Hey - thanks!! That’s it exactly! Is this a “white savior” situation? And here’s Tarantino discussing it with Henry Louis Gates - perfect! Will dig in - cool.
Read it. Good stuff. Nzinga, Tarantino has your back completely! Totally worthy of future sneak-bragging.
I was waiting for you to see the movie because I was eager to discuss my theory with you. Because I always check for how you break stuff down on this board, and I was hoping you would like my break down. Not to gush too hard, but you are a poster I ALWAYS check for when it comes to break downs. I’m so glad you liked my take on it, I can’t tell you how hype I am!
I just read enomaj’s link and I can’t BELIEVE that I didn’t think of that…I mean of the idea that Schultz HAD to die in the film in order for Django to emerge as the true hero.
Wow; feelin’ the love - back at’cha. Great job on Django!
(okay, love fest over; carry on ;)).
Well, while I’m still in dick riding mode, I gotta say, I just can’t believe Tarantino wrote that. Oh my god, the genius of it all.
That’s why I was on the fence about the white savior angle - I was cool with the fact that in cowboy-movie terms, Obi-Wan had to die for Luke to step up. But Tarantino’s use of Schultz as the Master was ambiguous because of what Django knew about slavery and humanity’s ability to do evil. Nice genre mash-up work indeed.
I just got back from seeing this (we pawned the kids off on someone for an overnight. I thought I’d address this part of WordMan’s statement.
This issue here isn’t the character arcs. The both had separate ones, Django and Shultz. But only Shultz needed redemption. Django, literally, is playing the (forgive me) white knight, here. The only bad thing he did in the film was killing one man in front of his son. And he demonstrated his reluctance to do so.
Shultz was less involved, and therefore less focused, because his motivation in helping Django recover Broomhilda was never clearly defined. Django knows, deep in his heart, what he’s attempting to do. Shultz doesn’t, and that’s what kills him. His moment of clarity immediately prior to killing Candie shows him something worth dying for, which is much more powerful than something worth killing for. But it does leave Django in the lurch, I gotta admit.
Honestly, I think this might be Tarantino’s best movie to date. More than a genre movie or schlock, as someone upthread said, this is a morality play with a solid script and great characters (and performances!). This could be one that earns him that Best Director Oscar.
It’s been 24 hours since I’ve seen it and I’m still digesting. Awesome, awesome movie.
Nobody’s mentioned the Don Johnson cameo and the hilarious mask discussion. QT certainly provides
an emotional roller coaster.
Yeah, “Big Daddy”! That had to be a reference to both Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (Burl Ives plays the patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt) and The Long, Hot Summer (Orson Welles is Big Daddy Will Varner).
This is the most interesting and informative and thought-provoking discussion of a movie in a long time. I love it!
It was almost like a lark to Schultz. He was delighted to hear that there was a black slave named Broomhilda von Shaft (Tarantino alluded to her being an ancestor of John Shaft) who spoke German. It almost seemed like something fun for him to do, after bounty huntin’ through the winter of course. It wasn’t a priority for Schultz.
The more I think about it and read everybody’s thoughts the more I admire the movie and I can’t wait to see it again, but the Best Director thing isn’t going to happen. I’d be surprised if Django gets more than a couple/three nominations (likely Original Screenplay, maybe Best Picture, maybe Christoph Waltz, possibly Leo). I hope I’m wrong and it gets a bunch more.
Even if Tarantino was nominated, he’s got tough competition. It seems to the “experts” (scroll down for more than just those first 6) to be a race between Steven Spielberg for Lincoln, Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty and Ben Affleck for Argo, with Tom Hooper (Les Miserables), David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook), Ang Lee (Life of Pi), Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master) and Tarantino bringing up the rear. Ok, I added PTA because, dammit, he’s not getting near enough attention. Tarantino’s time will come, but it won’t be this time, sad to say. The movie is too controversial (loveya Spike, but STFU!) and seemingly, deceptively so, more lightweight than Inglorious Basterds, which did get lots of nominations but only one win, for Waltz. At least a lot of those people mentioned the movie in their Best Picture predictions and most mentioned it in Original Screenplay. Waltz and DiCaprio are both mentioned for Best Supporting Actor.
He also deliberately killed Miss Laura*. Her role as an oppressor is clear, but it is not as glaring as her brother’s. I’m of the school that almost everyone’s fair game when it comes to good slave insurrection. However, I can see how others might think Django could have shown mercy on her just because she hadn’t pointed a gun at him.
That wouldn’t have been as entertaining, though. Seeing the slaves high-tail it after Miss Laura got shot made the last 30 minutes worth sitting through.
*I think that was her name.
Bye, Miss Laura!
Also, Django set off the events for that dog mauling. He sacrificed that man in his quest for Broomhilda. It was not easy for him to do, but he did it. It was awful, but it also took superhuman strength by Django…to force himself to do something he found so horrific. Very complicated.
She ordered his balls cut out.
But then changed her mind, just in time! That should count for something, right? Right…?
Saw it tonight and mostly liked it. Foxx and Waltz were both great. Thought it was a bit overlong, though, and the repeated huge gouts of blood from bullet impacts were just too much.
Just a few random comments, since I think that the discussion here got to the heart of the movie.
I kept waiting for someone to explain the name Broomhilda. If a German owner named a slave for a famous character out of German legend, they would have gotten the name right. There are several spellings, but all use an “n” instead of an “m” as in Brünnhilde. I saw the name wrong on the record of her sale, but so what? That’s not what she would use and any subsequent owner would make it a point of pride to get the reference right, especially on a plantation where they give literary names right and left.
Tarantino always somehow manages to get things right and wrong in the same breath. Every account of every battle in the Civil War mentions the horrible screaming of the wounded men. Almost every war movie eliminates that. Even Lincoln, in that first battle scene, has everybody drop quietly - in hand-to-hand bayonet combat!. Tarantino loves his screaming and that makes it more horrific. But the long-range pinpoint accuracy of his guns and the way they plough through flesh - does any bullet in the entire movie stay inside a body? - undercut real horror by turning it into movie horror.
He does have a way of showing evil to be E-V-I-L, though. The New York Times reviewer wrote that this and Lincoln would be a fascinating double bill and he got that right. You really need this movie to viscerally feel the evil that every move of Lincoln’s was designed to end once and for all. Lincoln’s villains are all mouth and no weight, though I don’t see how he could have done it differently. Congress and antebellum plantations were different universes.
Finally, I hate movies in which characters are forced to do stupid things just to advance the plot. Schultz would not - could not - kill Candie when success meant walking alive out the door. You don’t sacrifice a pawn in chess only to throw away your king from the horror of it all. (In chess terms Schultz is the white king, and Django is the all-powerful ironically white Queen. Candie and Stephen are the ironically black king and queen.) Even his being unhinged is not a satisfactory explanation. Tarantino’s need for an exploitation-flick ending was more powerful than the character he carefully spent two hours constructing. That’s why he’ll always be considered a second-rate director, even though the rest of the film was masterly.
In a thread that reads like a Tarantino hagiography, I suspect they will soon be a callin’ fer you to be ‘clipped’!
Damn, I just used my last ball gag in another thread!
Gotta disagree specifically because I felt Tarantino showing the breaking of Schultz over an extended period of time. He was weak in every play of the con from the moment he meets Candie- even before he meets Candie, because Django throws him off. Very early on Schultz is disturbed by Django’s character portrayal feeling that Django must be overdoing it because it just can’t be that harsh and cruel, it just can’t be.
He can barely keep his stomach for the Mandingo Fight. He stutters and is poorly grounded during his very first conversation with Candie. Upon first viewing, not knowing where the story was going, I was very frustrated because Schultz had been flawless and calm in every single con we had seen him play up to that point. That fact is he was, step by step, slowly realizing he was getting himself into something he wasn’t prepared for.
Django’s harshness throws him, the Mandingo Fight pushes him more off center, and the effect of witnessing the killing of d’Artagnan has already been discussed.
The reason I can accept Schultz’s killing of Candie, despite the obvious consequences, is precisely because Tarantino doesn’t just expect us to accept it but he shows us that Schultz is building to that point.
Schultz plays the con horribly through the entire dinner. If he were conning a smarter mark he would have blown it himself without being unmasked by Stephen. His building anxiety pushes through the surface with his outburst at the harp player- the harp player who was playing Beethoven. We’ve got cinematic history showing us a major character driven to an attempt at suicide while tortured by the music of Beethoven, I really do believe this usage was deliberate on Tarantino’s part. He could easily have had Schultz say, “Stop that music!” but instead he says, “Stop playing BEETHOVEN!” Schultz had been cracking for a long time and immediately preceding the killing of Candie I already knew he was unstable, I already knew he was no longer predictable, I already knew that he could easily be the one to throw it all away.
Jesus, bienville serving up critique a la mode up in here! Teach!
Exapno Mapcase, I think you should consider too that Schultz was responsible in some way for that dog mauling. He could have stopped it, but he allowed Django to take the lead. Django was tapping into that super human strength to save his woman, and Scultz sat down and let him do it.
I can totally buy an exceptional man like Schultz, who detested slavery and thought himself better than slavers being DESTROYED by the idea that he had allowed that horrific traumatizing nightmare befall that slave. He was thrown into a personal crises at that moment. He was no longer playing chess. He was playing solitaire.
ETA: bienville, I agree about the Clockwork orange reference. I meant to say that when I peeped it in the earlier post. I would have never noticed that, but now that you point it out, it is a brilliant touch.
I want you to be my new friend.
In order to believe any of what you’re arguing, you have to believe that Schultz, the bounty hunter who has been killing people in cold blood across the South and West for six years (five at the start of the film and the year’s length of the movie) has never encountered the horrors of slavery. That stops me cold. Slavery and the treatment of blacks was not something that occurred just on plantations. It was everywhere. You could not travel the roads without seeing it. You could not ride into towns without seeing it. You could not stay in hotels without seeing it. Travelers in the South always commented about it.
The audience may not understand this and may need a history lesson to understand that the killing of “bad men” in front of their children is not as evil as the lifelong daily treatment of slaves. Schultz is supposed to be our modern eyes, a “civilized” man with contempt for the barbarity. But you can’t have it both ways. The “extended” breaking bienville cites takes place over about 24 hours. That’s not breaking, it’s a psychotic fit. Worse, if he’s supposed to be us snapping at the horror of it all, you can’t show him condemning the blacks in his care to death. That’s what he does when he refuses to shake Candie’s hand. Unless he’s read the script, the character in that moment has to know that he has just killed them all. What’s Tarantino saying here - that the proper response to evil is to commit suicide and take everyone along with you so that they don’t have to suffer evil any more? Nobody believes that. He’s making a revenge fantasy movie.
I really did like the movie a lot - up until that point. Tarantino could have handled the transition in a hundred ways. He picked the gaudiest and worst because he is who he is. Saying that the clues are references to earlier films doesn’t help. He likes wallowing in the idiocies of exploitation movies* but that’s a failing. He can’t have it both ways there either. He can’t say that his idiocies are homage and at the same time have his homages be higher art. They’re subtractive, not additive.
Evil needs to be fought slowly and painfully. Only in revenge fantasies do we get to knock it down in a technicolor bloodbath. Tarantino is, as I say, great in depicting evil. He’s a coward and failure when it comes to fighting it. That’s why Lincoln is the far greater picture. In Lincoln, evil is fought in tiny steps, with great mess and unclear reward. It’s not as thrilling or viscerally satisfying. The color palette alone tells us that. I’m glad I saw both pictures. Revenge fantasies have a needed place. But don’t tell me that the last half hour of Django is art.
*Yes, I know that A Clockwork Orange isn’t an exploitation film. But if that was a callback it was the rare exception.