Quentin Tarantino’s N*****s and B****es
by Lena Potts
“Nigger” is said about 65 times in The Hateful Eight, according to Gawker. It shows up more than 100 times in Django Unchained. Quentin Tarantino, a White man, has been using the word in his films since 1994, and unsurprisingly, it pisses people off.
Tarantino has faced criticism his entire career for his gratuitous, stylized violence, which some have claimed contribute to the normalizing of real-life violence. His response has always been that those criticisms are absurd. In a 1993 Chicago Tribute interview he said, “The bottom line is I’m not responsible for what some person does after they see a movie. I have one responsibility. My responsibility is to make characters and to be as true to them as I possibly can.”
Tarantino’s last three films have been extremely racial, and this has shifted the conversation largely away from his use of violence, although that’s still relevant, to his portrayals of race and, specifically, his wildly liberal use of the N-word.
I was surprised to have liked The Hateful Eight so much, and I was even more surprised to have been more bothered by the N-word and its variants in this film than in Django. Gawker has provided this excellent timeline of Tarantino’s use of the word, as well as his published comments on it, so I don’t have to. In thinking about my post-Hateful Eight discomfort, I’ve found that I can’t, as most people haven’t been able to, decide whether Tarantino is blatantly in the wrong here. He carefully moves away from condoning the word and consistently couches it in “truthful context”. I can, however, dive into the shifting themes of his work and explain the roots of my discomfort, and, eventually, why I call bullshit on his general rationale.
Let’s take it back and talk about both Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, Tarantino’s two previous films, and, the other two that aggressively deal with race. Basterds (2009), if you missed it, is the tale of Brad Pitt and a band of Jewish-American soldiers who brutally kill Nazis (lots of scalping, some skin carving, some baseball bat beating). The movie includes horrifying slayings of Jews at the hands of the Third Reich, as well. It’s bloody, it’s gross, it’s angry, and it’s Tarantino. SPOILER ALERT: it ends with Jewish-Americans killing a theater full of Nazis, including Hitler. It’s basically the bloodthirsty fantasy justice Nuremburg just can’t give you.
Basterds also includes SS Colonel Hans Landa, played masterfully by Christoph Walz, for which he won an Oscar. Landa is, in this film, somehow worse than Hitler himself; he’s known as “The Jew Hunter”, and the movie’s chilling opening scene is Landa murdering an entire family through the floorboards above the basement in which they’re hiding. In addition to Jew hunting, he’s also just so slimy and creepy, and Waltz did an amazing job of making him purely evil.
Moving to Django (2012): I have felt, since it came out, that it’s just the same movie as Basterds, replacing The Holocaust with Slavery. The big bad here is Leo DiCaprio’s awful plantation owner, Calvin Candie. Candie is, again, the worst. His “Mandingo fights” are actually painful to watch and you, the viewer, just hate him, unquestionably.
This film, SPOILER ALERT, ends with Jamie Foxx’s Django, a slave, killing essentially everyone in a massive gunfight, and eventually blowing up the plantation after saving his wife. Again, bloody, brutal justice against the obviously evil and for the obviously oppressed.
This does not make up for all of the times someone said “nigger” in Django, and it felt terrible, or all of the Jews murdered in Basterds that absolutely gutted you. Tarantino is not necessarily absolved from his violence or language, and I don’t know that he can ever make it “ok”. But, by the end of both of those films, there’s a sense of balance, or, as I’ve mentioned, justice.
The Hateful Eight never gets there, though, and I didn’t leave feeling better about every “nigger” or “bitch”, or every time the sole female character got beaten by a man. It was just, rather than objectively right or wrong, in that slippery Tarantino way, extremely uncomfortable, with nothing to balance it.
The film is a western mystery. Kurt Russell, as John “The Hangman” Ruth is taking Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh with a well-deserved Oscar nomination), a vague criminal, to town to be hanged. They come across Major Marquis Warren, played fantastically by Samuel L. Jackson, a Civil War hero and our clear protagonist from start to finish. They eventually also run into the racist and mostly incompetent new Sheriff, one who has a somewhat personal history with Warren. They all end up at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a little hotel situation, trapped in the middle of a blizzard, where they meet four more men, all suspicious, and altogether they become the eight.
The Hateful Eight is gruesome. Lot’s of blood, lots of “nigger”s, lots of “bitch”es, lots of anti-Mexican sentiment, and lots of bone breaking. None of this is at all a surprise to the viewer knowingly walking into a Tarantino film. The plot kicks into gear when Russell, “The Hangman”, and Jackson, “The Bounty Hunter”, begin to believe that at least one of the strange men is working with Daisy in an attempt to free her before her hanging. Death and mystery ensue, and it’s all good fun.
We do, in the end, find out who is working with Daisy, and, like Tarantino’s last two films, the good guy wins. But Major Warren’s (Jackson) win, SPOILER ALERT, ends with him mortally wounded and bleeding to death, and he has to rely on the mercy and redemption of the awfully racist sheriff, his new BFF, to beat the bad guys. ADDITIONAL SPOILER ALERT: then they both bleed to death, together, as new friends despite their intense differences, after hanging Daisy.
Part of the problem is that Tarantino never truly convinces you to hate his villains in The Hateful Eight. The audience never witnesses any of Daisy’s crimes at all, yet she’s meant to our main antagonist. She’s introduced into the film as a prisoner, for what, we’re never told, and when Kurt Russell’s “Hangman” elbows her in the face early in the film, we should take it for granted that she deserves it. Yet, without ever seeing her do anything loathsome, it’s hard to rationalize, and every time one of the seven male characters declares what a “bitch” she is, or hits her in the face because they didn’t like what she had to say, it hurts. The audience I saw the film with actually said “ohhhhhh” almost every time she was struck.
Inherent to the film’s main who-done-it plot device, we don’t know for the bulk of the film who our other bad guys are. And, when they’re finally revealed, they’re still not terrible. When, SPOILER ALERT, Channing Tatum shows up as our villainous ring leader, rather than being upset, you’re all “Hey! Channing Tatum!” None of our actual antagonists, once they’re revealed, are Nazis or plantation owners. We don’t see them do any wrongdoing. In fact, the worst behavior in the film is all the “nigger”s that have been thrown around by just about everyone but Sammy Jackson. And our villains are just a Wild West gang trying to save one of their women from being hanged; in other words, in many films they might even be the cool, outlaw protagonists.
The closest we get to revenge is the scene where Warren (Jackson) describes to a racist and evil old Confederate General how he met the Confederate’s son. The son was on his way to kill Warren, and Warren caught the son, just as he previously caught many other White men attempting to kill him for the bounty on his head. Knowing the young man was the Confederate’s son, Warren forced him to walk to miles through the snow naked, and eventually suck his dick, laughing all the time like only Samuel L. Jackson in an insane Tarantino movie can. It’s Hateful Eight’s big revenge scene. Or, at least, it feels like you’re on your way to a scene like the others, like the Jews killing Hitler or Django shooting up the plantation. Instead, we never make it there in this film. We peak at freezing forced fellatio in the snow.
It’s also a tricky revenge scene, as it clearly plays on homophobia. That is not to say Tarantino himself is homophobic or that the scene is necessarily problematic. The real question comes, however when you consider whether the scene is playing on the homophobic fears of the viewer or of the Confederate General, and whether viewers are able to discern the difference.
This is where we really get down to one of the issues with what Tarantino’s been doing. He wants to make widely consumed, important, and relevant art. When your art is this widely consumed, however, and becomes pop culture instead, you may have a responsibility to ensure that your art isn’t harmful, and I’m not sure that he would agree. He, instead, wants to make things in a vacuum, where he has a free artist past to do whatever he wants.
One of Tarantino’s arguments behind his use of the N-word has been about authenticity- people spoke this way, so why can’t he write it that way? He has always claimed that he’s just representing the world, meeting his duty as a film maker, and that it’s racist to ask him not to just because he’s White. That’s hard to argue against. After all, Django would have been a “nigger”. Marquis Warren would’ve been a “nigger”. Daisy Domergue would’ve been a “bitch”, and she would’ve been punched in the face many times, if not more than she was on screen. However, that doesn’t make it feel any less bad every time I hear or see it in Hateful Eight, and I’ve struggled to put my finger on what is so uncomfortable about it. Is it truly that Tarantino is White? Partially. In the end, it is an intersection of social positioning (his as a powerful White man), responsibility (his as a popular film maker), and intentionality (what he wants to do with these films).
Take 12 Years a Slave; the goals of that movie seem to involve education, sympathy, and to make people understand. Those people might even be White people. Tarantino’s movies, on the other hand have no real goal in the socio-political sense, and he’s stated many times that what happens on-screen is not necessarily related to the world off-screen. He’s comfortable with being violent and racist because it apparently has no bearing on reality. He wants his films to exist as films, as his art, as entertainment. If that’s the case, I don’t really need “nigger” repeated 65 times in something that’s just supposed to entertain me.
The “this really happened, I’m being historically accurate” rationale for his physical and verbal violence, then, becomes a little contradictory to his “this is art and it doesn’t have to map to reality” reasoning. And if we’re gonna stick to the historical accuracy thing, you know what, Q, I don’t need a White man to explain this to me. Believe me, I know people called people “niggers” in 1870. Even better, Mr. Tarantino, I know that people still do!
Within The Hateful Eight, Tarantino upsets his own history argument even further with his treatment of the character so poignantly named, “The Mexican”. MORE SPOILERS: Major Warren’s argument for not trusting “The Mexican” was that Minnie (the hotel owner) hated Mexicans, so wouldn’t allow one to care for her place, raising suspicions that he might be one Daisy’s co-conspirators. It makes you, the viewer, feel like it’s not racist that we keep calling him “The Mexican”- that would happen in the late 1800’s, right?! Well, when we get our flashback to the conspirators arriving and Minnie greeting them, she didn’t have a single problem with him. Didn’t even give him a dirty look. Hell of a plot hole, Tarantino, and yet another time you didn’t want to be accurate, you wanted to be interesting, and you leveraged real racism for that interest.
If Brown people want to tell their own stories, and want to show everyone else the horrors of oppression with the intent to make them understand, that’s one thing. That’s not to say it can’t be misguided or poorly done- not every film about oppression made by the oppressed is an educational, moving art piece. But, those attempts are also well within the rights of those people. And, as we all know, it’s your right too, but everything you choose to say has consequences, and your consequences are shaped by who you are. As we slowly 1) begin to demand more voices of color (as we have with the outrage surrounding the Oscar nominations the last two years, fortified with the nationally recognized #OscarsSoWhite campaign) and 2) actively consume more art from those voices, especially newly famous ones like Ava DuVernay, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Ryan Coogler, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and many others, we need Tarantino, and White men like him, to tell Brown stories less and less. We’re telling our own now.
It’s hard to know whether Tarantino just wants to be Black. Lately he’s got these Black good guys. The only biopic he’d do would be John Brown’s, because the man was on board with the idea of “spilling White blood”. And he actually said out loud in a 2013 interview, “I’m not your slave…I’m not a monkey”. Okay.
But, despite that, he’s not Black. And for him to continue to use his platform as a person of immense privilege, notoriety, and influence to, rather than be a real ally, just write a bunch of incredibly racist characters and act victimized when people don’t like it, is obnoxious and harmful. No, Quentin, no one has ever acted like you’re a slave or a monkey, and it’s insulting for you to insinuate that you’ve been subjected to that treatment. And no, you don’t write “nigger” into your films that much because you love historical accuracy. You don’t give a damn about accuracy. You do it because you like shock value, and “nigger” is the same to you as an exploding head or a sliced off arm.
It’s not that White people can’t write characters that say the N-word, and it’s not that White characters can’t do it where it makes sense for the storytelling and the progress of the film. In Gone Baby Gone (2007), written and directed by Ben Affleck, a White woman, in addition to saying “faggot” and “retard” multiple times, said “nigga please” like it was nothing. I remember being shocked but not upset, and, in the end, really impressed that the movie was able to pull it off. It felt natural coming out of Amy Ryan’s mouth — I wonder how many times she had to practice to make something she’s probably been taught she should never say roll out so smoothly (at least I hope she needed a ton of practice). It works because it is accurate, and the whole movie is accurate, and at no point is the film condoning what the character says or does, just telling us. Nothing about the film is over the top- it’s not flashy, it’s not using language or violence as a prop, nor is it using people as such. It is just telling a story, a real story, realer than any of Tarantino’s insane flicks have ever been. And, despite what he tries to tell us when it’s convenient, he’s never meant to make real movies. He’s always simply set out to entertain us. “Nigger”, however, is not entertaining. Definitely not 65 times.
In the same way that I’d love for Game of Thrones to stop using rape as a surprise tactic, I’d love for you, a White man, to stop using the N-word as a means to shock your audiences into feeling like your movies are daring or on the edge, especially if you’re going to pretend that it’s just for history’s sake. I want you to let filmmakers of color tell their own stories and stop taking up so much goddamn space, throwing around the N-word like it’s something for you to do, like you’re exposing history’s horrors and doing me a favor. I don’t want conversations about the N-word to be based in what a White man made anymore. Don’t leverage a real problem, other people’s real problem, for your own fame. Not when we have such talent in these newly acknowledged writers and directors, and those amazing artists who have come before and may not have gotten the notoriety they deserved, and not when the world is clearly asking for them to tell their stories. So, Quentin Tarantino, if you really want to be an artist, if you really want to be helpful, if you really want to be an ally, please step the fuck back.
I’ve now written out the N-word more times than I ever expected, and I want to chop my own fingers off. I don’t know how Tarantino does it.
Originally published at medium.com on January 22, 2016.
