America, 1858. Two individuals, an ex-doctor and a freed slave, turned into bounty-killers. They have zero concern for the welfare of their society and seem to be irreconcilable to each other but actually, as the tradition of spaghetti-westerns wants, they are associated by practical, monetary and private reasons. A true 'union of egoists' in the Old West, as Max Stirner would put it.
This was the intriguing subject of films as the Dollar Trilogy or Butch Cassidy, to which Tarantino owes more than a reference. “Egoistic unions” Leone-style have emerged, in fact, as an opposition to the lovely “liberal unions” of Traditional WASP Western movies – where the autonomy of action of the Lone Gunman, even when motivated by personal issues, was only a replacement of an evanescent State. On the contrary, in their temporary alliance, the bounty killers keep a healthy distance from an oppressive Society: they don’t respect it – they only utilize it. They transform the Law into their own property and their own creature.
The art of film has always had something to do with the manipulation of surfaces, but the art of Tarantino is specialized in manipulating a certain kind of audience, a certain type of social segment in post-racial America: people who would never hurt a fly, let alone throw cobblestones during a protest, but still are, undeniably, attracted by that violence which is made cool by Tarantino. How can the average well-educated spectator – let’s say a community organizer from the Bronx or a marketing intern from San Francisco with years of travelling abroad – restrain from smiling while watching the scene in which a Nazi is burned alive or a slave owner is whipped to death, in slow motion? It’s all about our perception of what “justice” is: something never really universal, as Mainstream Hollywood would like us to think, but always contextual, shaped by our culture.
Perhaps a first ‘cultural warning’ signal is the exultant laughter (annoying like any laughter out of place) of Django fans, at the screening I attended, as a woman was wiped three yards out by a gunshot. Not that I am disturbed by screen violence, even when not strictly necessary. I mean, take the historical significance of the ending blood bath in Bonnie & Clyde (1967), or the scene of the old man in wheel-chair pushed out of a window in The Pianist (2002). Sometimes disturbing the viewer is a healthy practice, and I really think art should be more about afflicting the comforted than comforting the afflicted. The problem is the aesthetization of gore with a postmodern twist: that was “wow” in the 1990s, maybe, but in 2012? Postmodernism, this cadaver still floating in the river… Can you still pretend that laughter is just laughter, and conclude: “It’s all right, it’s just another Tarantino movie”? Of course you can’t.
If you have ever been at the Knitting Factory, in Brooklyn, you probably know that the American public is obsessed with three things: sex, religion and... race. There are stand-up comedians who build their entire career on those issues. I am not even bothered to accuse Django to promote racial hatred against the White, as someone suggested. American History is cruel enough to allow minorities to carry fair deal of resentment. But the post-modern laughter put in between the fantasy of the oppressed and the historical reality of the oppressor, what can this teach us? That of Django should be a fantasy of a black slave’s revenge, but In Real Life is the fantasy of revenge of the White Man against himself. A film where blacks and women are, for the most part, extras, has a clear protagonist and it’s Dr. Shultz (Waltz), impersonating the colonizer who works on his demons and his Perennial White Guilt.
Maybe the most effective character is the loyal, subservient senior house slave, Stephen (Jackson), reminding us how behind every domination there’s always a manipulative intermediary. And while he’s annihilated as a Race and Class Traitor, the revenge is completed in such a spectacular, hip approach that the oppressed becomes himself an oppressor: like the Whitest and Goodest of them All, Barack Obama, the first US President of African descent, and the first one to use drones on African soil. And we, Good Ol’ White people, to get rid of our whiteness click ‘Like’ on the Facebook page of his wife.
