“Django Unchained” by Quentin Tarantino is a wonderful and brutal film that does not shy away from the cruelty of slavery.
The film is Tarantino’s seventh and stars Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson. Django Unchained is inspired by spaghetti westerns, particularly because Tarantino wanted to make a spaghetti western-inspired movie about a freed slave who gets revenge.
Taking place in 1858, the movie starts out with slaves being led in the woods when German dentist and bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz, played by Waltz, arrives. He buys Django, played by Foxx, to help him kill three wanted men.
Schultz is a very interesting person and Waltz plays him spectacularly. He despises slavery but compares his work as a bounty hunter to it. He buys Django for what he sees as a greater good, but treats him well.
After Django and Schultz kill the three wanted men, Schultz teaches Django to read and kill people. Django tells Schultz about his wife, Broomhilda, played by Washington, and they plot to set her free.
Broomhilda is held by Calvin Candie, played by DiCaprio, on his plantation “Candyland.” Django and Schultz have an idea to pretend they are in the slave trade looking for fighters.
Tarantino uses the fictionalized concept of Mandingo fighting to show the cruelty of slavery. Mandingo fights are when two slaves are forced to fight to the death for their masters’ amusement. Although there is debate whether such a thing happened in real life, it should be known things just as bad took place. The film’s violence shows just how brutal slavery was and does not whitewash the atrocities of it as some history classes in the United States do.
I feel it is important to remember how brutal and violent American slavery was, especially with the right-wing attack on “critical race theory,” which in reality is just historical accuracy. The violence and use of racial slurs in the movie have been a point of criticism, but without them, it would just be whitewashing the brutality of American history.
Candie holds an outward appearance of a Southern gentleman, but inwardly he is rotten. He treats his slaves viciously; beating them, feeding them to dogs and making them partake in Mandingo fights. He uses pseudoscience like phrenology to justify to himself his idea of slaves being subhuman. He is a francophile who named one of his slaves after a character from The Three Musketeers without realizing Alexandre Dumas is black.
Candie has no redeeming qualities; he is a complete idiot, which is where his head house slave Stephen, played by Jackson, comes in. Stephen is a slave who hates other Black people. He sucks up to Candie and the other White people so he can be treated slightly better. Stephen is not an idiot, however; he is clever enough to be menacing. He is useful to Candie, whether or not Candie knows it.
Django Unchained is a fantastic and necessary film everyone should watch. The violence can be hard to stomach, but it is worth it to remember how terrible slavery really was.
Nico Brazill can be contacted at
nbrazill@kscequinox.com
