Abstract Abstract: This commentary surveys the skull scene in Django Unchained. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution or have your own login and password to Project MUSE. Additional Information. Project MUSE Mission Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.
The scenario includes a depiction of New Orleans, by the way, an apt reference point given that the city has come to symbolize the horrors as well as the unplanned promise of the African experience in the United States. In fact, it can be seen as courageous—unless premised on falsehoods or fraught with intellectual dishonesty. And let loose he does. Neither film is racist, in that both excoriate institutional racism and advocate black equality—not that such stands are any longer brave or even controversial.
However embarrassing or uncomfortable white movies about black people may be to black viewers, in the post-civil rights era they are signs of racial progress. Ever since when W. The reason, I think, is this: Tarantino, more than other white hipsters, excels at turning vernacular cultural genres blaxploitation movies, spaghetti westerns, comics, pulp fiction into elite displays of craftsmanship, in the process trivializing their meaning or emptying them of meaning altogether.
There is a lingering suspicion that hip white artists mine stereotypical modes of black expression for their currently trendy style and sound.
Spike Lee—a longtime critic of Tarantino—took the unwieldy position that he refused to see the film but knew that it would be disrespectful to his ancestors. There are moments where this convex history works brilliantly, like when Tarantino depicts the K. In the Harlem theatre where I saw the film, the largely black audience cheered each time an overseer met his end. There is a noble undertaking at the heart of all this gunplay. Django, played brilliantly by Jamie Foxx, and King Schultz, his white bounty-hunter mentor—played by an equally adroit Christoph Waltz—are on a mission to rescue Hildy Kerry Washington , the enslaved woman Django loves.
The trade-off for an audience indulging in that emotionally powerful and rarely depicted brand of black heroism is overlooking aspects of the film that were at least as troubling as the other parts were affirming.
Primary among these concerns is the frequency of with which Tarantino deploys the n-word. If ever there were an instance in which the term was historically fitting it would seem that a Western set against the backdrop of slavery—a Southern—would be it. At some point, it becomes difficult not to wonder how much of this is about the film and how much is about the filmmaker. For his part, Django never deigns to offer a civil word to any other slave, save his love interest.
In a climactic scene, Django informs his happily enslaved nemesis that he is the one n-word in ten thousand audacious enough to kill anyone standing in the way of freedom. Is this how Americans actually perceive slavery?
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