Payback

“You even know what reimburse means?” Di Caprio’s Calvin Candie replies to a runaway slave, not smart enough to know economic jargon, before he is torn limb from limb by Candie’s pack of sadistic bloodhounds.

Inglourious Basterds’ barfly banter is substituted for underhanded business negotiations and transactions, mostly centering on the commerce of human flesh, either dead (bounty-hunting) or not-so-dead (slavery). The ensuing carnage of Django Unchained is thus the paroxysmal riposte to the injustices of the master-slave economic system, just as the atrocities of WWII provide the stimulus for the revenge fantasy of Basterds. QT’s latest is certainly audacious, and you can’t say that about 90% of today’s movies. Yet when QT “rewrites” the past, as he has done in his past two films, in order to “get even” with the crimes of history and the inadequacies of cinema to confront these crimes, the rambunctious manchild cannot help but consolidate even further the brutal motor of the history he is rewriting, in all its obscenities, viciousness, and barbarism.

It’s a matter of reparation versus reimbursement. Both acts necessitate the righting of wrongs, but only the former implies renewal, while the latter only presupposes payback. In Django, Sam Jackson’s Stephen (his best performance since I was still in preschool) is obviously a damning doppelganger for actor Stepin Fetchit, and by blowing off his kneecaps in the film’s end Django reimburses the negative African-American stereotypes exemplified by the roles of Fetchit in the ‘30s. Whether it’s riddling bullets to the mangled body of the Führer or blowing up plantation houses, both reimbursing the resistance that was supposedly lacking those dark days (respectively, the French Resistance and innumerable slave uprisings prove otherwise), QT’s “history” films provide no “restoring” alternative other than this vicious system of exchange.

Hence, Django is less about slavery, or the collective emancipation from it, than vengeful individualism, which is easily subsumable to the same evils of history that one is against. Besides his wife, Django rarely helps out any of his fellow slaves. In fact, one scene shows him giving a black barman the stink eye, and, during the long ride to Candieland, Django, on horseback, goes so far as to treat the marching slaves alongside him as inferiors. Why the hell should he help them, when he is the indomitable baadasssss! Turning the tables on the white man, Django whips the white captor’s ass; now he is the one who inflicts pain, making the white man his “bitch”. In a way, in his quest for vengeance, Django just takes over the role of his brutal white masters, and, conversely, the white men replace the roles of the black men as helpless victims. Similarly, the Jewish Americans of Basterds carry out mass slaughter against those genocide-loving Nazis, who’re blown to pieces. No matter how loony QT’s rewritten histories become, the same roles of master-slave, perpetrator-victim, are still maintained, and any alternative from this diabolical dualism has no place here. The roles will frequently change, but it won’t be destroyed. Django frees his wife, but, from Schultz’s cold corpse, keeps the bill of sale.