Tarantino`s Wild West: Django Unchained

What do you think when I say the words Wild Wild West?

I bet whatever you pictured, it wasn’t a comprehensive subversion of the logic of slavery. And that’s why today, we’re talking about Django Unchained - a movie that has all the typical Tarantino hallmarks we love while also giving us an incredibly clever, nuanced, and dare we say fun, criticism of slavery. Django Unchained is a spaghetti-western directed by Ocho Quentin Tarantino and set in the deep south of 1858. It touches on America's horrific Antebellum black slave past with significant use of Tarantino's glorified violence and is wrapped up in the western genre. The film follows Django, a once black slave, and his voyage as a free man. The plot begins when a German bounty hunter Dr. Shultz buys Django's freedom and the two set out on a precarious journey as bounty hunters. They attempt to deceive Calvin Candy, a wealthy established plantation order to rescue Django's wife. Growing up as a film buff and working in a video store, there's no surprise that Tarantino takes great influence from others in his work. Undoubtedly the blaxploitation genre of the 1970s is the greatest intertextualization in Django unchained. The genre that is ironic in contrast to slavery as it mostly entails racism and violence towards white culture. We see the rise of the black antihero in this film - a bad man but not a good man either. Through film form and an interwoven narrative, it features an exploration of freedom and takes the idea of 'an eye for an eye' past the point of even. In saying this Tarantino's use of a black existential spaghetti-western hero Django to tackle the heavy subject of slavery is very interesting and effective

Language as a symbol of supremacy

Surprisingly, Django Unchained offers a purpose to language beyond a vehicle of bearing a man of culture. That’s because, from the perspective of the white slavers like Big Daddy and Calvin Candie, white bodies represent culture and civilization, while black bodies are seen as uncivilized and incapable of proper use of language and appreciation of culture.

Enter Schultz, This eloquent German speaks English as a second language so well that it confounds the native-speaking slavers. His mastery of English vocabulary confuses those around him multiple times: Meanwhile, his rhetorical skills allow him to talk circles around the simpletons of the American South. Schultz disrupts the racist binary we just discussed by making these self-satisfied Southerners look wildly uncivilized by comparison. He’s an emblem of the mythical European civilization that American men of means built their plantations on. And he’s the walking reminder that these self-styled men of culture are, well, they're full of crap.

The idea that slaves were incapable of proper language goes back to Aristotle. For Aristotle, humans differed from animals based on “logos” - a Greek word meaning both speech and reason. By contrast, my dog Woody can only communicate by “phonos” - the yapping and barking that can only communicate fear, displeasure, and hunger, as well as other base instincts. More importantly, Aristotle used this to justify slavery in Greece because they were, in his mind, only capable of receiving and understanding “logos” but not possessing it. In other words, slaves weren’t capable of proper speech, and the reason that came up with it. And not surprisingly, this language-based justification for slavery and racism just never died.

Django takes this dichotomy and flips it. Some of the cruelest slavers mumble so incoherently that they make Post Malone sound articulate. Contrast that with the intelligible slaves. At every opportunity, the film contrasts how Schultz treats slaves with how every other white person does. Unlike his peers, Schultz uses the honorific 'Fraulein' when talking to Broomhilde, instead of the N-Word. Candie, however, demands the french honorific “Monsieur,” as a sign of respect. Whereas Schultz uses titles as a form of voluntary respect, Candie uses them as mandatory submission.

Tarantino also plays with the soundtrack to emphasize how Django flips the script on all types of cultural expectations and uses what might seem out of sync with a Western set in the mid-nineteenth century - rap music.

But this choice makes perfect sense when we consider that rap music has long been used by those in positions of racial and economic inequality to call on people too. With this power often is the type of systemic white supremacy rooted in the history of American slavery. Rap music has often been used to fantasize about both changing one’s circumstances and seeking revenge for this injustice along the way. So it makes sense that the song that Rick Ross and Jamie Foxx wrote for the film, 100 Black Coffins has lyrics like: “Our revenge is the sweetest, bitch cause I'm coming / Gonna die in my arms, for what you did to my mother.” So what seems like a weird juxtaposition of genre and soundtrack ends up being the perfect way to highlight Django’s journey of seeking power and revenge under conditions of oppression. Now to move from rap to opera, music is also used by Schultz to give context to Django’s journey to save his wife. Using Richard Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods”, the fourth and final opera in his “The Ring of the Nibelung”, Schultz interprets Django’s attempt to rescue Broomhilda in a way that makes Django the Siegfried of his own story of revenge.

Wagner’s opera can also be read via the lens of his friend-then-enemy, or frenthenemy, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose Twilight of the Idols is a nod to Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. It’s not a stretch to say that Wagner’s Siegfried can be read as a Nietzschean ubermensch, one who responds to a nihilistic lack of values by powerfully creating new ones. So if Django is the Siegfried of the film, he is also a sort of ubermensch who responds to the nihilist values of slavery and white supremacy not with rational appeals for reform and dialogue, but by both metaphorical turning the whole damn thing to the ground.