I haven't seen Django Unchained yet, and as soon as I can, I'm going to take the advice of Anthony Lane that I should make a double bill of it and Lincoln. (Which should come first? Tips?)
My hunch is that the best thing to come of the movies is probably not going to be the movies themselves, but rather the conversations about the movies. Paul already linked to David Brothers' daily posts about Django Unchained over at 4th Letter, and yesterday I came across a thought-provoking essay on The New Yorker by Jelani Cobb, a professor of American history who writes that this may be Tarantino's most clever film, but a hugely problematic one given the stereotype that real-life African Americans didn't fight back against slavery.
In my sixteen years of teaching African-American history, one sadly common theme has been the number of black students who shy away from courses dealing with slavery out of shame that slaves never fought back.
It seems almost pedantic to point out that slavery was nothing like this. The slaveholding class existed in a state of constant paranoia about slave rebellions, escapes, and a litany of more subtle attempts to undermine the institution. Nearly two hundred thousand black men, most of them former slaves, enlisted in the Union Army in order to accomplish en masse precisely what Django attempts to do alone: risk death in order to free those whom they loved. Tarantino’s attempt to craft a hero who stands apart from the other men—black and white—of his time is not a riff on history, it’s a riff on the mythology we’ve mistaken for history. Were the film aware of that distinction, “Django” would be far less troubling—but it would also be far less resonant. The alternate history is found not in the story of vengeful ex-slave but in the idea that he could be the only one.
Django’s true nemesis is not the slaveholder who subjects Hildy to cruel punishments but Stephen, the house slave devoutly allied with the slaveholder. The central conflict is not between an ex-slave and a slaver but between two archetypes—the militant and the sellout. ... We’ve come a long way racially, but not so far that laughing at that character shouldn’t be deeply disturbing. ...
On the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s worth recalling that slavery was made unsustainable largely through the efforts of those who were enslaved. The record is replete with enslaved blacks—even so-called house slaves—who poisoned slaveholders, destroyed crops, “accidentally” burned down buildings, and ran away in such large numbers their lost labor crippled the Confederate economy. The primary sin of “Django Unchained” is not the desire to create an alternative history. It’s in the idea that an enslaved black man willing to kill in order to protect those he loves could constitute one.
