Can someone please tell me which character Bruce Dern played?
IMDB says he was “Old Man Carrucan” but for the life of me I can’t remember who that character was or what he did. Can anyone help me out, please?
Thanks!
He’s the one who split up Django and Hildy in the first place, isn’t he, ordering that Django be “sold cheap”? We see him only once, in closeup, wearing weird multicolored sunglasses.
I have to say, naming the plantation “Candieland” took me out of the movie every time they mentioned it: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WPI4fed1XrU/TZjYBuRilAI/AAAAAAAAAB8/_LlS8_kDXwU/s1600/candyland.jpg
Ah, yes! I remember. That was him, eh? Much obliged!
I’ve actually seen the movie twice and I don’t believe Hilde ever actually says her full name, so we aren’t sure how she pronounces it. Since everyone close to her calls her Hilde, it’s easily possible that the rare instances when people have to use her full name, and get it wrong, a lot of effort never went into correcting it. It’s easy enough for a slave’s name to get written down incorrectly on bills of sale, too. Slaves were not entitled to a name in the first place, and could be renamed and given new last names or first names at will.
Tarantino at least was aware of the correct pronunciation, because when Django first mentions his wife’s name to Schulz, Shultz repeats it as you would correctly say the name in German. I was stationed in Germany for years and at one point could converse in German fairly well, and words like Brünnhilde could/would be very easily mispronounced by an English speaker as it involves sounds that we just don’t make in English. I think it was just Tarantino’s weird little thing he put in there to show the Americans didn’t actually know the correct way to either spell or say the name in German.
This and your other comment about Shultz shows a common error in interpreting creative works. You’re projecting your own opinion on the entirety of Shultz’s character. You only knew him to successfully negotiate two dangerous situations in the past (the incident with the Marshal, and the incident with Big Daddy–three if you count the incident with the slavers in the beginning.) Ostensibly there’s a lot more to a character than those two incidents, so you’re assuming a lot. You’re assuming he’d have no problem at all seeing a man beat to death in a slave fight just because he lived in America for five years? You’re also assuming the same about him seeing a slave torn apart by dogs. As a matter of fact, that was not something commonly seen by most Americans nor was it commonly seen just by casual travel in the South. Masters did kill their slaves with dogs for sure (I’ve read it in slave narratives) but it happened on the plantation grounds or somewhere in the wilderness when trackers would capture the slaves. If you’re passing through a town there is little to no chance you’d see something like that. The Madingo slave business (which I believe to have been fictionalized based on a movie from the 60s), in Tarantino’s universe is portrayed as being something you have to pretty much be involved in to actually witness, so there is no reason to assume Schultz would ever have seen that stuff.
Further, there is no reason to assume Schultz spent significant time at all in deep south plantation country. All of his warrants seemed to be out of Austin, Texas. Texas obviously had plantations but it’s a big State and was still the wild west in the 1850s. Schultz may have spent most of his time in wild west type towns, cattle towns or etc, it’s just impossible to say. Austin was 40% slave immediately prior to the Civil War, assuming Schultz had spent time in Austin he would obviously have seen slaves, but people didn’t normally execute slaves on the streets. And a German bounty hunter would not be someone who got many invites to plantations, he’d have been a serious outsider in the South.
But that’s all just my guesses, the truth is we don’t know much of anything about Schultz’s history, so it’s impossible to say what Schultz would or would not do. We only got to see a few incidents near the end of his life, for all we know Schultz always had a short fuse. He’s obviously a guy who was at least moderately educated, immigrated from Germany and then switched to killing people instead of being a dentist. It kind of says something Schultz never once tried to get a bounty for returning someone alive, which was a totally valid option for him. That says something about his personality. I don’t see any reason to assume Schultz is the most perfectly level headed guy in the world.
I actually liked the movie, my issue with it wasn’t Schultz “breaking” I think Tarantino did his due diligence in explaining all of that, whether people are satisfied with that or not. What doesn’t make sense to me is the whole plot itself, it’s just needlessly complex.
Slaveowners were business men, and obviously Candie had no serious attachment to Hilde. I can personally think of several easier, more likely to succeed methods of getting Hilde away from Candy. One could just be Schultz arranging a meeting with Candie or even a representative of Candie under the auspices of Schultz being a wealthy German who wants to buy a German speaking slave, a rare commodity. Schultz could portray himself as a neophyte slaver (just as he does with Candie) and offer something way above Hilde’s price like $1,000.
I just don’t buy this setup that “if you went to ask Candie for her, he’d never sell her.” I do get that Candie was a sadistic bastard, I could see him, if Django and Schultz showed up just wanting to buy Django’s wife, refusing to sell her just to deny someone happiness. But someone like King Schultz just interested in overpaying for a meaningless slave because she’s bilingual? I don’t see why Candie wouldn’t take the offer. For $1,000 he could buy two Hilde’s and have profit left over.
Stephen mentions in the library “for $300 he wouldn’t get your attention.” That doesn’t explain it either. Candie ostensibly owns several hundred slaves, and for low value slaves you are assuming Candie isn’t involved in the day to day decisions to buy/sell them. Apparently Stephen or the lawyer are there for that stuff. (FWIW, the Stephen character is realistic, at 76 years old he’s old enough where he would have been raised before Nat Turner’s rebellion which is when many jurisdictions banned teaching slaves to read, and enough plantation owners at one point used slaves as plantation clerks that many states had to criminalize employing slaves as clerks due to fear they were becoming an educated–meaning dangerous, class of slaves. But an old one like Stephen realistically could have still been hanging around running things.)
We can’t presume Candie never sells cheap slaves because it isn’t worth his time, any real plantation would be buying and selling slaves of various values all the time when the plantation is as large as Candieland.
Even aside from that possibility, it’s easy to dream up a lot of more plausible and failproof ways to have bought Hilde out of slavery. Instead they create a complicated ruse that requires both Django and Schultz to be heavily involved with Candie and have to perpetuate a lengthy and dangerous subterfuge.
About the only thing I’d agree with Tarantino on is it makes sense to lie about the circumstances a little bit, just because a guy like Candie might refuse to sell someone to her husband just because he’s a bastard. But there are a lot more plausible ways to just buy Hilde directly than to go through this whole Mandingo side story.
(snipped for brevity)
Hmm. I disagree with you so much.
5 years isn’t a long time. He was from another land and didn’t understand how fucked up slavery was. You can’t bounty hunt with slavery as a backdrop to know how fucked up it is. You know how fucked up it is when you are a slave or slave master over many years or a lifetime. That’s when you go from seeing slave scars to seeing gruesome slave whippings on a regular bases.
But that’s not the point of the trauma. He wasn’t traumatized because he saw slave horrors, he was traumatized because he played a part in one. By allowing Django to keep him from paying that slaves debt, he allowed that dog mauling to happen. He tried to absorb it for the sake of the ultimate plan, but, over the course of the evening, it became harder and harder for him to push the horror out of his mind. The shock began to turn to flashes of trauma in his mind’s eye and he was becoming undone by it.
It is interesting that you think he should have somehow avoided snapping when he did for the sake of not spilling the blood of Django and Broomhilda; that is interesting because you don’t understand that this was a FAILING on the part of Schultz. He would have loved to be able to sink himself to the level of scum like Candie for the greater good of the safety of himself, Django and Broomhilda. He realized he just *couldn’t *live with himself if he *continued *to level himself with the likes of scum like Candie. This, imo is what made Django a hero where Schultz failed.
The handshake was SYMBOLIC. It was actually a device to show Candie being level with Schultz. Schultz was barely hanging on to his self image as a human being after taking part* in that mauling. To shake Candie’s hand would have been to seal the deal and admit he was no better than this man…Schultz needed to walk away without bringing himself level with that monster.
*in Schultz mind he had taken part by not paying the debt.
It’s a minor point but Tarantino also got the Brünnhilde (or Brynhildr) legend wrong.
There is a Norse legend found in the Völsunga saga where a valkyrie known as Brynhildr (Germanicized as Brünnhilde Anglicized as Brunhilda) is punished for crossing Odin by being placed on a mountain surrounded by fire and guarded by a dragon. In this legend Sigurðr Sigmundson rescues her (Germanicized as Siegfried.)
The German legend involving Siegfried and Brünnhilde is the Nibelungenlied, a poem written sometime in the 12th or 13th centuries by an unknown poet. It’s sort of akin to many Arthurian legends written in that era, it was based on older, pre-Christian myths that changed a lot of the facts while still using some of the character names.
Unlike the original Icelandic/Norse saga, in the Nibelungenlied Siegfried is married to Kriemhild. Siegried is known as a dragon-slayer and as an invincible warrior (like Achilles there is one spot on his body that is vulnerable to being wounded, and like Achilles it undoes him.) Brünnhilde is the Queen of Iceland in this tale and known as being a super-strong warrior. Siegfried’s friend, Gunther (himself a King) wants to marry Brünnhilde but she is known to require a feat of strength to win her hand.
Siegfried wants to marry Gunther’s sister (aforementioned Kriemhild) and agrees to help Gunther as long as his approves his marriage to Kriemhild. Once they get to Iceland, Brünnhilde demands several feats of strength from Gunther. None of which Gunther could perform himself, but in a serious or ruses Siegfried and Gunther work together with Siegfried doing the real feats of strength but in such a way as to make it look like Gunther did them.
From there things take a much darker turn in the German poem than the Icelandic saga. As part of the ruse for Gunther to marry Brünnhilde, Siegried had pretended to be Gunther’s vassal when they were in Iceland (in fact at the time Siegfried was a Crown Prince and later became a King in his own right.) Not knowing this, some years later when Brünnhilde and Kriemhild are together, Brünnhilde insists on being first in line for something because of her higher social rank (not realizing Siegfried is a King himself.) This results in some level of bad blood between Gunther as it violates some medieval Germanic code of conduct.
So later Gunther’s man-at-arms Hagen arranges a plot whereby he finds out through deception of Kriemhield the one vulnerable spot on Siegfried’s body. Gunther goes along with the plot, and Hagen kills Siegfried.
Kriemhild swears revenge and marries another King. Years later, at her son by her new husband’s baptism, Gunther and his men are invited. They are generally aware it could be a trap but go anyway. When they get there it ends up being a trap. In a lengthy battle that starts when Hagen decapitates Kriemhild’s son, Kriemhild’s husband’s men eventually kill all of Gunther’s men camped outside and they lock the rest in a building and burn them to death. Hagen and Gunther are both then decapitated. But then one of Kriemhild’s husband’s liege men decides the whole thing was incredibly dishonorable, to use a baptism as a pretext for such slaughter, and himself murders Kriemhild in a fit of rage.
Wow. Sounds like a Tarantino movie. ;).
Hmm, great analysis, I think I might up the film to 4 stars now that I can appreciate it at a whole other level. Call this the anti-Prometheus thread (the one which made me like the movie less having participated in it)
Quick question: how much is $1000 in those days?
If I remember correctly from my adventuring down at plantations in New Orleans, during that period $1000 would roughly come out to about $25,000 in nowadays money. When the war broke out, that would have dropped. Someone can correct me if I’m totally off base, though.
The Inflation Calculator which uses historical price data for pre-1975 dates and goes back to 1800 puts it at around $25k.
Of course CPI has its flaws, but some comparison numbers from 1850:
-One bottle of port cost $0.11 (Greenville County, SC, 1847)
-One piano cost $195 in 1847
-A routine doctor’s visit cost $2 (Florida, 1852)
-A new home in Brooklyn, NY cost $2,500 (1853)
-One pound of coffee cost $0.80
Read more: The History Of What Things Cost In America: 1776 to Today - 24/7 Wall St. The History Of What Things Cost In America: 1776 to Today – 24/7 Wall St.
Also, not to muddy up the movie thread with antebellum history, there are some good slave narratives out there in the public domain. I read many of them in physical libraries but I know some are available online these days.
A lot of the stuff in Django is probably drawn from these narratives. For example slaves being torn to death by dogs, I’ve read that as something slaves interviewed in the early 20th century (they were young slaves at the time, elderly in the early 20th century) reported as seeing first hand. Those strange muzzle/mask things you saw some slaves wearing, were very realistic adaptations of several drawings I’ve seen of slave punishment devices. My understanding is the real punishment factor were those four long spikes off the neck of the punishment device, it made it impossible to lay down to sleep so you basically in perpetual discomfort. Slaves would be locked into those for days at a time.
Mandingo fighting I do not believe has any historical basis, but I think this concept of “super-valuable championship fighting slaves” was necessary in Tarantino’s mind to justify the prices. I’m not aware historically of any slaves selling for $12,000 in 1850s dollars. I’ve heard “high” numbers in the $2-3000 range.
FWIW being a runaway decreased the value at auction of a slave by over 50%, as they were seen as a much worse investment. The average price of a slave near the end of the antebellum period was $800. Hilde would have been valuable because of being fit to work in the house, having good manners, being physically attractive, and speaking a foreign language probably would have made her an interesting purchase.
Generally though, Hilde being female made her worth less across the board, and being a runaway moreso still. So $300 is probably a good upper limit for what she would have sold for at auction. In the real world without Mandingo fighting, the most expensive slaves were highly trained male artisans who were accomplished blacksmiths, carpenters, or the like. So a younger male slave, with a history of good behavior and no attempted runaways, who was trained as a blacksmith, would probably fetch some of the highest prices at auction.
That is kind of the whole point in the movie…that the price is ridiculous. So ridiculous that he can’t refuse.
The rest of your informative post I snipped, because I don’t want you thinking and researching and doing so much work. Just relax and enjoy the movie!
(jk)
If I remember my “Roots” correctly one of Chicken George’s sons was a blacksmith-turned wrought iron artisan. He was highly prized for his decorative iron work and was often let out in contract to do work on other plantations. He was a rare slave who actually got to see something of the world, like Kunta Kinte, who eventually became the driver for his doctor massa.
Lots of slaves got to ‘see something of the world’. Many slave owners were ‘kind’. They educated their slaves, taught them to read, allowed them to write and travel and do everything but be free.
My takeaway from “The Confessions of Nat Turner” was that most slaves never left the farms where they were born and lived their lives in appalling ignorance of even the most basic geography. But I get your larger point.
Oh, I got your point too. I wasn’t trying to be contrary. I was more trying to just add on to your post…not challenge it. Sorry if it came off like that.
I have read that novel too, and many other things that lets me know that slavery was a horrific position to be in. Even if I DID have a ‘massa’ that educated me and let me travel, I would still be wanting my damn freedom!
ETA: To be honest, I have more to say on the topic, but I am gonna start a thread.
Just saw it. I loved everything about it.
Stephen’s reaction to seeing Django riding onto the plantation was the most hilarious scene in a movie I’ve seen in a while.
Something else that needlessly took me out of the movie:
http://www.bwanh.org/advocacy/Broom%20Hilda-distracted-013110.gif
Historic examples of slave collars; the first two are very similar to those shown in the movie:
http://www.cowanauctions.com/itemImages/yy4565.jpg
http://sites.duke.edu/signsofpunishmentmaroonslaves/files/2012/04/Slave-Collar.jpg
Any discussion of American slavery should include, I think, this wonderful letter, said to have been written after the Civil War by an escaped slave to his former master:
As it happens, today is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation taking effect. Here’s an NYT essay on it: Opinion | The Emancipation of Abe Lincoln - The New York Times