I debated for long with myself how to write up different
Jumpcut Junkie pieces about many of the films recognized by the Academy this
year as best films of 2013, cataloguing my thoughts in myriad ways about my
opinions on the worthy qualities, or lack thereof, behind each choice, the
message the Academy would send by choosing certain films and not others, and
even whether there was, as there often is somehow, a particular theme of
interest the institution was calling attention to. Alas, these different veins
of argumentation can lead any cinema aficionado, or even just an Oscar
aficionado (they are not the same kind of animal) to stall and wait for others,
more experienced analysts to provide context as to the rationale behind this
year’s choices. And lo and behold, dear readers, you probably have already
heard maybe too much about the politics, message, rationale and context around
many of the candidates for best picture of 2013.
There is now a labyrinth of blogs, articles, forums,
discussing these films, but no discussion was more surprisingly overwhelming as
that behind films such as DJANGO UNCHAINED, LINCOLN, and BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN
WILD, particularly because of their links to the politics in the foreground of a
national conversation on race and culture. Indeed, these films have been
treated as cultural objects to be turned inside out, and have been used as
springboards for critics to touch on themes as far ranging as the workings of government today, the links between actual violence and movie violence, myopic visions of history, or the turning of it into entertainment, or its romanticizing, or even the self referential ‘linguistics’ of filmic pleasure.
I feel all those themes are fine things to talk about. They are
great propellers of erudite, insightful conversation about the cultural
signifiers surrounding us. As it turns out, these conversations are sorely
needed, for virtually everything I’ve read about these choices by the Academy
has been so concerned to place the films into a cultural podium of their own,
that the films feel to have become tangential to the conversation. There
clearly has been a strong desire to discuss these moral, political, cultural
issues, and as it is with desires, they mainly unveil our needs.
There is clearly a need to analyze, for example, Tarantino’s
thwarted view of the economic realities of slavery, or Spielberg’s literally
childish depiction of a political process by relying on didactics that mainly
seem to speak to government and constituents today as if to kids, or whether Zeitlin’s ahistorical romanticism
qualifies as ‘poetic’. But to me those are interesting, valuable conversations
that revolve around sociological patterns and the manner in which we consume
our culture and history. They are only tangential to film.
After all this valuable conversation, the questions in my
mind still remain: Are these films actual works of art? What is their artistic
stance? Will they matter, as films, or is mainly the talk surrounding the subject
they depict what makes us think of them as ‘important’? Do they point to the
future of their medium, to its past, or are they static, relying mainly on the
discussion to be had about them as cultural artifacts? What is the machinery
behind them? What of their soul?
These are to me the right questions to ask, in view of
figuring out why we should care if one or another gets an award acknowledging
its artistic stature and importance. This is also the reason why I would like
to discuss these films in the context of their artistic vision/structure and
their failings or cracks. And in order to discuss these films as artistic
works, as if talking about the context surrounding them wasn’t enough meat to
chew on, I think the most useful thing to do is to bring in another film not
considered as a candidate for best film of the year, but that I believe is a
far superior artistic achievement: THE MASTER.
I’d like to start with LINCOLN, because I feel Spielberg’s
film is both the most welcoming of tangents, and also the easiest to talk about
in terms of its artistic merit. I liked LINCOLN. I think it’s one of the least Spielberg-like of Spielberg’s
films, mainly because I feel he, as a director, finds himself with so many
things to say, so many issues to depict and represent, that his presence is
barely felt for most of the film. I
think there is a greatly smart, academic spark of creativity in choosing to
make a film about the political process behind getting a bill to pass Congress.
LINCOLN is a film inspired by the book Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius
of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and as such it should not have
been called LINCOLN, but rather carry the full name of the book. For it is
really, from the director’s perspective, not so much a film about slavery and
emancipation, or about the mind of Abraham Lincoln, but rather about his
political genius. The film is mainly a set piece for the character of Lincoln
to demonstrate political acrobatics.
Except for about 15 minutes of the film, scattered in the
first half hour, which almost reach in their own subtle way great mythic
heights if it wasn’t for the rest of the movie. In the very first minutes we
are introduced to battle scenes, tightly held and concentrated on Union and
Confederate soldiers fighting in hand to hand combat, to the death. The visuals
are striking in their grey palettes, where a Union flag holds sway in majestic
color, not really popping out but a bit washed out, as if color struggles to
keep itself from being muddied. Many, and if I remember correctly it seems that
most, Union soldiers shown in midrange close ups are African American. This is,
from the very beginning, a use of color and movement in front of a calm camera
that is both realistic and sentimental, far from the pathetic use of these
tools in SCHINDLER’S LIST to awaken sentiment and drive a point home. After the
battle, we see two black soldiers talking to a commanding figure off-screen, and
the speech of one of them, the seasoned soldier, reveals more of a rebellious
violence and sense of the violent resolution of the ‘slavery problem’ by the
people directly affected than the whole 3 hours of plot in DJANGO UNCHAINED.
Here, we learn, there have been black soldiers battling and killing Confederate
men, and the pride seen in the reporting of it suggests that
this battling spirit did not only awake just one day when the war started but
was always there, resisting oppression. When we hear a voice off-screen
reacting to the reporting of these news, we are hence introduced to the figure
of Lincoln. Many people have had problems with this introduction, since it
takes huge factual liberties to the point of being even qualified as misleading
history. The other black soldier present, who begins to point out inequalities
between black and white ranks in the military, speaks frankly and with no
nonsense to his Commander and Chief, in the middle of a Civil War. His existence
in this scene is not only a taking of historical liberties, but it is an
outright impossibility, just as Lincoln's presence in the scene is. And yet, this soldier is suddenly the most relatable and grounded
person besides Lincoln. The scene progresses simply with a shot-reverse shot
structure, and by the time this soldier speaks of what the white man may abide
of the black man in the future (equal pay, rank, and in a 100 years…the vote)
the film is suddenly alive with a curious fractured temporality: it is grounded
on historical representation of the past and yet speaks of the future as if
with knowledge, directly at us. Its speech is that of a past, which imagines a
future that we as a nation have already lived (we are products of such
progress). This is the very working of myth, brought bare and simply, without
didacticism. It is obviously historically misleading, but in its spirit, it
represents the very emotion behind a nation’s memory of the path to a more
perfect union, and as such speaks volumes.
The other brief, clear moment held in contrast to the rest of
the film, seems fully expository. Here, we see Lincoln first meeting with his
cabinet, where he proceeds to have a dialogue, as if with himself, about the
legal rationale and very logic behind his insistence in passing the 13th
amendment before Congress finishes its session. Daniel Day Lewis’ eerie personification
is here matched and strengthened only by Spielberg’s choice to focus on his
face and voice. Here there is Lincoln as a political storyteller, giving his
audience a distilled version of the great contradictions embedded in his
choices as a wartime President. The tale is given a dramatic weight, and even a
philosophical edge, in that here we see a person quickly conjure up legal ideas
and just as soon as they sink in he brings their contraries. This is the treatment
of law as philosophy, and of a commander trapped between contrary binds. The moment
could reach the heights of tragedy if it dared discuss the humanity of the
issue, the actual effect on mortal lives, but it remains an exercise of the
mind. Even so, it’s a moment were we feel a range of ideas gain some
physicality, in the face of a great performer. A whole movie could have been
made about that phenomenon by a greater director, and indeed, there was another
movie that came to mind the first time I saw that scene: THE MASTER, but more
on that a little later.
All in all, those few minutes do not make a film, and
Spielberg feels the need to, for the rest of the time he needs to tell his
story, put the audience down and treat us like children, literally making us
see things unfold from an imagined child’s point of view, meaning how an adult thinks a child could see 'adult' and 'serious' matters unfold. The one child in the story, Lincoln’s
son, is used as a prop, a mask to hide behind and see the world without wonder,
without question, but as didactic lesson. It would feel both too heavy handed
and superficial were it not for Daniel Day Lewis’ awesome embodiment of a
historical figure, showing physically the weight and torment of ideas brought into
fruition.
DJANGO UNCHAINED, on the other hand, guises itself as a
popular, entertaining revenge fantasy, willing to throw history out the window
in order to tell us how we should feel about that history. I do not agree fully
with fellow junkie Gabe, who objects to a political and moral reading of
Tarantino’s film, arguing that an understanding of the real world needs to be
left behind in order to understand this film and take it for what it really is:
an exercise in remixing, recontextualization by Tarantino our cultural DJ. In a
sense, Gabe is right to think this, given that DJANGO UNCHAINED is about other
exploitation films as much as it is about the violence of slavery and the
fantasizing of the past. Any Tarantino film is first and foremost a film about
other films, yes, and it takes a very skilled and knowledgeable filmmaker to
entertain and more, even to pleasure an audience with relentless cinematic
geekiness. What I don’t yet know is whether one can call a film like this an
actual work of art, mainly because it does not care to make an audience sink
itself into another’s vision and go back to the real world with it. With
Tarantino, there is no journey to transcendence and back into the mortal world.
All which exists is the text and the enjoyment of its textures. It’s morbid and
on the edge of masturbatory.
And yet, it is the most fun I’ve had watching a Tarantino
film since PULP FICTION. I actually like it more than I like that film, or even
JACKIE BROWN. There are specific reasons for this enjoyment, chief of them
being that DJANGO UNCHAINED in its formal structure is air tight and yet
remarkably playful, something his other films I mentioned don’t have. There is
relish in every scene, color and transformation of moral conundrums into
aesthetic coolness. Even with all its allusions and recontextualizations, the
film enjoys enough self-reliance and bravado. There is a lot of lingering, yes,
and the world created by the film is richer for it, but one never feels the
tangents to stray off, to not have a thematic center. This is also why the film
is extra problematic: it represents a fully enclosed imagined economics of slavery, and in doing so within such a dreamt up and unrealistic fantasy (yes,there can be fantasies grounded into reality—they are called myth and folklore) it can not help but negate the actual history from which its ‘cool’ anger feeds. That is the reason why writers of every sort, not only film critics,
have found it necessary to balance the representations in the film with
historical context. In clearer terms,
DJANGO UNCHAINED is an entertainment fantasy and not a creation of movie
myth, despite its uses of so many other mythical and folkloric signifiers. It
does not edify.
Nevertheless, there is a clarity of thought this time in
Tarantino that is not as prevalent in his other films, and it happens to be of
a deconstructive nature. His famous knack to pair image and sound into an
elegant, hip whole is, in DJANGO, also a path to awaken emotion and even
identification with the characters in front of us. There is a particular scene,
when Django finds the three brothers he is set out to hunt and upon seeing one
of them in the fields remembers his own time under their tyrannical violent
gauntlet, where he is forced to plead with them for the safety of his beloved,
Brumhilda. The scene is quick, but it stays with you because in it Django is
completely powerless, and very talkative. In contrast to his new cool self,
stoic and silent, bent on just saying enough to get the job done: revenge, the
Django under the threat of the whip is saddened, pathetic, and pleading, with
great knowledge of his weakness. When his pleading inevitably fails and his beloved
is whipped, all to the soundtrack of a soulful Elayna Boynton singing
“Freedom”, the emotional weight of image and song bear down with full strength
upon our shoulders too. The humiliating effect of violence is shown at a close
range, not from a safe distance. Its magnitude relies on our emotional
attachment to this scene: watching it is enough to get us mad and wish for the
retribution about to fall upon the slavers. This type of flashback is classic
Tarantino. He used it to exhaustion in KILL BILL VOLs. 1 and 2. As a matter of
fact, those films could be seen as a mosaic of those moments of recognition
before revenge. What’s more, KILL BILL is a type of deconstruction of that
motif. And yet, given the gravitas of revenge in those past projects, there is
not a drop of real sentiment shown there. Here, in DJANGO, we get a straight
forward version of this motif that is emotionally powerful too. Why is that? I
lean to think that here Tarantino, in order to give his revenge tale a
backbone, and in choosing to go into the obvious sentiment that leads to
revenge, ends up affecting us with something akin to moral awakening.
There are reasons to believe more strongly on that reading,
reasons given by other aspects of this film that are a bit unlike his other
movies. It is precisely because here Tarantino is so adept at using his own
filmic vocabulary, so much that he seems to have become a sort of linguist,
that he also tends to examine the power in the simplicity of this vocabulary. The most salient example of this process
is towards the very end of the film, right before the full blown blaze of
revenge falls upon all culpable parties. Django and his bounty hunter partner,
Dr. Schultz, have conned their way into Calvin Candie’s plantation, under the
ruse of being there to buy a Mandingo fighter. On their way to the main house,
they find a runaway slave, trapped on top of a tree and at its feet, feral dogs
barking and ready to tear him to pieces. This man ends up, after all, torn to
pieces by dogs in a very violent, raw manner. And yet when it first happens, we
do not see it but just hear it happen. Later on, when Dr. Schultz and Django
have been found out and have had to actually go through a transaction to buy
Brumhilda’s freedom, a transaction they wanted to avoid, and which Calvin
Candie uses as an opportunity to humiliate them, they are sitting on the
luxurious drawing room. Dr. Schultz sits with his back to Calvin in his
library, while everyone eats white cake, surrounded by plush old world luxury. There
is also a woman playing Beethoven’s Fur Elise on a harp. Now, we have by this
point come to know Calvin Candie as a man who surrounds himself by his idea of
high culture, a European, high class white culture. Schultz and Django are
told, before meeting Monsieur Candie, that he is a devotee of French culture,
to which Schultz responds amicably by speaking French. He then is warned, in an
alarmed manner, never to speak French in front of Monsieur Candie, who does not
know the language and is shaken in a negative manner when confronted with his ignorance.
In other words, Calvin Candie is a connoisseur of surfaces. His idea of
erudition is to surround himself with culture, to wear it like a costume. Of
course, this definition could be a line of attack that I’ve heard people use to
describe Tarantino. In such a view, Tarantino is only a cinephile in the sense
that he can only relate film reality to film reality on its surface, and never
gain or offer any real insight into the human condition. His path to knowledge
is rigidly through style. It is an approach to filmmaking anathema to that of
Jean Luc Godard, for example, who was in many ways the first director to create
films that place themselves in historical, aesthetic and political context to
other films, specially those coming from classical Hollywood. Godard’s early
style of filmmaking was a form of working through quotations, through surfaces
turned inside out in order to reveal the power of moving images to mythicize,
to even sanctify different existential systems. With Tarantino, the process of
quotation becomes commonplace and a path towards the stylization of ideas. In
DJANGO, however, there is a critical analysis of this process, a deconstruction
of it. When Dr. Schultz sits on a chair in the drawing room while Calvin Candie draws up the necessary papers to give Brumhilda to them, Dr. Schultz’s
face betrays distress. He cannot get out of his head an image witnessed: the
runaway slave being torn apart by dogs.
He closes his eyes, tired, and the image pops into his mind in full
force, only this time we are to see it too. It is indeed violent, cruel raw
scene, with no elegance to it. Thankfully it is very short, but the annoying
repetition of the first notes from Fur Elise exacerbate Dr. Schultz distress
and ours. He derails, loses his cool, and asks the woman playing the harp to
stop playing Beethoven. He has become aware of the deep rift between the cultural
surfaces surrounding him and their foundation, the violent institution of
slavery. The appropriation of cultural icons by people who in other respects
resort to the barbarity of slavery disgusts Dr. Schultz.
As far as I know, such a straight forward criticism of
cultural appropriation is not found in other Tarantino films. Of course, the
moment passes on too quickly, all clarity is lost over a handshake and the
entertainment of violence, a bloody revenge, ensues. Violence, style, and the
texture of text are not transcended: they are again put on a pedestal.
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