Tarantino has spent the last decade exploring the difference between revenge and vengeance: Revenge is nasty / Vengeance is philosophical. Revenge is personal / Vengeance is political. Revenge is an individual burden / Vengeance is cultural retribution. Kill Bill was a revenge movie. Django Unchained is a movie about vengeance.
The story follows Dr.
Schultz (Christopher Waltz), a German bounty hunter, and Django (Jamie Foxx), a freed slave, as
they journey across southern America in search of Django’s wife Broomhilda
(Kerry Washington) – along with assassinating white people. They eventually find out that she is being
kept as a house slave for a ruthless plantation owner called Calvin Candie
(Leo Dicaprio). Schultz tries to strike a
deal to purchase some ‘Mandingo’ fighters off of Candie in order to covertly
smuggle Broomhilda out to freedom – Lots of people get shot and tortured along
the way.
Without getting too
psychoanalytical, it seems that Tarantino has managed to become the
revenge/vengeance, mainstream auteur he always wanted to be. He manipulates his audience to project their
own western guilt onto the onscreen villains, which are given a narrative path
of ultimate cruelty and dominance before the final explosion of violence and
reckoning is rained upon them. The ecstatic
punishment inflicted upon the villain is so satisfying to watch that a sense of
catharsis and release washes over you and it feels like you have spent 3 hour
with a therapist – cleansing you of your nihilistic, modern angst. (There are other directors that are capable
of this, like Chan-wook Park or Michael Haneke, but QT is the most mainstream)
Most of the discussion
in response to this movie has obviously been about hyper-violence and racism,
but I think that this film is far more insightful about the terror of slavery
than Lincoln could ever have been and
I welcome a little ugliness and artistic license with regard to history if the
film itself is aware of its b-movie aesthetic.
The comic-book style of Tarantino’s is far more suited to this film than
it was in Inglorious Basterds
(although, as pretty much everyone agrees, Quentin needs to stay out of his own
movies…and not do stupid accents).
Tarantino is one of the
great modern scriptwriters and the honesty in which he has delivered his
pastiche trilogy of the last decade is commendable. I hope that Tarantino’s next film will be a
violent, postmodern Sci-Fi with lots of swearing and anachronistic music
followed by a violent, postmodern Rom-Com with lots of swearing and
anachronistic music. And then a musical.
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