Tarantino: Django Unchained (2013)

Django Unchained has been acclaimed for paying homage to spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation, but it’s not a nostalgia exercise so much as an archaeology, or an ancient history, of the gangsta culture that’s become omniscient in recent years – especially the gangsta distinction between niggers and niggas, old slaves and new slaves. Set in the antebellum South, it’s about Django, a freed slave, and Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter, who set out to save Django's wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from sadistic plantation owner Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his loyal house slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). However, the standoff between Django and Candie is a bit of a smokescreen, as Tarantino seems more interested in the encounter between nigger and nigga, Django and Steven, inducing Jackson and Foxx to put in two of the most lurid perfomances of their careers. As Stephen, Jackson’s positively hallucinatory, bug-eyed with all the contradictions and self-loathing that come from internalising everyone and everything that’s ever convinced him he’s just a nigger. But it’s Foxx who steals the show, drawing more on his career as a rapper than an actor, as he steers his steed like an SUV, strutting through the film like it’s one of his music clips, with Rick Ross and RZA as guest vocalists. Brandings become battle scars, lashed backs segue into gangsta tattoos, in a tribute to the lurid spaghetti melodrama of the most memorable gangsta clips, their sense that anybody who’s not perpetually branding themselves as a nigga, a gangsta, a free citizen, is still just a nigger, a nonentity, a slave. Like the most propulsive, provocative gangsta beats, Django never stops inhabiting those few seconds after being delivered from slavery, riding a torrent of pent-up machismo so unbridled and uncontained it seems to warp the film out of its intended ending, producing a series of nested denouements and truncated subplots. And that’s exactly where Tarantino chooses to make his cameo, swept out of the story almost as soon as he appears, as if enjoining Django to speak despite his direction, despite everything he’s done to make gangsta culture palatable to a white audience.