Django – my choice for best film of 2012

February 2, 2013

(Warning: spoilers ahead.)

I haven’t really kept up with my movie-going lately, but Django stood out for me quite spectacularly. I'm a fan of Tarantino, especially of Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill series, but on one level at least I think this may be his best film yet, and to my mind arguably deserves the Oscar for best film of 2012.

I read reviews and comments about the movie, best performances of the actors and the occasional weaknesses in the plot line, but I really haven't seen much mention of the thing that struck me most – its portrayal of what slavery meant in the deep South. Of course when people ask Tarantino about this, he reverts to his usual, "Hey guys, I'm just making a movie here. Don't go reading all that different stuff into it." And certainly on its surface, Django is anything but a "message" movie. Which, I think, is part of why it succeeds so well.

In one sense, I think the closest analog to Django is District 9, a sci-fi movie of sorts where an alien spaceship ends up stranded over Johannesburg, South Africa. (By the way if you haven't seen this movie, see it.) Rather than being the usual conquerors from outer space, the aliens here are in desperate shape and need a place to stay. Initially welcomed, their novelty gradually wears off and they finally end up being housed in one of the old black townships (District 9). The aliens themselves are about the same height as human beings, but look quite insect-like – they are nicknamed "Prawns” by the local people. The most powerful thing about District 9 is the insight that it gives you about apartheid. The appearance of the aliens makes it easy to feel a deep sense of revulsion about them, and their treatment and the squalor of their lives within the Township echoes the kind of degradation imposed on blacks all through the apartheid regime. I had visited South Africa many times in the past, had seen the shantytowns that ring Cape Town, and had listened to focus groups with every kind of audience, including blacks living in townships, and I had also read about the apartheid era, but none of that came close to giving me the emotional understanding of what apartheid meant that I got from District 9. At the family reunion in Berlin summer before last, I talked with one of my Cape Town relatives, who happens to be, oddly enough from my viewpoint, an Anglican minister (a Zen Anglican minister, as he describes himself) who is very involved in the peace and reconciliation movement, and he completely agreed with me about the impact of District 9.

The point is that District 9 never came off as a "message" movie. (Although it also never got much traction period, which may not be entirely unconnected to what it was saying.) The plot line involves a somewhat clueless bureaucrat who is sent in to serve eviction papers to the Prawns, and sees this as an opportunity to impress his superiors and perhaps get a promotion; in the course of all of this is accidentally infected with the virus that turns him into a Prawn. The story is perfectly engaging in its own right, and the emotional impact of the movie comes about on its own.

In Django, the most fascinating element to me was the pervasive sense of menace all the time and in all directions.

We see this in a lot of different ways within the movie. For one thing, the German bounty hunter (Dr. King Schultz) has seized upon the most convenient portion of the "Wanted: Dead or Alive" equation and simply shoots the people on whose heads he wants to collect a bounty. But this merely sets up a backdrop of violence in the society at large. More directly, when Schultz meets up with the slavers who are taking Django to his next destination, the encounter leaves one of the two slavers dead and the other with a severely broken leg trapped under his horse. Schultz takes off with Django and leaves the other slaves, whose chains he has unlocked, to choose whether to carry the wounded slaver 40-some miles to the nearest town or to shoot him and head out to friendlier territory. Obviously, with the tables turned, the freed slaves immediately shoot the wounded slaver.

I think this readiness and even hunger for payback is something that's missing from most narratives. Roots may have portrayed the injustices and some other tragedies of slavery, but on some level the slaves were stuck with being "good." Can you imagine the slaves in Roots taking knives and slitting the throats of all the white people on the plantation? Django changes all of that.

One other really interesting parts of Django is the scene with the Mandingo fighting. I don't know anything about the historical reality or accuracy of Mandingo fighting, but given the history of mankind from the Roman Coliseum on, I can't see it not happening. What was striking to me however, was that the fight that we see was not held in some kind of arena with a sizable audience of enthusiastic bettors (as with cockfighting for example), but rather takes place in a private bar in an elegant men's club, where the total audience consists of the owners of the two slaves, one or two other associates of the owners, and the black bartender and a few other slaves. There are no weapons, and really nothing dramatic about the fight itself, other than the grim ending, where the victor is handed a hammer to smash in the skull of the loser. After which, Monsieur Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), owner of the winner, tells the bartender to give him a nice cold beer, and congratulates him, "Enjoy that beer, boy. You've earned it." Both of the slaves in the fight are presumably quite expensive, far more so than the average field hand. Which makes the fight all the more appropriate for a private match, presumably involving a significant bet.

As we move on to Candyland, we begin to see just how massive the apparatus required for slavery really is. Armed (white) men are everywhere, and when we get to the very large mansion itself, we discover that Django’s wife is in the "hot box" as a punishment for trying to run away. The hot box itself is there on one side of the front lawn, a sign of how important it is and how frequently it is necessary.

By now, when we see a scene in the mansion dining room where a series of black serving women are putting the dishes on the table in a synchronized routine, we not only see the elaborateness of the table setting, but even more, we feel the sheer menace surrounding every single act that these serving women perform. There's a sense of terror that if one of them should happen to drop a plate and have it break, the punishment would be incredibly brutal.

But that tension flows both ways. Monsieur Candie, who is eager to discuss his theories about how phrenology demonstrates the inherent servility of the black race, talks about the slave who used to shave his father every morning with a straight razor and never slit his throat. Candie assures us that it would not have taken him very long to do so.

I came across a very interesting quote about the situation in the South during the time of slavery:

The English actress Frances Kembel wrote in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839 that "every Southern woman to whom I have spoken on the subject, has admitted to me that they live in terror of their slaves."

Throughout the South newspapers were filled with terrifying stories of Black conspiracies and editorials urging constant vigilance. Virtually every traveler comments that White men and women "never lay down to sleep without a brace of loaded pistols at their side." (William R. Polk, The Vence Partitas, c.1990, p. 122)

As far as the overall storyline of the movie, it ends up with a very satisfying bloodbath of revenge. (One of my favorite lines from the final shootout scene is, "Cora, say goodbye to Miss Laura.") Obviously plenty of fantasy here and nobody bothers to worry about how Django and his wife, even with their papers of freedom, will make it out of the South afterwards. I wasn't a great fan of Inglourious Basterds; a nice fantasy, but it all too obviously didn't happen. Here, there is no claim that slavery is being brought down or that the plight of slaves generally is being affected in any way.

I saw an article in the Huffington Post the other day offering predictions about which films will win which awards at the Oscars (http://data.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/oscar-predictions). Django had the best audience rating of any of the nominees for best picture, and the highest gross except for Lincoln. Critically, it was beaten out by a number of the other contenders. It was given a 0.0% chance of winning best picture. I understand why, and I think it's too bad. But the real message is probably not all that palatable.

The only other film on the list of nominees that I've seen so far is Zero Dark Thirty. It was extremely well done, but it was the kind of movie where you walk out and say, "That was a really good movie." That's pretty much the end of it. I didn't find myself thinking about it afterwards. But I do keep thinking about Django.