Isn’t this getting a little toooo nitpicky, espcially when we know it’s a direct homage? Plus, Django knowing how to spell it made for one of the best jokes in the film. Let it go folks, let it go.
You know, if you don’t like a conversation, you are more than welcome not to participate in it.
Why wouldn’t Schultz know how to spell it? Maybe he knew some gypsies back in Germany. Maybe he picked up some linguistics in his travels and recognised the /dʒ/ sound.
I’ve worked with children who have learning disorders, and even they almost always know how to spell their own names, even if they can’t spell anything else at all. I see no reason to doubt that a slave in the US could have picked up the spelling of his own name. Some slaves were literate, and those that were often shared their knowledge with those who weren’t. It’s really not a big leap to believe that Django could have known the spelling of his own name.
Slavery in the US was horrific, but it (mostly) wasn’t death camp genocide stuff. Slaves could and did learn how to read. Literacy would have been expected in house slaves and those that did skilled work. Teaching a slave to read increased the slave’s value - they weren’t kept illiterate deliberately. Owners might not have spent much time and effort on it, but it usually wasn’t actively discouraged.
And, as I’ve said already, in a movie filled with anachronisms, why is this one so difficult to swallow and all the others not? Why is nobody complaining that the slaves use late 20th century slang and not mid-19th century? That’s a lot more unlikely than Django knowing how to spell his own name.
I’m with Equipoise, it is getting a bit nitpicky. I can think of a zillion reasons why he would know how to spell ‘Django’. He was named after a favorite uncle of his first master, and the child in the home taught him to spell it, being extra careful to impress upon him the silent D. I mean, I really am baffled how people can’t see that kind of thing just being a given in a movie like this.
I suppose its possible, but it strikes me as kind of an absurd coincidence. Django is an *extremely *unusual name. What are the odds of what must be the only guy in North America named Django running into the only guy in North America who knows how to spell Django?
Actually, by the mid-nineteenth century, it was illegal to teach a slave literacy throughout the slave states.
Anachronisms don’t usually bother me, particularly ones based around language usage or accents. This isn’t an anachronism, though, it’s an internal plot error, which tend to bug me a bit more. Not that I was bothered by this one - I thought it was kind of amusing. I didn’t really expect to see a debate over it.
Do you actually mean you think it didn’t happen? Because it was illegal???
No, that’s not remotely close to what I was saying.
Oh.
What are the odds of anything in a Tarantino movie? We’re not talking about a documentary, or about a movie that even pretends to be realistic, we’re talking about a Tarantino movie. Do you remember the bit in Quentin’s last movie where Americans assassinated Hitler in a French Cinema?
…and yet, house slaves and artisan slaves certainly were literate, and we have letters written by them and even books written by ex-slaves. So clearly there were literate slaves.
No, it’s entirely plausible, within the context of a Tarantino movie, and in real life, that an ex-slave might know how to spell his own name. And that’s it for me, I rest my case and any further arguing about this can be addressed to someone else.
Right. It’s not a realistic movie. I pointed out another example of how it was unrealistic. I’m not sure why that has you so torqued up.
Sure, and I never said otherwise. I was correcting you when you said that slaves learning how to read wasn’t considered a big deal. It was, in fact, considered a big deal, and a good deal of effort went in to making sure that slaves couldn’t read.
I didn’t say it was implausible that any slave would be unlikely to know how to spell his name, I said it was unlikely that this slave, in the circusomstances shown in the movie, would know how to accurately spell his name.
You know what makes films great? They can be analyzed. Everything about them. Without people waving their hands at every turn. Analyzing the titular name is not “nitpickery”. It’s analyzing the very essence of the film.
Although “Django” as a slave name was possible, it is obscure enough that we could have benefited from a backstory.
Wasn’t the whole point that Schultz located Django in hopes of tracking down guys Django could identify on sight? We see how Schultz locates Hildy, by reading the plantation records of who bought her and when; he presumably found Django the same way. (At that, didn’t Django get signed over to Schultz’s ownership?)
The back story is - the entire back story is - ‘Django’ is a name much used in spaghetti westerns. On 31 occasions according to Wikipedia.
That’s it. That is the whole story.
That is an excellent point.
This doesn’t explain how a slave got the name. So no, that’s not the kind of back story I’m talking.
I’ll going to chalk this one up to me not being a fan of QT movies and being perfectly fine with this.
I mean, “Hilde” is a fairly unusual name for a slave, but not nearly as obscure as “Django”. Yet, QT saw fit to include a back story to explain it.
Prob a good idea.
We finally got around to seeing Django Unchained yesterday - surprisingly large crowd for an afternoon screening.
We loved it - thought it was the perfect combination of absurdity, humor and great visuals - probably our favorite QT film. As we both speak German, it was fun to see that incorporated into the film - quite unexpected to say the least.
BTW - look back in any thread asking for baby names and you will see I almost always suggest Brunhilde! Looks like QT has been reading my threads!
Spike Lee should have at least seen the film before throwing his hissy fit about it - yes, they bandy about the word Nigger - but those who like to use that word don’t usually hang around very long to chuckle about it. And coming from a small town in Illinois, let’s just say it isn’t the first time I have heard idiots say the word.
I do sort of feel sorry for Leo DiCaprio and Sam Jackson - I mean, they were GREAT in their roles, but pretty hard to be Oscar bait when your characters are that vile. Christoph Waltz, on the other hand, is the glue that holds this story together and comes across as a wily, fair man for that era.
At any rate - great film and fully deserves the nominations and awards it has received and hopefully will continue to receive.
^ This whole paragraph is utter bullshit.
Just the opposite: Oscar loves good villains. Just look at the Best Supporting wins for 2007 to 2009: Christopher Waltz won in 2009 for his Nazi character in Inglorius Basterds (beating out Stanley Tucci’s serial killer from Lovely Bones), Heath Ledger in 2008 for the Joker (beating out Josh Brolin’s Dan White in Milk, and Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men won in 2007 (beating Casey Affleck, who played one of the titular characters in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).
The three best ways to get an Oscar nomination is to play someone who’s A) retarded, B) terminally ill, or C) completely evil. Someday, someone will play a serial killer with Down’s Syndrome and tubercleosis, and they won’t even bother nominating anyone else in his category.