The line on Django Unchained, the latest from Quentin Tarantino, is that it’s a companion piece to his previous feature, Inglourious Basterds. Both are genre pieces that function as racial revenge fantasies: the war movie Inglourious Basterds shows Jewish-American soldiers slaughtering Nazis in occupied France, and the western Django Unchained follows a freed slave in the antebellum south as he guns down hillbillies, plantation owners, and Klansmen. Both movies play fast and loose with history: Inglourious Basterds ends with Hitler being assassinated, and Django Unchained, set in 1858, is filled with implausible characters and events. Tarantino may be a stickler for period details—most of the rooms are candlelit, most of the characters have terrible teeth, and excess beer foam is wiped off with a stick—but his vision of the south also includes rap tunes, a German bounty hunter, and Australian bad guys who seem to have stepped out of Crocodile Dundee.
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Despite this questionable history, though, Django Unchained has deep roots in the American literature of the 1850s. The most popular book of that era—aside from the Bible, of course—was Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, it had sold a half million copies by 1857, when it was flying off shelves at the rate of 1,000 a week. Today most people are less familiar with the book than with the racial epithet it spawned: in the 50s and 60s especially, “Uncle Tom” became synonymous with blacks who changed their behavior or appearance to ingratiate themselves with whites. Oddly, this epithet is far removed from Stowe’s conception of the character as a Christ figure, which was a radical notion in antebellum times. Django (Jamie Foxx) is more like the Count of Monte Cristo, to name another character from 19th-century literature, but the history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin can tell us a lot about Django Unchained.
The other major American literary trend of the 1850s was the growing popularity of dime novels: cheap, throwaway stories that favored action over introspection, fantasy over reality, and directness over metaphor or symbolism. The pulp fiction of their day, dime novels were responsible for many of the western archetypes that filtered into the movies, including the spaghetti westerns that inspired Django Unchained. Django escapes from slavery after his owners are killed in a bloody shootout with Dr. King Schultz (Dr. King—get it?), a German dentist turned bounty hunter who’s played by Christoph Waltz. The doctor wants Django to lead him to a gang of killers he’s pursuing, and after hearing the story of Django’s lost love, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), he offers to help rescue her from Candieland, a notorious plantation run by the brutal Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a lover of Mandingo fighting.
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
