Some Thoughts On Django Unchained

So, I got this interesting email today. It came from a college student who had read my article on why Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today and she asked if I thought that Django Unchained was an effective racial satire. I thought I would share my answer with you folks and see what you thought. Here goes.

As a general rule, I've found Tarantino's work to be brilliant. He has both a gift for dialog (particularly seen in Public Fiction) and a gift for figuring out how to take things that should shock and disgust us and instead turning those into funny and often enlightening moments. Unfortunately, I think these gifts failed him in Django Unchained, and rather than making a clever racial satire, he ended up making what really amounts to a revenge film.

Where Brooks and Pryor succeed so brilliantly was in pinpointing things that a lot of people still believed were true either out of fear, stupidity or ignorance. They then twisted these stereotypes to expose how silly they were. A great example is when the "superior" white cowboys running the rail crew tell Clevon Little and his friends to sing a black "work song" and they sing "I get no kick from champagne." This mocks the white stereotype that poor black people sing spirituals, and it does so by showing them singing a high-class elegant song sung by Cole Porter. Basically, it shows that black culture has aspects that are very high class indeed, and it thereby disproves the stereotype. Then Brooks goes further and has the white cowboys proceed to make fools of themselves trying to explain what they perceive to be black culture as the blacks laugh at them. This mocks the intelligence level of the people who bought into the stereotype in the first place. The end result is that everyone laughs and the white audience feels ashamed if they had thought like the cowboys did.

Prior's satire is similar in the sense that he points out stereotypes that obviously aren't true and then he essentially says, "we're just humoring you dumb people." Again, everyone laughs and the people who bought into the stereotype feel stupid and ashamed to re-assert it.

The keys in both cases are (1) stereotypes which are the result of ignorance, (2) and which clearly are not true or which can be debunked easily, and (3) turning the joke so that anyone who claims to believe the stereotype will feel stupid and ashamed for doing so.

Tarantino doesn't do this.

First of all, the characters Tarantino uses are not unintentionally racist because they are ignorant. They are intentionally racist because they are vicious and hateful and they view blacks as less than human. No one sitting in the audience will identify with those characters. That limits the ability of the film to make people re-evaluate themselves. By comparison, there are many characters in Blazing Saddles or in Pryor's routines that anyone can identify with. Moreover, it changes the film from being a satire about race in our culture to being a satire of hateful racists.

Secondly, Tarantino doesn't really expose modern stereotypes. Instead, he attacks an entire era. So whereas Brooks and Pryor picked out things modern whites may have wrongly believed about blacks, Tarantino really doesn't address modern themes. Hence, while Brooks and Pryor are saying, "Wow, does anyone really believe this anymore?" Tarantino is saying "Wow, were the people in the post-Civil War South rotten." That's a big difference.

Third, rather than showing us the error of our thinking, as Brooks and Pryor did so well, Tarantino just has the main character brutalize the racists. So rather than having a film that constantly asks us, "You weren't stupid enough to think like this, were you?" Tarantino instead gave us a film where the hero runs around killing everyone whose views he doesn't like. And while this may be satisfying for some people, it doesn't ultimately change any minds. To the contrary, I would suspect that it actually is more likely to go the other way by confirming to people that they should be afraid because "those people hate you." (With "those people" being both the whites who hate the black hero and the black hero who gets revenge against the whites.) In other words, whereas Brooks and Pryor told us that we better change our thinking because everyone is laughing at us, Tarantino is telling blacks "whites are racist" and telling whites "watch out or blacks will start killing you."

So ultimately, I don't see Django Unchained as being an effective satire about race.

Thoughts?