A Look Back at "Django Unchained" and Tarantino's Battle with Racism

Left to right: Leonardo di Caprio, Christoph Waltz,
and Kerry Washington

With the DVD and Blu Ray release of director Quentin Tarantino's western revision Django Unchained hitting shelves this past Tuesday, it brings an end to a time frame that made me reassess how I look at the director. Not necessarily just as a film maker, but also as a person, who probably has started losing good will after making a collection of cinema that I would personally call fun and exciting. What he did with Django Unchained was not only raise awareness of racism and how poorly cinema represents the time frame, but also just make a fool of himself, showing cracks in his well crafted thesaurus of movie knowledge. So what exactly did he do and why would Django Unchained have been better off if he was more of a reclusive personality?

Brilliant. That is the word I would have used to describe Django Unchained if you had showed me the first 80 minutes. During that time, it seemed like Tarantino had created a kinetic, fast moving western with a likable Christoph Waltz as Dr. King Schultz, proving that he could tie his shoe and win an Oscar for Best Loop-de-Loos. It is such an enjoyable throwback and he is well aware of his time frame. Even the titular Django (Jamie Foxx) is doing an excellent job. Most of all, it is a fun take on it, including a clan rally that goes ridiculously wrong when their bags start causing problems.

But that wasn't where the film stopped. It went on into another half that made the movie clock in at two hours and 45 minutes, or as Tarantino called it "The shortest long western since Rio Bravo." Rio Bravo is a classic and at very least, it was nice to recognize the hits. However, Tarantino's second half turns into a whole different film, full of phrenology, "The Three Musketeers" analogies, and anachronistic dynamite use. Even the gun shoot outs set to an amazing mash-up of 2Pac and James Brown just fell flat, as it felt like it was added in as an oversight. Maybe this clunky nature was the fault of the unfortunate death of long-time editor Sally Menke, even though her successor, Fred Raskin, was assistant editor on both Kill Bill films and has a rap sheet that includes Boogie Nights and Insomnia.

No matter what, the film was a mess, choosing to play out slowly until it ends with Django giving a smile that Tarantino calls "The FDR" face after president Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous grin with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It was this moment in the film that was bringing the film to a close that I felt like Tarantino was officially full of himself. Not in the way that seemed pleasant or fitted the aesthetic of the universe. It was more a recognition that he was being clever and literally smiling at the camera.

Overall, the film was overwhelming to the worst degree. However, I'll admit that I brought some baggage into this experience, and something that somehow has unfortunately changed the way that I look at Tarantino. Having thoroughly enjoyed Inglourious Basterds, I was ready for another great film, given that he successfully made anachronistic history exciting. Since that film, I have realized why it worked. It was a love letter to cinema and therefore worked as using the medium to fight evil. It was exciting. The problem going into Django Unchained was that it didn't have movies to bounce off of in quite the same respects. True, it did reference Duck You Sucker, but as far as blatant references, they had to stick to literature and Mandingo wrestling.

This is where things get tricky. I didn't see the film until January for varying reasons. Despite this, I do love consuming press materials and Django Unchained was no exception. Tarantino is such a personality that him talking could get him on the front page of /Film. However, the world began to react all around him. We'll start with the racism. When asked if he had seen the film, director Spike Lee took to Twitter with this comment: 

Lee's opinion probably remains the most recognized in terms of people who disliked the film. Notably because of his pride in the African American culture. On the other side, Django Unchained ended up being Tarantino's most successful film to date, grossing $419 million internationally. It currently ranks #44 on IMDb's Top 250 and has won two Oscars: Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz. The question to be taken away from this is: is Django Unchained an important film because it made people address slavery, or is it just a really racist film?

I fall in the category that thinks the writing is very much black face of the modern era. While it may be accurate that people walked and talked like they did in the film, I felt it was done to an excess. The derogatory use of the word nigger was used 110 times and for all the escapism that came with Django shooting bad white men, it still treated its main subject like dirt. It was only with the help of Dr. King that Django got anywhere, which almost feels like a subtle way of claiming that the white man helps all.

But then there's Tarantino himself, who I found to have a fascinating take on westerns, if just because each piece seemed to unravel more clues into his psyche. The first example of controversy surrounding the film came when the shooting at Sandy Hook happened, leaving many detractors to blame Tarantino's western the fault of the blame. However, this is an interesting argument, speaking as nobody blamed the Aurora, CO shootings last July on Inglourious Basterds, which feels more plagiarized than the Sandy Hook/Django Unchained correlation (please do not take this as condoning either theories). On top of racism, Tarantino had to battle arguments on violence, which he was more able to work his way around by claiming that real life animal torture was far worse than anything he ever filmed.

However, that lead to an amazing interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air to promote the film and talk about racism and violence. During this discussion, he claims that:

"I went to a mostly black school. You know, it wasn’t all-black because I was there, but it was mostly black. And the different points of my life I was raised by black people, raised in black homes – between my mom’s best friend that I lived a lot of times with her and her family and just the kind of United Nations aspect that my mom’s house was in the early ’70s, right at the explosion of black culture. So black culture is my culture growing up."

This is a bold thing that may have been clear to some as early as Jackie Brown, a far more successful take on blaxploitation, but for me struck me as odd. I am aware that Tarantino has a wide array of interests, but this comment has lingered in my head ever since when trying to access him as a film maker. For instance, I almost feel more like Django Unchained is black face writing because it feels like Tarantino is out of touch with culture. It feels mostly written so that he could make black people look cool, but only because white people look very, very, very stupid.

With this in mind, it almost made this particular interview very awkward:

Yes, he grew up in black culture, which is perfectly fine. However, having just turned 50, he clearly isn't the same hip director he used to be. I am fine with him wanting to address slavery, but it just doesn't feel like an honest narrative. In fact, an argument can be made that Tarantino only won Best Original Screenplay because of the audacity to tackle these subjects just like Crash won Best Picture for tackling the same thing to a less pleasing feedback.
But to close out this part on how Tarantino's audacity to tackle racism has possibly damaged the opinions of the movie, I want to address one more issue that has always struck me as odd, as I feel that Tarantino is a hypocrite for saying this. During the press circuit and discussing his western film director idols, it was inevitable that John Ford would come up. But guess what, Tarantino doesn't like him. In an interview with The Root, he claims:

"Oddly enough, where I got the idea for the Klan guys [in Django Unchained] — they're not Klan yet, the Regulators arguing about the bags [on their heads] — as you may well know, director John Ford was one of the Klansmen in The Birth of a Nation, so I even speculate in the piece: Well, John Ford put on a Klan uniform for D.W. Griffith. What was that about? What did that take? He can't say he didn't know the material. Everybody knew The Clansman [on which Birth of a Nation was based] at that time as a piece of material. 

...he put on the Klan uniform. He got on the horse. He rode hard to black subjugation. As I'm writing this — and he rode hard, and I'm sure the Klan hood was moving all over his head as he was riding and he was riding blind — I'm thinking, wow. That probably was the case. How come no one's ever thought of that before? Five years later, I'm writing the scene and all of a sudden it comes out. 

One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else's humanity — and the idea that that's hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms. And you can see it in the cinema in the '30s and '40s — it's still there. And even in the '50s."

So basically because Ford was in Birth of a Nation and held a different ideal, Tarantino doesn't approve, despite making such classics as The Searchers and Stagecoach (and frankly far superior to this western). While I cannot comment on parallels between Django Unchained and Birth of a Nation, as I haven't seen it, this statement feels bold, especially from someone who tried to justify black culture so blatantly only to look kind of silly and self-indulging. In fact, maybe the issue with Django Unchained is not the subject matter, but probably that Tarantino is not as strong a writer as he once was. He can be as anachronistic as he wants, but by tackling racism, he kind of revealed his own hypocrisy. If you can separate the film after these interviews, you are a better person than I.

Even with a line of dolls that were pulled for being racist, the most ridiculous aspect of the Django Unchained circuit remains the director and his viewpoints of the world. Maybe he is as crazy as the people he tests. However, in an inspired twist of fate, the most recent backlash came from within the camp from famous composer Ennio Morricone, who contributed an original piece ("Ancora Qui") to the film. According to a piece from The Hollywood Reporter article by Eric J. Lyman:

Tarantino is frustrating to work with, Morricone said, observing that the two-time Oscar winner “places music in his films without coherence" and "you can't do anything with someone like that."

He went on to later claim that this wasn't necessarily a feud that he had with Tarantino, but more an observation. Morricone is honored that Tarantino recognizes his music, but still feels that it is too scattered. Also, he didn't like Django Unchained because there was too much blood. Morricone previously worked with Tarantino on Inglourious Basterds, which he called a masterpiece. But as for the pieces in Django Unchained, the famed composer claims that he was rushed and Tarantino used whatever he gave him.
That is essentially an issue that I had with the film. Not that there were original cuts (including the excellent John Legend song "Who Did That to You"), but because the music just didn't work. For all of the big moments, the songs just existed in the scene instead of feeling like a character. At very least, it feels like Morricone's judgment is what my initial problem with the film's soundtrack was. There's plenty of great song selections, but they don't feel as well placed as say "Stuck in the Middle with You" in Reservoir Dogs. While this may just be an unfortunate editing problem, I hope that this isn't the end of Tarantino and his infamous ability to make any song feel like his films own them. 
And one more thing, I am glad that he recognized Franco Nero in the film, as I feel it is a nice tribute to his elder statesmen. I am even glad to hear the Django theme song by Luis Bacalov used in the film. However, what has annoyed me ever since is the fans who not only accept his take on revisionist history as somehow being excellence, but also their inability to use proper titles (this was even more frustrating when discussing last year's the Dark Knight Rises). When asked "Have you seen Django?," I feel like saying that I have, referencing the Sergio Corbucci classic. However, they are referring to the inferior Tarantino flick. I know it's anal, but please call films by their proper names and not truncated names that can be mixed up (especially one that has garnered so many unofficial sequels).
THIS is Django:

Franco Nero

THIS is Django Unchained:

Jamie Foxx

I am not expecting you to search out the Sergio Corbucci film, even though it is a great one. I just want you to recognize the differences so that next time you ask "Have you seen Django," I know that you are referencing the film of that name and not Django Unchained. 

In closing, there was one more infamous interview that Tarantino had at Channel 4 News with Krishnan Guru-Murthy that has been dubbed "I'm shutting your butt down." Clearly having taken one too many interviews on the subject of violence, Tarantino snaps at the journalist, claiming that he just wants to talk about the film, and racism. This may be a noble move, but it does leave a zen moment that is a great note to go out on.
Around the 7:30 mark, things start changing to focus more on Tarantino as an artist. He is asked if he feels that he is aging well as a director after claiming that directors do not get better over time. This is an argument he has stated many times, even comparing himself to later Billy Wilder. However, what he claims is fascinatingly poignant to how we come to see him as a filmmaker: 

"I think that I'm still in the sweet spot. I hope. That's up for everyone to decide. Am I?... I feel like filmmaking and directors are like boxers. They have their time. Hopefully, I am on the right side of my time.  At a certain point, a boxer loses. It's all about knowing when to hang up the gloves, or I guess in my case the megaphone." 

It is an oddly humble thing to say and I feel a very poignant meta commentary on what has been the Django Unchained press circuit. It has won some awards, become a box office sensation, but it also has created controversial discussion. As I close the chapter on this film, I look back on the past few months and see that maybe Django Unchained changed the way I look at Tarantino more than racism. Still, it feels like the otherwise talented filmmaker is reaching the end of his prime with unfortunate products that I will remember more for its recognition in the press than the actual film.
With that said, do I feel like Django Unchained shouldn't get praise? As I opened up with, there are portions that are phenomenal. However, that is mostly from the first 80 minutes. I feel like this film starts off well, and sadly turns into Tarantino's fascination of dialogue, however stilted this time around seems to be. It gives us another fantastic performance by Christoph Waltz and maybe an unfortunately placed Leonardo di Caprio example of overacting. Yet, I think the thing to take away is that maybe this is the end of Tarantino the great, or maybe it is just a misstep. Maybe racism just brought out the worst in him, which is actually more tolerable than some people. Still, at 2 hours and 45 minutes, Django Unchained proves that if anyone needs to be chained up, it is Tarantino's editing.