THE DJANGO UNCHAINED PHENOMENON

I know this is completley out of character for my blog, but I wanted to write a post on the movie Django Unchained. With so much excitment amongst the blogging community talking about the critism and approptitness of the film, and being that I am currently studying African American literature, I thought only befitting to write my own opinion.

Django Unchained was my first Quentin Tarantino film. I know! Shocking, right? Not familiar with this award winning directors sense of dark humor and love of gore and blood, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I think anyone who saw the film in theaters can testify to the fact that from the opening to the closing credits there was a sea of tension that filled the room.

 Even though there was no division of white and black physically in the large AMC theatre, I felt as if all of a sudden, I was very aware of my own race, and for that matter, everyone else’s around me. While tiny chuckles of stiff laughter filled the cinema during certain scenes, I sat squirming in my chair, trying to disappear from the uncomfortable awkwardness that seemed to devour me. Oprah refers to this feeling as the “Django Moment”- when African American viewers feel strange that Caucasian audience members are laughing at the horrible situations depicted in the movie- and although I am a white girl from Clearwater Florida, the Django Moment, seemed to have taken ahold of me! Even the scenes that were supposed to purposefully be comical, like when the ku klux klan members couldn’t see out of their eye holes, didn’t seem all that funny to me.

 I still had the image of the slave rider whipping a black man from the previous scene. The pain in his eyes and the blood down his back seemed ever too real and not too far back in time. As my boyfriend laughed at the hilarious truth of the scene, I shot him looks of annoyance and confusion. I couldn’t understand how he could sit there and not be as sucked into the world of the movie as I was.

All historically accurate and painfully brutal scenes put aside, the part of the movie that struck me the most, was when Calvin Candie, an incredibly wealthy plantation owner portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, asked a question so hauntingly obvious, one has to wonder, why it hasn’t been pondered at more. He questions why, with such an enormous and continually growing population, haven’t the black slaves over thrown their southern white owners? What exactly is stopping them? Here lies the curious wonder of the world when it comes to any overthrowing of one groups race, ethnicity, religion, social status, or gender. We see throughout history congregations of people of the same kind wiped out through genocide or slavery and wonder, why didn’t these people fight back? What did they have to lose if their lives were already in danger? With over three fifths of the population being slaves in 1858 alone, DiCaprio’s character poses an engrossing question.

There could be many reasons as to why the slaves didn’t gang together and go above their hardships. One reason could be that they didn’t have the access to resources that whites did- such as guns, dogs, and other auxiliary items to cause harm. Say that they did take over, though? Then what would they do? Having no money of their own and being completely dependent on their masters, the thought of overriding their superiors was probably not only terrifying but unthinkable. The white masters, realizing the population difference, put their slaves through a mental state of mind, making them think they were meant to be slaves. By breaking apart their families, choosing who they’d marry, refusing literacy, preaching that they should obey their masters through religion, and giving them little opportunity to have thoughts and opinions of their own, masters slowly broke down their slave psychologically without the slaves even realizing it. Another concern is the few black slaves that shared a strange kinship with their masters. Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Stephen, is a good example of this.

Even though Stephen is as black as they come, he places himself above his fellow brethren, and looks down on them, as if he was a slave master himself! He hangs on his master Candie’s every word, dresses in nice clothes, and attends visitor’s dinners. Not only involved in the white conversations on the plantation, he also is naturally involved in what the slaves talk about behind closed doors. In the heart wrenching moment where Stephen starts to catch on to Django and Dr. Schultz’s plan to take advantage of Calvin Candie in order to join Django with his wife again, Stephen reports what he sees to Candie, preventing Django from succeeding. As I sat and watched the scene take place before my eyes, I wanted to scream at Stephen, “WHY? Why are you being so evil?” Why did these characters who we read about in stories such as Harriet Jacobs, Incident of a Slave Girl, and Williams Wells Browns, Clotel, go against their own kind in gaining liberty and having the right to their own freedom? Why side with their masters? Maybe it is just for the fact that they look up to them. With their masters powers, money, social status, and overall their heir of being untouchable these loyal slaves respect them. Like we in modern day might idolize a super star or famous athlete, they looked at their white superior’s and wished more than anything to live the life that they did.

By the end of the movie, I was on the edge of my seat with anticipation of when the movie would be over. If I saw one more twenty minute scene of blood squirting out of a body, I would have had to run to the bathroom and vomit! I kept expecting a riot of African Americans to storm the theatre and gun down all white people in retaliation, but maybe that’s me letting my mind get carried away or being too aware of the insane people that seem to be appearing on the news on a regular basis. Although Django might not have been my favorite movie, it was a movie that made me think about the past and the present, and how history has affected the world we live in today. With a strong plot and a powerful ending, this movie opened my eyes to how far we have come as a nation, and how some things in history should be studied but never repeated.