When I was
a child, my mother told me the only reason my brother kept calling me names was
because he could get a rise out of me. “If you ignore him,” she said, “he’ll
stop.” She was right. So I learned it’s what I answer to that matters more than
what you call me.
I may not have seen Django Unchained if the movie had not
generated such controversy. There was angry talk about the number of times
“nigger” was used--somebody counted and said it was more than a hundred. Spike
Lee said he wouldn’t see it because it would offend his ancestors. Others were
outraged that Brunhilde (Kerry Washington’s character) was a “helpless female”
needing rescue. (If she had been the proverbial “strong black woman” fighting
to get her husband back, we would have complained about that as well.)
I thought Django Unchained was fun and
funny.
When I heard the contemporary music playing,
I knew it was not a serious movie, so I relaxed. I’ve seen a couple of Quentin Tarantino
movies and I was more disturbed by the prospect of his signature mayhem than I
was about how many times “nigger” would be uttered.
This movie is an ironic spoof of
slavery. Beloved (1998) was a serious
film treatment of slavery and nobody saw it. Tarantino knows what kind of movie
puts butts in the seats: lots of big blasting guns, explosions, blood flowing
freely, a damsel in distress, an invincible hero who has close calls, but whom
we know will triumph in the end; and, with tongue firmly in cheek, anachronisms
all over the place. In other words, Tarantino made a typical Hollywood
adventure film. What was atypical is that it was set within slavery and the
last man standing was black.
Yes,
Tarantino mocked the travesty that was slavery, but he also showed the cruelty and
absurdity of it. I much prefer that to having slavery being denied or lied
about. And there were several moments of hilarity. The night riders who
couldn’t see through their ineptly made hoods was a scream. The sadistic slaver
who “owned” Brunhilde called his plantation “Candyland;” a silly parody of the
pastoral names given to the estates of traders in human flesh. I hooted when, after
all the whites around him were dead, Samuel Jackson’s character dropped his
cane, straightened his back and stopped acting servile. I also laughed when
Tarantino’s own character wound up as a hole in the ground, victim of one of
the explosions. It was escapist, cathartic entertainment.
The film Lincoln, on the other hand, is serious and can be faulted for
ignoring important aspects of history pertinent to the story. I believe the
movie has resonated with so many, as it did with me, because nearly 150 years
ago the U.S. Congress was as sharply polarized as it is today, and along nearly
the same lines. This is a movie for those who love the gamesmanship of politics.
Unfortunately, by focusing solely on the white male elected officials who
finally managed to make traffic in human lives illegal in the United States,
Spielberg has denied agency to the many others who forced this political
battle. This is particularly obvious and painful because those who are ignored,
not even given the courtesy of a line of conversation, are those who are historically
marginalized in this society that reserves power for wealthy white males.
Briefly, these people are Quakers
who were resisting slavery in the seventeenth century; abolitionists who
labored for decades to change public opinion from acceptance of slavery to
abhorrence for it. One of the most eloquent abolitionists, Frederick Douglass,
met with President Lincoln to convince him to allow blacks to fight in the
Union Army. Eric Foner, professor of
history at Columbia University, said, “The 13th Amendment originated not with
Lincoln but with a petition campaign early in 1864 organized by the Women’s
National Loyal League, an organization of abolitionist feminists headed by
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.” To not even
mention Douglass or the Women’s National Loyal League in this movie is
inexcusable.
However, I am pleased to see a
serious, major American movie admit that the Civil War, this country’s most
pivotal event, was fought over whether or not the U.S. would continue to hold
other humans in bondage. For a very long time the country has been in denial
about that.
The capture, enslavement of, and commerce in the
bodies of people of African descent went on for hundreds of years, and the
fallout from that trauma continues to the present day. It will hound us and haunt
us until we face it, talk about it and accept it as a tragic part of our
history. Despite their flaws, these
two popular movies, the latest of several Hollywood attempts to present that brutal experience on film, at least have the country talking about an enormous and critical subject that we usually avoid.