DJANGO UNCHAINED directed by Quentin Tarantino (USA, 2012)
The men (and handful of women) who commit murder, behave savagely or revel in brutality have deep-rooted problems that are not triggered solely by exposure to the wrong kind of entertainment. This makes it all the more bizarre that the premiere of Django was delayed by the Weinstein Company in the wake of the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.
Both Tarantino and Samuel L.Jackson publically criticised this decision and the director was equally disdainful of Krishnan Guru-Murphy’s puritanical line of questioning in a recent Channel 4 interview.
Django Unchained is without doubt a violent movie but it is wildly misplaced to regard it as just a tasteless or gratuitous bloodfest. It borrows from exploitation-movies but it is far too intelligent and knowing to be treated as a common or garden splatter movie.
The scenes of cruelty and killings can even be justified in view of the subject matter and are surely mild compared with the actual treatment handed out to slaves in America.
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It’s a measure of how unpolitical most American blockbusters are that this movie practically counts as a radical drama. It begins with archive footage of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and this left-wing group’s vain attempts to counter injustice, greed and warmongering in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Weathermen’s opposition to US military involvement in Vietnam was such a central part of their protest that it all but fizzled out when the war ended.
