Want to take Tarantino seriously? Don’t take Tarantino seriously
Django confirms it: Tarantino is the master of Avant-Pop. An ironic, anthropophagic scourge of the Hollywood industry and sanitized entertainment, he leaves no room here for cultural police who despise mass culture, treating its products as industrial waste.
Django—with a silent D, as Jamie Foxx, its lead actor, teaches us—is Quentin Tarantino’s new film. It is playing in Brazil and around the world, irritating many people and delighting a fair few crowds.
Spike Lee’s tweet at the end of the year became famous and sets the tone for what offends many activists. For those who don’t remember, Lee wrote: “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a Holocaust.”
The film tells the story of Django, a freed slave who joins forces with a German bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (a brilliant Christoph Waltz…), to search for his beloved, who has been sold to the cruel Mississippi plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).
The theory that all Tarantino’s films are one is well known. The subject was explored in the short film Tarantino’s Mind, starring Selton Mello and Seu Jorge, and its central hypothesis was explored further here, in seLecT, by Alexandre Matias, former editor of Link and current editorial director of Galileu magazine.
Beyond the connections mapped by Quentin Tarantino experts, which would establish continuity between his films, making them all part of one long screenplay for a narrative in progress, his references to the entertainment world recur in brilliant remixes of the rhetoric of B movies and comics.
But now we must add Tarantino’s view of history to this menu. After all, his two most recent films are historical fictions: Inglourious Basterds (2009), set during World War II, and Django Unchained, set in the nineteenth-century United States before the American Civil War (1861–1865).
When Basterds was released, Tarantino remarked in an interview with award-winning American journalist and writer Jeffrey Goldenberg in The Atlantic that Hollywood’s lack of imagination on the subject, with its traumatic, sorrowful scenes, was irritating. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans who are terrified of Jews. Let’s not make it all end in one big disaster; let’s take the fun of action movies and apply it to this situation.”
In that film, a group of Jewish American soldiers in German-occupied France aims to exterminate Nazi leaders. In Django, the freed slave enjoys getting paid to exterminate white people. What could be better than that, he asks ironically.
Pastiche and parody
Both films reverse positions: the oppressed take the place of the oppressor. More than that, they incorporate the oppressor’s discourses, ideology, values, and dictatorial behavior. Bloody, cruel, and hilarious, Basterds presents Jews who literally make mincemeat of terrified Nazis. In Django—also bloody, cruel, and hilarious—the eponymous protagonist, like a lone cowboy, crosses America’s immense empty expanses to write the future with the individual’s pen (and bullet).
A pastiche and parody of Westerns, Django pays tribute to the aesthetics of comics. Horses’ heads explode, and chests burst open by unerring gunshots gush blood like fountains in punctured bodies. Sound effects replace the onomatopoeia so common in comics. Audiences have fun, and rightly so. Tarantino is an invitation to noise and good humor.
He seems to follow the gospel of Mark Amerika and Lance Olsen’s Avant-Pop Manifesto in In Memoriam to Post-Modernism (San Diego University Press, 1995, p. 21), when they assert the differences between postmodernism and network culture:
One of postmodernism’s central beliefs is: I, whoever that may be, gather pieces of data and form a text, while you, whoever you may be, produce your own meaning based on what you bring to that text. One of avant-pop’s most important principles is: I, whoever I may be, am always interacting with data created by the collective, whoever that may be, and through interacting with and expanding that collective, I will find meaning.
It is in this context that Tarantino’s films gain their force. An ironic, anthropophagic scourge of the Hollywood industry and sanitized entertainment, he leaves no room here for cultural police who despise mass culture, treating its products as industrial waste. It is on our horizon, and its clichés are there to be devoured by countless strategies of symbolic hacking. As Amerika and Olsen said:
In an Age of Data, when we risk suffering from information poisoning (…), creating a work of art depends increasingly on the artist’s ability to select, organize, and present the pieces of raw data at their disposal. We all know that originality is dead and that our contaminated virtual realities are already readymades, ready for consumption!
That said, there is only one way to take Tarantino seriously: don’t take Tarantino seriously.
Enjoy.
Django Unchained. 2012
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.
With: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Distribution: Sony Pictures
www.djangolivre.com.br
Images: Sony Pictures publicity and IMDb
Originally published in seLecT magazine online.