Last updated on August 15, 2013
But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.
Django Unchained – Let me guess: this was the last thing you’d expect to see on Theology Gaming. I am, for lack of a better set of words, an American conservative Christian who shouldn’t be caught dead revealing his interest in a Quentin Tarantino film…right? Given my love for Chesterton’s embrace of the lowbrow, the vulgar, and the dumb – as well as my like for such things – who wouldn’t expect to see Django Unchained up here at some point? Right?
Every film he makes takes some high concept directly plagiarized from exploitation films, spaghetti westerns or utterly rout and unoriginal genre fare and proceeds to twist them inside out, add a hideous amount of self-indulgent (and highly entertaining dialogue) and ultimately end in some kind of horrific violence. Honestly, I find it difficult to tell whether (as critics would say) this is done out of an ironic gesture wherein Tarantino aspires to a higher art, or that he just finds all this stuff funny at its relative absurdity.
I mean, seriously, the shootouts appear entirely unrealistic, as if the special effects team had a love affair with squibs and proceeded to place as many explosive blood sprays as possible. Furthermore, any pistol from the 19th century could never shoot that accurately or at that distance! Furthermore times two, why do you need so many people to protect a single plantation? It’s insane, and could only happen in a film. I suppose I get a similar vibe from Bayonetta; to use a game related analogy, Quentin Tarantino is the Hideki Kamiya of film. How insane can I go? How much can I push this scene past over the top? How long can I sustain the tension in a nearly three hour film before a gigantic burst of violence?
It’s rather masterful in that way, to say the least. At least in his last three films, Quentin Tarantino turns everything into a high concept film. How does he approach feminism? By making the woman in the story a highly skilled killer who mows down her enemies with a katana and martial arts training. How does he approach the Holocaust? Make a special operations team of highly-skilled Jewish soldiers to kill Hitler. A bit of revisionism never hurt anyone! How about Django Unchained? Take a black slave and let him get revenge on both slave owners AND Uncle Toms. Does the Bible tell us that vengeance is the Lord’s? Absolutely! But it doesn’t stop Tarantino from mining the same well of his own childhood films of old. So what would happen if a freed slave became a bounty hunter and sought to find his wife and rescue her, much like Siegfried attempts to rescue Brunhilde in all those German legends? Unless you want to call every hero in every story a man in pursuit of vigilante justice, we can do fine with a flawed hero as this.
These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.
He plays with everything, from social taboos to harsh language and violence, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter how offensive something should be. He still makes an intriguing, entertaining, and funny film in the midst of all this craziness. Perhaps it is because his movies don’t appeal to the mind at all. Django Unchained could merely tack on slavery like just about other film in existence – with a thirty-nine and a half foot pole – but he goes right for the jugular. This film must set the record for the most racial slurs ever uttered in a film, by every character black and white alike. When the villains comes onto the sign, we’re presented with such a black and white view of the world that we turn our brains off, assume that the film portrayed that hated man rightly, and then feel utterly satisfied when events resolve every single loose end. With somebody dead, preferably everyone who did bad things. It’s a surprising straightforward moral vision. Whether Tarantino chooses to restrict himself to genres tropes or sees the world in this light I’m not sure, but it does contribute to the narrative flow.
Or maybe Tarantino just gets giddy at the idea of pushing people’s buttons. I’m sure you know of its infamous use of the “N-Word”. How many films bother to use it when discussing slavery at all? Why not? What is the problem with a realistic depiction of its use in 1858? Heck, even the white actors had a tough time saying the word in 2012! It’s not supposed to feel comfortable, and it’s not supposed to feel safe, but (in an unrealistic movie, no less) it should feel real. Tarantino nails the cross-section of film fantasy and realism, and this makes Django Unchained utterly jarring to everyone who’s seen it. If you don’t feel offended at some point in the film with real slavery in it, then what IS the point? If you don’t feel satisfaction at justice done, wrongs righted, and a successful well-rounded film, then why did you bother? G.K. Chesterton tell us:
Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.
Chesterton certainly wasn’t thinking of film, but Django Unchained clearly fits into the “penny dreadfuls” box. Boy oh boy, is Tarantino expressing it in a new way – perhaps the only way that his inspirations allow, but a great way nonetheless. Life’s full of ugliness, joy, sorrow, pain, laughter, and suffering; why not stuff them all into the most offensive spaghetti western with the most overwrought dialogue and the bloodiest action sequences you’ve seen in such a film? And that it actually works in spite of how disjointed all these concepts appear?
Not that I would ever recommend this film to children, but you get the idea!
