Right. But if he gives a back story for every unusual slave name, it almost insults the audience. As if we can’t just accept that not every slave was named Toby or Effie.
‘Django’ is one of his lil’ call backs to other films. He does it all the time. If one knows that (and not everyone does, I know) but if one does, then it does seem strange to say, “how would a slave get a name like that?” We just assume he was named after somebody or something.
It’s like Ellen Cherry said, it seems like sometimes some of us get caught up in thinking about slavery as one way or the other, forgetting that it has many layers and wasn’t all so cut and dried. That is why I reacted when I misunderstood Miller’s post…it is because I’m projecting in this thread, I fear. I’m remembering real life discussions I have had about the movie where people kept saying things like, “I don’t believe he could have just up and learned to read”. Uh, yes, he could. Lots of slaves ‘up and learned to read’ because some white person taught them, just like in the movie. You would be surprised at how many people doubted me that lots of slaves could read. It doesn’t mean slavery wasn’t horrible, or that most slaves didn’t live in abysmal ignorance or any of that. It just means that it was a fact; lots of slaves were literate.
I know I quoted you, but all of this rambling post isn’t directed at you…I just used your post as a jump off point.
Nzinga, I admit I don’t like movies that have “callbacks” in them. I’d like a movie to stand alone and not be one long-running wink at the audience. I’d be the first to admit I’m not hip, but at this point in my life, I don’t care to be reminded of this fact. I don’t mind a little abstraction, but I suppose my limit is at the title and the protagonist’s origins. It’s not a major thing–something big enough to turn me off the flick entirely. But it does takes me out of it.
I don’t think it would have been condescending to give Django more of a backstory. My imagination is rich enough that I certainly don’t need one, but why I should I have to use my imagination to make Django a full character? And as much as I did like the movie, I felt like none of the characters were fully developed. There was something weird with all of them. I sat there waiting for things to be clinched (the masked woman, the incentuous Candies) and was found wanting and confused about why they were there. Were these also callbacks? :shrug: Maybe it’s just not the kind of movie I’m used to and I’m trying to see “there” that isn’t even designed to be there. But then again, IMHO, it can’t be both a great film, worthy of the gravitas QT seems to think befits it, and a live-action cartoon that’s only supposed to register laughter and applause. Either the characters are worthy to enough to be dissected and evaluated, or the movie is pure fluff and virtually meaningless.
Fwiw, heros in conventional Spaghetti Westerns don’t have backgrounds, they just arrive from over the hill. Example Fistful of Dollars where Clint Eastwood is ‘The Stranger’.
Another slave in this movie is named D’Artegnon. Slaves get named by masters for all sorts of reasons. It’s silly to sit around trying to dream up an explanation or think QT needed to include an explanation for the character being named something odd. I mean, it’s fun to project that some slave owner had an uncle from the old country or something, but really it’s pointless.
“Why is he named Han Solo? That’s a weird name. Where’s the backstory? I mean, he’s not solo, he has a partner the whole time.”
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but you didn’t pick a great example. D’Artagnon’s name did have a backstory, and that back story was crucial to the plot: He was named that because his owner was a fan of the Three Musketeers. His name tipped Schultz off to this fact, which led him to making the dig about Dumas being black, which led Candie to forcing the issue of the handshake as a counter-dig, which led to Schultz shooting him in the carnation.
I know that. My point is that slaves got named for lots of silly reasons. We had one explained (favorite author), because explaining it was central to the plot. But Django’s name isn’t central to the plot. It’s just an odd name. But just like D’Artegnon was named for his master’s favorite author, Django got named for some equally silly reason. We just don’t need to know that reason.
Ever checked out the names of free white people from this time? In my own genealogy there’s one barely literate branch of the family where the given names included Catullus, Oberon, and Epaphroditus, and I’ve seen reference to slaves on Bama plantations named Flavius Josephus, Vespasian, and Jupiter
Grandiloquent names among “the lowly” were not uncommon, and it’s also not uncommon for somebody who can’t read and write to know how to spell their name even if they can’t write it. It’s not impossible that Django grew up knowing his name was spelled D-J-A-N-G-O even if he couldn’t have pointed out a D from an O if he was looking at the HOLLYWOOD sign. Schultz could later have told him “the d is silent… sometimes letters are silent”.
On another topic, per one account Kevin Costner was the original choice to play Schultz (presumably as a non-German, though his mastery of accents is of course legendary). When he passed, Kurt Russell was mentioned. Do you think the movie would still have worked with them in the lead or do you think that Woltz added that much to the success of the film?
I just came back from watching the movie tonight and I didn’t find Stephen’s back story to be mysterious at all. I think the most telling scene is when Stephen and Django meet for the first time, the first line that defines their interaction is something like “niggers aren’t allowed to ride horses”.
Stephen made a Devil’s pact, to be given dignity and to be treated as a human rather than an animal. But the cost was that he had to buy into a system that he knows to be immoral. His entire life has been about constructing a justification for the path he chose.
And now, in walks Django and he’s forced to confront, in an incontrovertible way that there existed an alternative to his path. Django is riding a horse, Django is holding a position superior to his and was not forced to morally compromise to do so. I think the shots between Django and Stephen were masterfully done because Django holds a pride in his face that Stephen knows he has forever lost, and Stephen HATES him for it.
Stephen loathes Django for everything he represents because it puts into stark relief his own immoral choice which he needs to be in denial about. The only way for Stephen to regain his just sense of the world is to bring Django lower than him and I think that’s what you see as the major power dynamic in the second half of the movie. There’s a symmetry between both the black and white half of the power struggle where both Candie and Stephen are exposed to the rank hypocrisy of their actions and their reactions are driven by a need to justify what they know to be wrong.
I don’t think this symmetry was accidental. The entire movie is an examination on how immoral systems warp the people within them.
I also see a lot of parallels between Stephen/Django and Joan/Peggy on Mad Men. Like Stephen, Joan was a person who rose to a position of relative power inside of a corrupt system by compromising herself. Along comes the outsider, Peggy, who refuses to play by the rules and forges a separate path to power without buying into the corruption.
[QUOTE=Shalmanese]
I also see a lot of parallels between Stephen/Django and Joan/Peggy on Mad Men. Like Stephen, Joan was a person who rose to a position of relative power inside of a corrupt system by compromising herself. Along comes the outsider, Peggy, who refuses to play by the rules and forges a separate path to power without buying into the corruption.
[/QUOTE]
Though blood is reserved for when she sees a secretary riding a lawn mower.
Fair enough, but I think one thing that gets overlooked is that Django is not free of compromise himself. While in the movie he has the hero’s role, it is easy to forget that he is only able to play it by becomming a bounty hunter, who kills men he doesn’t know for money, not knowing or caring if they are good or bad - a trade that is explicity compared in the movie itself to slavery: money for blood.
While it is easy to justify him doing that, he is shown to have moral qualms - he is reluctant to shoot down a man right in front of his young son. He does it anyway. He’s on the same path of justifying his moral corruption by circumstances. True, it’s a path that allows him to ride a horse like a man rather than shuffling and bowing, but moral compromise it remains.
I pretty much agree with your conclusion as to why Stephen hates Django (it has little to do with him fearing the loss as power so much as it does jealously), but I disagree that Stephen is exchanging morality for being treated with the dignity of a human being. It is precisely because he’s not treated with dignity that he hates Django. If he was treated like a human (as you put it), then he would have had no need to hate Django. This is the heart of the crab-in-a-barrel mentality that drives him in this movie.
Morality has nothing to do with Stephen, because the character, as presented, is devoid of morals. We are given no reason to think he cares one whit about the people he hurts.
I can’t help but ask: you’ve seen Pulp Fiction, right?
To me, this is just more of the same: the story’s already in progress as we come in, and we never find out what the heck was in the briefcase; we don’t get to see who keyed Vincent’s car – is it relevant? – or hear why he was in Amsterdam all those years; there’s never any explanation about why Marsellus has that bandage on his head, and I’m not entirely sure what happened with Tony Rocky Horror.
That’s, y’know, Quentin Tarantino: he’s perfectly capable of making a film that answers every question it raises, but he’s got other plans.
That’s, y’know, Quentin Tarantino: he’s perfectly capable of making a film that answers every question it raises, but he’s got other plans.
[/QUOTE]
The etymology of the name Eskimo Joe is one that I’m sure would be an interesting story. Perhaps one day we’ll get ESKIMO JOE UNCHAINED, or perhaps given the varied and eccentric spellings of the time, *ESQUIMEAUX JOE UNCHAINED *(“The U’s and the X… are silent”).