Quentin Tarantino and the Plantation Bloodlust Of Django Unchained
A quick look at Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre reveals a gauntlet of exploitation film inspirations and spoofs. From the samurai splatter of Kill Bill to the horror sexploitation of Grindhouse, Tarantino remains no stranger to putting together exploitation film tropes to create long epics with a modern sheen. His 2012 western film Django Unchained is no different. Loosely based on the 1966 spaghetti western Django, the film follows the black slave Django who partners with a German bounty hunter on a mission to free his wife from a plantation owned by Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. This time around, Tarantino chooses blaxploitation and splatter from his selection of exploitation tactics as stylistic backdrops to his upgrade of the spaghetti western.
Of all exploitation cinematic traditions, Tarantino seems to be most inspired by blaxploitation cinema throughout the making of Django Unchained. Blaxploitation, as defined by Ed Guerrero in Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, refers to the “cheaply-made, black-cast films… targeting black audiences… released roughly between 1969 and 1974” (Guerrero 69). These films arose in response to the post-Civil Rights films starring Sidney Poitier, which typically adhered to white liberal sensibilities in depicting integrationist, sexually-neutered, and overly polite blackness. Guerrero argues that these representations of blackness stripped the African American experience from its socio-political and economic historical legacies (Guerrero 76-78). As such, the films of Poitier received frustrated backlash from black audiences, who demanded more assertive black characters in Hollywood film (Guerrero 73). These historical circumstances paved the way for the rise of the Blaxploitation cycle, films in which overtly militant, typically but not exclusively macho male, protagonists seek self-determination from white institutions (Guerrero 110). Considering Django Unchained follows the story of a former slave who topples the plantation institution through sheer might to save his slave wife, this narrative conforms directly with the blaxploitation narrative.
Django Unchained most explicitly aligns itself with blaxploitation cinema in the moment of its protagonist’s radicalization, where he murders his former masters. The scene opens with Django and his silver-tongued German colleague, Dr. King Schultz, riding on horseback into the plantation, where they are greeted by the skeptical owner. The owner complains about Django riding on a horse around his slaves, whom he worries will be influenced by Django’s image of black liberation. Dr. Schultz appeases the plantation owner with the promise of money, buying Django the time to find and kill his former masters. Django converses with a slave, who appears shocked that Django is “really free.” Then, Django cold-bloodedly shoots the first master as he prepares to whip a slave, then proceeds to whip the second master as a form of poetic retribution. The slaves around Django stare agape as he empties his gun on the white man he had just whipped, signifying the first two individuals that Django kills and his first victory against the white institution of slavery. As in common blaxploitation protagonists, Django sets himself apart as a black liberator in the midst of institutionalized, oppressed black masses by crushing the inhumane white institution and revealing its frailty.
Django Unchained co-opts not only blaxploitation cinema, but splatter, as an exploitation film style underpinning its text. Splatter films, as defined by Jay McRoy, consistently include “excessively gory displays of the human form ripped open or disintegrated” (McRoy 197). In contrast to blaxploitation films, which maintain consistent plot tropes and themes, splatter films characterize themselves strictly through visual spectacle rather than narrative detail (McRoy 197). However, as McRoy argues, the splatter film spectacles of disassembling body parts and blood-drenched mise-en-scene “reveal the artificiality of socio-cultural paradigms informed by modernist myths of organic wholeness” (McRoy 192). By splitting human bodies into meaningless blobs of flesh and spraying copious blood throughout, the splatter spectacle demystifies the body, removing any semblance of humanity from its parts. What audiences previously perceive as a meaningful “whole” suddenly collapses into hunks of matter -- precisely the effect of the blood-drenched violence throughout Django Unchained. As Django wreaks havoc across the southern plantations, the exploding bodies of slave-owners render themselves meaningless and empty “parts” rather than whole, meaningful “human beings.”
No sequence better demonstrates the allegiance between Django Unchained and the splatter spectacle than the climactic explosion of gore near the film’s conclusion. When the slave owner Calvin Candie recognizes Django’s plot to rescue his wife, he threatens to kill her if Dr. Schultz does not pay a significantly larger amount. Just as Schultz and Django prepare themselves to leave with Django’s wife Broomhilda, Calvin Candie insists on shaking Schultz’s hand -- to which Schultz responds with a bullet through Candie’s heart. A whiplash of exploding body parts and blood gushing ensues as Schultz is shot to death, leaving Django with the mission of completely slaughtering the nameless white men of the plantation. Django’s raging bloodlust renders the already nameless whites even less human by disintegrating their bodies -- the very staple of splatter filmmaking.
Quentin Tarantino effectively merges both blaxploitation and splatter to create a tantalizing, justice-driven piece of entertainment. By utilizing exploitation film narrative and visual techniques, Tarantino’s Django Unchained offers more than a tired exercise of spaghetti western recreation. Rather than simply paying homage to blaxploitation and splatter, Tarantino wields these cinematic traditions to create a gargantuan piece of historical vengeance -- an incredibly entertaining one at that.
Works Cited
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: the African American Image in Film. Temple University Press, 1993.
McRoy, Jay. “‘Parts is Parts’: Pornography, Splatter Films and the Politics of Corporeal Disintegration.” Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, edited by Ian Conrich, I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010, 191-204.
