Django Unchained: Is Quentin Tarantino Vying to be Hollywood’s King of PC?

By Nicholas Stix

I recall that Quentin Tarantino’s movies have lots of cursing and buckets of blood. During the 1990s, I saw Reservoir Dogs, which I enjoyed immensely, and Pulp Fiction, which I also enjoyed, but which I found ridiculously overrated by the media/Hollywood pc-brigade, which ascribed a depth to it that wasn’t there, and which launched a jeremiad against Forrest Gump, for the simple reason that the latter movie was not only a masterpiece, but a celebration of human decency.

Tarantino’s fans seem to be the sort of people who, like many West Germans I went to school with, have to give you a sophistic, metaphysical “theory” to explain why they like a bad (or in Pulp’s case, less than great) movie.

I have not seen any of Quentin Tarantino’s later installations, but brother have I heard disquisitions on them, and seen clips from them. I once accidentally watched a shootout scene from a hugely popular and award-winning production called Inglorious Basterds. One of the geniuses that dominate Youtube had identified the clip as being of the greatest shootout ever, and I made the mistake of taking him seriously.

Well, there was a lot of shooting, alright.

The clips from the latter production were so imbecilic--Hogan’s Heroes meets The Diary of Anne Frank meets The Dirty Dozen that I had no interest in seeing it.

I once complained to someone that the story of Inglorious Basterds was ridiculous, and had no connection to reality. He insisted, “Everyone knows that.” I don’t buy that.

Since at least 1970, American school and college textbooks have been reduced to racial socialist propaganda, so that people who say “Everyone knows that,” like the Republicans who complain about political correctness, themselves typically have no idea what they’re talking about.

According to the ads and the explication below for Tarantino’s newest installation, Django Unchained is a bit of propaganda about slavery in the South that could have been written by the NAACP, or Leonard Jeffries. And this time, no one is claiming that it isn’t realistic. On the contrary.

“The incredibly violent film is R-rated for good reason: ‘Django Unchained’ includes whippings, brandings, beatings, dog attacks and even threatened castration, all directed at slaves.

“‘Django Unchained’ slavery depictions are not nearly as bad as history, says Quentin Tarantino.

"‘We all intellectually 'know' the brutality and inhumanity of slavery,’ Tarantino reportedly said at a screening of ‘Django Unchained’ in the U.K. on Thursday. ‘But after you do the research it's no longer intellectual any more, no longer just historical record –- you feel it in your bones. It makes you angry, and want to do something ... I'm here to tell you, that however bad things get in the movie, a lot worse sh-t actually happened.’”

[Tarantino and I must have read different books. He seems to have limited his scholarly studies to Roots and Mandingo.

What person gets violently angry after reading of injustices that were committed centuries ago? This must be a pose by Tarantino, in order to ingratiate himself with people like his violently racist star, Jamie Foxx.]

“Tarantino's film stars Jamie Foxx as the title character, a freed slave who goes searching for his wife with the help of a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz). Leonardo DiCaprio, in a character turn unlike any other he's done before, plays the villainous Calvin Candie, a plantation owner who treats his slaves with cold-hearted brutality.

"‘This movie is really going land heavy. It's the first Western that acknowledges slavery,’ Foxx told Jimmy Kimmel back in September. "In dealing with the slavery aspect of it, for black Americans -- for our education on what it is -- it's really going to land sincere.’"

[Foxx apparently conducted his history studies the same place Tarantino did. Violent black racists will no doubt use this entity as yet another pretext to victimize whites who are just trying to mind their own business.]

“Kerry Washington stars as Foxx's onscreen wife in the film. At one point, she's forced to take lashings from a whip, a scene that was incredibly tough for her to film.

[Ridic.]

"We've never dealt with the brutality of this part of American history in this way. And it's one thing to not even want to talk about it, but to actually have to see it -- to go there -- has been hard," she told HuffPost Entertainment.

[Oh, so we don’t “even want to talk about” slavery? Yet another “dialogue on race,” is this? Washington expects us to believe that it was “incredibly hard” to listen to the sound of a whip, and feign suffering? Then she’s in the wrong business.]

[“Django Unchained Slavery Depictions Not Nearly as Bad as Real History,” Says Quentin Tarantino by Christopher Rosen, The Huffington Post, December 7, 2012, 6:19 p.m. EST; updated December 8,2012, 11:34 am EST.]

Lots of blood and cussing, I’m sure.

Should I ever undertake to write a book on the auteurish oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino, I promise to dutifully study all of his, er, things, not to mention the voluminous academic literature!

Last night, I caught about two-thirds of the 90-minute-long romantic comedy, The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), starring Maurice Chevalier, Miriam Hopkins, and Claudette Colbert. My son watched and enjoyed the whole thing. (I was alternately watching and moving around furniture and books, and laying a new Internet cable, which kept me from seeing the whole thing.)

The Smiling Lieutenant was not “edgy” or “post-modern.” It wasn’t even an excellent movie, though it had its moments.

It came out during a rough time for movies, whose makers were re-learning their craft, four years after the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, and only two years after the last silent pictures had been made.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw a more recent picture, True Grit. There was an unfortunate moment of profanity, and of course some violence, but remarkably little for a western, compared to what is today routine.

Every time I see that picture, I find more and more to admire about it.

I’m speaking of course, of the 1969 original, starring the great John Wayne. What did you think I was talking about?

In 1931, directors, screenwriters, and actors all had an excuse for their clumsiness and need to re-learn moviemaking. What excuse do their successors have today?