Django Unchained: First Viewing

I’m on my way back from Los Angeles, where I spent a couple of days in the first week of the new year.  Traveling so far south right after the annual Christmas/New Year’s Eve obstacle course, I completely forgot about my planned New Year’s Resolution until I was about to head back home. Sitting in the train station with my friend, talking about our plans for the coming year, conversation meandered around to music journalism, and I remembered suddenly my grand schemes to write up a review to every film I saw in 2013. At which point, I of course realized I had seen a film in Los Angeles and, while I had discussed it vigorously with my two friends, I hadn’t written down a word about it.

Way to put your best foot forward, Allegra.

So, a few days late, here are some thoughts about DJANGO UNCHAINED.

Somehow I didn’t hear anything about DJANGO until Christmas; no posters, no trailers, nothing. I wound up opting to see Les Mis on Christmas day instead, and when I got home from the holidays I had trouble at first finding someone to go with me. That kind of utraviolence is sometimes more than enough to put people off, and the film’s profligate use of racial slurs by then had been widely criticized. On top of that, my primary movie buddy had seen a trailer for DJANGO that gave the impression that the film would portray rape, or at least heavily imply it. That’s not a deal-breaker with me for films, but I’m not that interested in seeing depictions of rape on the big screen. I also haven’t seen Tarantino’s most recent offerings, being the GRINDHOUSE films and INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, so I had no way of knowing if Tarantino had become the Rape Guy while my back was turned.

Surprisingly, DJANGO UNCHAINED almost completely sidesteps the subject of rape, which is all but astonishing in a film so centered on slavery in the American South. I kept expecting it to come up, but, spoiler alert: there’s no rape in this movie. It’s barely even alluded to. However, the film more than makes up for this by going the extra mile to make the viewer uncomfortable in practically every other way possible. This film is not for the faint of heart. I guess that should go without saying, but it really bears mentioning: the violence in DJANGO is both gratuitous and casual, as is the use of racial slurs—oh, who am I kidding? The n-bomb is so ubiquitous in this film that by about halfway through, I found myself almost entirely desensitized to it. Having experienced a constant string of jarring moments throughout the film, the knowledge that that discomfort had become normalized for me lent another, more lasting discomfort that lingered throughout the rest of the viewing.

How easily the intolerable becomes everyday, how easily human beings will accept the unacceptable: this theme of the narrative was mirrored by my own experience of becoming used to the environment seeped in violence and dehumanization in the film. Just as I ultimately stopped flinching when an n-bomb dropped or some mook died in a spray of plasma, so were the slaves in the film completely resigned to their status as sub-human—with a few notable exceptions. I surely wasn’t expecting such a violent movie to have an uplifting, even hopeful, message, but that’s really the feeling I was left with: that people are capable of fighting back against a status quo that is just plain wrong, fight back and win.

After I saw this movie I couldn’t really talk about anything else for the better part of three hours, so there’s plenty more to say, about exquisite use of landscape and color, the constant gritty humor, it’s undeniable Western-ness, but it’s been too long and the details are scattered. I do want to see DJANGO again, so on the second viewing I’ll have to take the time to jot down those other thoughts. For now, this will have to do.