Django Unchained.

Here’s the thing: I, like many people, am tired of slave movies. For me, watching them feels like being made to accept this twisted conflation of time where yes, Black people, you are free, but you could become un-free at any moment, and you were slaves just a few generations ago, so who’s to say you won’t be slaves again? I think sometimes in trying to learn how to be better, White people can lean so far into the past that they indulge in it, awarding Black stories for being gory and gristly and tragic, as if it is not how Black artists tell the story that matters but how much it involves—and implicates—White people. Maybe that’s ungenerous and it’s definitely not applicable one hundred percent of the time, but if one more story about slavery wins a prestigious award, I just might primal scream. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t want us to think about slavery. While my research is more contemporary, I think it’s thoroughly interesting to study what happened back then and even more compelling to think about how it informs our present. Like, for example, I was showing my class the footage from the Montgomery Brawl—did you see this?—where this wild racially-aligned fight breaks out because these White guys are jumping this Black guy (he asked them to move their boat so that he could dock). And they’re jumping him because they don’t want to move their boat, and then this other Black guy who presumably doesn’t know the first Black guy jumps in to help him and then more White people come to help the White people and then more Black people come to help the Black people until all of the frustration and anger of everything symbolic is being played out right here on this dock. That, in itself, is interesting, but even more so is the Black boy who jumps off the boat waiting to dock and swims over to help the Black guy. And even more interesting than that is how the woman recording him swimming is yelling, “Go ahead, young buck! Go ahead, young buck!” which is what they called Black boys like this one during slavery. 

Or even take the n-word, a more prevalent example—how that’s remained, went from being a word all White people said readily to one that will make them lose their jobs if they say it around the wrong people. I’m thinking now of how a few months back this White dude on a bike called me and my boyfriend the n-word because we were in his way—how, after the shock, I wanted to run after him, shove him off his bike, make him say it to my face for real, and I’ve never fought anyone. Instead I wished horrible things on him and felt the world was on my side. I can’t believe there were so many years where Black people were called that as an insult and had to hang their heads and bear it. I can’t believe—knowing how ugly it made people feel, knowing being called that somehow justified having a host of evil things happen to you—White people can forget all of that context and still feel it’s unfair that now that we can finally say it ourselves and feel something other than shame, they’re not allowed to join in.  

Yes, I’m very interested in how slavery informs our present, so my problem isn’t with remembering it, it’s with how often it’s toted out as a lesson for innocent White people on how bad some White people used to be (not them, obviously, every single one of them would have never owned slaves). There are often in these movies—I’m thinking about popular ones like 12 Years a Slave, not more indie ones like Sankofa—an Evil Violent White Person and a Good Will Protect You White Person, and if you are White, when watching these movies, you can choose who you identify with, whereas if you’re Black, you can only identify with the Black people, who will be tortured the whole movie through until, if they’re lucky, the Good White Person comes to save them. It’s exhausting and it’s not for Black people and it’s not really for White people either because watching movies where Black people are tortured is not somehow going to exonerate you or make you a better person. 

Anyway, here I am, going on about how tired I am of slave movies when my boyfriend asks me if I’ve seen Django Unchained. And I’m skeptical, but I love Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, so we turn it on. And at the very beginning, when the German guy throws the slaves the key to their chains and tells them, if they want, they can go ahead and set themselves free, I know we’re working with a different movie because if this was a Regular Slave Movie, he would bend down and unchain them himself and then look up and expect thanks, gratitude, eternal love for not being an Evil White, as if this choice to not be evil is a favor they should be grateful for. 

The German guy takes Django with him because he needs his help, and he’s explicit about this, about how though he doesn’t believe in slavery he’s gonna use it to his advantage here because it’s convenient. He does not insist that he is a Good White Person and this somehow makes him one. Django is allowed to pick his own clothes—which are extravagant—ride his own horse, go by his actual name. He is able to fully fight back against the people who have made his life a living hell—he doesn’t have to wait for the Goodness of White People to kick in and this is such a relief that it kind of healed me a little to see it. Through the ability to even the playing field, there is closure, and this is not a revenge fantasy: nobody got more than they deserved. 

I love Django Unchained for its agency and for its dignity—it is violent but it doesn’t relish in this violence—it doesn’t make you watch a White person scream at a Black person that they are a nigger without them being able do anything about it. When someone called Django a nigger, he pushed him off his horse. This script is filled with the n-word but not in a way that feels bold or over-thought-about or malignant. It is not used with the same intention of White people who are mad because they want to say it without getting in trouble or who decide it’s fine to yell it at you when you’re in the way. When someone does say the n-word as an insult to Django, he is able to hold his head high and protect his sense of self, and yes, of course, this is not necessarily historically accurate, but it is what we—as present Black people, as descendants of descendants, as survivors in one sense or another—need to see, and if White people need to be reminded of just how bad slavery was to feel bad about it then they can build a time machine and go see for themselves. See, maybe, that everybody participating in an evil system is at least a little Evil and that it’s easy for anyone to look back at the choices someone else made and say—abstractly—Wouldn’t be me. 

I love Django for its agency and for its dignity and also for its tone. It’s neither flippant nor melodramatic but matter-of-fact almost. It says: We are here to do what we are here to do, and we will do it. Others will do what they will do, but maybe those others are not Fully Evil as much as they are A Little Stupid. Yes, if they cannot see that Black people are human, they are, in fact, kind of dumb. I’m thinking of the KKK scene, how the holes in the sheets are not big enough to see through and so they fumble on their horses through the dark, wandering into each other and into the ground. I’m thinking also of Monsieur Candie, who loves all things French, but cannot speak it. I like how Tarantino, in this movie, does not absolve White people or write in some Misunderstood, Ahead of Their Time Heroes as if this was half of the people living back then, as if this would be every single White person in the audience. He lets things be what they are—gristly—but he doesn’t hold our head to the violence and make us take it in which suggests that this movie is not for people who can’t understand the violence of race, not for people who are in denial and can only be convinced by prolonged exposure to Black suffering. Kerry Washington quirkily puts her fingers in her ears before the plantation explodes. Afterward, Jamie Foxx, our Django, does pony tricks. For once, this is a slave movie for Black people, and even if it doesn’t show you the truth of what happened, you’re at least not getting humiliated the whole way through.

Image: Sony Pictures