Quentin Tarrantino has scored another controversial but entertaining story that chronicles a slaves journey to freedom. This journey to freedom hasn’t been quite told this way. In classic Tarrantino fashion he tells a great story that is embellished by an overly violent display of blood and guts. Of course the word Nigger was an verb, noun and pronoun in the film. Many movie goers and film critics cringed at how much “the word” (I don’t mean the bible) appeared on the lips of the characters.
Many African Americans took offense including one prominent director whose criticized quite a few people in entertainment. If you guessed I was talking about Spike Lee you read my mind. First off I can feel Spike’s pain about Tarrantino. Not solely on “the word” but I feel his frustration about someone like him not necessarily getting to tell that story. Many black heroes and sheroes deserve to have their stories told detached from executive producers who wouldn’t have the best interest of telling the stories of black unsung heroes.
Prime example most of us have heard the name Hannibal used in certain Hollywood productions like the A-team. In case you were born in the 1990’s or been living under a rock George Peppard played a disgraced Vietnam general who led 3 others of his comrades in their quest to clear their name of war crimes. Of course who can forget academy award winner Anthony Hopkins’ role as “Hannibal Cannibal” in Silence of the Lambs franchises. What does this example have to do with Tarranintino, the film Django, and Spike Lee’s disdain? I’m glad you asked. I took the journalistic liberty of taking the long way home to explain how most black directors couldn’t get a film like this made in Hollywood. The dichotomy of Lee’s disdain is both right and wrong, Bitter and Sweet, much like the fictional story written by Tarrantino. I don’t buy that this was a “spaghetti” western per se. I believe this film was meant to be a variety of genres rolled into a fictional biopic of the untold stories of slave revolutionaries as Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Toussaint Louverture.
For the first time in film history a slave was able to not only kill his enemy but rescue the woman that he loved. Have we seen black men be heroic in American Cinema? Sure but very rarely to the back drop of black romance let alone with the setting and a story centered around one of the most vile and ugliest periods in America’s storied history. TSome of the most chilling scenes in the film was when Django (played by Jaime Foxx) had to become the evil he was trying to free his wife Broomhilda from. (Kerry Washington) One scene in particular that is difficult to watch is when Foxx stand back and watches one of the Mandingos eaten alive by dogs after trying to escape.
Watching Foxx’s character Django in certain instances take revenge on those who whipped him or ever treated him subhuman gives black people a sense of righteous indignation that is quenched. In other scenes one could be made to feel like D’jango is selling out when he leaves the men behind into slavery for his freedom. Or when seemingly rises above the glass ceiling akined to being black in the antebellum south.
I couldn’t help but reflect on how we even in 21st century America wrestle with those same feelings and choices. How many of us walk away from drug infested neighborhoods, leaving family and friends behind in search for a better life? How many of us can afford to reach back in some capacity to pull up our peers that never escaped the planatation of poverty. The brilliance of this film is that is speaks the same language that many of our predecessors spoke in a time that it was the norm to murder D’jango’s of the world. Apparently American society at large is still wrestling with who can tell such a worthy story while digesting the irony of an ugly and inconvenient truth.
By: Andrew Patton
