How Django Unchained Sheds Light on Global Connections

Films have a way of demonstrating past histories. Whether the films make fun of certain events or not, they shed light on global connections. Django Unchained does exactly that. The film Django Unchained sheds light on global connections through changing the perspective and the adage of exaggerations at certain scenes.

Django Unchained was released on December 25th, 2012, earning $425.4 million in the Box Office. The film won a couple of awards, such as the Oscars, NAACP, BET, and many more, for its portrayal of a spaghetti western in the view of a slave. Django Unchained is set in the year 1858, two years before the Civil War. This film is about a slave, Django (Jamie Foxx), who finds himself accompanying a bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Dr. Schultz buys Django in order to find and capture the Brittle brothers. Django and Dr. Schultz make a deal in that once Django helps to find the Brittle Brothers, he will be set free. After the mission, Dr. Schultz frees Django as per their agreement when Schultz bought him. Once he frees Django and hears about how Django is going to find his wife, Dr. Schultz proposes that they partner up for the winter to hunt the most-wanted criminals and collect the bounty. During the winter, Django has a taste of being a bounty hunter because he kills white men, his oppressors. After winter, Django and Dr. Schultz go on a mission to find Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who is still a slave at the plantation of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Dr.Schultz and Django create a scheme in order to enter Candieland, find Broomhilda, and escape before being caught by Calvin Candie. It does not go as planned, but in the end everything works out for Django and Broomhilda riding on horseback away from the burning main house of Candieland.

Django Unchained is about revenge in the sense that the oppressed finally have victory over their oppressor. The film changes the perspective in which most films have not delved into. Django Unchained is from the point of view of an enslaved black man. Most films based off this time period of the Civil War do not portray a black man as the hero. It is usually a white man who is the main character. The main character is usually reserved for whites, which is the hegemonic code. The hegemonic code refers to particular ideologies regarding race and gender. It is where the audience can recognize and receive the ideologies as normative and familiar (Satchel, pg.88). Movies have been following this code for as long as movies have started to be made. Minorities, when they have a part in films, they are usually second and subordinate to the white hero. Historically, movies with white hero bring in a bigger profit because if its appeal to the audience. The film Django Unchained changes this notion and proves that there is greater profit in investing non-hegemonic storylines that change the perspectives of minorities (Satchel, pg.88).

In the film Django Unchained, the main character is a black man who is played by a black man. Some films have minority character being played by a white individual. “For the present, however, we must consider the nature of value independently of its form of appearance” (Marx, pg.128). This film demonstrates that value is not based off the appearance, it is based off the quality. Django Unchained proves that although there are different appearances with a hero being a white individual or a minority, there can be a similar quality that appeals to audience. Django Unchained changes the idea that a white individual has to play the main character in order for a movie to do well in profits.

With Django- a black slave- as the main character, the film changes the perspective of history. The film, Django Unchained, retells history. Although the film does not accurately depict slavery, rewrites the story so the film is no longer in the view of a white man. The story is being told from the view of a black man, although it was written by a white man, Quentin Tarantino. Django Unchained’s perspective of a black slave adds a new element to history. History no longer belongs to the white man, it also belongs to a variety of people. In Eric Wolf’s introduction of Europe and the People without History, he argues that history is turned “into a moral success story, a race in time in which each runner of the race passes on the torch of liberty to the next relay”. This suggests that history is about the “good guys” beating the “bad guys”. This then turns history into a tale of moral purpose, with no indication of various social and cultural processes at work in their own time and place. Wolf uses the example of the class conflicts in ancient Greek cities and of the relation between freemen and their slaves to suggests that history as a moral story does not allow us to see the social processes of the time. We would not ask the questions in which history is turned into a moral success story. Django Unchained highlights the social and cultural processes of the time period it is set in. With this, the film brings forth a new element of history through a different lens that other films of the same time period fail to do sometimes. Eric wolf says that history is comprised of multiple views. If we do not see these multiple views, then we lose sight of the connections between people, societies, cultures, and countries.

This film illustrates a different side of history. It shows escape from slavery and the paranoia of the slaveholders. With this escape and the paranoia, in came violence. The different side of history shows the violence in slavery and the importance of slavery in the local and global economy. For example, in the film there is a scene at the beginning were a line of six slaves were walking barefoot in shackles through Texas heading to be sold. They were chained up like dogs with mindset that they are not people. The film also demonstrates other forms of violence. Another example is a scene were Django and Dr. Schultz are entering the Tennessee plantation of Spencer “Big Daddy” Bennett. There were little snippets of many slaves working on the massive area of the cotton. In the perspective of a white man, the only thing shown are the cotton fields without slaves working them. If the film was in the point of view of a white man, Django Unchained would not show or would only emphasize the injustices and violence towards slaves. With the change of perspective to a black slave, it brings forth the retelling of history in a different light.

In regards to Django Unchained retelling history, the film depicts how globalization caused social consequences. Slavery had a huge part in boosting the local and global economy, which added to social structures. Michel Rolph Trouillot observes “academic, political, and corporate leaders in most of the world tell citizens that they cannot do anything about the social consequences of globalization”. Django Unchained depicts this clearly through the dialogue. In the entire film, the n-word was used over a 110 times. This exaggeration of the use of the n-word demonstrates the social consequences. These consequences in the film suggest that slavery created a name that grouped people together with no identity.

With snippets of cotton fields and slaves working them, the film illustrates that slavery was not just a speck in the history of the United States/ world or in the economy. Django Unchained brings slavery to the forefront. It does not hide it. In Sven Beckert’s “Cotton and the Global Origins of Capitalism”, he argues that “elites in the North Atlantic started to tell new stories about themselves, stories in which slavery did not have much place” in economic growth. Slavery did in fact have a bigger role in capitalism. As Beckert argues that we should see slavery being a huge part of the global economy, the film Django Unchained too suggests that slavery’s history must be a part of the conversation in regards to capitalism.

With slavery being the main focus of the film, Django Unchained, it illustrates other forms of economy in the local level. In Sven Beckert’s “Slavery’s Capitalism”, he suggests “the domestic slave trade witnessed some of the crassest entrepreneurship anywhere in the nineteenth century and helped transform slavery into something more than a labor system: a property regime in which wealth could be stored, transferred, leveraged, collateralized, and bequeathed through black men, women, and children held under legal title”. This means that slaves are property which then means that property equals power. The more slaves one owns, the more power one has in politics, society, and in the economy. “Baptists proposed ‘torture’ as the most apt explanation of the new efficiencies of field labor. The violence of the lash, in the field and at the weighing house, pushed workers to ever-greater feats of picking”. Sven Beckert suggests that slave owners used violence to make slaves work faster in order for them, the owners, to receive more wealth from the amount of cotton that is ready to be sold. Not only does the number of slave one owns mean more power, it also mean that the more slave one owns the more labor production one has. This in turn gives them more wealth.

Because slave owner could practically could do anything to their slaves, they would allow overseers to use any force necessary in order for the quota of cotton to be reached. If the slaves were not doing the right thing in whatever capacity they are in on the plantation, they were punished so that it sets an example that this what happens when something wrong is done. The scene where Django is taken to the Brittle brothers on Spencer “Big Daddy” Benet’s plantation, he sees two of the brothers about to whip a female slave for breaking a couple of eggs. The brothers were using that slave as an example for the rest to show what would happen to those who do wrong. With slaves being considered as property, the owners can basically do anything to the slaves. In the film, there is are particular scenes that demonstrate this. When Candie finds that Django and Dr. Schultz conned him, he grabs Broomhilda saying that she is his property and can do whatever he wants to her. And at that moment he has a hammer to Broomhilda’s head. In another scene, a slave escaped because he did not want to fight anymore, so Candie ordered for the dogs to attack. Calvin Candie cool the situation down, but that only led to the slave from hiding and eventually leading to his demise. Candie not allow the slave to not be punished because it could potentially lead to more escapes. With more escapes, it could cost him to lose profit and power.

The film not only portrays slavery as a labor force, but also as other forms of profit. The other forms of profit demonstrated in Django Unchained fuels Michel Rolph Trouillot’s idea of polarization and oligopolies. These two ideas has led to local economies to boom. Oligopolies are market forms in a market or industry that is dominated by small numbers of sellers. The slave wrestling matches, in the film they are referred to as mandingo fighting, demonstrate a form in which owners of slaves have increased their profits and power. With these fights, it demonstrates Marx’s view on value. “Nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it”. The character Calvin Candie demonstrates this notion by the fact that if his fighter did not win, he would have seen the slave as something that was useless in him becoming wealthier.

Throughout the film, Django Unchained, one could see that it was trying to highlight the wrongs in history, even some parts were not as accurate as it could have been. Django Unchained sheds light on how slavery was a huge part in the global and local economy in the United States. The film demonstrates that the one percent at that time were rich and powerful was only due to slavery. In history, it is not told how a country becomes powerful or rather it does not present the actual processes or elements that led to success. Django Unchained, although it is satirical, illustrates the somewhat hidden truths of what comprised of the United States having local and global connections.