Quentin Off-Leash! Part II

Historical fact - or Tarantino fetish?  Or both?

(Part I of this series is available here.)

Whippings, and the welts they left on the backs of slaves, are a constant motif of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (above, one of the first shots of the film).  Django himself has been whipped repeatedly; his wife "Broomhilda" has been similarly abused; and we see scar after scar on back after back throughout the entire movie.  The whipping of slaves has been portrayed in film before, but never with the same level of intensity or repetition.

Horrifying as it is, Tarantino's imagery is hardly exaggerated.  At left is a photograph from 1863, of a slave in Louisiana (who some claim eventually fought for the Union).  Records from the era report that 39 lashes was a common punishment for even minor offenses, and escaped slaves who were recaptured (essentially Django's position in the film) endured far worse; one slave, Moses Roper, withstood 200 lashes upon recapture, and was only spared from death by the pleadings of his master's wife.  There are even newspaper reports from 1844 regarding an eight-year-old slave girl who was whipped to death (her master was tried but acquitted - the murder of slaves by owners was actually not permitted throughout the South, but as slaves could not testify against whites in court, only one or two cases of white-on-black crime ever reached trial).

And violence against black men and women hardly ended with the Civil War.  Below is an image from some seventy years later of Southern whites gathered to see, and be seen with, the bodies of two lynching victims - to them, murder and torture (note the bloodstains on the broken corpses) was a form of entertainment.  Indeed, such images were known to be sold and traded by whites as postcards - and the crowds depicted often included happy children, there with their parents.

Are we that different from the crowd in this photo? Is Quentin?

So one cannot fault Quentin Tarantino for lurid depictions of violence that are actually outdone by the historical record. Yet many observers of his latest film have nevertheless been disturbed by theatre audiences' reactions to the cruelties it depicts.  Critics have noted the knowing chuckles that greet its many scenes of torment from Tarantino's hardcore fans, who seem to view the movie almost as they might . . . a gruesome postcard.

And therein lies the rub regarding Django Unchained.  The film goes where few American movies have dared to tread in terms of the abuse of slaves; but in the end, it goes there for a thrill, and even a laugh.  Perhaps the more things change . . . the more in some horrifying way they remain pretty much the same.  For it's quite easy to imagine that many of the people in those postcards had their excuses; perhaps some were even there "ironically," to garner a grim chuckle at the moral horror of their neighbors - much like the audiences packing the cinemas for Django.

Or perhaps they simply liked violence - although it would be hard to imagine they enjoyed it more than Tarantino himself.  I wonder, has anyone done a tally of just how much mayhem his films have included (and how little they've included of anything else)?  He struck his template at the very beginning, in Reservoir Dogs, and has stuck to it ever since - hip conversational longeurs floated around heists or capers, spacing out torture sequences that were obviously the main event.  Tarantino borrowed this odd opposition from Godard - specifically from Le Petit Soldat; although to be fair, Tarantino has always acknowledged the plagiarism at the bottom of his sense of cool, and even named his production company after Bande à part, another Godard opus from which he borrowed much. (The French auteur was less than impressed by this homage, however - perhaps because his sense of cool was never designed to power a frathouse thriller, much less a grindhouse fantasy.)

Tarantino's great theme in a nutshell.

At any rate, from the bloody Mexican stand-offs of Dogs to the gallons of hemoglobin spattering Django, the beheadings, castrations, burnings, dismemberments, disembowelings, etc., etc. in the Tarantino oeuvre are surely now beyond count.  But I think it's worth remembering that it's not actually the amount of violence in Tarantino's pictures that make them, well, a band apart.  It's the style of that violence.

Consider the photo at left, from Quentin's previous opus, Inglourious Basterds; it's of Diane Kruger's broken foot, after her character has been tortured by Brad Pitt.  The shot struck me as the most interesting thing in the picture, as it seemed to fuse in a single image almost everything that motivates Tarantino at the deepest level.  Of course the image is absurd on its face - a cast in the shape of a nose-bleed heel?!?  But it nevertheless limns a certain kind of fantasy that Tarantino obsessively pursues.

Artist and subject.

For as most movie fans know, Quentin has a foot fetish (it's by now a Hollywood in-joke; one photo that made the rounds, at right).  So it's no surprise that Kruger's tasty lower digits are made up, and their nails polished; what's even more important is that they're encased, held stiff in a painful pose - and we get the odd sense that this restraint is actually, to Tarantino, the most sexually charged aspect of the shot.

For it's hard to miss the parallel between this encasement and the central scene of almost every Tarantino film ever, from the bound cop in Reservoir Dogs to the rubber ball stuffed in Bruce Willis' mouth in Pulp Fiction to Uma Thurman paralyzed (and then buried alive) in Kill Bill, to Zoe Bell tied to the hood of a car in Death Proof.  In fact, Tarantino is never really drawn to "action" (as some have claimed), he's drawn to inaction, to powerlessness - to helplessness, really, to the position of the torture victim, encased like Diane Kruger's foot and held immobile through unbearable pain.

A conceptual parallel to slavery itself is almost too obvious.  For what is slavery but a kind of torture (spiritual as well as physical), in which the victim is held powerless by political forces?  Hence Django Unchained equals Quentin unchained - he doesn't have to dream up any absurdly unlikely situations or characters (gay "hillbillies" in L.A., etc.) to indulge his fetish; the basic setting of the movie offers him limitless opportunities for the kind of scene he likes best.  

Hence the almost-self-parodic parade of atrocities on display in Django - although it's worth noting that Tarantino exercises some restraint in his treatment of these horrors; he knows exactly how much he can show and still hold onto the comic twist in his tone, and only once (in a scene in which hounds tear one victim limb from limb) does he arguably cross the black-comedy line.

A sly portrait of Tarantino himself?

Still, the violence does grind (they were called "grind houses" for a reason, Quentin) and grows numbing; the sadism quickly loses its edge, and becomes a kind of background hum.  So the comedy dominates, goosed on by moves like the showy zoom above, which first presents the sadistic Calvin Candie, owner of the plantation "Candie Land" (where Broomhilda is enslaved) - a gesture so clumsy and faux-naive that it all but begs for a laugh.  It's at such moments that A.O. Scott's claims for the movie's moral purpose ring most hollow; it's hard to understand how moral purpose could survive this kind of crudely comic technique.  (Indeed, the opposition of earnest feeling with klutzy presentation is a staple of sketch comedy today.)

So it's no surprise that audience members giggle at Django; they're constantly being cued to (by both the camera and the spaghetti-rock soundtrack).  But of course that happy laughter prevents and precludes any sense of building outrage regarding the context of the movie.  It also helps Tarantino deflect and dodge the demands of actual art - perhaps because that would put his own taste directly in the cross-hairs of his camera.

Indeed, in a canny performance, Leonardo DiCaprio seems to hint that he knows Calvin Candie is not very far from Tarantino himself (several gestures mimic the director's) and that the cinema we're all watching is likewise rather like the gladiatorial entertainment at Candie Land (we have, after all, come to watch slaves gouge out each others' eyes, haven't we?).

But he seems alone in that perception.  Jamie Foxx plays Django as almost a block - but then as a character (rather than a type), he barely exists - and the lovely Kerry Washington is likewise hamstrung by the limits of Broomhilda.  And while DiCaprio is sick fun, he is never given the chance to explore the psyche of his sadistic character (for obvious reasons).  As for Christoph Waltz, I suppose he's about as hammily enjoyable as he was in Inglourious Basterds, but his dialogue operates at a sitcommish level; this is how fans of That 70's Show might imagine a European.  Which may be why Tarantino patiently has to explain the ironies of such tropes as Broomhilda's Wagner-esque name; without cue cards, his audience would be lost.

Of course, I suppose I could argue in A.O. Scott's defense that Django Unchained does wrap with a vast Caucasian bloodbath, and the literal explosion of Candie Land.  The tables are turned, justice is done, and the oppressed ride off into the night triumphant (how Django and Broomhilda escape Mississippi, though, I've no idea).  

But it's odd how un-cathartic this sequence feels; the slaughter (being filmed, at left) feels labored, like a weary ritual, and also utterly pre-determined; there's no suspense because we know Tarantino wouldn't have the balls to kill off Django at the finish.  For that would inevitably beg questions of lingering injustice; it would hint that racism wasn't entirely in the past.  In short, it would demand that we engage with the accuracy of what we've seen.

And that's anathema to Tarantino.  He wants to enjoy slavery, and that enjoyment per force demands that the violence in question not be taken seriously; if it is, then his fans really are just like the people in those lynching postcards.  Which in turn means that in the end, Django Unchained is a most unusual form of propaganda - a kind of propaganda of disengagement.  It's for people who look at life, and history, from the other side of a screen.  And is art possible on the other side of a screen?

Samuel Jackson in Django Unchained.

There's really no way out of that conundrum, I'm afraid. As it is stands now, Django contradicts itself, and so is utterly un-serious.  Yet what does it mean for movies to not take American slavery seriously?  Few fans of Django seem willing to ponder that question.  Even the Nazis never made ironic black comedies about Auschwitz; so why are we making them about our own crimes?  Given our current political battles, and the fact that our president was often depicted as a lynching victim down South, Tarantino's stance seems even harder to defend.  (And perhaps it's worth remembering that Inglourious Basterds likewise glorified "enhanced interrogation" while that debate raged a few years back.  It's hard to think, in fact, of any time Tarantino's movies have had any kind of progressive political valence.)

Another, even more disturbing, way of looking at Django Unchained does come to mind. Tarantino, of course, is white, not black (and a Southerner, too).  Yet he seems to reserve his deepest contempt not for Calvin Candie and his ilk, but rather for Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a vicious "Uncle Tom" at Candie Land who - in the film's one cleverly subversive stroke - is a dead ringer for Uncle Ben, a long-time corporate mascot of Mars, Inc. (at right).  Tarantino seems to want to rip off the benign veneer of all such figures, from Aunt Jemima to Mammy in Gone with the Wind.

But the gambit lacks any real sting, because in Django Unchained, we can tell that the rules of this particular game have shifted. Isn't Tarantino himself really in charge of this plantation? And so we're not sure who truly counts as an Uncle Tom any more.

Blood spray on my popcorn! or Quentin off-leash! (Part1)

I knew early on in Django Unchained that I wasn't going to be able to take it seriously - even though according to A.O. Scott it's "a troubling and important movie about slavery and racism."  (HA!)  You see, right at the top there's this title card telling us that Quentin Tarantino's latest flick (although I think "cinematic fleshlight" may be the more accurate term) is set in "1858 - two years before the Civil War."

Two years before the Civil War?  Really?  You're sure about that - two?

Now we were only maybe five seconds into the film proper, but already I was thinking that maybe someone who wanted to make "a troubling and important movie about slavery and racism" might, you know, have fact-checked when the fucking Civil War started.

But then again, it turned out Quentin was actually just setting the proper tone.  Because his movie had nothing to do with history, it turned out.  I mean not real live history.  Not the history that African-Americans have endured in the United States of America.  Not that.

No, it's about movie history, of course.  (Is there any other kind of history for Quentin?)  And you know, if he can win World War II all by himself (as he did in his last opus) what does it matter when the "actual" Civil War occurred?  Tarantino's a cinematic god, goddamnit.  He may look like Jay Leno's grandma on meth, but hey - respect the genius, know what I'm sayin'?

Likewise, does it matter that the "mandingo fights" central to the plot of Django Unchained never really occurred - at least not according to those fusty old, you know, history-people?  I mean mandingo fights were in a movie - Mandingo, in fact - and hell, that's good enough for Wesley Morris! Oh, and wait - you're saying the Ku Klux Klan (which also appears, sort of, below) didn't exist until Reconstruction?  What the fuck does that matter, asshole?  THE KLAN IS IN A MOVIE - BIRTH OF A NATION - SO TAKE THAT MOTHERFUCKER!!  Seriously, what are we talking about here?

What indeed.  That's what I kept asking myself as I sat through this hilarious parade of movie-brat ignorance.  That is when I wasn't wondering - how did we ever come to this juncture?  How did we get to the point that a major studio release about slavery could sink to a lower moral level than Gone with the Wind?  Honestly.

I will admit this, though: I thought Django was going to be - I don't know, djisturbing or something.  Tarantino used to be disturbing; at least Reservoir Dogs is disturbing - it's a glimpse straight into the mind of a sadist, after all - a sadist who believes torture is like a pop song, no less.  Of course Tarantino immediately backed away from the honest nihilism of Dogs, and Disney-fied the finale of Pulp Fiction - and has sentimentalized his endings ever since. Fiction was still plenty creepy thanks to its homophobia; but I guess people were desperate at that point for any sort of new juice in the movies.

And Tarantino had energy and confidence, and in their carefully-calculated mind-fucks his films functioned as gauntlets.  They subtly played on the anxieties of their age - fatherless boys (and girls) flocked to them and saw the experience as a kind of rite of passage; an empty generation with no outlet but self-abuse found in Tarantino a perfect mirror.  And of course he expertly exploited the obvious stupidity of film critics (who think of Pauline Kael as an intellectual). Tarantino's films weren't so much works of art as a kind of cultural symptom - but at least you understood why the kids were buying tickets.

Now Django Unchained would seem poised to replicate the twistedness of those early hits.  Torture, Tarantino's forte, has gone mainstream, and slavery is the perfect environment in which to conjure it. At the same time, Obama's presidency has ripped the mask off Republican racism, so prejudice as a theme is fresher than ever. The Hollywood planets aligned in other ways - in fact Spielberg himself just wrapped a picture about slavery (these two directors are like mirrors, frankly, both grasping for prestige from different trash barrels with pictures about Nazis and slaves).  Thus the Weinsteins had granted Tarantino a larger budget than usual, and Christoph Waltz (who won an Oscar for the thinly-sliced ham he served in Inglourious Basturds) had joined the cast  - what's more, as in Pulp Fiction, the film's other lead was a closeted gay star (and the closet always adds a certain edge to Tarantino).  How could the movie possibly go wrong?

Oh, no, it's the KKK!  Where it shouldn't be!

But the surprise about Django Unchained is that it is so very un-disturbing.  In fact for much of its length it is quite boring.  Perhaps this is because familiarity breeds contempt (which is why all horror has a short shelf-life).  Fifteen years after Frankenstein was eliciting screams, he was meeting Abbott and Costello.  Tarantino is in something of the same fix.  The Saw franchise has out-grossed him (in both meanings of the word), and his outraged adolescent-masculine id has lost a bit of its fire.  He hasn't grown up, but he has gotten older (so have we), and his mind-fuck techniques only work as long as his anxieties match our anxieties - and you can't see (or don't notice) the strings holding up the puppets as he gouges out their eyes.

But everything feels painted and phony in Django Unchained, and Tarantino's twistedness feels tired.  Because let's be honest: as an auteur, he has never really gotten very far.  He's just not an intuitive cinematic talent.  When you go to a Spielberg or Scorsese picture, you quickly feel an inner coherence, a personality, behind the style - an assurance about camera placement, rhythm, and musical cues.  There's also a whole younger generation beneath these technical masters who are if anything even more facile (Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, for instance, is overstuffed with brilliant cinematic gambits).  And then there are the magisterial pop auteurs like David Fincher and Robert Zemeckis, who actually suppress their talent to achieve an atmosphere of restrained sophistication - and who can count on our ability to appreciate their cunning.

Compared to all these directors, Tarantino remains an amateur rather than an auteur.  Klutzy, crude, and simply under-powered as an image-maker, he's obviously a screenwriter with a bullhorn, not an actual director.  You can even sense in the raves the critics give him that they're minding this gap: Tarantino has "never been more fluid in his film-making technique," they'll say, or "His work has a new, more mature range and power!"  Uh-huh.

Now this may be technically true - Django has a few evocative images, and a handful of Tarantino's trademarked moving-frieze tracks and pans.  But mostly it's just a tedious series of establishing shots, medium shots, and close-ups (sometimes rendered as "ironic" zooms); the movie plausibly has a new, more mature range and power only because the starting point of this director's development is so far behind that of his peers.

Of course Quentin has always had a way to dodge this core truth about his ability; he works in pastiche, after all, and what's more, in pastiches of poorly-made movies.  Thus his crummy technique actually counts as a form of "tribute" - it's the air-quotes that count critically, his fans tell us, not what's in between them.

Once Upon a Time in the West.  Sergio Leone did things with the camera that Tarantino never could.

Okay . . . I guess you can believe that if you want to. But I wonder - why then, doesn't Tarantino ever  put air-quotes around something worth watching?  I'll explain: after sitting through Django Unchained - and seeing as Tarantino has described it as a "spaghetti western - exploded!" - I watched a little Sergio Leone on my computer. And I was once again stunned by Leone's sheer talent. Sergio Leone was fuckin' awesome; he was a director.  His sequences are superbly controlled; his vast spaces are all but sculpted (above); and it's obvious what his desolate tone brought to the spaghetti western: a profound and haunting sense of alienation - precisely the opposite of what Tarantino conjures in Django Unchained (which, for all its pretensions, is actually a gruesome form of comfort food).

Thus I knew that Tarantino could never pull off a "tribute" to, say, Once Upon a Time in the West.   He wouldn't know how.  Which is why he instead quotes obscurities like the original Django - they were forgotten for a reason; their directors were as bad as he is.  So the bottom line is that in Django Unchained, we're basically trapped for three hours in a bumping, halting cinematic contraption, in which we're chained to a chattering grindhouse maniac who simply cannot shut up.  And the excuse for the whole dreadful exercise is that we're engaging with our country's history of racism.

But are we?  Honestly - is this August Wilson?  Is it Faulkner?  Is it even Toni Morrison?  Sorry, I just don't think so.  And can a torture porn auteur really make a convincing moral statement about torture?  (In other words, is Tarantinoland so different from Candie Land?)  Hmmmm.  There's still more here to unpack, so I'll have to explain in full the contradictions that render Tarantino impotent as a shaper of art in the second half of this post.  (To be continued.)