Django Unchained and Michel Foucault - Part 1
The Revenant sucks. So instead of writing about a dreary self insistent mess about nothing im going to write about an actually fantastic film about quite alot also starring the very same overrated character actor.
Django Unchained is an exercise in genre, a elevation of the classically low-brow. A celebration of the visceral and the cerebral in the same stanza, Tarantino has inspired a generation of film through disguising big idea heady character studies as visceral action flicks. While the Revenant is a narratively empty boring revenge story masquerading as an obtuse big idea drama; Django is a telling and venerating look at a pre-civil war south and the philosophy of American slavery as a Foucauldian power structure hiding as a exciting and compelling revenge story. In order to really dissect the narrative of the film in the correct lens, which would be my lens of course, we have to take a bit of a crash course, so bear with me here.
If you were to research the origins of power and institutions you would no doubt become familiar with almost absurdly influential Micheal Foucault. One of his most frequently visited assertions is his notion that power comes from everywhere.
“The omnipresence of power; not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” - The History of Sexuality Part 2 (93)
because the more unfair and absurd an institution is, the more elaborate the rationalization needed to justify that institution. As such, it needs an architecture of lies and performances in order to keep it from collapsing onto its own fallaciousnes. And as far as institutions go, slavery is the perfect relinquishment of all power. With this information, lets look at a scene from the film.
The scene occurs in the flashback in which Django and Brumhilda has been caught attempting to escape their plantation. Brumhilda is to be punished, and as a response, Django desperately attempts to barter her out of her punishment, ultimately resorting to preform an act of complete submission, which only leads to her punishment to be carried out more brutally and Django is further humiliated. This illustrates to the audience what slavery is’nt. Unfortunately for Django, power not only come from the top down but from everywhere. Slavery is not an institution carried out by men through the threat of violence but a culture of racism that comes from everywhere. The men who own slaves justify the necessity of it to themselves and the slaves are rewarded when they comply and punished when they do not. The slave is not only forced to passively endure the injustice of racism but also to preform the web of lies that justify it. And by acknowledging the institution you verify its existence.
Monsieur Calvin Candieis an example of this. As the primary antagonist, all the film really needs to do is hold a few scenes of Candie acting dastardly, treating his slaves poorly, or acting generally racist. But the film lingers on his character he reveals himself to be a self proclaimed liberal, a cosmopolitan, and an intellectual. Every interaction that Candie has with his subordinates serves to buttress his ideals of genealogy and generational ambition. It is not that Candie is unaware of his own injustice, or that he is ignorant to his slaves’ suffering, but in his simulated reality, it his solemn right to impede his will. This is where the artistic value and the narrative weight of the film intersects. Django Unchained does not pretend to be greater than what is declares, but it is what it implies that is far greater than what it ultimately shows.
It is also entertaining while The Revenant is not
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