Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino has perfected the dubious art of crafting artistic and engrossing films that are still no more than schlock Z-movies. Pulp Fiction is undoubtedly his best work: it redefined the grammar of cinema in a way that most average movie-goers could still enjoy. Inglourious Basterds was also inriguing, mostly due to the fantastic performances of Til Schweiger, Brad Pitt, and the formerly brilliant Christoph Waltz. But none of these films are good in a moral or philosophical sense.

The world all these films inhabit is a dark parody of our own, nihilistic and cold. If good ever prevails it's an accident, and the only good that ever prevails can only be called good because it's slightly less bad (though never any less violent) than the evil over which it triumphs. Lately, Tarantino has been rewriting a parallel history to our own, recasting crucial moments into savage caricatures that turn sober events like World War II, the Civil War, and Southern racial slavery into excuses for graphic depictions of mindless violence.

Django Unchained is by far the worst of the lot so far. The plot is simple enough: a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) teams up with the titular ex-slave (Jamie Foxx) to kill people for money; when they have enough money, they go on a wild, brutal revenge spree accompanied by gangsta rap tunes and glory shots. The blood comes in buckets, and there are unimaginably savage scenes which aren't meant to be indictments so much as catalysts for the audience's lust for "justice."

A couple of scenes in particular: a slave used for to-the-death bare knuckle fighting is eaten to death by dogs; one such fight is graphically depicted, complete with the winner finishing off his opponent with a hammer. Are these supposed to be exposes of the Old South? I'm about as far as you can get from being a Southern sympathizer, and I believe racial slavery to be one of the great evils of history, but these speactacles don't ring true. Instead, they incite the viewer against the perpetrators, keying them up for cheers and applause when the "hero" goes crazy and murders dozens of people.

This is wicked filmmaking. If anyone did half the things Django does on-screen in real life he'd be jailed, probably executed, and judged a sociopath. Why is it okay, then, to enjoy his antics through the medium of film? Why is it okay to glory in violence perpetrated in a fantasy reality, but not okay to be violent in real life? Simply put, it isn't, and the only justification to be made for such a film is that it feeds the darker appetites of humanity.

But don't we want to starve those appetites? As Christians who worship the Prince of Peace, we ought to eschew violence in all its forms, not hypocritically embrace fictional violence while decrying school shootings and rape. We ought to and we must as the citizens of Christ's kingdom and of the New Jerusalem.