that Nazis are not. It’s cool to say that Nazis get what they deserve because they’re way over there across the water, and their story ended cleanly enough that we’re totally okay with using them for cheap pop. When you’re talking about Joey’s great-great-great-grandfather, though, and the source of his family’s money, things are a little different. You want to excuse the past with phrases like “oh it was just the times” or “it was an unenlightened time.”

So people are understandably cagey about this particular boil being lanced. Tarantino depicts violence in a clever way - anything happening to the slaves is shot in unflinching realistic detail, with very little relief. When a Brittle brother takes a whip to a slave girl's back for something as mediocre as dropping a set of eggs, when an old tired Mandingo fighter is torn apart by dogs, Tarantino lets it play out, lets the audience feel ill. I was horrified by a scene in a gentleman's club when two Mandingo fighters wrestle brutally for the amusement of the rich white folk, because the tone was sustained throughout. Even when one "wins", there's no sense of relief for him.

But when the violence is happening to the bad guys? It's lurid and bloody, often hilariously so, in true Spaghetti Western fashion. It's catharsis in its most primal form, and so much more satisfying for how gruesome it is; you want to see these guys die horribly, and you are rewarded for it. One of the influences cited by Tarantino and producer Reginald Hudlin is the 1972 blaxploitation film The Legend of Nigger Charley, another film about a slave who revolts from his masters and sets about killing Whitey. Blaxploitation has thrived on the sense of righteous vengeance, on giving The Man™ what for. The quote by the original Django at the top of this review justifies this not just as blaxploitation but as a Django film in its own right; it's built on that fantasy of punching the powers-that-be right in the goddamn face until they're little more than smug piles of pulp and bone.

It also helps that the film is funny, as per Tarantino tradition. Just watching Waltz as the silver-tongued steel-hearted Schultz is joyous (early on, he manages to convince an entire town that yes, he was completely justified in shooting their sheriff), and there's also a very Blazing Saddles-ish scene involving a group of proto-Klansmen and the difficulties of riding around wearing a bag with holes. Tarantino understands that humour becomes so much more enjoyable when it follows misery, as it provides a welcome sense of relief.

Performances are great across the board. Waltz is fun to watch, as always, playing Schultz as a demon with a better moral compass than most (being a bounty hunter is described as having only minor differences to being a slaver); DiCaprio's wonderfully slimy and moronic as Candie; and Jamie Foxx hasn't been as good as this in years. Django starts as clueless and taciturn, always observing, and ends the film a true bounty hunter.

A good deal of praise has gone to Samuel L. Jackson, and with good reason. As the despicable old house slave Stephen, Jackson isn't playing his usual role of the anti-authoritarian angry black man. His Stephen is described in the script as what would happen "if Dickens wrote about House Niggers in the Antebellum South": he's Candie's simpering sycophantic butler, all yes-massa no-massa; his brutal head of staff (his very presence terrifies Broomhilda); and the shrewd intelligent schemer, the power behind the throne - he figures out why Django and Schultz are at Candyland pretty quickly, and has been giving the staff suggestions on how to deal with troublemakers for years. Stephen is a cartoon grotesque, and as someone proud to play Uncle Tom (or at least the old bumbling fool taken from the films, not the original young muscular martyr by Harriet Beecher Stowe), he makes a natural antagonist for Django.

Is it even worth commenting on the music? It's a Tarantino film, the soundtrack is guaranteed to be diamond. The film opens with the original Django theme song by Luis Bacalov and Rocky Roberts; Ennio Morricone naturally makes an appearance (how could he not?); there's a neat mix of folk, country, R'n'B and rap making up the rest. Favourite tracks have to be "Too Old to Die Young" and the James Brown/2pac mashup from the trailer.

For a film that's pushing three hours long, Unchained is incredibly well-paced; a lot happens, but it never drags. Despite, or indeed because of Tarantino's familiarity with the genre, there's no way of knowing where the film could go, whether it will play to Spaghetti western conventions or not. It moves fast when it needs to, and the long scenes of dialogue feel incredibly tense because you know there's more to these characters beneath their smiles and charm and banter. Considering he was working for the first time without his usual editor Sally Menke, that's no small feat.

The Spaghetti western was an attempt by Europeans to capture the spirit of America, specifically the America of Johns Ford and Wayne. Fittingly, Unchained feels like a very American story. There's the raw unflinching way it looks at one of the most shameful periods in American history, the way it ruthlessly exposes the lie of the Antebellum South, the stunning views of the scenery (the mountains, the plains, the beautiful shot of blood raining on cotton plants) right out of The Searchers, and the re-appropriation of European folklore, in this case the tale of Siegfried and Brynhildr.

But most of all, it has the defining image of the Western - the Lone Gunman, a vigilante, the man who will play by his own rules and fight a corrupt and wicked system - a demon on the side of the angels. It's an image that goes back to John Wayne, to Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, to the nameless protagonist of Yojimbo, and - yes - to Franco Nero's Django. And it's one that's alive and well in the superb Django Unchained.