A Hateful Prologue
If you want to better understand America in 2017, all you need to do is take a peek at some of the artistic output produced in the past year. Or better yet, maybe go back to the last month of 2015, when one of our premiere auteurs unleashed a masterpiece that signaled a culture boiling with social injustice amid economic class disparity. The masterpiece is The Hateful Eight, a film I found difficult to love, at first, but can’t seem get enough of with subsequent viewings. I wrote all about the film HERE but I’ve come to realize there is so much more worth discussing.
Oh, it is a bleak film. But — as I wrote last December — I think it is also a subversively optimistic view of the racial and cultural divide in this country. This is especially true when you consider the context of a collection of characters; hateful versions of white men from the north and south, a hateful Mexican, a hateful woman, and a hateful African American. They’re all stuck with one another within a volatile log cabin, amid a tenuous Union, bore down by a tumultuous storm.
Springfield, America.
I did my best to avoid spoilers in that initial piece but I’m going to delve into the last act here pretty heavily.
SPOILERS MOVING FORWARD:
Very late in The Hateful Eight, Chris Mannix (a very funny Walton Goggins) and Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson, once again snubbed by the Academy) find themselves as antagonists in compromising positions.
Mannix is a racist who despises Warren, often invoking the N word when referring to him. There is more to this hatred than broad racism, however. He also knows Warren is a liar and a murderer. He hates Warren, in part, because of the lawful freedom granted to him and his fellow African Americans (at least to the degree African Americans were granted this freedom). The great emancipation meant the slow death of a way of life that the North, to Mannix’s eyes anyway, could never fully comprehend (states rights, a red herring). It meant the long overdue turning of the tide of an economic and moral injustice imposed by those with no true understanding of the Christian values many of them alleged to hold dear.
Mannix was raised on hatred, yes, but Tarantino doesn’t take the easy way out. He manages to make Mannix rather likable. And while he is a terrible racist, he is also a sharp observer of human behavior whose suspicions and declarations are proven correct time and again throughout the course of the film. Sneer at him. Be disgusted by his distorted world view. But do not underestimate him.
Meanwhile, Warren is no saint. He isn’t even a likable anti-hero with a mean streak the way, for instance, Django was in Tarantino’s prior work. No, Warren can be straight. Up. Villainous. It doesn’t help that there appears to be a semblance of truth to Mannix’s claim that Warren was more than willing to sacrifice his fellow Union soldiers — even burning them alive — if it meant he could escape a rebel prison. And it also appears to be true that Warren relished the opportunity to kill, as he would call them, “Johnny Reb and Crackers.” And it is Warren who mercilessly manipulates the doddering Confederate General Sandy Smithers (a terrific Bruce Dern) into a comfort zone before pulling the rug from under the unwitting racist, goading him into a draw of pistols of which he is no match. Warren hates Smithers and he hates Mannix because they are more than mere symbols of oppression, they were active oppressors. And while they did not care who knew it, they did appear to care how the discussion of their oppression was framed (states rights again, a response to federal oppression again).
Villainous he may be, but Warren is the smartest deplorable in the room and our admiration of his cunning amid a room of awful individuals earns him more than enough emotional investment. He perhaps understood that it was the generational, cultural and economic fear that drove the hatred, not to mention the states rights talking points. This then lends itself to the idea that these boys of the south are not in fact oppressors but potential victims — a hollow cry born from trumped up fears of federal oppression within a culture always ready to point and compare federal governance to British oppression. Whether he was conscious of it or not, there is nothing scarier to a man the likes of Smithers than the “other” who may replace his economic position (see: Springfield, America). And that fear breeds a hatred that begets and begets and begets and everyone — all of us — are worse off for it. This is the phantom core conflict at the pit of the log cabin. Warren represents everything that white men like Smithers should absolutely fear. He has proven to be underestimated and appears to be financially successful, empowered and has just enough freedom to make his maliciousness deadly indeed.
And that, as Warren says, is why he carries a phony letter from Lincoln that is addressed to himself. Because even the far less-bigoted, more modern and progressive white man, John Ruth, would have thought twice about picking him up in a snowstorm without it. Ruth’s reaction to the Lincoln letter being a fabrication is the most fascinating, important and relevant exchange in the film.
The cultural divide between the Confederate Smithers and former negro soldier Warren is obvious, as is the cultural divide between the northern-friendly Ruth, and Mannix, a son of the south. But the divide between Ruth — who supported the North and President Lincoln — and Warren — who benefited from the support of like-minded individuals like Ruth — is the more interesting and modern cultural conversation.
Here’s a bit of what I wrote about John Ruth in my initial Hateful Eight post:
…before long John Ruth is revealed to be an unbearable bully. Not just in the way he seems to enjoy knocking out his prisoner Daisy Domergue’s teeth, but also the way he walks into the room and pounds his chest in front of every other potential alpha-male in Minnie’s Haberdashery. In the cathartic movie sense, we react to these acts of violence on Daisy with the same humor we often cling to when we witness something horrific and are unsure how to react at all exactly. We are shocked by Ruth’s savage response, even if a part of us may think “she had it coming”. But it becomes clear that Ruth, an otherwise seemingly ethical man, has a very real darkness to him. If he acts righteous, it is because he lives by a moral code that allows him to act in terrible ways. He enjoys telling the company he keeps that he takes his bounties alive and lets the hangman do his job. That’s his version of righteous justice, but we come to wonder if he only keeps his bounties alive so that he may brutalize them. John Ruth is dangerous because it is very tempting to view him as the absolute moral authority among these rogues; his speechifying advertises the sort of moral compass we are accustomed to unearthing in such a role. But Tarantino buries him.
…Without any sort of moral compass character, the audience is left only with these hateful characters and their actions, and these actions are not easily digested. The Hateful Eight is not an easy film to digest let alone regurgitate and re-analyze.
Ruth does not appear to have any real hatred in his heart towards people of color such as Warren. He would sooner stand by Warren’s side in a gunfight than someone like Mannix. But this does not absolve Ruth of prejudice or unconscious bigotry, be it against a southern white “cracker” like Mannix, or a “colored fellar” such as Warren. Ruth is quick to assume the worst in Mannix. And after the Lincoln letter is revealed to be a fake, Ruth lumps Warren into the stereotypes someone like Mannix would spout when he says, “I guess it’s true what they say about you people. Can’t believe a word that comes out of your mouths.” With the legacy of the Lincoln letter now tarnished — a legacy that symbolized an official belonging as infallible as a Casablancan letter of transit — Warren no longer maintains a white seal of approval. He becomes, instead just another “other.”
And Warren knows it.
The Major understood that in order to better survive — if he were to be afforded a sense of flawed humanity — he had to convince the dominant race around him that he was “one of the good ones”. Without that, every action was a representation of his race and subject to both suspicion and judgment by pale eyes.
I know my conservative friends hate talking about race and they believe liberals make too much of it for political gain. They are right that liberals exploit it — many times irresponsibly and in damaging ways — for political gain. Yet they are wrong that too much is made of it. It is privilege to deny that it is woven into the cultural and economic fabric of our being. From the abolition movement to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s to the election of Barack Obama, these progressive steps have been met by Civil War, presidential assassination, lynchings, murdered civil rights workers, political assassinations, the birther movement and our current, volatile political climate that really revved up with the Tea Party and has decayed into a Trump administration. We are, hopefully, leaning towards a less violent approach to our differences, responding to the better angels of our nature in our most fragile moments. But fires are being stoked in a way that has many legitimately concerned.
There are plenty of flat-out racist people alive and well, slithering, Golem-like out of their caves these days. But the true divide today is the same divide between Ruth and Warren, only further down the line. While it is manifested in cultural ways, it once again stems from socioeconomic inequality and the color of that equality; that is, what equality actually looks like as opposed to the more abstract notions.
Ruth and Warren’s divide is the more modern conversation because while racism and bigotry is alive and well in substantial pockets of 2017 America, it is the unconscious prejudice (manifested in other socioeconomic platforms which include gender and class politics) that is the true engine of our turmoil. And this prejudice is the result of economic fears as it pertains to statuses today and tomorrow.
In her fascinating book, White Trash: The 400-Year History of Race in America, Nancy Isenberg concludes something similar:
We are taught that the Civil War was principally a contest about the sustainability of a world predicated on black enslavement. We are not told the whole story, then, because social insecurities and ongoing class tensions preoccupied the politicized population too, and exerted a real and demonstrable impact on the fractured nation — before, during, and after those four concentrated years of unprecedented bloodletting. (Isenberg, pg 137, emphasis mine)
Those insecurities and tensions were often driven by race, but also often engineered by the wealthier classes of the time. We are, whether we wish to admit it or not, caught up in a great and terrible revolution of progress. But it is not about race or color at its core. That is merely fallout. Red and blue state voters may feel divided and far apart right now, but that is only because many still believe the answers are hidden in the vague, vomitous, hate-filled speech of demagogues. It is true that, throughout our history, we are so slow to progress because we are distracted by boogie men rather than working together for solutions. We either do not believe in our own ability to institute the kind of change that allows for upward mobility or fear another class or group of people may replace us. We lack confidence (and perhaps rightly so), but we cannot conflate this lack of confidence with a lack of opportunity.
And consider the end of the film, when Mannix is tempted to kill Warren — who he hates — and be rewarded by Daisy Domergue who is a confederate in his bigotry to say the least. Mannix declines. He may be racist and he may even more specifically hate Warren, but he also saw first-hand how Domergue was ready to sacrifice any one — black or white — in that cabin to get what she wanted. He declines her offer and works with Warren to enact their version of justice upon her.
Again, for fear of repeating myself, this is what I wrote in my original piece of the film:
If the most awful and hateful of us can find some measure of common ground among those whom we most despise, perhaps there is hope for the rest of us… To be fair, another valid interpretation of the film’s final act [where Warren and Mannix work together to lynch Daisy Domergue] is more cynical…that common ground is possible so long as there is someone else we agree to hate more than each other. Yet I’d argue this, however deranged, is still progress. Among this wild bunch, that counts for something. Civilizations were started on such simple, dark concepts.
Part of the genius of The Hateful Eight is the unforgiving truth it hangs around our necks when it grants us catharsis darkly: common ground may be cultivated between the most bitter of enemies…they just need someone or something else to hate a little more than each other. Mannix hates blacks and Warren may hate whites, but they hate everything that Daisy Domergue represents just a bit more. Tarantino is a master exploiter and he exploits this hate by embracing all the mixed emotions and deeply complicated racial dynamics that trail along. In the muck of it, he finds a bleak glimmer of hope as Domergue’s legs go kicking in the wind, mere feet above a tentative and unlikely peaceful union.
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This piece was originally published on WinTheDark
