Django Unchained: Coonskin Redux?

January 22nd, 2013 by Guest Contributor

In another sense though, I argue that despite the importance of performance within Tarantino’s narratives, blackness remains a privileged sign of alterity, difference, and badassedness. Django is able to perform different identities within a range of possibilities but this range remains circumscribed by a conception of “real blackness” that Tarantino has obviously drawn from the Blaxploitation movies he loves. Django is not free to transform his identity at will but is able to perform particular identities that align with a white audience’s conception of blackness–both in terms of the white audiences he encounters in the film and the audiences that will watch Django Unchained. Tarantino traffics in particular depictions of black people that he alleges are at once realistic, in that they are not racist stereotypes, but that are in fact shaped by his conception of what constitutes “real blackness.”

The fundamental trouble with Django Unchained is not merely that it decontextualizes slavery, transforming hundreds of years of bondage into a videogame-like shoot-em-up narrative, nor that it is historically inaccurate, nor that it depicts every slave as silent, submissive, and subservient, nor that it neatly and inaccurately represents the transformation of the black subject from slave to capitalism entrepreneur, nor that the images of brutal violence against black bodies do not merely admonish slavery but become a component of pleasure in a broad spectrum of stylized, fetishized, and generally cool violence in the film. Of course these are problems.

The fundamental problem with the film, however, is that it cannot escape this paradox of racial realism that attempts to represent some “core” or “reality” of what it means to be black that ends up reproducing the very racist stereotypes that the film claims to counter. Despite Tarantino’s aesthetic achievements, he is unable to disrupt the fundamentally racist claim that there is such a thing as “real blackness” and that it is fundamentally different than whiteness.

Paul Gilroy has discussed the transformation in racism from the “crude biologism” of phrenology to a “new culturalism” that treats race as a form of cultural difference while smuggling old conceptions of racial difference and racial hierarchy in through the back door. I suggest that this is new culturalism is at work in Django Unchained. As with Spielberg’s Lincoln, black people in Django Unchained do not speak in their own voices but rather reflect back a performed version of blackness that does little to disrupt concepts of racial difference. Indeed in both films black people are primarily talked about, discussed, worried over, and instructed by white actors. Tarantino’s film suggests a number of possibilities for employing narrative to disrupt the paradox of racial realism, but he never really achieves this within the film.

 

 

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Posted in Entertainment, african-american, authenticity, black, film, movies, race, race & representations, slavery, white | 3 comments

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  • Foxessa

    Tarantino’s history is not history, it’s playing with movie history, so all his claims to authenticity in terms of the history in his movie are false right there. Twice as much since all of his movies are about the past of movies, which are entertainment, but not history.

    Within entertainment in the U.S. the truth of our racial history can be found in many forms of music — including non-entertainment but worship and praise music, which in turn influenced entertainment music — you might think — but never in movies.

  • http://the-wilsonian.blogspot.com/ Wilson

    It seems that part of the problem with the identification of aesthetic and racial realism in Tarantino’s film, and the subsequently troubling cultural essentialism that he may present, involves a much broader argument on the revolutionary potential of aesthetic form. The author correctly points to the element of performance and awareness in Tarantino’s filmmaking, which implicates the audience in a much more radical way than most audiences are prepared for. Part of this performance and awareness is a highly stereotyped performance of race, where performance is highly racialized and therefore highly problematic. His filmmaking moves beyond realism toward a highly exaggerated and abstracted realism, that attempts to deal with issues on an epistemological / ontological level. I think where Tarantino takes the audience, however, is toward a thorough critique not only of the film, but of themselves where their own enjoyment of the spectacle is inherently problematic. As in the burning of the theater in “Basterds” and in the Mandingo fighting in “Django,” the viewer is made aware of their own complicity in these modes of violence as entertainment. Ultimately, Tarantino’s exaggerated filmmaking technique brings the audience to a critique of contemporary constructions of society, race, and the self. Through criticizing the audience’s culpability, and through his somewhat abstracted filmmaking, Tarantino invites the audience to see reality as more vicious than they otherwise may have. Simply put, Tarantino’s problematic portrayal of race is mean to discomfort the audience; through this discomfort the audience learns to be maladjusted to the broader world outside of the theater.

  • http://the-wilsonian.blogspot.com/ Wilson

    But this is a major problem for the film. The gender politics were especially troubling, where Broomhilda appeared to Django as an idealized daydream figure more than as a real character. She is as flattened as most of the other black characters, and only Django is able to assert agency in the film. Due to Django’s singularity in his agency, and in his single-minded pursuit of saving Broomhilda-as-damsel, the film posits a troubling bourgeois reduction. Django is individuated and does not speak for any collective, racial or otherwise. Instead, his single-minded pursuit of his wife reinforces a hyper-masculinist ethos, which does not allow Django to develop a mindset of liberating other slaves. He never develops a Fanonian perspective on oppression. The gender politics of the film are inherently conservative, and the racial politics left unexplored. Django speaks only for himself.