(no subject)
Dec. 30th, 2012 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretSaw Django Unchained on Saturday night. I'm still turning it about in my head, and will continue to do so for some time. It's a pretty phenomenal, complicated, thought-provoking movie. It's also, as I told a friend, "Tarantino trolling America about racism."
As I've written many times before, as a general rule I do not cut-tag posts for spoilers. If you haven't seen the film, don't read this post. Or read this post, if you don't care about spoilers.
I thought Dr. Schultz was a much more interesting character for Christoph Waltz than Landa- Landa is subtle and clever and witty, and absolutely perfect for his role in Inglourious Basterdsm but I never understood the Oscar buzz around Waltz's performance. Landa's a fully static antagonist, whose main purpose in the film is to be the guy who never learns his lesson, even at the end. All Waltz had to do was calibrate a single mood and stick to it for the entire movie. Schultz on the other hand... Schultz has an incredibly subtle but powerful character arc that Waltz sells completely, as he goes from the egalitarian and brutal bounty hunter of the first scenes and transforms into an ideologue, and at the same time, a friend.
But this isn't Schultz's movie, it's Django's. Jamie Foxx's performance was brilliant, the different shades of acting a role within acting a role within acting a role, as he has to convince at some points three or four different groups of people that he is exactly who they think he is. It's his ability to shift register naturalistically that make this movie work, because behind the camera Tarantino is gleefully mashing every button on his keyboard of '70s movie stunts. The movie's climax is deliberately out of order! There are random and incongruous supertitles. There are hip hop songs, soul songs, Italian ballads, Morricone songs. There are stupendously out of place cameos. There are dozens of movie references. And all through it, Jamie Foxx shifts register and always stays in the moment. It's magnificent.
As far as the story goes, for the moment, at merely my first viewing, what stood out was how much the movie is about the relationship between freedom and choice. Schultz tells Django later in the film that he, having never before freed a slave, feels responsible for Django's success. But the opening of the film shows Schultz killing the slave traders who are transporting four slaves and Django and offering the other four slaves a choice: They can either save the life of their slaver and continue their lives as slaves, or kill the slaver and try their luck making their way to the North. Surely this effort at freeing slaves predates freeing Django, but Schultz doesn't seem to count it.
There are two explanations that occur to me. The first is that Schultz is being disingenous when he claims that Django is the first slave he has freed, and Django understands this disingenuousness. Schultz is merely passing a bit of bullshit in lieu of an actual answer, which he is unable to provide, and Django is accepting it in the spirit it is offered. This is wholly possible. Dialogue in Tarantino movies often works like this, with its true meaning several layers down, because people really do talk in subtext and code and inside-jokes when among friends, after all, and Tarantino gets that.
But the second explanation is that Schultz doesn't count that as freeing slaves. He didn't free them. He gave them the choice about whether to free themselves. Now, Tarantino and the film laugh at this 'choice', since as soon as he turns away the slaves do what we all knew they were going to do, and kill their slaver in the most brutal way possible. But for Schultz, the choice matters. Schultz feels bad that rather than give Django the ability to free himself, he had to first use Django as a slave and only when his job was completed free him. This is consistent with his moral arc that eventually leads to shooting Candie.
Candie himself gives this theme a fascinating bio-deterministic dimension when he gives Schultz and Django a lecture of the phrenology of Africoid skulls. He argues, and it's obviously absurd and ridiculous, but nonetheless important, that Africans are biologically predisposed to servility and submission. This sets him up in opposition to Schultz, who believes that all men have the biological ability and thus deserve the opportunity to choose their own master. But interestingly it doesn't set up Candie in opposition to Django. One of the film's final lines sees Django admitting that he is in agreement with Candie about the servility of Africans, even as he marks himself out as the one in ten-thousand exceptional African-American who benefit from the ability to make choices for himself. In the final moments of the film, that is to say, Django repudiates his mentor's most important lesson. Which, after all, was what Schultz wanted all along- to be able to legitimately let Django choose to be free himself rather than have that freedom handed to him. It's only too bad he had to die for that choice to happen.
Probably more thoughts on the film later. I'll almost certainly be going to see it again soon, and I want ALL THE FIC.
As I've written many times before, as a general rule I do not cut-tag posts for spoilers. If you haven't seen the film, don't read this post. Or read this post, if you don't care about spoilers.
I thought Dr. Schultz was a much more interesting character for Christoph Waltz than Landa- Landa is subtle and clever and witty, and absolutely perfect for his role in Inglourious Basterdsm but I never understood the Oscar buzz around Waltz's performance. Landa's a fully static antagonist, whose main purpose in the film is to be the guy who never learns his lesson, even at the end. All Waltz had to do was calibrate a single mood and stick to it for the entire movie. Schultz on the other hand... Schultz has an incredibly subtle but powerful character arc that Waltz sells completely, as he goes from the egalitarian and brutal bounty hunter of the first scenes and transforms into an ideologue, and at the same time, a friend.
But this isn't Schultz's movie, it's Django's. Jamie Foxx's performance was brilliant, the different shades of acting a role within acting a role within acting a role, as he has to convince at some points three or four different groups of people that he is exactly who they think he is. It's his ability to shift register naturalistically that make this movie work, because behind the camera Tarantino is gleefully mashing every button on his keyboard of '70s movie stunts. The movie's climax is deliberately out of order! There are random and incongruous supertitles. There are hip hop songs, soul songs, Italian ballads, Morricone songs. There are stupendously out of place cameos. There are dozens of movie references. And all through it, Jamie Foxx shifts register and always stays in the moment. It's magnificent.
As far as the story goes, for the moment, at merely my first viewing, what stood out was how much the movie is about the relationship between freedom and choice. Schultz tells Django later in the film that he, having never before freed a slave, feels responsible for Django's success. But the opening of the film shows Schultz killing the slave traders who are transporting four slaves and Django and offering the other four slaves a choice: They can either save the life of their slaver and continue their lives as slaves, or kill the slaver and try their luck making their way to the North. Surely this effort at freeing slaves predates freeing Django, but Schultz doesn't seem to count it.
There are two explanations that occur to me. The first is that Schultz is being disingenous when he claims that Django is the first slave he has freed, and Django understands this disingenuousness. Schultz is merely passing a bit of bullshit in lieu of an actual answer, which he is unable to provide, and Django is accepting it in the spirit it is offered. This is wholly possible. Dialogue in Tarantino movies often works like this, with its true meaning several layers down, because people really do talk in subtext and code and inside-jokes when among friends, after all, and Tarantino gets that.
But the second explanation is that Schultz doesn't count that as freeing slaves. He didn't free them. He gave them the choice about whether to free themselves. Now, Tarantino and the film laugh at this 'choice', since as soon as he turns away the slaves do what we all knew they were going to do, and kill their slaver in the most brutal way possible. But for Schultz, the choice matters. Schultz feels bad that rather than give Django the ability to free himself, he had to first use Django as a slave and only when his job was completed free him. This is consistent with his moral arc that eventually leads to shooting Candie.
Candie himself gives this theme a fascinating bio-deterministic dimension when he gives Schultz and Django a lecture of the phrenology of Africoid skulls. He argues, and it's obviously absurd and ridiculous, but nonetheless important, that Africans are biologically predisposed to servility and submission. This sets him up in opposition to Schultz, who believes that all men have the biological ability and thus deserve the opportunity to choose their own master. But interestingly it doesn't set up Candie in opposition to Django. One of the film's final lines sees Django admitting that he is in agreement with Candie about the servility of Africans, even as he marks himself out as the one in ten-thousand exceptional African-American who benefit from the ability to make choices for himself. In the final moments of the film, that is to say, Django repudiates his mentor's most important lesson. Which, after all, was what Schultz wanted all along- to be able to legitimately let Django choose to be free himself rather than have that freedom handed to him. It's only too bad he had to die for that choice to happen.
Probably more thoughts on the film later. I'll almost certainly be going to see it again soon, and I want ALL THE FIC.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-31 09:34 pm (UTC)Later that day, talking to H, she warned me, "Don't read
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-31 10:00 pm (UTC)I'm sorry if it ruined your enjoyment of Fringe. You know what'd solve the problem? Catching up on the seasons you haven't seen yet! :P
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-01 12:56 am (UTC)And a happy New Year, too. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-01 01:09 am (UTC)