First, why was James Remar playing two different characters in the movie? In the opening scene, he is the slaver that King shoots in the top of the head. Later in the movie, we see him again in Candie’s house as one of his minions. Django sees him, they have some sort of knowing glance at each other (as if they recognize each other), and Django comments something to the effect that even he knows to take your hat off inside. So, at this point, I assume that somehow he survived that initial gunshot, and at some point there will be a big reveal when he takes off his hat and shows that the top of his head is gone. But, it never happened. When I get back and check IMDB, turns out that he was, for no apparent reason, playing two distinct people. So, I’m not sure what the deal was with the knowing glance they give each other, or the need for the hat.
Second, what was up with the one minion, who appeared to be a woman, wearing a bandana over her face? She was looking at photographs in a stereoscope when Django bursts in and kills her. I guess this was just a Tarantino little thing, but I thought that woman was going to amount to something, and she didn’t really have any role at all, ultimately.
Both are discussed up thread. In both cases, it was Tarantino being Tarantino - casting James Remar in two roles and his stuntbuddy Zoe Bell as the girl minion, but not offering any explanation - it’s good to be the movie director.
No particular deal, I’m assuming. Tarantino just decided to use him twice for his own reasons and made him up differently. The second character was a presumed badass bodyguard and Django and he were carefully circling each other like two wary would-be alphas sniffing for weakness.
Tarantino should have cast Bell as one of the miner slavers that Foxx kills. Her accent would have fit in, and there wouldn’t have been a need to hide her face. I’d have loved for her to have been the one who hands Foxx the gun and gets immediately shot. It would have been a interesting way for her to go.
Now that I have given some critical thought to Stephen, it would be much more believable on its face if Stephen’s motive for sticking with the whites was simply based on ruthless self-preservation rather than some irrational idea that he’s “one of them”.
It’s no mystery why Tarrantino favored the latter for this character: it’s easier to villanize someone who is evil for no good reason than it is villanize someone who does bad things to protect his own neck. But not even the slavemasters in the movie are evil like Stephen; at least profit is their ultimate motive not sadism and you can kind of relate to that. Although Stephen procures status by being Candie’s assistant, that almost seems to be a secondary motivation for him.
Tarrantino could have done a better job explaining the why behind Stephen’s character. As it stands, he let it be implied that all house slaves were as backstabbing and brutal as Stephen was. Not only does this device distort the truth (house slaves were as much victims of slavery as the field slaves), but it takes away the singularity of Stephen’s villany.
Did Candie save his life or something? Did he have a bad experience with other slaves in his formative years that caused him to hate his race? Did being in cahoots with Candie allow him to be his naturally psychopathic self? What motivated this man to go to such lengths to hurt Django and Hildy, when the success or failure of their ruse would have been of zero consequence to him? There is no real good answer to these questions.
He answers those questions just before the big house blows up. What he’s screaming at Django are also his own views on the hopeless life of a slave:
“You ain’t gonna get away with this, Django. They gonna catch your black ass. You gonna be on the wanted posters now, nigger. The bounty hunters gonna be looking for you. You can run, nigger. But they’re gonna find your ass. And when they do, oh lawd, what they gonna do to your ass. They ain’t gonna just kill you nigger. You done fucked up. This Candieland, nigger. You can’t destroy Candieland. We’ve been here… there’s always gonna be Candieland.”
He’s screaming about an inescapable institution. If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em.
Plus, some characters are just evil for the sake of being evil. We’ve come to expect more depth and complexity in characters, but sometimes you need someone who stands out as the ultimate evil amid all those other seemingly evil characters (but as mentioned: the slave owners at least have a financial motivation for doing what they do-- Stephen helps you realize the depth of their characters by being so one dimensional in his view).
The problem is that Stephen goes above and beyond the “if you can’t beat em, join em” mentality. He doesn’t want to “beat em”, in fact. There is no indication that he has or ever has had a problem with the insitution. He seems to revel in the oppression and the role he plays in it, even while knowingly being a victim of it himself (as evident by his fake cane act…such deceit obviously adopted to give the impression he was weaker than he was).
Sure, we could wave this away as him simply being evil so no explanation is necessary. But that’s a kind of copout when you consider that he’s a slave and thus, the unlikeliest of villains in a movie full of greedy white slavemasters and overseers. It’s like having a Jew be one of the bad guys in Inglorious Bastards without giving any backstory.
I think Stephen’s death scene would have been better if he’d confessed (in classic comic book villain style) why he wanted so badly for Django to suffer and fail. Why did he take Django’s boldness as a personal affront (and Hilde’s runaway attempt?) Could it be that Django enjoyed a freedom that Stephen wanted but knew he could never have? The most likely explanation is that he felt threatened by any slave who didn’t meekly submit to white supremacy. He liked keeping the other slaves in their place not because doing so made him feel powerful, but also because any failure on their part to escape oppression made him feel less shameful about his own failure. Classic case of crab-in-a-barrel but multipled times a hundred.
This would have added more depth to Stephen’s character than the unsatisfying “he’s a house negro thus is evil” assumption that Tarantino needs us to swallow to accept this villain.
Well 'if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em, and if you join them the view is most comfortable from the the top. Being the head house man clearly has a lot of perks. He’s overtly the most powerful and respected (in a way) black man for miles and miles, and covertly he’s probably the true honcho of Candieland - hiding it only under a thin veneer of tomming.
His death tirade was an expression/justification for his life.
Yeah, I think it’s made pretty clear that he’s the brains and the White dude Candi is the front.
I read that as, basically, a clever subversion of the crude racism Candi was spouting - Candi may be the all-powerful “master” but in reality all his life he’s been dancing to Stephen’s tune.
I don’t think Stephen ever wanted “freedom”. He wanted - and got - power.
Ultimately, equality is about the capacity to rise up to-or sink down to-the level of others, and the fact that Stephen was the clever-but-evil éminence grise at Candyland is just as much an example of potential equality in action as Django acting out the gunslinger’s version of the Sigfried myth. They both disprove the mythology of racial inferiority merely by existing (even if, ironically, Stephen’s whole facade depended on supporting that mythology with his last breath).
My problem with the con was that it was never explained why Django was necessary for running it. It would have been infinitely easier for the Doc to run it on his own, without a potentially troublesome Black slaver as escort - after all, the con failed because his wife couldn’t hide her reaction. It was very predictable that having Django around would cause complications, and it wasn’t as if they needed him to ID her - how many German-speaking Black women with that name could there be?
It would have made much more sense for Django to wait it out somewhere else.
Yes. There really are people who are evil out of pure, unmitigated selfishness. For some reason, I think some people have an easier time accepting this from white characters.
When I watched Les Miz, I didn’t understand why Javert killed himself. Oh I it from an intellectual perspective, a man who betrayed his ideals and could not live with the dichotomy within himself it created but it still didn’t make any sense why he threw himself into the Siene.
In Django it was different. Here is a man (Shultz) who kills for a living but not only legally but ethically. And while Schulz personally despises slavery at a personal level (kind of freeing the slaves at the beginning) he is not an ardent abolutionist trying to end the institution of slavery. For Shultz, Candie was evil and ethically deserving of death. Unfortunatly was he not only not a bounty, Candie did nothing legally wrong. Thus Shultz made the decision to kill Candie and in doing so he knew he was guilty of murder deserved to die just like one of his bounties. This made perfect sense to me unlike Javert in Les Miz.
{said this earlier but reposted anyway in response to you with the face’s doubt of SLJ’s motivation}
There was no choosing “beat them or join them” for Stephen. He joined them and was born to join them. Stephen was exactly what Django was pretending to be - a black overseer and was raised to be the head house servant complete with “superiority” complex from birth. He spent his entire 70 year old life wearing nice clothes, drinking booze, bossing slaves around, doling out punishment, advising Candy, and essentially running the plantation. It may seem ironic from a 3rd person, far-removed perspective but it’s a very real one - as real as Jewish kapos at Nazi concentration camps.
Then you couple that warped mentality with the ersatz father/son relationship that SLJ has for Candie and things get very emotional.
On top of all of that, there were some legitimate albeit outdated notions of salvaging honor. It was probably hard for anyone from the South to accept that a foreigner and a field slave waltzed into “THEIR” plantation and tried to pull a fast one on THEM. A degree of comeuppance was required to save face.
Toss in the fact that SLJ is still harboring sour grapes that Hilde “got off easy” from her punishment for escaping and top it all off with the fact that Stephen is inherently a vindictive assholey SOB and you have layers upon layers of motivation for him being the asshole that he was.