Jeremy’s Tophunder №32: Django Unchained

7 min readMay 17, 2020

I go back and forth on this movie quite a bit. On one hand, the intersection of the subject matter, the way it’s presented, and the creator of the vision is, well, concerning. On the other hand, I think if you take the movie for what it is, I think it actually does a pretty good job of handling a very delicate topic.

There’s something about the idea of thumbing your nose at slavery that doesn’t sit right with me. But at the same time, this same director made a movie that thumbs its nose at World War II, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, and for some reason (rightly or wrongly), that doesn’t bother me quite as much. As a non-Jewish white dude living in 2020, I don’t think it’s my place to make a determination of which atrocities were worse than others, but my first instinct is to think that there’s something morally questionable about a revisionist western film about slavery than there is a revisionist war film about World War II.

I think that there are a lot of parallels between Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds (which we’ll cover in this space about a month from now), but the most obvious is that they both feature a member or members of a brutally oppressed group exacting righteous (and comically violent) revenge on their oppressors. There’s something inherently satisfying about that. My issue is that I’m not sure movies like this should feel satisfying in that way. There are movies like 12 Years a Slave and Schindler’s List that grapple with the same topics and present more bittersweetly happy endings, but the catharsis feels more genuine. Is that because those two happen to be true stories, while Django and Inglorious Basterds obviously aren’t? Or is it because 12 Years a Slave and Schindler’s List seem to treat their subjects with reverence rather than spectacle? I don’t know. All I know is that after watching a movie like 12 Years a Slave or Schindler’s List, you really feel the weight of the story in the pit of your stomach. You don’t really feel that way after watching Tarantino’s movies. And I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, or neither.

But I really love Django Unchained, in spite of my conflicted feelings about it. Given the aesthetic that Tarantino chose for the movie, I think he did about as well as he could to depict the institution of slavery in a way that felt realistic and true, even if there were obviously some artistic licences taken. It was brutal, uncompromising, and unsanitized. There was understandably a lot of controversy about the use of the N-word in the movie, but I think a movie depicting slavery in 1850s Mississippi has to use it in order to be authentic. Leonardo DiCaprio has talked publicly about how uncomfortable he was at times portraying the outwardly vile Calvin Candie, but how he was able to find the path in large part thanks to Jamie Foxx and Samuel L. Jackson, who told him that he had to be even worse than he thought was acceptable, otherwise the character would ring hollow.

Speaking of DiCaprio, I think Django Unchained might be his best acting performance to date. It’s just such an immense departure from any of his roles before or since that it can’t help but stand out. He’s played heroes, and he’s played anti-heroes, and he’s played guys somewhere in the middle, but he’s never played an outright villain, and he is so, so convincing as a scum-of-the-Earth, racist plantation owner. It’s legitimately baffling to me that his performance didn’t get more buzz around awards season. Christoph Waltz got the lion’s share of the recognition (winning both the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor), but I thought DiCaprio was better than Waltz across the board, and played a more integral role in the movie. If Waltz’s character was merely acceptable as opposed to great, the movie is obviously worse, but not outrageously so. But I think if DiCaprio’s role went to a lesser actor, the entire third act of the movie just falls apart. And more than that — DiCaprio’s character represents the most reprehensible elements of slavery. To some extent, he serves as a stand-in for the institution of slavery itself. He absolutely -has to- be the absolute worst, most vile version of that character in order for the movie to work. And he nails it.

His most famous scene in the movie is probably his explosion at the dinner table, where Candie slams his hand on the table, breaking a glass in the process, and his hand starts to bleed rather profusely. This was not done with effects. This was not planned. Leo actually cut his hand deep enough that he would later require stitches. Throughout the scene, he starts to gesture more emphatically with his bloody hand, which finally culminates in him smearing blood on Kerry Washington’s face. (Granted, the take in which Leo smears blood on Washington’s face used fake blood, but the idea stemmed from Leo actually gashing his hand open and just going with it.) It’s a level of commitment to the craft of acting that just isn’t seen very often, and I can think of a select few actors other than DiCaprio that would have even thought to continue the scene.

And that kind of brings us full circle. There are scenes in the movie that are absolutely brutal and uncomfortable to watch — that scene at the dinner table, a scene where a runaway slave is attacked by dogs (and it’s depicted very graphically), and a flashback scene where Kerry Washington is whipped after running away with Django. These scenes feel real. They feel authentic. But the question remains whether or not the comedic elements of the film, and the more spectacular tone struck by Tarantino serve to trivialize the nature of slavery and racism and undermine that authenticity, or do Tarantino’s attempts to ridicule the white slave owners and other criminals of the era simply broaden the scope and context? I can see both sides of the argument, and I’m more than happy to be talked into either one. I just don’t think it’s entirely up to me to decide what does or doesn’t undermine the authenticity of a depiction of the antebellum South.

Similarly, I truly love how the movie presents the idea of the Black Cowboy, something that has been woefully under-represented in American cinema. Too often, black heroes in movies are depicted as urban and suburban, but almost never as outdoorsmen. And that was something that Tarantino specifically wanted to portray — a black man who rides horses and (literally) shoots from the hip and gets to follow the same arc of righteous vengeance that has been overwhelmingly occupied by white characters throughout history. I think that’s really, genuinely cool. It’s one of the reasons I think the movie resonates so much. That kind of representation really matters.

So, is Django Unchained a perfect movie? No, of course not. It’s probably 15 or 20 minutes too long, and I’m still not sure that the movie strikes the right tone. But that doesn’t mean that the tone is unenjoyable. I enjoy it a great deal. It just makes me feel a little guilty for enjoying it as much as I do. I think it’s an important movie to study, as are most of Tarantino’s movies, and as this one is almost certainly his most controversial, I think it’s really illuminating to dive into exactly what he was trying to accomplish with it, and how people responded to that, both positively and negatively. I’m not sure it’s Tarantino’s place to re-write parts of American history the way that he did, but I’m even more unsure that it’s my place to pass judgment on it (in fact, I’m rather sure that it’s not). Still, it’s a movie that I love in spite of its flaws, and it’s my 32nd-favorite movie of all time.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11