'Django' expresses an anger not every filmmaker can show: Jarvis ...

In "Django Unchained," an enslaved man has declared he won't participate in fights to the death anymore. He is being rewarded for his refusal by being mauled to death by dogs. A German visitor, ostensibly on the Mississippi plantation to purchase a so-called Mandingo fighter, is visibly sickened at the spectacle, to the great amusement of the plantation's master. He turns to Django, the unflinching black man who is pretending to help the German scout the best black fighters, and tells him his boss doesn't look so good. Django agrees. His boss, he says, "ain't as used to Americans as I am."

If you've tapped into social media, you may have noticed the spirited debate over the movie. Much of the debate has been driven by black people who think that director Quentin Tarantino is dishonoring black culture with this movie about a black man killing slavers to rescue his enslaved wife. But chattel slavery isn't black culture. And if black folks own it as such, then we really have been bamboozled. The dehumanizing brutality was visited upon our African ancestors, but its character was American, through and through. If that wasn't understood before, it becomes an unavoidable conclusion once Django, played by Jamie Foxx, describes the killing of the black man for kicks as typical Americana.

We may tell ourselves that America came into being because of its high-minded ideas - liberty, justice, the pursuit of happiness - but really, doesn't it all come down to violence, the triumph of the people with the guns? People indigenous to this land were declared savages and wiped out by Europeans. Those same Europeans brought in other human beings from Africa. There have been a good number of movies about American slavery, and a whole genre of movies about white folks' violent expansion into the West. "Django" is a Western set in the South. It's a bang-bang-shoot-'em-up with a black man playing something other than a hero doomed to die.

That doesn't mean Tarantino should be swept up into the NAACP. He has said some ridiculous things in support of "Django." For example, he says that "Roots," the 1977 mini-series that begins with Kunta Kinte's capture in The Gambia, rings false to him. Thus he implies that "Django," with an angry black protagonist who walks through master's front door and eats at master's table, is truer in its character depictions and its storytelling.

It's ironic that a man who makes a movie about white people lording their power over black people seems unaware that he has privileges in 2012 that writer Alex Haley did not have in 1977, privileges that Haley probably wouldn't have today. Haley originally called his manuscript "Before This Anger." That's telling, isn't it? If "Roots" is less angry than Tarantino thinks it ought to be, maybe that's because watering down the anger - indeed, changing the title to excise that word - was the only way to get Haley's story out.

A white dean on my campus said she wouldn't see the 1997 movie "Rosewood" because white friends had been unnerved by black moviegoers cheering a white man's death. That movie, directed by John Singleton, was inspired by the real-life attack by a racist lynch mob on the mostly black town of Rosewood, Fla. The black people fought back. I knew the scene the dean was describing, and I told her, "But he was the bad guy." He was shot off his horse as he was galloping and taking aim at two innocent children. If her friends had gotten that far into "Rosewood" and didn't rejoice at the sight of a would-be lyncher being shot to hell, what was the point of their going to that movie?

"Django" is fun to watch. At times, it's embarrassingly fun to watch. That said, I don't know if its depiction of slavers being bullwhipped, shot and blown up - there's even a scene where the missus gets her due - is being better received because more time has passed or because this revenge fantasy sprung from somewhere other than a black person's head. I suspect that much of the anger at Tarantino is not about the film he made but at a Hollywood establishment that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for black writers and filmmakers to do the same.

Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at jdeberry@nola.com or 504.826.3355. Follow him at http://connect.nola.com/user/jdeberry/posts.html and twitter.com/jarvisdeberrytp.

Source: http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2012/12/django_expresses_an_anger_not.html

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