In Amaryah Armstrong’s recent post at Women in Theology she points to a talk by Frank Wilderson that compares the approaches to slavery in Django Unchained and Manderlay. Wilderson argues that “My goal [was] to raise the level of abstraction from discussion of interpersonal guilt and innocence–that is, from a question of morality–to a discussion of institutional violence, structural violence, and the collective responses to that violence by people in revolt. … Manderlay condemns the US and Western Modernity by arguing that a totalitarian despotic regime and democratic socialism are one and the same to and for the slave. Django Unchained seems to believe that America and Western Modernity are imbued with certain evils which can be reformed and indeed transformed, if the right people have the right change of heart.” Continue reading “Django Revisited” →

[WARNING: Spoilers!!! I’ve tried to put enough prefatory material that you can easily skip past it in Google Reader at least.]

From the moment I first saw the preview of Django Unchained, I could predict the criticisms from my general vicinity of the internet: Tarantino’s exploiting black suffering, he’s not giving the appropriate amount of “agency” to the hero, he isn’t using the opportunity to educate the broad public about the true horrors of slavery, etc., etc. After seeing the film, I’m convinced that all those fussy, hand-wringing critiques are bullshit. If he’d taken the advice of liberal critics, he would’ve made the kind of self-congratulatory, “morally nuanced” film that they’d show in schools in February as a token gesture. Maybe he would’ve even won an Oscar!

The one critique that stands is: “Isn’t it kind of weird that it’s a white dude making this movie?” And it is, but that isn’t Tarantino’s fault. An identical film spearheaded by an angry black man simply wouldn’t have been made, for much the same reason that our first black president doesn’t support slave reparations. Until American society stops being so deeply racist — i.e., probably not in our lifetimes — a white artist is going to be stuck in a double-bind when it comes to race. Either you bring the black experience into the conversation the best way you know how and inevitably get accused of some form of racism, or else you leave it to the blacks and ensure that it remains a “ghetto,” special interest topic — rather than the scar that runs down the very center of American history and society.

This double bind is irreducible, an unfixable problem. There’s no “right answer” to the portrayal of race for whites because and as long as our whole society is wrong. Either you remain silent, “just to be safe,” or you take the risk — and maybe create something like The Wire.

So, here begin the spoilers: Continue reading “A first pass at Django Unchained“ →