In Tarantino’s vision, slavery’s definitive injustice was its
gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized
degradation. Malevolent, ludicrously arrogant whites owned
slaves most conspicuously to degrade and torture them. Apart
from serving a formal dinner in a plantation house—and
Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and
Best Original Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of
plantation life from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind,
as well as old Warner Brothers cartoons—and the Mandingo
fighters and comfort girls, Tarantino’s slaves do no actual work
at all; they’re present only to be brutalized…. Django Unchained
trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and
lurid excesses. Slavery also was fundamentally a labor relation.
It was a form of forced labor regulated—systematized, enforced
and sustained—through a political and institutional order that
specified it as a civil relationship granting owners absolute
control over the life, liberty, and fortunes