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" One of the strangest cultural trends of 2012 \u2014 the year in which Americans handily reelected an African-American president despite the white vote \u2014 has been the tendency of major white directors to make films about black liberation. Way back at the beginning of the year, George Lucas&amp;#039;s Red Tails came out, a forgettable depiction of the Tuskegee Airmen and Lucas&amp;#039;s first non-Indiana Jones, non-Star Wars film in nearly twenty years. Spielberg&amp;#039;s Lincoln is a virtual shoo-in for Best Picture at the Oscars, and it is a minutely detailed, some might say laborious, account of the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment. And now, just in time for Christmas, comes Quentin Tarantino&amp;#039;s Spaghetti Western, black-revenge flick Django Unchained. It&amp;#039;s a film that is in its own way as serious \u2014 perhaps even more serious in intent \u2014 than either Spielberg&amp;#039;s or Lucas&amp;#039;s. It&amp;#039;s one of the most overt attempts ever made to deal with the physical reality of slavery. In a year in which Hollywood has been consumed with America&amp;#039;s original sin, it&amp;#039;s the year&amp;#039;s best film about slavery. The serious business, as you would expect from a Tarantino movie, is cloaked in a cloud of superficial pleasures. The blood and gore are spectacular. Tarantino seems to have developed a whole new technique of depicting a man being shot that scatters chunks of flesh along with the blood. He embraces his Spaghetti Western and blaxploitation roots to the full, though he expands the repertoire of his references to include Wagner and German fairy tales, among other things. The basic plot is classic revenge Western. Django, a slave, is rescued by a bounty hunter named King Schultz. Django&amp;#039;s wife is owned by a cotton plantation owner named Calvin Candie, played by a deliciously malevolent and brilliantly cruel Leonardo DiCaprio. They ride in, and after various adventures, rescue her. It&amp;#039;s pretty simple. But of course the simple plot of a Spaghetti Western is merely a string on which to bead various scenery. Django Unchained is nearly three hours long, and the time is filled with slaves being whipped, dogs chewing slaves to death while bystanders watch, slaves forced to gouge out each other&amp;#039;s eyes, slave women given to houseguests the way one might give a basket of decorative soaps, slaves kept in burning holes to die by thirst, slaves having their balls cut off with red-hot blades, and so on. The amazing thing about watching all this is that it&amp;#039;s all perfectly Tarantinoesque, but it&amp;#039;s also for the most part historically accurate. Tarantino himself has neatly pointed out that you cannot make a film as lurid as slavery was in reality. He&amp;#039;s right. One of this film&amp;#039;s most brilliant tricks is that, while you are watching the filmic violence, the fact that these horrors really happened keeps intruding. The monstrosity of real history in the United States surpasses any pretend violence.  Its physicality is why Django Unchained is so necessary. If you watch Lincoln, you might imagine that American slavery was a matter of debate and policy, that it was a matter of law, and that all white people needed to do was correct their intellectual error of categorizing personas as property. For a film about the bloodiest period in America history, Lincoln is oddly bloodless. Early on in the film, the president gives a long speech in which he explains the difference between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, as if that were what mattered. The only really graphic scene is a battlefield filled with the (mostly white) bodies of Union soldiers. Their suffering is the film&amp;#039;s focus, the glorious dead who paid a price so that American law could be corrected. There&amp;#039;s a scene in which Senator Thaddeus Stevens gets into bed with his African-American housekeeper; this is the closest we come to the sexual reality of life in a time of racism and racial mixing. And even then the message is: Look, black and white people can live together just like regular white people. Lincoln is confronted by an African-American woman near the film&amp;#039;s end, and he really has nothing to say to her. He admits, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know your people.&amp;quot;  Django Unchained knows that America&amp;#039;s relationship to slavery was not merely through legal institutions; it was a physical reaction to black flesh \u2014 a potently horrific mixture of abjection fused with desire. That physical sensation is what distinguishes American racism from the racism of Europe or the British Empire, where the hatred of black people was (and still is) rooted in a fundamentally intellectual contempt inscribed in law and custom. The slavemaster monster of Django Unchained, Calvin Candie, lives entirely surrounded by black people; Schultz and Django first meet him in &amp;quot;The Cleopatra Club.&amp;quot; He is much more intimate with his slaves than with his sister or his white neighbors. His head servant, a terrifying Uncle Tom played by Samuel Jackson, does not hesitate to insult him in front of visitors, but the owner of Candieland finds these antics charming; he treats his old servant like a well-loved but ornery family dog. He sleeps with black whores. His primary recreation is watching &amp;quot;Mandingo fighters&amp;quot; kill each other. Certainly, he can offer intellectual justifications for why white people are masters and black people are slaves \u2014 he goes into a disquisition on phrenology, and he accepts the existence of free black people because they are protected by the same law that protects his own property interest. But the law is only a cover that allows his sick and violent passion free rein and expression. Candie&amp;#039;s life is consumed by his relationship to black flesh, which he either wants to screw, pet, or tear to shreds \u2014 sometimes all three at once. The most interesting plot decision in Django Unchained (seriously, spoiler alert) is when Candie signs over the freedom of Django&amp;#039;s wife, and then Schultz and Django kill him anyway. For Tarantino, a legal solution will not suffice. Blood expiation is required, a physical response to a physical crime. One of Django&amp;#039;s key lines, &amp;quot;killing white people and getting paid for it,&amp;quot; has provoked the wrath of several conservative commentators. I don&amp;#039;t really know if these people are so stupid that they don&amp;#039;t understand what a movie is, or if they have just been in the business of phony outrage for so long that they have had to drop their standards to the level of the incomprehensible. Either way, they have utterly missed the point. Django Unchained is a movie concerned with the violence done to black flesh. The revenge scenes are mild in comparison. Blowing up a plantation seems like the bare minimum when you spend nearly two hours watching the crimes that supported its existence.  Needless to say, Tarantino&amp;#039;s movie will not receive nearly the adulation that Lincoln will at the Academy Awards. The Oscars likes its racial redemption delivered by white people, through clean, legal means that can be accompanied by swelling music. But Django Unchained is more honest (and much more enjoyable) than Lincoln. Tarantino understands that the laws were only the screen of the real crimes of torture and rape and murder. Redemption for Tarantino comes through genuine respect for and pleasure at the African aspect of the American experience. The soundtrack contains hip-hop as well as spirituals, which is entirely appropriate. The redemption comes, not really through revenge or law, but through love. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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