Question about Django

[Waterloo50]

I enjoyed the movie. Samuel Jackson seems to play these quirky roles such as his role in Django and the bounty hunter Marquis Warren in the Hateful Eight. Whether historically accurate or not I leave to others to answer.

One movie critic Aisha Harris said W'e are obviously meant to find him deeply problematic and to feel uncomfortable watching him. That discomfort is the point: Jackson's twisted portrayal strives to convey how slavery could inflict nearly unfathomable psychological damage, as well as unthinkable suffering of a more obvious, physical kind.
The character of Stephen gives real complicated pain to a peculiar institution.

 

[James B White]

The point is, it is one of those movies that focuses on a particular period and then magnifies the worst bits of that period of history,

The problem is that if a movie is to "tell" me something about a certain time and social situation, I have to suspend disbelief first. Django didn't allow me to do that because it seemed to require more knowledge and love of other similar movies than the 1850s, and that's not me, though it is a lot of other people, and everyone has a different point at which they'll suspend disbelief. I mentioned the German guy telling the white men that all the slaves were witnesses to his innocence. If only the testimony of slaves against whites had been allowed, how different the south would have been! But no one bothered to look up one basic way that whites used to keep slaves legally powerless, because that didn't matter to the target audience.

If someone has to exaggerate the evils of slavery to make it seem upsetting and horrible, well, they're not making a movie about slavery any more, because slavery can stand on its own. I'd venture to say that 12 Years a Slave got across the same idea of the helpless horror of slavery while sticking very close to the book, which was at least a participant account and typical if not specifically verifiable in each detail.

 

[Waterloo50]

The problem is that if a movie is to "tell" me something about a certain time and social situation, I have to suspend disbelief first. Django didn't allow me to do that because it seemed to require more knowledge and love of other similar movies than the 1850s, and that's not me, though it is a lot of other people, and everyone has a different point at which they'll suspend disbelief. I mentioned the German guy telling the white men that all the slaves were witnesses to his innocence. If only the testimony of slaves against whites had been allowed, how different the south would have been! But no one bothered to look up one basic way that whites used to keep slaves legally powerless, because that didn't matter to the target audience.

If someone has to exaggerate the evils of slavery to make it seem upsetting and horrible, well, they're not making a movie about slavery any more, because slavery can stand on its own. I'd venture to say that 12 Years a Slave got across the same idea of the helpless horror of slavery while sticking very close to the book, which was at least a participant account and typical if not specifically verifiable in each detail.

I'm in agreement with you all except one point and that is where you raise 'If someone has to exaggerate the evils of slavery to make it seem upsetting and horrible, well, they're not making a movie about slavery any more, because slavery can stand on its own', I can see and understand the valid point that you make and your right, 'slavery can stand on its own' but only to those who care to look or try at least to understand it', we live in a culture where people are aware of slavery but ask most people and they will more than likely have a limited understanding, 'I happen to include myself along with those who don't have a deep enough understanding'. Perhaps popular films like Django Unchained have a place in modern culture, it obviously raises awareness and that can't be a bad thing despite the fact that it's historically inaccurate.

 

[James B White]

I'm in agreement with you all except one point and that is where you raise 'If someone has to exaggerate the evils of slavery to make it seem upsetting and horrible, well, they're not making a movie about slavery any more, because slavery can stand on its own', I can see and understand the valid point that you make and your right, 'slavery can stand on its own' but only to those who care to look or try at least to understand it', ...

What I mean is that the horrors and excitement of slavery don't require making up things like slaves being pitted against each other in fights as the worst awful thing. Some real life things:

All kind of tortures on deep south plantations, from using an angry cat to rip open a slave' s back to various pronged collars that prevented a person from lying down, to letting dogs chew on runways for a bit. Plus whipping, stocks, hanging by the thumbs, etc. Or hanging, mutilating, burning, heads on pikes or all four, for more serious crimes.

Intrigue: Whites who pretended to be underground railroad conductors to steal slaves and sell them. Or blacks who pretended to be runaways to discover safehouses and routes, then went and told slavecatchers. Or whites who sold black partners, who then escaped and rejoined the white man, they split the sale money then headed for the next town and new victims.

Combine the real life stuff into a good plot, and I think it would be just as accessible to audiences as a fantasy version of slavery. One weakness of 12 Years was its plot, because it stuck to the book. Kidnapped guy tries and fails, tries and fails to escape slave, then finally a random anti slavery Canadian carpenter shows up and solves his problems. "But that's how it really happened" is little defence against the rule that the main character should solve his own problem in an exciting showdown at the climax. But a fictionalized story using real attributes of slavery can solve that.

 

[Allie]

The problem is that if a movie is to "tell" me something about a certain time and social situation, I have to suspend disbelief first. Django didn't allow me to do that because it seemed to require more knowledge and love of other similar movies than the 1850s, and that's not me, though it is a lot of other people, and everyone has a different point at which they'll suspend disbelief. I mentioned the German guy telling the white men that all the slaves were witnesses to his innocence. If only the testimony of slaves against whites had been allowed, how different the south would have been! But no one bothered to look up one basic way that whites used to keep slaves legally powerless, because that didn't matter to the target audience.

If someone has to exaggerate the evils of slavery to make it seem upsetting and horrible, well, they're not making a movie about slavery any more, because slavery can stand on its own. I'd venture to say that 12 Years a Slave got across the same idea of the helpless horror of slavery while sticking very close to the book, which was at least a participant account and typical if not specifically verifiable in each detail.

I kind of feel like they made it clear in the rest of the movie that the German was not himself aware they were not valid witnesses. He's not exactly a legal expert, although he projects an air of authority. His cockeyed and unnecessarily complicated schemes are meant to seem cockeyed - to the audience, not to Django.

What everyone missed, I guess because we're all so serious about this subject, is that it was funny. No one complains that a Mel Brooks movie was not historically accurate.

 

[Dave Wilma]

did men such as Stephen ever exist and if they did, what was the outcome for them after the war had ended.

Men such as Stephen existed in the form of drivers and more privileged house servants. There was a whole caste system in slavery imposed by the slave holders as a management tool. The image of Legree supervising the whipping of a slave by another slave is based on reality. (in concentration camps there were trustees called capos).

After emancipation drivers could still supervised gangs of slaves, but under sharecropping, each tenant worked his own plot. All that mattered was what crop he delivered at the end of the season and the planter was out of it. If there was bad blood with drivers, et al., it got sorted out like all human issues.

 

[Dave G]

What everyone missed, I guess because we're all so serious about this subject, is that it was funny.

Exactly! It was almost as much fun to see Quentin Tarentino get blown to bits as it was to see Ted Turner biting the dust in Gettysburg.

 

[James B White]

I kind of feel like they made it clear in the rest of the movie that the German was not himself aware they were not valid witnesses. He's not exactly a legal expert, although he projects an air of authority. His cockeyed and unnecessarily complicated schemes are meant to seem cockeyed - to the audience, not to Django.
What everyone missed, I guess because we're all so serious about this subject, is that it was funny. No one complains that a Mel Brooks movie was not historically accurate.

I thought he was supposed to be a super clever manipulator of the law, after how he got out of being guilty of murdering the man in the saloon, and it was exciting/funny because it actually worked. But let's say he didn't know US law; the coffle drivers surely did.

It all comes down again to suspension of disbelief. Slapstick and more subtle humor works if one can swallow the premise--in this particular world, for example, Buster Keaton can lift and throw railroad ties as needed to keep a train running, or whatever. In this case one needed to believe that low class whites didn't know they could get away with anything as long as only slaves witnessed it. In a movie about the mistreatment of slaves, I couldn't buy it, in addition to all the other anachronisms, but obviously most people could. It wasn't a movie for people like me.