Whites’ Cultural Symmetry Demand: Django Enduring
I’d make three brief observations:
. I was not put off by its unrelenting, near-comic book violence: after all, the actual history it raises up and then so sharply, naughtily, cartoonishly subverts was, day-to-day, year-over-decade, far, far more raw with blood, bones, heartbreak, viciousness, treachery, pain and injustice than any ten-minute stretch of shootings, whippings, beatings, near-castrations, rapes, bodies ripped apart in dogs’ jaws, and explosions the film trades in.
. I liked immensely Mr. Tarantino’s final shot of the plantation house dynamited, burning to ash, as it’s a rather hilarious moral and psychological inversion of the Gone With The Wind shot of Georgia plantation homes burning at the hands of Union regulars. Ironically funny because the shots in both films are set against what moments before were inky night skies bursting now orange and red. Yet whereas the 1939 expectation was that audiences would be (and largely were) horrified, Django Unchainedviewers see only justice in Dixie’s symbolic immolation.
. I was, finally, not put off by the film’s more than a nod to Seventies ‘Black-sploitation’ films. When Django, recently freed, is offered a legally sanctioned dead-or-alive partnership bounty hunting white outlaws and assesses its potential: “Kill white folks and get paid for it? What’s not to like?” he’s giving raw voice to what had to be on the minds of at least 3,999,999 of America’s 4,000,000 slaves in the run-up to the Civil War. The many contemporary white commentators (political, not cinematic) who have railed bitterly against that line (and thus the film), livid that no white actor/character/writer could survive saying that about blacks simply do not have and do not want to have any understanding of slavery’s historical and psychic contexts.
Majorities who demand cultural symmetry from minorities, particularly in that context, ought not, quite honestly, be permitted in theaters unaccompanied by an adult.
koshersalaami
06/30/2019 @ 6:45 am
Symmetry without symmetry. I’ve written about the pernicious myth of racial symmetry before. The “Black/White” vocabulary adds to this tendency, it seems very yin-yang, but it’s not. At All. In America, Black and White for the most part aren’t even the same kind of category: Black mostly designates an ethnic group, at least as envisioned by most Whites (who ignore the smaller Caribbean-descended Black population when thinking of Blacks and focus solely on American slave descendants) while White designates both a catch-all ethic group and an actual race. White is an umbrella category for a lot of ethnic groups. It would be closer to true to compare Blacks to Italians than to Whites.
JW1
06/30/2019 @ 11:32 am
Wholly right.