This article contains spoilers for the climax of Django Unchained.
At the climax of Django Unchained, Dr King Shultz (Christoph Waltz) shoots and kills Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), and it’s a little bit cathartic but also strangely dissatisfying. We’ve been waiting for this motherfucker to get murdered before we even saw his face; he’s not just a slaver, but the descendent of slavers, alternating between brutal violence and condescending superiority from the comfort of a privileged position. The really interesting thing is that we’re presented with multiple cases of Django, an actual black slave, contemplating starting violent revenge and choosing to step back for the sake of pursuing a rational goal, whilst the otherwise pedantically rational Shultz suddenly whips out his gun and kills Candie on impulse.
It’s incredibly funny, but it’s a betrayal of everything we know and love about Shultz. From his opening scene, he’s been even-tempered and laser-focused; not that he doesn’t do brutal violence, but he always makes sure he can get away with it. This, on the other hand, is stupid, impulsive, gets quite a few people killed, nearly gets Django killed, and completely upends the entire reason they came there. More than that, it’s a reaction to being humiliated; Candie has figured out the whole thing, intimidated Shultz and Django into giving up twelve hundred dollars instead of the intended three hundred, and laid on one final humiliation in forcing him to shake hands like a civilized person.
On the other hand, is it that much of a betrayal, or is it instead a revelation of Shultz’s character? I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a nemesis – or, more accurately, to be a nemesis – but that’s because I don’t give a shit if it turns out I’m a bad or stupid person, and Shultz has revealed some gross stupidity and debasement here (ironic, for being the most relentlessly Good character in Quentin Tarantino’s filmography). When you choose to become someone’s nemesis, it’s because they represent something repulsive that you’d rather wiped from the earth, and it’s always because of something evil and repulsive in yourself that you want destroyed and wish you weren’t perpetuating.
I am, of course, not saying everything you need to destroy is a reflection of yourself. I ask a rowdy customer to leave where I work because they’re causing a nuisance to my source of income; similarly, Shultz kills slavers and horse thieves because they’re a fun and easy way to make money. When he kills Candie, however, he does it because he hates the guy and wants him to be dead on principle. It’s a useful demonstration of how doing certain actions can lower you; by killing Candie, Shultz has put himself on the same level as him, not in the sense of a perfectly symmetrical moral equivalency, but in revealing that his own motivation and character isn’t really that different from him.
Candie is pretentious and stupid. All the racists are in this film, but Candie is pretentious and stupid in a particularly geeky way. He has become a master of the pseudoscience of phrenology, a bullshit justification for asserting superiority over people he’d assert superiority over anyway (he wonders why black slaves don’t simply kill him; I wonder why Candie doesn’t simply take joy in the mere fact of being human and alive as a reason to feel worthy of it). He plays at social genius and master of mannerisms when the fact is simply that he was born to power and people are forced to do what he asks as a matter of course.
Which forces us to consider that much of this is true of Shultz. He’s far smarter than Candie and far more charming, but then, this attempt to be extremely, precisely clever ultimately blows up in his face and gets him killed. He finds the nicest way of exercising power – gently encouraging the slaves he frees to take the exact action he wishes them to take at the start of the film, playing a prank on Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) that would be very mean if he weren’t gentle about it – but he’s still acting from a position of superiority, if of character as opposed to divine birthright, and of course, his charm is worthless in the face of actual power.
He murders Candie because he’s just as passionate, and ultimately just as emotional as him. This doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person, of course – he’s freeing slaves, for fuck’s sake – but there’s no other option than to see Candie and Shultz as two points on the spectrum of being human that start in the same place and go to two different directions, and to question the wisdom of his smaller decisions and how they ultimately led to his demise. Perhaps this is a thing we should all be doing. I recognize Elon Musk as a threat; one that’s a product of a system that produced him, of course, but a personal source of destruction. I hate him because he’s a fucking loser that’s never been funny or useful in his life and sucks the life out of any room he’s in. Perhaps I should be choosing my enemies more carefully.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Much Ado About Nothing
Shakespeare in the Gardens, so a good time – they had it built around a Mad Men-like aesthetic, with the men wearing pilot outfits (and later, polo shirts) and the women in dresses, as well as various Fifties and occasionally Sixties pop songs marking transitions. They amplified the slapstick of it all; the bits where Benedick and Beatrice are listening in on their respective friends had them doing some Tom and Jerry shit, including Benedick accidentally falling in a pool, and the guy playing Benedick frequently went pretty broad; I found it interesting in contrast to Benedick and Beatrice embodying the cynic who falls in love anyway.
Red vs Blue, Season Two, Episode Seven
“I haven’t been here in some time. Which one’s the Blue base?”
“It’s the blue one.”
“Oh yes. We’re really thinking outside the box with the design.”
“Hmm. It’s quiet. Too quiet.”
[gunshot]
“Now suddenly it’s too loud. I preferred it when it was quiet.”
“I like my way better. It was more dangerous for you.”
“The access code is… ‘access code’.”
“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Ah, bitch about it later.”
“I am allergic to things that I don’t want to do.”
“What if Tucker is contagious? I do not want to be pregnant!”
“Hey Caboose! You hear something behind you!”
“I do? I wonder what’s causing it!”
“Caboose, better go boil some water.”
“How can you think of soup at a time like this?!”
Wings
Thus begins my journey through the Academy Award Best Picture winners – though, of course, this was known as the Outstanding Picture at the time. It sets the standard by being a strong mixture of spectacle and sentimentality; it’s a war story and a love story, with It Girl Clara Bow in a major role. Actually, it does come off pretty modern despite having no sound; aside from close-ups and long shots and editing based around where people are looking, it has quite a few moments setting up later moments that are still done today, like one guy taking a sentimental object he intends to bring back home, where you know he’s gonna be dead by the end.
There’s one famous shot – which I didn’t realise came from this film – where the camera tracks through a busy party, moving over tables and between couples; the same scene has a character seeing animated ‘bubbles’ coming out of his drink, to his delight, and I actually prefer a very early shot where we’re rocking with a couple on their swing and seeing their friend come up behind them.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Not so much a sequel as a second volume, though one that expands upon the original very successfully. 28 Years Later was one of the most creative zombie movies I’d ever seen; this is even moreso, with a totally original plot that goes some weird and unexpected places. There was a vague sympathy for Samson in the first, and this expands upon that to cure him of his zombieness; in fact, this actually shows us how people look from the zombie perspective before the revelation of how it probably works.
I was toying with the idea of writing an article about how the ‘zombie genre is racist and inherently violently libertarian’ idea is poorly considered for the past week or two, but then this film ended up being better at doing that than this ever could. It uses the Jimmies as an example of someone trying to use the zombie apocalypse to pull off a violent cult and then contrasts it with the success of Dr Kelson, who is constantly reaching out to people for connection; not just empathising with Samson and giving him not just a cure, but temporary reprieve, but in that even his big confrontation with the Jimmies involves at least trying to meet them on their own terms.
I think I only know the famous shot from Wings but it’s so good, definitely need to check out the whole thing sometime.
Both 28 Years films have been so stuffed full of fun ideas – it seems fairly likely that the third one won’t get made at this point which is a real shame because it doesn’t feel like they’re anywhere close to running out of things to say or things to do.
Going broad tends to be the case with Shakespeare comedies, in part because the dialogue is hard to parse and find as funny as a Groundling might 500 years ago.* Unfortunately I don’t always enjoy this style of acting so it can be hit or miss for me.
*Midsummer does have a joke from Bottom that wouldn’t be out of left field for Charlie Kelly to say out loud.
Back in the 80s I saw The Flying Karamazov Brothers staging of A CODEMY OF ERRORS as a circus show, punctuated with Laugh-in asides bursting through trap doors and windows built into the set. It kept the original dialogue too, and it seemed a natural fit.
I saw a great production of A Winter’s Tale with a predominantly Black cast that played the “exit, pursued by bear” as absurdly as possible, complete with guy in a bear suit and the character yelling “My story is over.” It can be done!
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) – Yep, still the most AMERICAN horror in it’s obsession with meat, consumption, hippies versus hardhats, the death of factory labor, misogyny, and the pure love/horror of violence. My friend had seen the crappy Platinum Dunes remake forever ago and obviously declared this vastly superior. So many occult and poetic moments here – the bones and feathers arranged into shrines, the hitchhiker writing what feels to me like a sigil on the van, marking these kids, and Leatherface dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
It’s hilarious that the opening narration is from John Laroquette and he was paid in weed.
A Bird Hit My Window and Now I’m a Lesbian – Charming stop motion short. The title essentially sums up what plot there is, but it’s more about the meet-cute of the characters and the dreamier moments, like the water surrounding them in the bathroom. On YouTube.
Fuck yeah to everything here about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. What a gorgeous and grueling experience (even as it’s intermittently funny: Leatherface nervously peeking through his curtains is one of my favorite bits). The hitchhiker scene in particular feels like an unsettling intrusion of folk horror–and of course you can read the whole movie in that subgenre, it totally works–especially with how burning the photo and cutting himself has the off-kilter feel of improvised folk magic.
Great point, it’s like another form of marking them. That and the use of astrology with “Saturn in retrograde.”
It’s hilarious that the opening narration is from John Laroquette and he was paid in weed.
TIL! That’s so charming.
28 Days Later – girlfriend hadn’t seen this (but enjoyed both of the Years Later entries) so we threw it on for a tired Friday night viewing. Like the whole franchise (basically) I think it has brilliant bit and some pretty major flaws, but on this viewing I was more forgiving of the flaws than before, particularly the “what if the real monster was… man?” final act which does tie in quite nicely to a lot of the stuff in the later films. The young actor playing Brendan Gleeson’s daughter is still… not great. The soundtrack is incredible though and that early scene of Cillian walking through a deserted London is absolutely wonderful.
The House of Mirth – from intentionally lo-fi to incredibly lush! This received high praise on Screen Drafts recently and showed up on streaming so we gave it a shot. I’ve never seen any Terence Davies stuff before so it was great to address that blind spot, this is classy filmmaking with some really strong performances. I was held back from loving it by the feeling that it kinda says all that it has to say about the cruelty of high society fairly early on and kinda keeps hammering the same notes, but they’re still effective even if I could have used some variety. Great seeing Gillian Anderson get a non-X-Files role where she really gets to show her skill, she’s so good.
Seinfeld, S6 – hammered through a ton of episodes this weekend, “The Race” through to “The Doorman” (minus the clip-show episode which we felt we could safely skip). This was a really strong run of episodes, some highlights: Kramer’s first-name reveal (I knew this, but it’s still wonderful how it emerges in the episode), Jerry trying to make “the switch” from one roommate to another and the way George falls back on the same plan in the following episode, a strong guest appearance from Jon Lovitz, George’s toupee, Kramer’s bra for men, Jerry getting set up by a doorman. Lowlight: the return of Poppy and more bad incontinence humour, those jokes just feel like a bad fit for the show.
Live Music – experimental Sunday afternoon matinee, lots of crackling drones and instrument abuse. Not bad, not great. The second act had quite a nice mix of glitchy weirdness and actual melody, the headline act had a drummer who did a lot of unusual textural stuff that was fun to watch.
Deep Blue Sea is great too as is Davies’ autobiographical short film trilogy – devastating though.
Wooooo live experimental music! Oooooooow!
The Race is such a great episode, Jerry has a lot of fun with the Superman stuff and it’s hilarious how him cheating both times is still “right,” screw that loser. Although the best bit is when he runs into George the “architect” and the two cannot stop sniping at each other. “You sure went BALD there!”
Haha yeah, it’s hilarious how delighted he is to be dating somebody called Lois. And Elaine being equally happy about her boyfriend being a communist is pretty great too.
The problem with The House of Mirth is that, the way that Wharton wrote it, and Wharton is, by any standards, a racist (I read her letters, while doing research on my book, and, oh boy!) you can only feel bad for what happens to Lily Bart, if you believe that she is inherently “pure,” and, yeah, you know where that’s going.
So trying to make a film of The House of Mirth (even it it wasn’t the worst of its time, trust me) is going to be a challenge, because you have to deal with an overall story that doesn’t make sense outside of a racist belief system.
Hmm I’m not sure that’s true, not knowing anything about the source material or Wharton’s beliefs I definitely still felt bad for Lily for getting chewed up by the system despite being less objectionable than most of her peers.
I’ve seen the film, and I agree with your comment that it “kinda keeps hammering the same notes.” What I’m arguing is that the repetition discloses how there’s really nowhere else to go in filming the book, so tightly is it guided by racist logic.
The real issue is Rosedale. He’s a major figure in the novel, but Wharton is trying to convince us that it’s better for Lily to die than to be rescued by him, because he’s — wait for it — Jewish. And there’s your ending of the novel, as disgusting as it is.
The film tries to find a way around this ending, and, yeah, Lily is being chewed up by the system from the beginning, but I don’t think you can make what appears to be such a flighty character (Lily, in the novel, has her reasons, but they all add up to how she’s too good for a society going to hell, cause people like Rosedale are taking over) into a tragic one.
The Little Foxes – Wyler’s adaptation of Hellman’s Broadway play (with some touches by, among other, her BFF Dorothy Parker), wherein Bette Davis schemes to find the wealth denied her by both her station as a woman in Jim the South in 1900 (and by her equally conniving brothers) and her not very greedy husband. At one level, the story of a woman who sells her soul in search of everything she thinks she wants, even if it costs her what she actually has. At another level, and examination of sexism, capitalism, classism, and racism (as seen in how the various servants are treated by rich folks who are not far removed from slavery). Davis, who struggled with how to play the part since she didn’t want to mimic Tallulah Bankhead’s performance on the stage and who argued constantly with Wyler, is very good. Teresa Wright, making her screen debut, is excellent as Davis’s daughter. The story itself is basically melodrama, but the social commentary and the backstabbing give this some oomph.
Stranger Things, “The Bridge” – The aptly named penultimate episode that is to a large degree connective tissue between the rest of the season and the finale. Generally entertaining, but things have stopped making sense at the worst moment, and the cast is Avengers-level large. More later in the week.
Miss Marple, “A Murder is Announced,” parts two and three – Things are totally not what they seem, and not one, not two, but three people are hiding the truths about who they are. The amount of contortions needed to make the solution to who the killer is are extensive, even by Christie standards, but there is a lot to enjoy here, especially the larger role played by Marple, and her often acerbic wit. (Detective played by Kevin Whately: ” you can go it, you’re above suspicion.” Marple: “No one is above suspicion.”) Two interesting elements of note to me: 1) a cat provides a key clue merely by acting like a cat; 2) there are two women who run a farm together and live together, and it’s really hard to say they are not a couple, especially when one is killed and the other wants revenge. Did Christie write them as coded queer on purpose? Who knows? But I sort of think she did.
The Practice, “Fire Proof” – Just before a local businessman, apparently with Mafia connections, is to be tried for murder and arson, the co-defendant copes a plea and agrees to testify. Jimmy has to cope with the discovery that his long time family friend is not as upstanding as he once thought, and Helen has to deal with a witness who is a scumbag and a firebug and her boss once again bending the rules. In a season that had rarely had any stakes carry over from a previous episode, Helen working to unseat her boss is welcome. We also have Jimmy, in trying to defend his client against anti-Italian-American stereotypes, blaming “overhyped TV shows.” I guess someone was jealous. There is also a subplot involving Lucy and a high school student crushing on her that goes nowhere.
Enter the Ninja
With the We Hate Movies commentary track. Umpteenth rewatch here, and you know what, it’s a slice of fried gold.
Live hockey
Local AHL game, with dinner with friends beforehand. It took forever to find a parking spot, so we actually missed two glorious fights live-texted to us by a friend who’d already made her way inside, but there were still more fights to come. Good, close game with some good moments, a fun arena singalong to “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and some people behind me having a fond discussion of Heated Rivalry. Unfortunately, we were on the live audience cam at one point, and I desperately wanted that to stop happening. Do not perceive me.
I really do find it very soothing to watch zambonis.
Inside No. 9, “To Have and to Hold”
One of the first episodes I watched! There’s a “small in terms of time, huge in terms of impact” difference between the script and the episode, and the episode’s version (this has the most substantial script-to-filmed-version changes of any of the episodes so far, I think?)–which suggests Harriet’s affair might be continuing, or that she’s at least (understandably) not being completely honest with Adrian about her level of contact with her former lover–is the better choice and the one I’m glad they went with: it keeps up the ostensible main dramatic tension for longer and in a more complex way, which makes the big turn partway through hit harder. Great choice.
This is the episode with the least comedy so far–it really leans into the painful, sometimes cringey drama of a marriage that’s skated way out over rotten ice, so even the moments that show Pemberton and Shearsmith’s comedy writing credentials (like the specificity of “Wolverhampton Ibis” as a blowjob location or the agonizing awkwardness of the interruption) are all deliberately utilized for somewhat despairing kitchen sink drama instead. It’s fascinating to see their toolkit being used like this, and then it gains extra mileage in the second half, when you get a kind of joke construction that’s not wholly dissimilar to the pissing-in-a-cup secondary payoff in “Cold Comfort”–Harriet giving Adrian an unusual flavor of Pot Noodle as a gag gift for his birthday–having a resonance that’s pure horror.
Great Nicola Walker in this episode.
Inside No. 9, “And the Winner Is…”
From one of the most somber episodes to one of the purest comedies. A jury panel meets to pick the Best Actress winner for some Legally Distinct from the BAFTAs Awards. A funny, acerbic tour of how the awards sausage gets made: I especially enjoyed Shearsmith’s has-been writer–frantically sucking up at every opportunity to a director he wants for his latest script–and Pemberton’s genially condescending and officious coordinator (“It is! It is a word!”), but there’s a good crowd here and a lot of good jokes (my favorite is one character beginning her clearly-didn’t-watch-the-movie comments with a rote declaration that the actress stole her heart). If it’s not hugely different from most industry satires and not up there with the show’s best, it’s still entertaining and well-executed with a silly but fun ending. Good to have a bit of lightness after the previous episode.
Also rewatched “La Couchette” (maybe my pick for the funniest episode to this point? That or “The Bill”), “Seance Time” (can’t believe I forgot to mention that delight of a Last Exorcism reference–I feel very seen), and “The Devil of Christmas.”
Babylon 5 — Guest starring Penn and Teller! With voice cameo by Harlan Ellison! And written by *double take* Neil Gaiman?! *massive Krusty sigh* ugggggggggggh. Various Gaimanisms poke through, although this is not as bad as it could be it still sucks pretty hard (and at one point he directly steals a Simpsons joke). Penn and Teller play the galaxy’s most popular comedians and the show knows their comedy is not particularly funny and makes some jokes about that but on the other hand everyone at the station loves it so apparently we’re watching morons, always fun for me and my time. There is an interesting bit with Lennier and a somewhat surprising returning character that is pointing toward something I’ve suspected for a while, but boy is this show in the fucking dirt right now.
The Naked Gun 2025 — still god damn hilarious. Neeson rules of course but the rest of the cast is right there with him, and the balance of joke modes is really something else. The big snowman sequence is one thing, but the extended Tivo/Buffy gag is far more niche and I love how they roll with it, (correctly) understanding Neeson’s outrage will carry the humor that a lot of people won’t get. Wonderful stuff.
What If — aka The F Word, in its native Canadian. Michael Dowse’s follow-up to the great Goon, Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan navigate a friendship that could be more, Adam Driver and Mackenzie Davis attempt to steal the film as the wacky best friends in a relationship of their own (this is where Driver’s amazing sex nachos line comes from). I remembered enjoying this quite a bit some years back and the rewatch was even better, for complicated reasons. Just as a movie this is very well done, it’s apparently based on a play and its characters are sketched well with real emotions beyond cliches, and Radcliffe and Kazan have excellent chemistry. There is some wackiness but it’s grounded in the same character-based work Dowse supervised in Goon. The one weak spot is the twee soundtrack by AC Newman (and how it is used hardest on even twee-er animated interstitials) and this is the most overt dating factor of the movie as a supreme Obama-era entertainment (it came out in 2013). But the mix of mild vulgarity and slight quirk with a general optimism — there are no real bad guys here — is much more potent, it hits extremely hard for a person who was around the age of the people in the film at the time of the film. (And on a less flattering note, the depiction of Toronto as almost entirely white people feels true to that era as well, not understanding blinders that still exist despite nice intentions.) I think that gives the already-good movie legs as a time capsule (Kazan works as a digital animator, tech-based but still hands-on, a very 2010s profession and lol at it being full-time and well-paid) but it’s got more than enough charm on its own.
Hell yeah What If, I’m probably digging up old arguments here but with the twee / animated stuff I’m glad that it has some sort of aesthetic rather than just being another generically brightly-lit romantic comedy. But then I’m probably more tolerant to a vaguely twee vibe than a lot of people.
The twee stuff is more an eye-roll from me than any real problem, just not my vibe (same with solo Newman I think). Wholeheartedly agreed on the larger aesthetic concerns being a big plus, this is another reason I see the film becoming something of an underappreciated classic — it feels like a specific work made by specific people in a specific time, without striving to be a definitional text. Termites gnawing away.
And I forgot to mention this but Radcliffe speaking in his normal accent is such a huge plus here. Just let actors act normal! It is not an insane thing for a British person to be over here!
“Hello… Newman.” – Dave Shutton
Agreed on the accent! The whole film benefits from that relaxed, natural vibe.
Robin Hood (2010) – I guess I’m in the minority on this one. I’m an easy mark for medieval/sword and sandal films, so I really liked Ridley Scott’s revisionist take on the legend. With Scott behind this it comes as no surprise that this film is stunning to look at. He knows how to create a vibrant world with his usual meticulous eye for detail. I can forgive a lot as far as characterization and plot in a medieval film if the setting and world building are there.
This film is too plotty and it comes with the cost of sacrificing characters, and even action. The band of merry men and Friar Tuck could have been excised completely. Their characterization consists of Tuck liking bees and the rest of the band is comic relief who love to drink and party, that’s it. The sheriff is virtually nonexistent, an ineffectual buffoon. In this milieu I like the court intrigue, backstabbing, and power plays, so the lack of action didn’t bother me too much. The two battle scenes that bookend the film are at an impressive scale.
The cast is stacked. Russell Crowe is no Errol Flynn but, thankfully, no Kevin Costner. Is this his last great role? He does have Noah and The Nice Guys after this then he falls off a cliff. I thought his chemistry with Cate Blanchett was fine and not as bad as many reviews let on. John Hurt doesn’t have much to do. But I liked Max Von Sydow, who is always great in a film like this having himself been in possibly the greatest medieval film ever. Oscar Issac as King John steals every scene he is in. We root for him till we don’t. That’s where the film excels. Setting this Robin Hood a bit later in time than is traditional, to the reign of John instead of the Richard’s, is genius, tying the legend together with the politics surrounding the Magna Carta. Ok, so it took some hand-waving. The three main characters are fun, a great supporting cast, the world-building is incredible, and it’s nice to see a fresh take on the material.
Unhinged is not a good movie and is actually pretty gross in some ways but Crowe is … well, not great, but extremely compelling in it. Nutty movie.
What did we play?
I think I have SEVEN jokers left that still need gold stickers and then I can uninstall Balatro from my phone and get on with my life.
(I am actually still really enjoying it despite the grind to get to 100%, it’s a very clever game)
Hollow Knight on Nintendo Switch
Team Cherry is Australian? Now everything about this game makes sense. I swear, every time I look ahead at the map and say “Well, they can’t have put a whole new area over there”, they do. Made it to the Ancient Basin, The Hive, and Kingdom’s Edge this week.
Bionic Commando on Game Boy – Nintendo Classics on Nintendo Switch
Haven’t had the time to boot up the NES to play the original game, so I tried the Game Boy adaptation on Switch. It plays just as great as the NES game, and it might just be a little smoother due to the handheld’s constraints, nevermind the convenience of save states and rewind functions. There are a few key differences, like the lack of overhead stages, and the switch to a sci-fi theme, which means there won’t be an Austrian painter’s face to blow up at the end, but I might just push through with this version, then return to the NES one. I might even pick up a thing or two to make from this to beat the other one.
The version of Animal Crossing on my used Switch decided not to play with my account, and the quick fix was to buy a new game. Everyone clap for my kid, who decided he couldn’t stand listening to me complain about this any longer and just bought me the fucking thing. So I’ve been decorating hotel rooms and catching up with my old pals. Fauna my beloved.
At some point I might catch up on Destiny’s plot but mostly I’ve wanted to shoot things so I have played so many rounds of the infamous Gambit. I like Drifter sleazing at me, what can I say.
And into the new season of Snap. I bought last season’s pass but I think I’m skipping this one.
Great stuff here. Your headline and this — “When you choose to become someone’s nemesis, it’s because they represent something repulsive that you’d rather wiped from the earth, and it’s always because of something evil and repulsive in yourself that you want destroyed and wish you weren’t perpetuating” — get to the heart of the matter, which is I and you. Schultz makes himself the protagonist, which we all do to some extent (a very large extent!) but he seizes protagonist prerogative — including choosing a nemesis — at the expense of what he says and thinks he’s doing, facilitating other people’s self-creation if not actual personhood. Everyone believes they’re the protagonist of existence (to steal a great Luke O’Neil line) and everyone finds out they’re not in the same way, but Schultz does so in a way that will take others down with him, making them part of his I.
The jig is up on King from the very beginning when he keeps Django enslaved because he is critical to his plan. Treats him as a man, trusts him, offers friendship and accepts it in turn, absolutely. But doesn’t manumit Django because it is personally convenient for him.
Very thought provoking essay. Where DJANGO is most powerful is when it skewers Euro-American attempts to define morality, which the filmmaker sees as aesthetic, in terms of rationality, or achieving disirable effects resulting from deliberate planning of action. Schultz’s scheme reminds me of Tom Sawyer’s plan to free Jim in HUCKLEBERRY FINN, where direct action is discouraged from Tom’s perspective because it lacks the complexity illustrated through the labyrinthian world building of romantic adventure fiction. The film, in the end, falls in line with a lot of 70s genre revisionism, in which the facade of civilization disguises a will to violence.
Missing from this (and the more critically lauded, and now rather overlooked 12 YEARS A SLAVE) is the perspective from the world the slaves made, through culture and negotiating of cracks in the authority of the plantation, of a labor centered dialectic to the Eurocentric model. Clearly, Tarantino is ironically calling attention to the myth of the “natural aristocrat” embodied in many Western gunfighter heroes, but the film feels like its erasing a more communal form of resistance in making the point about genre and spectacle.
One of the many morally thorny bits in 12 Years A Slave that I’d like a whole movie of akin to The Known World – or a movie of The Known World, hell – is Alfre Woodard as the former slave who married her master and now runs the plantation, and that lack of complexity is why Django has never been a favorite of mine in QT’s work.
Both (but particularly DJANGO) present slavery as a philosophical conundrum than as a socio-economic system through which competing needs (capital vs. subsistence) are addressed through coercion and resistance. One could argue that the archetypal Western hero completes the myth of the Southern ethos by replanting it on the frontier. Reason and civilization can be reconciled by men who profit from knowing the environment and dealing with the unruliness within it through constrained violence; in the process showing the weakness of democracy. Like Peckinpah and other 70s revisionists, this notion, present since the days of James Fenimore Cooper, was replaced by a more retrograde cynicism regarding violence as part of human nature, representing progress and order as extensions of our cultural DNA. For all of the attention paid to “wokeness” in contemporary narrative, McQueen and Tarantino don’t seem to be pushing the revisionist cycle froward. I think SINNERS, itself kind of a revisionist take on FROM DUSK TO DAWN, might be the start of a new dialogue within genre.
McQueen at least is coming from a memoir and a very singular perspective in the way he’s adapting Northrup’s story, but even so, Northrup goes into remarkable detail about the cotton and molasses industrial processes. Hard to put into a movie without resorting to montage and lecture.
Oh man, love the connection to Tom Sawyer’s bullshit in Huck Finn.
Year of the Month update!
Coming in February, we’ll be looking at 1957, including all these movies, albums, books, TV, yadda yadda.
Feb. 6th: Gillianren: The Story of Anyburg, USA
Feb. 12th: Bridgett Taylor: The Music Man
Feb. 13th: Gillianren: The Truth About Mother Goose
Feb. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Incredible Shrinking Man
Feb. 20th: Gillianren: Our Friend the Atom
Feb. 27th: Gillianren: Sleeping Beauty’s Castle
This March, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, TV, etc. from 1980.
March 5th: Cori Domschot: The Music Man
Mar. 23rd: Bridgett Taylor: Magnum PI