Post contains mild spoilers for Django Unchained, especially if you somehow missed the news that Django kills everybody.

Two of the most challenging movies I saw last year came in December: Django Unchained, and Killing Them Softly. Try as I might, I never managed to cull my many and contradictory thoughts on these movies into a coherent post. Here are some orphaned ideas that continue to trouble me in conversations about the three:

1. Why have Django don the trappings of Calvin Candie in the closing frames of Django Unchained? I didn’t take notes when I saw Django, so I don’t recall the very last shot of the movie with precision. But when Django is done killing everyone on the Candieland plantation, he puts on what appear to be Calvin Candie’s clothes – the red smoking jacket, if nothing else, is certainly Candie’s. He also chomps down with satisfaction on the ivory cigar holder that Leonardo DiCaprio’s vicious dilettante slaveowner had wielded throughout the latter half of the movie. What precisely are we to make of Django stepping into the mantle of his enemy? It fits, roughly speaking, into some of the more unnerving themes from the rest of the film. It seems to reinforce Django’s disinterest in liberating anyone other than his wife, which the PostBourgie podcast crew spent significant time on in their rousing discussion of the flick.

The other costuming moment that stuck in my mind was Django’s choice, when Dr. King Schultz tells him he can pick his clothes, of a powder-blue outfit with high white socks and a white cravat. This got a hearty laugh in the Silver Spring, MD, theater where I saw the movie, and that includes me—it’s a good gag, if somewhat cheap. Looking back, I felt okay having laughed at it because its exploitation of modern stereotypes about black men and outlandish fashion choices fits Tarantino’s fundamentally fantastical project of putting a Blaxploitation twist on a Western homage set in the antebellum south. Shortly after the cheap gag of a smash cut to Django gone dandy, he’s whipping an overseer while wearing the same getup, and I was half expecting to hear Curtis Mayfield cut into the soundtrack. And once on board with Tarantino’s aims, it’s tough to single out elements of it as going too far.

Still, that endpoint bothers me. Django relishes stepping into his wife’s owner’s clothes and signature accessory just a little too much for me not to feel queasy.

2. Did Killing Them Softly stink, or was it brilliant, or did it brill-stink? I did take notes while watching Andrew Dominik’s overstylized, beautifully acted, and well-written hitman movie. They include, on the top of the first page, things like “this kinda sucks” and “pacing??” and my little glyph that represents the universal PG-rated sign for self-indulgence. The movie is set in late 2008, and its only soundtrack is news clips of various speeches from President Bush and Hank Paulson and President-elect Barack Obama, on the financial crisis and our government’s response to it. A couple of these moments could have been a masterstroke of subtlety, but Dominik prefers to beat you over the head with the parallels between the inept criminal organization in the background of the story, and the ineptitude of every other major American institution. If someone described Killing Them Softly as a crime thriller filtered through a few reads of “Twilight of the Elites” and a few Occupy general assembly meetings, you’d be intrigued, right? The cruelty of Killing Them Softly is it heavy-hands everything that should be interesting about that idea, and leaves critics wishing for the Coen brothers version of this picture.

So why am I holding the door open to the possibility that it’s brilliant? For one thing, the performances and dialogue are marvelous. Richard Jenkins’ squeamish mob go-between is funny and dour and occupies basically the same place within his organization as Paul Bettany’s character in the excellent Margin Call did within that movie’s not-Lehman Brothers financial firm. James Gandolfini’s prideful, depressive, unraveling hitman is captivating every time he’s on screen. Brad Pitt’s protagonist hitman with a simple code is enjoyable to watch, most of all in his immaculately written conversations with the Jenkins and Gandolfini characters. But more than the performances, what keeps a torch half-lit in my mind for Killing Them Softly is how relentlessly unsexy and frustrated and dysfunctional and inconsistent an underworld it portrays. Our expectations for crime movies are that they’ll be all efficacy and power and languid allure, and that a lot of folks will get killed in a lot of awesome ways. Most of all, everybody will be cool. They’ll talk cool and smoke cool and shoot even cooler. Nobody does any of these things in Killing Them Softly, and nobody is particularly cool, including Pitt. And the big climax isn’t gunplay, but a heavyhanded yet effective soliloquy about the ways America lies to itself to sleep at night. By refusing to give me anything that I expected from a gangster flick, Killing Them Softly made me tempted to forgive its cinematic sins.

Teasing over these kinds of questions is part of what makes film so much fun, and I hope some of y’all have thoughts on these two movies.

There’s a lot to chew over in Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s bloody slavery epic, and the second in a planned trilogy of revenge movies, the third of which will be about black World War II fighter pilots. There’s the movie’s worship of cool masculinity, even as, like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln it marginalizes the role black women played in the fight for their own liberation. There’s the reaction to a black man, first killing white people for money, and then to eradicate the forces that have consistently brutalized his family and denied him his humanity, something that’s been rightly demolished by other critics. But as I’ve thought about the movie in the weeks since I’ve seen it—and I needed that time to really consider Django Unchained—it strikes me that it’s as interesting a movie about whiteness, solidarity, and how best to achieve social progress, as it is on any of these other questions.

And it’s impossible to consider that element of the movie without thinking about it in context of Lincoln. Like long-term abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens’ decision, on the floor of the House, to moderate his stated views on the equality of black Americans to win support for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in Spielberg’s film, a crucial moment in Django Unchained comes when German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a newer advocate of equality, is offered an opportunity to avoid violence and advance the cause of equality with social moderation—except that in this case, he chooses purity, radicalism, violence, and ultimately his own death.

Where Stevens is a long-standing participant in the struggle for black liberation, Schultz is a newcomer to radical action against slavery, and a rather accidental one at that. Though he initially approaches Django, when the other man is imprisoned as a member of a slave-trading caravan, in a tone that makes the white men transporting uncomfortable enough to tell Schultz to “stop talking to him like that,” by which he means as if Django is a man possessed of agency and opinions, he treats Django as an equal only as in so far as he treats him like someone who can be of use to Schultz. Schultz clearly thinks slavery is wrong—he tells the other member of Django’s caravan that they should “Make your way to a more Enlightened area of the country. Oh, and if there are any astronomy aficionados among you, the North Star is that way.” But at least at the beginning of the film, he appears to view the institution as a particular American backwardness rather than a moral abomination that requires urgent opposition, and Schultz is willing to hold Django’s freedom over him until he gets what he needs from the other man. “On the one hand, I despise slavery,” he explains to Django. “On the other hand, I need your help…In the mean time, I’m going to make this slavery malarkey work for me.”

Schultz’s radicalism comes from his increasing ability to place Django, the first slave he’s ever known personally, into the tropes that for him seem to define humanity. “Do most slaves believe in marriage?” he asks Django when he finds out his traveling companion is married. “Me and my wife do,” Django tells him. And when he discovers that Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) is named Broomhilda, Schultz is able to fit Django into a cultural framework that he understands, seeing him as the legendary hero Siegfried. “I’ve never given anyone his freedom before,” Schultz explains to Django when he decides to stick around and assist in Django’s quest to rescue his wife. “And now that I have, I feel vaguely responsible for you. And for a German to meet a real-life Siegfried, that’s a big deal.”

Where Schultz feels vaguely responsible to a specific slave, of course, Stevens feels very specifically responsible to black Americans both particular and general. As Stevens and Lincoln discuss in the kitchen during Mrs. Lincoln’s party, Stevens has a vision for the reintegration of the seceded states back into the Union that will reorder the nation’s economy to give the people who once were property in it a foothold they can lever into independence. At the end of Lincoln, the movie suggests that there’s a specific woman of color who motivates Stevens’ vision, the housekeeper he can’t bring to the White House, Lydia Smith (S. Epatha Merkerson). But in both cases, Stevens wants to reshape the world so he can live in it in a fashion more to his liking, with the woman he loves in particular, and in what he believes to be the true state of nature beyond his domestic affairs.

Schultz has the fire of a recent convert, but not the experience of America’s past and the things to gain from its reformed future that animate Stevens. And so when, after securing the freedom of Django and Broomhilda during a tense dinner with Broomhilda’s brutal owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), Schultz has a chance to end the interaction in the kind of tense show of comity Stevens engages in for the greater good, Schultz takes the purer, but more dramatic path. After pointing out that Alexandre Dumas, an author Candie admires enough to collect, and to use as inspiration for naming one of his fighting slaves, D’Artagnan, after the hero of The Three Musketeers, was black, Schultz refuses to shake Candie’s hand. And then he shoots the other white man, explaining to Django, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist.” That act of self-indulgent purity sets off an orgy of violence that endangers Django and Broomhilda’s ability to escape: it’s the act of a crusader who is more concerned with his own ability to get and stay right than with whether or not he achieves the freedom of the people he initially intended to help. I’m not sure whether Tarantino intended to make that point, or if Schultz’s indulgence is merely a way to set off a spasm of cool that gives Django the opportunity to free himself and to claim the mantle of a badass rather than having Schultz do that work and get that credit for him.

There’s no question that Hollywood could do more to let people of color be the heroes of their own stories, but I don’t think any of us would deny that it would be better if they didn’t end up in peril because white people made self-regarding decisions that placed them in great danger and difficulty. Stevens’ willingness to compromise may mean he gets credit that is not available to black characters in Lincoln. But he also doesn’t endanger the people he claims to represent and care about for the sake of his own pride.

In Tarantino’s world, it’s possible to have both, the shootout and the triumphant escape, to put Broomhilda through the tortures of slavery, while also preserving her radiant beauty as an inspiration to Django, to portray a weirdly sanitized vision of plantations full of well-clothed slaves working in immaculate fields, while still condemning the institution as an affront to human decency. But while Lincoln eschews Django Unchained‘s fondness for gouged eyes and gouts of blood in favor of a single, muddy battle scene and wars of words, it’s Spielberg who ultimately has the tougher vision of what it takes to achieve substantive social progress. Revenge may be more fun than reform. But it’s ultimately more self-indulgent.

In the wake of the murder of elementary school students and their teachers, as well as the mother of the shooter, Nancy Lanza, in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, Hollywood has struggled to demonstrate sensitivity in its programming and premieres. The Weinstein Company cancelled the Los Angeles premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s characteristically violent revenge period drama Django Unchained, which ends with a bloody gun battle at a slaveholding plantation. Though its finale depicted an act of terrorism rather than gun violence (though such violence was threatened, but did not emerge), Homeland put up a title card before the episode began that warned that some images in the show might be disturbing in light of the Newtown massacre. And shows from Family Guy to Best Funeral Ever have postponed episodes until later dates. It’s one thing for networks and studios to observe a mourning period. But the more interesting question is whether the massacre will prompt longer-term changes in the kind of material Hollywood considers both marketable and appropriate.

In a series of Tweets, Time television critic James Poniewozik laid out the problem with these short-term measures. “THR: TLC delaying BEST FUNERAL EVER bc of Newtown shootings. Apparently becomes appropriate again Jan 6,” he wrote in a series of messages. “This recurrent thing, postponing shows bc of sensitivities–I get it. But resist the idea that something is ‘inappropriate’ for like 2 weeks…Either it’s inappropriate in general or it’s not.” There’s something sadly perceptive in the cynicism of that proscribed period of sensitivity. Hollywood’s acting on the recognition that after these increasingly-common tragedies, the members of their audience not directly affected by the deaths are hyper-cautious for a brief period, call for changes in all sorts of culture and policy, and then return to their preexisting level of sensitivity and allow those demands for a different path to peter out. The studios that have pulled or labeled programming or cancelled events are acting like savvy marketers, rather than like moral agents.

This is, of course, their prerogative and purpose as large companies. But just as it appears that President Obama and members of Congress are, for the first time in political memory, renewing the push for gun control legislation, I’m wondering whether some networks may decide to change where the line is for what they’re interested in airing.

It’s been a period of intense cruelty to children on television. On Sons of Anarchy, the children of the main character, Jax Teller, have been kidnapped and in car accidents. This season of Breaking Bad reached a turning point when Todd, a newcomer to the meth cooking operation run by Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, shot a young boy who happened upon the men in the aftermath of a train robbery, though there was little evidence that the child understood what little he had witnessed. When children aren’t the victims of extreme violence, they are often being enlisted in those acts themselves. On Game of Thrones, while Sansa Stark is beaten by grown men and threatened with sexual assault, her sister Arya, on the run and disguised as a boy, kills another child to escape from King’s Landing, and must fight in battle to protect herself. And this season on The Walking Dead, Carl Grimes both witnessed his mother’s own impromptu caesarean section and then killed her to prevent her from turning into a zombie.
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I’ve joked at various points this year that 2012 is the year of Walton Goggins, the intense-eyed actor who made a name for himself on corrupt cop drama The Shield, and who’s found an equally juicy role as Kentucky white supremacist Boyd Crowder on FX’s U.S. Marshal show Justified. First, there was his year on that show, where his character found new depths caring for his bitter enemy’s father, and as a political advocate for the residents of Kentucky coal-mining country. Then there was his bravura cameo on Sons of Anarchy as a very funny, sexy transgender prostitute named Venus Van Dam that shook up the conception of what Goggins is capable of. And now he is the common human element of two very disparate movies about the South, racial violence, and the tensions that cracked our country in half, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. It’s not just that Goggins has had what could be a career-making year. He’s done so in roles that could have stereotyped him as a googly-eyed, slack-jawed redneck, but that instead work together to explore a common idea, the lingering ghosts of the Confederacy and the struggles of poorer white men to define their identities, 150 years after the Civil War.

In Primary Colors, Joe Klein’s main character, Henry Burton reflects on the rise of white Southern, Civil Rights-supportive Democratic public officials that “Those pale, bland Southern Democrats seemed a down payment on the family dream. It was a whisper of a revolution: there wasn’t much blood or lust to it, just the promise of Northern money—new factories, new branch offices—in return for the appearance of racial harmony.” Tony Horowitz put a different spin on that phenomenon, twenty years after the seventies, in his reported journey through the South he chronicled in Confederates In The Attic. “First, it was the loss of the War and antebellum wealth,” he wrote of the South’s construction of its identity around loss. “Later, as millions of Southerners migrated to cities, it was the loss of a close-knit agrarian society. Now, with the region’s new prosperity and clout, Southerners wondered if they were losing the dignity and distinctiveness they’d clung to through generations of poverty and isolation.”

Goggins tends to play characters who never had access to that antebellum wealth. On Justified, Boyd Crowder is the descendant of multiple generations of poor white criminals. His own father deals drugs. He worked as a coal miner as a teenager, and found a temporary escape from Harlan County through service in the Army. In Lincoln, he plays Clay Hutchins, a Congressman of modest means and power—when considering bribing him to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) says of his asking price “A first-term Congressman who couldn’t earn reelection…I deemed it unseemly and bargained him down to Postmaster.” And in Django Unchained, he plays Billy Crash, a minor member of the entourage of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a sadistic plantation owner—his access to plantation prosperity comes from his role relatively low down on that economic ladder, rather than his position as the predator at the top of it.
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“Kill white folks and they pay you for it? What’s not to like?” That will be the line that most stands out from the first trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming slavery revenge flick Django Unchained. But from even the brief glimpse of the movie we get here, I think it’s going to be a richer, weirder text than I initially expected from the plot outlines:

It looks like Django Unchained will be less geographically specific to the South than I expected. We see cotton bolls mostly so we can see them sprayed with blood. But much of the landscape that Django and the man who freed him ride through is framed as Western rather than coded as Southern, whether it’s drought-stricken land, men riding horses down small-town streets into the sunset, or wide open spaces instead of trees heavy with Spanish moss. There’s something powerful about giving a slave the chance at a new start that’s traditionally allocated to former Confederates. It’s not a new idea—Hell on Wheels tried, but it looks like Django Unchained might do it while letting a black man be as violent and hardbitten as the Confederates he’s replacing.

Then, there’s the nature of the bargain between Django and Dr. King Schultz, the bounty hunter played by Christoph Waltz. Schultz promises Django that once he’s helped Schultz track down his targets, he’ll free Django and help him free his wife. It’s an inherently exploitative bargain: the reward Schultz offers is so valuable, that I’d imagine he feels he can ask Django to do almost anything to live up to it. The movie may turn out to be an exploration of how much Django enjoys the work he’s meant to do to earn his freedom, but there’s something uneasy about suggesting that slavery under one set of conditions is unbearable while under another it’s sort of awesome. But Django Unchained might be a more interesting movie if it explores what it means to hold a man hostage against his liberty, and what you’ll do to achieve it.

The bridge is yours.

-A great examination of dystopian fashion.

-How TV networks fall apart.

-Some early pictures from the set of Django Unchained.

-Judge condescendingly declares that documentary filmmaking can’t be a for-profit activity, gets a lesson.

-Having better cameras doesn’t mean everything has to look the same, does it?

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Kristian Vinkenes.

Over on BrowBeat, Debra J. Dickerson suspects that Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, a popcorn revenge flick starring Will Smith as an escaped slave out to liberate his wife and punish his former masters, might not do much to change attitudes because white audiences won’t see it, and because turning slavery into a caricature obscures the realities of that hideously peculiar institution:

White America loves itself some Nazi-hating, Apartheid bemoaning, and Communist-bashing, but their Confederate forebears? Their slave-raping relatives? Their lynching great-great-grandfathers who bequeathed them land stolen from blacks? Not so much. I doubt that even Tarantino can pull this off (i.e., get enough white butts into theater seats for a success), but my hat’s off to him for trying. Also, I’m having fun writing dialogue for all the Tarantino devotees devising their excuses for skipping this one…

Among all the other things slavery was, it was absurd and it was cruel in ways that could transcend whips and chains. As an armchair slavery historian, those absurdities and bizarre cruelties floor me, and I long for a filmmaker to plumb those depths. I think of stories like these: A kitchen mammy was trying to use coded talk to signal to her son that she knew his sale imminent. But he was the young master’s personal valet. They were basically brothers and the slave loved his life, travelling, whoring, and gambling with his “charge.” He’d forgotten he was slave, but his mother never did. Finally, Mammy literally had to slap her son upside the head with a frying pan to snap him out of his delusions. I hated myself for laughing, but laugh I did.

More than that, though, I wonder if white audiences who do see the movie will be able to reassure themselves that slavery and less violent but no less virulent forms of discrimination aren’t part of the same bloodline, that they’re not the monsters they see on screen. In a world where people who do racist things are desperate to avoid the label, it feels a bit like giving in to narrow the definition of racism to make it so you have to have held a lash to fall under it. In a sense, movies that turn slaveholding into a cartoon are, in their own way, as unproductive as movies where the intervention of a kindly white person makes everyone around them realize the good intentions they just didn’t know they had: the former allows audiences to narrow the definition of prejudice so they can feel it’s gone, while the latter at least acknowledges that maybe it’s still there. It’s harder to yank up the roots of institutions than to take a match to the newsprint comic villains are printed on.