Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) [151 points / 16 votes]
(Originally posted in a longer form here; reposted and modified with the author's consent.)
"Don’t you all have those tingling sensations when you watch certain films? Like when you are sitting in your chair, eating your supper, and suddenly the door knocks and someone else opens it, and you know that it’s the mailman with just the thing that you ordered or wanted to receive? Don’t you all have that sensation? That you know that the thing that is coming is just right for you? Well, that’s how I felt when I knew that there was going to be a new Quentin Tarantino film, a western that revolves around the issue of slavery in the Deep South of the United States.
The thing is that, looking back on the masterpiece that was Inglourious Basterds, there is one scene that stands out among the others. I’m not talking about the "best" scene, but the one that is the "most different" of them all. While the 2009 film was a pastiche of many genres and references, either literary, filmic or musical, it was still pretty much grounded in the war genre as well as exploitation cinema. Nevertheless, there is the scene at the bar in the basement when some of the Basterds are meeting up with Bridget von Hammersmarck in which the whole tone of the film shifts a bit. When seen in comparison to Django Unchained, this scene turns out to be a rehearsal for the themes and the genre that he would exploit here: the gunfighting that ensues, the card games, the conversation, the angles... everything is lifted up from western movies, and the principal theme in that scene was that of identity. Every element in that particular moment of Basterds was related towards who we are, what we are and where are we from. You just have to watch the scene a couple of times to really take into account how much of it is about identity: the card game where everyone is taking another "personality" and has to guess who they are by asking the others (what a fun game as well, to play in summer evenings), the whole of the accent endeavor where a German can know where you are from just by listening to the way you talk, the pitfalls of hiding your own identity by speaking German yet still getting cultural signals mixed up.
So in this script and film (something that he was prompted to do after not being able to finish a critical essay on Italian spaghetti Westerns), he expands these ideas about the Western genre and shifting identities for two and a half hours for us to wonder and enjoy. It’s just wonderful the depth that he goes into when he cuts and films every scene. Let’s just take one of the most already-"famous" ones, the one where the proto-KKK has a discussion on the bags on their heads. The fact of that scene, that which connects it to the rest of the film, is its theme about how they are trying to hide their identities. There’s also a meta-joke thrown in about how a famous actor (Jonah Hill, who really surprises here in his tidbit role) is thrown on in a role for a masked KKK member... again playing with ideas of identity and anonymity. So identity is a large part of it, and much of that is due to the fact that it’s a Western, and Westerns have always toyed with names (The Man with No Name comes to mind, as does Nobody changing his name into Trinity or the other way around), reputations (even a recent film like Rango is telling of how that element is important to the genre), or how the past can change someone’s fate and how they are always carrying their past with them (literalized as the coffin being carrying in the original Django). So here, Tarantino mixes up a significant trope of the spaghetti Western with a particular element of it that he explored before in the previously mentioned scene from his last film -- the issue of representation, of performing or acting a role as a way of affirming, hiding or otherwise muddling one’s identity.
The whole film is rife with references to the act of performance, both literally (Dr. King Schultz asks Django to perform the role of his servant when they are looking for the Brittle brothers, and later he is asked to play the role of a black slaver, during which he specially emphasizes that he needs to play the part with the furious anger that he feels towards those kind of people) and in a more metaphorical sense. In that latter sense, we have Calvin Candie "playing" a franco-phile without any actual knowledge of the French culture nor idiom, as well as "playing" as a man smarter than he is, hiding his ignorance under a suggestion of brilliance and acute ear for business, though he truly comes into himself only when he watches the mandingo fights. So, is Tarantino finally trying to tell us something with all these references to the covering of one’s identity through performance? Well... while the act of performance helps for a while, it is not something that always works, and it’s not something that will pull you out of the water when you’re drowning; in fact, it will finally bring you down low, as every character who’s hidden their identity, either through a role they are playing or with a mask or hood, are uncovered and end up dead or otherwise dealt with. Even our protagonist has to pay the price for playing a role, and even if he ends up succeeding, he still has a lot of suffering to go through to pay for his sin of trying to negate who he really is. It is when he is finally liberated of the schemes towards performance is that he can finally, truly succeed in his quest. With the final shot he assures his position towards the issue of his own race and self." - Jaime Grijalba
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