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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This novel is a fictionalised account of a slave insurrection that took place in 1831 in the town of Jerusalem, now named Courtland, in Southampton County in the state of Virginia. It is based on an account of Nat Turner’s confessions published by a local lawyer, Thomas Gray.
It was in Paul Verhoeven’s 1983 suspense film The Fourth Man that I first heard an author speak of the art of fiction as the ability to “lie the truth”. This principle is something Edward P. Jones follows very effectively with this Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel.
