Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained has provoked some controversy following its recent release. As one might expect from a Tarantino film, much of the criticism largely centres upon the brutal and bloody violence of the film, as well as its strong language. This might not be surprising, yet what makes such criticism particularly intriguing is the fact that everything that ordinarily makes Tarantino’s films problematic for people is magnified because of its historical setting – American slavery in the years immediately prior to the Civil War. For critics of the film, Tarantino’s flippant and heavily stylised form of filmmaking trivialises historical trauma, mistreating something that deserves respect and sincerity. This was precisely director Spike Lee’s point when he wrote on Twitter that: “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western: it was a holocaust.” For Lee, the film is “disrespectful to my ancestors.” However, it is precisely the provocative nature of the film, and the discomfort that its apparent flippancy might cause in its audience that makes the film so intriguing, and makes it a film that has some value beyond being an entertaining winter blockbuster, as it forces us to reflect precisely on the horrors of history, and moreover, the way we understand and represent it.
This juxtaposition of “Serious Historical Issues” alongside the flippant is nothing new. In his last film, Inglourious Basterds (2009), Tarantino approaches the horror of World War II with a similar reckless abandon. It might be said that in both films there is a certain opposition set up between history as real, lived experience (of suffering and trauma), which is encapsulated in the friction between filmic style and subject matter (a disjunction between form and content). Yet this dialectic is particularly pronounced in Django, which makes it a more successful, and more interesting film. With Inglourious Basterds, the horror of the Holocaust was a spectral backdrop; although it was clearly signalled in the explicit Jewish identity of the ‘Basterds,’ it nevertheless remained something at the periphery of the film. After the wonderful opening of the film, featuring the long conversation between SS man Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a French farmer hiding Jews beneath his floorboards, we come to forget the persecution that was an essential part of the historical moment the film was representing. Only in that incredible scene when Shoshana eats apple strudel with Landa do we sense the fear and persecution of occupied France, in a way that the film’s opening tried to portray. However, even in this instance the whole terrifying breadth of persecution is reduced to what would seem to be a personal rivalry between the fearful Shoshana and the terrifying Landa. The suffering of the Jewish people and the nature of their persecution is marginalized and downsized.
By contrast, throughout Django, the persecution suffered by black people in nineteenth century United States is persistent throughout. Although the similarity between Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained is clear in that the persecuted becomes the hero, in Inglourious, the Basterds themselves seem to be almost untouched by persecution (not to mention that they are American, rather than European, Jews). By contrast in Django, the racist milieu occupied by Django is quite clearly stated throughout. In an early scene in which Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz, again) enter a Texas town to collect a deputy who has a bounty on his head, Schultz’s unorthodox methods lead to a quite palpable look of fear on Django’s face, who isn’t quite sure whether the dentist is deranged or simply stupid. Watching the film, one isn’t quite sure what is going to happen. By putting the audience in this position, the film asserts, quite clearly, the sense of persecution and fear experienced by Django, and indeed, all black people. The humour of the scene, encapsulated in Schultz’s apparent recklessness, is not simply an instance of the flippancy that is characteristic of Tarantino’s filmmaking (although it is to a certain extent), but rather, that humour underlines a point about the oppressive and violent atmosphere of the U.S. south for a black man like Django.
The very visibility of violence throughout, and the fact that that violence has a clear aim – that it is clearly racist – is what makes the film more successful than Inglourious Basterds (not to mention the coherence of the story itself). The problem that is raised by the criticisms of the film – and by extension the film itself – is about representation. To return to Spike Lee’s comments, the implication if his words is that there is a right way and a wrong way to represent American slavery. He does not say that slavery cannot be represented in film, but rather that the violence of Leone-esque westerns is not the way. The question, then, is about legitimacy – what sort of film is legitimate in the way that it portrays slavery? What would constitute the right way?
An interesting parallel to the debate surrounding Django Unchained is a film like Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s film, given its canonisation within Hollywood filmmaking and the awards bestowed upon it (not to mention the fact that it has been considered “culturally significant” by the Library of Congress), would appear to be an example of the ‘correct’ way to represent historical trauma. In its cinematography, for example, there is something very elegant – cinematographer Janusz Kaminski himself used reference points such as Italian neo-realism and German expressionism as reference points when talking about the film, and also stating that the cinematography was supposed to give the film a timeless quality, so that anyone watching it would “not have a sense of when it was made.” (Presumably the audience have no knowledge of German expressionism or Italian neo-realism.)
The implications of this are that the correct way to represent something ‘Serious’ is to do it in a way that seems timeless, to conceal its construction and its very artificiality, and the fact that it is rooted within a specific cultural and historical moment. It is this that Django Unchained certainly does not do. When Spike Lee invokes Leone’s name in his critical tweet, what he is doing is saying it can’t be done like this, slavery is something that exceeds the boundaries of representation – it needs and deserves more than a violent spaghetti western.
One might say that Spielberg’s response to historical trauma is more skilled, sensitive and nuanced than Tarantino’s. It might seem as though Spielberg is trying to meet the demands of his subject matter, while Tarantino simply rides roughshod over his. However, the problem here is that a film like Schindler’s List, in working so hard to ensure that everything is done so properly – so elegantly – actually undermines the trauma of the subject matter. There is no friction here between form and content; everything just works so effortlessly leaving the audience, in a position where the film merely presents us with what we expect to see. By this, I mean that the film, in trying to represent its (distressing) subject matter as elegantly as possible, fails to highlight that very difficulty of representation, and instead glosses over what makes it most distressing. Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, a nine hour documentary film perhaps best demonstrates this when he dismissed Spielberg’s film for being ‘a kitschy melodrama.’ Lanzmann’s invocation of kitsch is particularly telling, particularly when thought about alongside Milan Kundera’s frequently quoted definition of kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being – ‘Kistch is the absolute denial of shit.’ Kundera’s exploration of kitsch is perhaps worth looking into a bit further –
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice, to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
It is a certain type of self-reflection that produces kitsch. In the case of Schindler’s List, it is that reflection whereby we are allowed to congratulate ourselves for feeling moved at the plight of the Jews, the moment we wonder at how far Hollywood has come when it can produce such a ‘Serious’ and ‘Important’ film. Indeed, as if to confirm this fact, one only needs to look at the amount of Awards the film has been been awarded, for what are cinematic awards – not least the Oscars – if not a clear exhibition of Hollywood (perhaps American) self-congratulation.
Django Unchained might well have this element of reflexivity, yet this is not kitsch. Tarantino is often written about as being kitsch, yet the referentiality and the affection for trash and pulp culture is certainly not kitsch. It is instead the inverse of kitsch, a means of embracing shit rather than denying it, a way of bringing to light that which is excluded, that which resists representation. If Django Unchained contains a disturbing friction between form and content, between its flippant cinematic style and its ‘serious’ subject matter, then this is precisely a gesture towards ‘shit’ and towards what we might call the remainder. It is in this sense that the film draws us to the way that historical trauma evades articulation or representation, and, moreover, the way that representation also necessarily marginalises or leaves something out. What is so stunning about the ending of the film, for example, is that it works to create an image of slavery that is completely untruthful and this untruth becomes ironic, a means of recognising the very difficulty of confronting the ‘truth’ of slavery from our present position in history. Indeed, the ending of Django shares much in common with Inglourious Basterds, not least in terms of the sheer expansiveness of what happens on screen. Yet the brilliance of Django is that this final scene – or rather, this final explosive moment – is placed alongside that relentless violence and atmosphere of intense racism, making it weirdly victorious but also ironic. The moment of vengeance (a perverse sort of redemption) is speech marked, painfully aware of what it conceals. This is distinct from Schindler’s List, where the redemptive ending, with the real-life people represented in the film are shown alongside the actors visiting Oskar Schindler’s grave in Israel. Such an ending is an attempt to justify the film, a supplement that is supposed to confirm the redemptive power of Schindler’s story, almost as though it is a defense against anyone wishing to criticise the film.
Django Unchained offers us a chance to think about history and how it is represented. Although it may seem crass, it is this willingness to provoke and unsettle that makes the film perhaps more significant than its influences would suggest. Indeed, in some ways the B-Movie roots of the film, fragments of might be called ‘low’ or trash culture, is a form that, for all its antagonism with its subject matter, actually mirrors it. By this I mean that both form and subject matter, marginalised from mainstream Hollywood films, comes together in an unsettling and provocative return of the repressed. This return of the repressed is powerful as it interrupts our expectations, turning us back to critically reflect on the horrors of history and the limits of its representation.
Cryptic Murmurs 