Django Unchained (T TALK)

I’m Trevor with the Sasquatch Movie Minute and its Wonky Wednesday so I am not doing a review, but a Trevor Talk about film things that interest me. Today I am talking about Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film, DJANGO UNCHAINED, starring Jamie Foxx. With help of a German bounty-hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from an evil plantation owner.

This isn’t my favorite Tarantino film, but Tarantino engages in a daring act of audience manipulation in this film that fascinates me. There will be SPOILERS in this video!

This film is an assault. It is gory and disturbing, but most of all, it is offensive. The dialogue wallows in nastiness, with endless amounts of racial slurs, n-word this and n-word that. The violence done to bodies is disgusting. Christopher Waltz’s character, Schultz, is an impartial observer to all this.

At the end, Schultz is about to get away with their mission of freeing Django’s wife from DiCaprio’s awful racist plantation owner, Calvin Candie. Schultz is walking out the door, when Candie demands that Schultz shake his hand. Schultz refuses but Candie insists. And that is when the whole movie pays off. He is revolted by everything he has seen, the parade of horrors that has driven him almost to numbness. And even knowing that it will mean his death, Schultz decides that he can not tolerate those atrocities for one more second. He shoots Candie and is immediately killed in return.

That gunshot carries all OUR horror and anger and disgust and it feels exultant to strike back. Tarantino KNOWS this. That is WHY he piled all the violence on the audience, so in that moment, Schultz can represent the audience and vomit vengeance upon our country’s historical crimes. Tarantino is weaponizing psychology to force us to empathize. What an unbelievable triumph of craft and plot, that one of the film masters has manipulated us through cinematic language.

Tarantino’s skills in DJANGO UNCHAINED are a fiery totem to film as an essential art form.