Vengeance is Clean; Vengeance is Cruel
Ta-Nehisi writes:
When I think of Django Unchained all I see are rape scenes and scowling dudes. One of the problems, at least for me, is that I don’t actually hunger for a revenge flick about slavery. I understand why Jews might hunger for a some cathartic revenge in terms of the Holocaust. There’s a certainly clarity to industrialized genocide. But slavery is something different, something at once more variable, intimate and elusive.
Right — there’s clarity: “to kill” is in some ways cleaner than “to enslave,” in terms of revenge. And Hitler’s face can act as a symbol of the enemy, or evil incarnate, in a way that Jeff Davis’ (for good reason, I’d be inclined to believe) can’t. But there’s also the question of what “revenge” means in the context of chattel slavery or Nazi genocide: Tarantino didn’t fantasize about transforming Hitler into a musselman and then gassing him. He fantasized about two machine-gun toting “New” (“Steroid”?) Jews emptying their magazines into his dying/dead body. Perhaps it’s over the top — but it’s still simply killing. Revenge in the context of atrocity tends to mean “desire to kill.” This is the form it almost wholly takes after the event. But from within the event — from, in fact, accounts secretly written in and buried nearby Auschwitz — one finds the desire to do this precisely to them. And this is part of the problem that TNC is pointing toward in his final sentence: that, since slavery can’t be reduced to the shorthand of “murder,” it’s harder to ignore the question of the particular cruelties revenge would call for.
More to the point, however, I think is that any desire for “cathartic revenge” among Jews more than African-Americans has to do with proximity: sixty years against a century and a half; one can’t find someone who still bears the literal scars of slavery but one can still find, on their grandparent, neighbor, or friend, blotty numbers tattooed on the left wrist. It’s still more personal in a way that it won’t be after another ninety years.
But catharsis and revenge are dangerous things, and not just for our souls. They stand as alternatives — either fantastic and impossible or misdirected and dangerous — that stand in the way of grappling with the event. Even if one can’t come to terms with or comprehend, there’s still a need to learn how to not come to terms with or find incomprehensible. Catharsis and revenge are replacements, that is, for history and for living.
If you’re going to deal with moral issues, you should have a moral perspective, or even an immoral perspective. Tarantino lacks this altogether, which is why his movies seem so vapid with repeated viewings. He just knows movies, not people. His films are like cinematic mix tapes of things from other films. Granted, he has visual style and an ear for dialogue, but that’s what makes it so depressing. He’s like a great filmmaker who has never and will never make a great movie.Report
There’s a genre out there that might fit, maybe, in this Tarantinoesque category.
Black Dynamite kinda might fit. It isn’t a slavery revenge film per se… but, it seems that like Tarantino, it’s a genre that ought to have a great movie even if it never will.Report
Spaghetti westerns + blacksploitation films, which I’m guessing was how this movie was pitched.Report
that, since slavery can’t be reduced to the shorthand of “murder,” it’s harder to ignore the question of the particular cruelties revenge would call for.
It seems that the particular cruelties from Blaxploitation films (the one from most of the ones that I’ve seen, anyway) involve being needed by The Man. The Protagonist doesn’t need The Man. He’s doing fine on his own. The Man needs The Protagonist, though and comes out and says as much. The Protagonist helps, kills some people that The Man couldn’t handle, helps some people beneath The Man’s notice, and sows some seeds.
He demonstrates strength, industry, virility, and, most importantly, INDEPENDENCE.
It’s a pity that so many were crap.Report
Yeah, there are some really bad ones. Most of those exploitation films at that time were made by a sort of alternative studio system that could be as formulaic as the majors, but was just cheaper. There were a few good ones. Jack Hill never made a movie that wasn’t entertaining at least and he did a few. Jamaa Fanaka made three great ones (Welcome Home, Brother Charles, Black Sister’s Revenge, and the first Penitentiary) while in film school that blended neo-realism and blacksploitation. I’d note that my opinion of him is not exactly mainstream. And The Spook that Sat by the Door is one of the most radical movies ever released by an American studio (which was why the FBI called for it to be pulled from release).
In general, those films work best when the main story is loudly about victory, but the subtext (often that supplied by the culture of the time) is quietly about failure. That’s when they have resonance.Report
Do you think he’s a psychopath?Report
I loathed Inglourious Basterds, and that’s as someone who enjoyed most of Tarantino’s prior work. Sad to see he’s continuing on this idiotic direction.Report
I read an article about IG that talked about how many of the actors had said something to the effect of “isn’t it great that we’re finally doing this?”Report
I didn’t even loathe IG, just found it bloated, boring, and ultimately pointless. (I expect the same would be true of Kill Bill.)
John Barth is a brilliant writer, a constructor of brilliant edifices, prose that alternates grace and pyrotechnic, plots so clever than they still amaze on the tenth re-reading, in short, a writer with only one flaw: he has nothing to say. Tarantino is like that too.Report
“something to say” is probably the point of cinema. not so much with movies. (kill bill is an excellent movie)Report