Recently I saw someone say on social media that if you’re considering Tarantino’s approach to race, you need to look at all his films, not just Django. To my surprise, though, the writer went on to say that looking at all the films, Tarantino was revealed as a filmmaker who didn’t get diversity, and didn’t care about race.
That doesn’t seem right to me. Tarantino does mishandle race sometimes, and can be racist. But compared to his white peers, he shows a consistent engagement with race, and a consistent commitment to casting actors of color in his films. Sometimes he doesn’t even come off so badly compared to black directors (he arguably has better roles for women of color than Spike Lee.)
Django Unchained and Jackie Brown are both thoroughly integrated, with numerous black actors in both starring roles and bit parts. Kill Bill 2, and especially Kill Bill 1, use numerous Japanese actors (and some other actors of color as well.) Death Proof has 3 or 4 (depending on how you’re counting) leading roles for women of color, which is practically unheard of in mainstream action films. Pulp Fiction has multiple leading roles — including arguably the lead role—for black actors. Four Rooms has a small cast of five people or so, of whom two are black. Reservoir Dogs and Inglorious Basterds are more like traditional Hollywood films; they both have minor roles for one black actor (though Samuel Jackson sneaks in as a voice over on IB). But still, it’s pretty clear that Django isn’t some sort of tacked on aberration. Much more than contemporaries like the Coen Brothers, or David Lynch, Tarantino has thought about racial diversity, and used diverse actors, throughout his career.
Again, diverse casting isn’t the be all and end all. Reservoir Dogs indulges in a bunch of racist chatter for no real reason except that Tarantino seems to think it’s cool (he is wrong.) Steven in Django is (I think) a racist caricature. Making a slavery revenge narrative is arguably a bad idea. And so forth. And of course, Tarantino is a white guy; when he sits in the director’s chair, he does nothing to advance the most consequential kind of diversity in Hollywood. Still, if Hollywood in general could get to a Tarantino level of diversity, that would be a big step forward in terms of representation. And a lot more actors of color would get paid.
Noah, I disagree. Counting the number of non-white straight male actors in leading roles in Tarantino films tells us very little about the director’s approach to race. What we know from the back-of-the-envelope census above is that Tarantino’s willing to hire diverse casts for his films; the characters they play, the racial sensibilities they present in Tarantino’s visions are another matter entirely, as you recognize.
I understand why many who support increased pop culture diversity support content creators who hire and display racial and gender diversity in their productions. The financial help these decisions provide actors of color should be noted. But simply showing up on screen as a woman and/or a person of color in a major motion picture does not automatically engender progress.
Review the social content of Tarantino’s films, and you’re left with a director who divorces race and gender from historical context to offer nihilistic badassery for Call of Duty fanatics and anime aficionados. Race for Tarantino presents yet another opportunity for slaughter, for depravity, for criminality; in his films Black male characters are most informed by Blaxploitation antiheroes than anything else. This speaks to a limited, myopic failure to regard people of color as fully realized humans in Tarantino’s work that cannot be overlooked, no matter how wealthy Samuel L. Jackson becomes through their collaborations.
I don’t really agree with any of that. Or I guess only provisionally.
It’s true that who you cast isn’t the be all and end all of an approach to race…but I said that repeatedly in the piece.
I don’t think he divorces race and gender from historical context. And I don’t think he looks for opportunities for depravity. He’s definitely informed by blaxploitation, but at least sometimes in a way that’s about undercutting those tropes (Ordell thinks he’s in a blaxploitation film. Doesn’t go well for him.)
Django’s kind of a mess, but Jackie Brown is, I think, very smart about race, and what it means to be a woman of color in a world that hates you. Death Proof includes extremely sympathetic portraits of numerous women of color. Jules in Pulp Fiction is a blaxploitation badass…and then he decides that that’s not the life for him, and walks out of the film.
I mean, there’s lots of things to criticize in terms of Tarantino’s approach to race. But I don’t think the kind of blanket condemnation of bad faith you make here is sustainable.
Christ, even I know enough about Call of Duty to know it has nothing to do with Tarantino. As for “anime fans” as a pejorative, check your cultural hegemony.
(“I don’t hate anime fans because I hate Japan, anime isn’t authentic Japanese culture, it’s pandering to white people who don’t understand Japan like I do, real Japanese people hate it…” Yeah, never heard that one before.)
Graham, perhaps J is talking demographic appeal (albeit while looking down).
Sure, he’s talking about demographic appeal; all those Americans who become unclean by watching Japanese cartoons.
You did. That’s why I said “… as you recognize.”
But it’s also clear that when having conversations about art and race, one of the easiest ways to positively reevaluate someone’s contribution is to count how often they’ve used people of color in their work. This dynamic leads some to stop the analysis there; the whole “as long as I see people of color, life is good” perspective that I routinely condemn. Obviously your support for Tarantino’s race record is more nuanced than that, but it started with an accounting of his interest in casting people of color and women, and I never find such accounting wise.
When I watched Inglorious Basterds I knew I could not watch another Tarantino film, so I never saw Django, and likely never will. Genocide’s no arena in my view for nihilism-as-entertainment, though I recognize that some viewers very much enjoy material that uses historical human calamity as backdrop for violence porn. It’s quite possible that Jackie Brown treats its woman of color protagonist with sophistication, or that Death Proof treats women with sympathy.
But Jules’ epiphany in Pulp Fiction does not impede the viewer’s blaxploitation badassery pleasure, and that badassery characterizes Jackson ever since, not the rejection. Hell, Kill Bill 1 and 2 are chock full of disgusting Asian stereotypes; these films define anti-Asian Hollywood tropes in modern cinema. I’d forgotten about the needless racist dialogue throughout Reservoir Dogs. If I’m wrong about Tarantino, a handful of debatable high points on race in his work exist amid a steaming pile of racist invective, stereotypical portrayals, and dehumanized violence, often inflicted on people of color in amazing numbers.
Recall that the last half of Kill Bill 1 involves one single White woman who slashes and hacks her way through scores of Japanese people. Tom Cruise’s Last Samurai has nothing on the Bride, and I hesitate to agree that the person responsible for hate crime action films today expresses nuance on race in his movies worth consideration.
@ J. Lamb
Well, better that than piety, which is what we usually get.
Read: I hate devices from movies disproportionately directed by and starring black people, and disproportionately popular with black people, but I swear I don’t have anything against black people.
Kill Bill is not my favorite Tarantino by a long shot. But 1 is such a celebration of Asian cinema…I dont’ know. Like, you see her kill the same people multiple times. That’s not an accident.
I’m always somewhat hesitant to speak as a Jew, but what the hell. As a Jew, Inglorious Basterds is far and away my favorite representation of the Holocaust; far, far superior to utter dreck like Schindler’s List, mediocre pablum like Maus, and even pretty good accounts like Eli Wiesel’s Night. I guess there are things that are close (D.M. Thomas’ The White Hotel, Celan’s poetry.) But as a take on the way that the Holocaust is central to American justifications of violence, and in which the image of the Holocaust has become central to American identity in depressing ways — it’s brilliant. It is the opposite of nihilism, at least as far as I’m concerned. It really gives me hope. It’s a beautiful film.
Graham, J. Lamb is black. You don’t have to hate black people to dislike blaxploitation. Some people would argue the opposite — though I don’t agree with that either.
And you know…Graham, if you could restrain yourself from doubling down & saying that J. Lamb still hates black people or some such, that would be great. You messed up (I’ve messed up in similar ways in the past; it happens.) Just apologize and move on, if you can.
I may have done any number of things, but I didn’t “mess up.” First, I guessed – though didn’t know – that J. Lamb was black. Second, maybe you really do think black people can’t hate black people, but I don’t.
Though “hates” was your word, not mine.
Sigh. I think everyone is touched by racism. I think white folks castigating black people for being insufficiently racially sensitive is one form of discourse that is often implicated in racism.
And…I’m going offline for awhile, and don’t want to leave this open with things so heated. So I’m going to close it for a bit. I’ll open again later today or tomorrow probably. Thanks everyone.
Okay; so opening this and the other thread again with a little trepidation…but I guess we’ll see how it goes.
Well, J. Lamb may of course have thoughts, but all I’ve got to add is that I wish you’d just straight up call me racist instead of putting it decorously.
I think what you did was kind of racist. But, as I said, racism is hard to avoid for everyone in a racist culture. I’ve done racist things too.
Alright, close enough. Thank you! (Wish you’d left off the “kind of.”)
“Racist culture” is redundant.
Also: I would say you are here being superficially self deprecating but basically complacent – that is, you basically don’t doubt that you’re right about what you shouldn’t and should do (this includes “listening”), you merely admit that you sometimes fall short.
(Okay, so evidently I lied about having nothing else to add.)
For the record, I don’t believe that anyone in this conversation is a racist. I wouldn’t waste my time speaking to racists. That being said, the notion that I have something against Black people because I do not prefer media that demeans Black people is both laughable and sad.
Popularity offers little relevance here: during the blaxploitation era, consumers did not have many options should they desire Black protagonists in American film. There was little avenue to choose between the Mack and something more respectable, so the idea that some Blacks found blaxploitation heroes desirable may only reflect the desire from some to find heroism in those like themselves, nothing more. I may not share their views, but nothing I’ve said here should reasonably allow anyone to conclude that I have something against Blacks. Again, laughable and sad.
No; I can point out specific instances of me being racist; there was a painful incident just recently. I think I’m right in this case, but I said I’ve been racist in the past because I’ve been racist in the past. I suspect I will be again in the future. I try to own up to it when it happens and do better, but I certainly wouldn’t say I’m always successful.
I don’t know why “listening” should be in quotes? I do think listening is important. “I’m so anti-racist I don’t need to actually pay attention to black people and can just sneer at them because they’re not as awesomely anti-racist as I am;” I don’t find that a tenable position. And I think it’s the position you end up in if you somehow decide listening is beneath you, or somehow unimportant.
Also, for what it’s worth, I don’t think racism necessarily has a ton to do with knowing what you should and shouldn’t do, always. It’s often about cultural assumptions and about how you treat people, and about being in particular positions of cultural power.
Noah, I’m not sure Tarantino celebrates Asian cinema, just as I hesitate to support the idea that he celebrates blaxploitation, as others have suggested throughout his career. I think he just makes the movies he’d like to see, and those preferences are informed by some of the same difficulties on race many in his demographic experience.
Put bluntly, Tarantino’s what happens when someone offers the kind of racial insecurity Stanley Crouch discussed in The Artificial White Man a camera and an action movie budget. He’s the White guy who treats racial diversity like some giant all-you-can-eat buffet, where cultural traits and innovations and history can be ripped from context and manipulated according to his whims, with no interest or concern for anyone’s humanity.
Tarantino borrows liberally from pop culture representations of minority groups, but has little interest in any nuanced portrayals of people of color. Asian martial arts are cool; let’s use that! Blaxploitation’s badass! Throw it in this movie. You suggest that Jackie Brown stands in opposition to this view; I think that if Jackie Brown’s the outlier, that’s a problem.
We won’t find an uncool and unfunny Black man in Tarantino’s films. We won’t find Asians without martial arts mastery. I stopped watching Tarantino because I dislike when people of color are asked to represent stereotypes first, and humans never. Using the genocide our ancestors suffered in like fashion starkly displays the amorality of this cultural borrowing, but others can comment on that. I couldn’t watch it.
“We won’t find an uncool and unfunny Black man in Tarantino’s films”
that’s just not the case. Marvin (the poor guy who gets shot in Pulp Fiction) is neither cool nor especially funny (his fate is humorous in an awful way, but he’s not funny in the sense that he’s clever or witty.) D’Artagnan in Django isn’t funny or cool; he’s a broken man. Ordell in Jackie Brown wants to be cool, and acts cool, but he’s a huge ridiculous fuck up.
I don’t really get how a film about the evils of slavery is taking black people out of cultural context. There are certainly elements that are ahistorical, but that’s the case in 12 Years a Slave too. And the ahistorical elements aren’t divorced from cultural context; Mandingo fighting never happened, but the delight at seeing black people hurt each other isn’t some sort of contextless interpolation. Similarly, in Jackie Brown, the source material is changed to have a black protagonist, but that’s not done in a contextless fashion; it matters a lot that Jackie is black, in terms of how few options she has, and in terms of the way in which the police (and Ordell) constantly underestimate her.
I don’t really know what the difference is between celebrating Asian cinema and making the movies he wants to make when the movies he wants to make are so obviously about the fact that he wants to make movies like those he’s seen.
I don’t even really like Django, and I have major reservations about his use of Asian steroetypes in Kill Bill. But you seem to be suggesting that he’s not thinking about what he’s doing at all, and that he has no interest in issues of racism. I just don’t think that’s true.
@ J. Lamb
Data? Because so far all we’ve got is the fact that black people bought tickets (in numbers disproportionate larger than their share of the population) and you speculating that they’d rather have bought tickets to something else.
Anyway, a key word is “little” (as opposed to “no”). It was an injustice that black Americans didn’t have the opportunity to make a much greater number of serious films in the early ’70s, but Claudine was made and released and it was less popular than Shaft.
Likewise, the black American-made entertainment that is most popular among black Americans today is generally not the most “respectable” available, and I’m guessing you don’t like most of that either.
Repeating it really makes it persuasive.
@ Noah
I put “listening” in scare quotes because lately a lot of people use the word when what they actually mean is agreeing.
I am paying attention to J. Lamb. Also, J. Lamb is a black person, not black people.
Making or not making assumptions, and treating or not treating people one way or another, are things you do (or don’t do).
they’re things you do or don’t do, but knowing (or thinking you know) what’s right isn’t always the thing that matters most in terms of how you behave.
And, fwiw, when I mean listening, I do mean listening, not agreeing.
@ me
This is much too mild. For that I’ll cop to racism. The point that follows stands, though.
@ Noah
So what is most important? Knowing the degree to which to defer to other people? That’s still knowing something.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing about anything in my characterization of you, except terms.
Ah, well. Terms matter.
No. I’ve suggested that the lack of meaningful choice for people interested in Black protagonists explains Blaxploitation popularity to a degree that can’t be overlooked in order to justify one’s support for the jive-talking coonery found in those films. Black people have never enjoyed a full range of portrayals when they decide to visit a movie theater; part of the person of color experience in America involves one’s developed ability to navigate pop culture choices that mostly ignore your existence.
So when films are released that display Blackness, people interested in seeing that support those films, quality be damned. Tyler Perry offers the best analogue to the blaxploitation era today; his films routinely gain massive support from populations Hollywood largely ignores, quality be damned. This notion that Black people prefer tales that denigrate them is absurd. We have precious little sense of what Black moviegoers prefer in theaters, since they’ve never been offered meaningful choice in those spaces.
I would say that whatever is most important, I’d rather have you being a jerk to me than other commenters…so I guess this divergence has worked out okay…
@ J. Lamb
They have less choices than white moviegoers, but they do have choices, and again, I’m pretty sure you don’t like what they actually choose today either.
I would say your claiming to know better than most black moviegoers what is denigrating to them is paternalist.
@ Noah
What’s the non-jerk way to say I think you’re complacent? Not saying it at all?
You’re right, the delight some people experience at black-on-black violence has resonance today; most popular contact sports require this color-coded bloodlust to remain viable. But I question the person who concocts fantastic and illogical scenes to demonstrate the basic inhumanity in American chattel slavery. Horrid physical and psychological violence was inflicted on Blacks in America for centuries, and we retain enough of that historical record to know the utter stupidity of any slaveowner who would submit his property to unpredictable human cockfighting. Even pregnant slaves were whipped with care taken to preserve their fetuses. It’s insane: American slaveowners were sadists and businessmen. They understood that dead slaves do not draw profit.
So why include such bizarre scenes in a slavery epic? Answer — it’s not a slavery epic, just like Inglorious Basterds is not really about the Holocaust. These films dramatize vague perceptions about justice-as-vengeance within violent eras; historical detail gets in the way. This is why I suggest that for Tarantino, cosmopolitan borrowing from people of color matters more than people of color humanity.
To respect Black humanity, one needs some knowledge of the historical circumstances that developed Black people. One needs respect for history. Nothing’s sacrosanct with Tarantino, not the Holocaust, not slavery, nothing. He can’t respect our history enough to respect our humanity, and that’s why so many scenes in Django display egregious violence towards Blacks. That’s why lacerated and dismembered Japanese flood the latter half of Kill Bill 1. There are many who enjoy this hyperviolent, contextless storytelling — the same people who enjoy first-person shooters, anime, and other violent pop culture marketed to 18 to 35 year old men. Perhaps I’m just not a member of his target audience.
So, again, Inglorious Basterds is more respectful of the Holocaust, in my view, than almost any Hollywood film I’ve ever seen, and than most other works of art.
I don’t think “respect” equals verisimillitude. If it did, you’d have to say that Celan wasn’t respectful.
I also don’t think it’s true that capitalist self-interest led slavers to necessarily take care of slaves, or put limits on their sadism. I actually like that Django gets at the gross excess of slavery, and the way that sadism could outweight business sense, for very wealthy people (and slavers were very wealthy.) That didn’t happen in quite this way in the South…but I’d say the argument (by folks like the Economist) that capitalism protected slaves is way, way more common than the opposite view. I think Tarantino in that sense is a welcome corrective.
I think the Mandingo fighting is in there as a way of asking viewers to question their own investment in the movie, which has parallels with the slavers watching the fight. I don’t know that it works entirely (Inglorious Basterds is smarter about this sort of thing) but there is definitely a point to it.
12 Years a Slave shows egregious violence towards blacks too. I think a movie about slavery that doesn’t show egregious violence towards black people is going to be a movie with some problems.
General note: I think there’s a significant indicator of how exactly Tarantino thinks and feels about race in a pair of scenes in the second half of Death Proof – first, when the heroines are playing around and Zoë Bell yells “Faster, you black bitch!” to Tracie Thoms, in a comradely way; or what Zoë (the character, obviously, not the person) thinks of as a comradely way; or part of her does – the second, when Zoë thinks she’s going to be knocked off the car by Kurt Russell and killed at any second, and takes a moment to apologize to Tracie.
It’s not that she(Zoë)/he(Tarantino) exactly thinks she did anything wrong, and she/he isn’t going to stop doing it – but she/he knows it’s not quite innocent either.
@ J. Lamb
Setting aside the particular case of Tarantino, I would say that treating anything as sacrosanct is a sure-fire way to make bad art.
As for Django Unchained, I would say it is essentially, first and foremost, a movie about Tarantino waking up to the fullness of the horror behind the myth of the antebellum South – or at least getting some of the way there – and concluding that he needs to kill it; paralleled by Christoph Waltz’ journey from nominally despising slave society but being willing to do business within it to exposing himself to certain death by killing Leonardo diCaprio (his thoughtlessness with regard to how this act endangers Django may or may not be a conscious statement on Tarantino’s part), and reflecting the larger recent tendency among white liberals to aggressively attack the antebellum myth after 140 years of mostly tolerating it.
“(his thoughtlessness with regard to how this act endangers Django may or may not be a conscious statement on Tarantino’s part”
I wish it were a conscious statement. There doesn’t seem to be much recognition in the film that he put their lives at risk for nothing, or that he’s an ass.
The problem with Django isn’t that it’s too callous or bloody. The problem is that it’s glib in a way that Tarantino usually isn’t. Spielberg could almost have made big chunks of that movie—including the King Fritz character.
I mean, there are other problems. Jamie Foxx isn’t a very good actor, for example.
This is so true and so trenchant that it’s making me physically wince.
Spielberg wouldn’t have killed him, is probably the only difference.
I don’t know. I was just about to post: And while we’re on the subject, that fucking scene where Django briefly pays his respects to Schultz/Tarantino’s dead body to confirm that he’s cool with black people… vomit.
That could be Spielberg too.
If he did kill him, though, he probably would have given him a much more drawn out death scene. (“Earn this…”)
Yeah, that scene is horrible, not least because I found it kind of moving.
I think Spielberg would have kept that scene and then have it turn out Schultz isn’t really dead.
Have I mentioned how much I hate Spielberg? How I hate Spielberg…Django is very flawed, but compared to Amistad it looks like a work of genius.
Same here.
Ha ha ha!
My favorite part is when the British navy evacuates the slave fortress like modern special forces rushing hostages to safety. Because when the redcoats show up in Africa, it’s good news!
J. Lamb,
“To respect Black humanity, one needs some knowledge of the historical circumstances that developed Black people. One needs respect for history. Nothing’s sacrosanct with Tarantino, not the Holocaust, not slavery, nothing. He can’t respect our history enough to respect our humanity, and that’s why so many scenes in Django display egregious violence towards Blacks. That’s why lacerated and dismembered Japanese flood the latter half of Kill Bill 1. There are many who enjoy this hyperviolent, contextless storytelling — the same people who enjoy first-person shooters, anime, and other violent pop culture marketed to 18 to 35 year old men. Perhaps I’m just not a member of his target audience.”
I agree with the last sentence; you J. Lamb are definitely not the target audience for any kind of hyperviolent entertainment.
However, since you evince the same disdainful reaction to BASTARDS– in which the majority of persons killed are white– that you have to films in which non-white characters are killed, as in KILL BILL– I suggest that your extreme animus toward such violent films makes it impossible for you to cry “racist” at KILL BILL with any intellectual consistency.
If you dislike hyperviolence, that makes it inconsistent to find some of it racist? If you dislike historically contextless yet historically set movies that benefit from genocide in what you think is a questionable manner, you are inconsistent if you believe there is some racism degree of there? J’s comments about IB seem to me to be of a piece with his other concerns.
Yeah…I don’t think J. Lamb is being inconsistent. I don’t agree with J. about IB, and only partially agree about Kill Bill and Django, but Gene’s comment doesn’t make much sense to me.
Noah Berlatsky: “Reservoir Dogs indulges in a bunch of racist chatter for no real reason except that Tarantino seems to think it’s cool (he is wrong.)”
This sentence has send my mind spinning.
The characters in this movie commits various crimes, including torture and murder. They have a VERY questionable value system, yes? With this in mind, isn’t it a bit silly to even notice their racist language?
Don’t get me wrong – on some emotional level, I can follow why racist language seems MUCH more questionable than torture and murder. But there’s still something crazy about it.
The torture and murder are (to my mind) clearly marked as wrong. The racist chatter is supposed to be funny (like much of the other chatter in the film.)
Also…the murder and torture are fake. The racist chatter is real racist chatter.
I think Tarantino may agree with me, here…or at least, he retained murder and torture through all of his films, but the racist chatter isn’t part of later movies. (At least not in the same way; racist characters in Django are treated quite differently from the casual racism in RD.)
I always took the casual racism of RD’s characters to reflect upon the characters negatively, to implicate the violence as negative (for those not otherwise bothered by violence), and to be implicated as negative (for those otherwise not bothered by the racism). These are bad people who do bad things, and Tim Roth has to endure pretending to be okay with it all. Their false professionalism, code of conduct, their brotherhood, and sense of cool, their ultimate answer of violence are all built up and torn down in this movie (and they all burden Roth, whether he accepts them or not). Even when they’re not doing other bad
But I certainly can understand how a viewer might be bothered by (or, perversely, enjoy) the racism in the movie, since it offers no direct judgment. Which is sort of a similar argument to Tarantinian nihilism.
*Even when they’re not doing other bad things, the criminals are still racist jerks bantering about their hatred.
I mean, the kind of clincher for me re the racism in RD is that the one black character is underutilized, and ends up basically being a magical black person stereotype.
Tarantino may have intended the racism to implicate the characters as bad people. It’s delivered in much the same spirit as the a lot of the not racist banter, though; the squabble over the check, for instance (which makes Pink look bad, maybe, but not anyone else), or the burble about Joe’s little book.
Is the racism supposed to make the characters look horrible (a la a lot of the violence?) or is it funny/humanizing? The answer to that doesn’t seem as clear as it might be, and the clumsy use of the one black character doesn’t help.
“If you dislike hyperviolence, that makes it inconsistent to find some of it racist? If you dislike historically contextless yet historically set movies that benefit from genocide in what you think is a questionable manner, you are inconsistent if you believe there is some racism degree of there?”
The simplest way for me to put it is that if the only way you can define a literary phenomenon– be it ultraviolence, imperialism, or whatever other bugaboos you can conveive– in terms that are either “bad” and “bad, but with racism added”– then you’ve failed to come up with any internally consistent definition of said phenomenon, and you’re just expressing your own personal tastes.
“The torture and murder are (to my mind) clearly marked as wrong. The racist chatter is supposed to be funny (like much of the other chatter in the film.)
Also…the murder and torture are fake. The racist chatter is real racist chatter.”
The torture and murder are (to my mind) clearly marked as wrong. The racist chatter is supposed to be funny (like much of the other chatter in the film.)
Also…the murder and torture are fake. The racist chatter is real racist chatter.
It’s possible that Tarantino wants his more enlightened audience-members to laugh at the crooks, not with them.
Aren’t the murders and tortures just as real as anything in the movie’s diegesis?
to your first comment, that makes no sense. If one bad thing is bad and the second bad thing is also bad and you put them together and say this is bad, tha’ts somehow inconsistent? What the hell?
The murders and torture aren’t real. Racist jokes are real racist jokes.
I mean, it’s in a fictional setting, obviously. And I’m not saying it’s absolutely verboten in every regard. But the movie is actually using racist language. It’s not actually killing anyone.
Re: your reply to Post– I think you are valuing the clarity of a supposed “political purity test” over the vagaries of art. For Tarantino to write in a black character who disproved racist stupidities would be the worst kind of “preaching to the converted.”
I think what Noah is saying is that we, the audience, know that nobody was actually killed or tortured in the making of the film, but the actors really did say, while being video and audio recorded, the racist things they say.
If we’re supposed to laugh at them for talking racist, it’s not clearly indicated. My take away is that Tarantino, like many white nerds, enjoys (or enjoyed) saying racist things, and – being a filmmaker – making his characters say racist things, partly because it’s naughty and partly because he thinks black people are cool, and black people get to say those things, and he wants it confirmed that it’s okay for him to say those things to, because then he’s an honorary black person.
@ gene
Eh, done right, I think that could be an effective slap in the face to white audience me members who like talking racist. Of course, it’s preaching to the converted as far as white audience members who don’t like talking racist, but they’re not the only people in the audience.
Yeah; “if Tarantino did this badly, it would be bad” is of course true. However, that doesn’t make what Tarantino did good, nor does it indicate that a change would in fact be bad.
It seems like you’ve got a political purity test yourself right? “Don’t deal directly with racial issues” is every bit as political as the suggestion that maybe you should.
Tarantino doesn’t face a binary choice when he decides to include racist dialogue in a film. It’s not reasonable to assume that the inclusion of racist language somehow provides an objectively purer artistic experience.
Further, there’s nothing intellectually dishonest or difficult about the idea that hyperviolent movies are bad and racist hyperviolent movies are worse. As has been discussed several times, the violence, however excessive, is fake. The prejudice is real, and inflicts real harm on real people.
And again, some viewers would have people of color stomach films and other pop culture offerings that lampoon them in stereotypical, racist ways, that pepper human speech with ethnic indignities, that show the callous murder of scores of racial minorities without explanation or apology. Some call movies like this ‘fun’.
I do not, and that reason alone prevents my enjoyment of Tarantino’s work. Perhaps Graham is right, and there’s truth to the old charge that Tarantino’s films display someone who asserts his self-informed ability to find racial common ground with Blacks and Asians such that his work need not shy away from racist depictions and commentary about those non-White populations. Maybe this is how Tarantino proves he’s down, though I doubt that really matters.
The real problem is that Tarantino’s movies generated a fanbase that does include people who delight in vile racist commentary, just as it includes people who delight in extreme violence toward racial minorities (not to mention extreme violence generally). Any attempt to re-examine Tarantino’s race record through his work should grapple with this dynamic, in my view. Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained offer many reasons to question this filmmaker; Jackie Brown can’t save him from everything.
Though I admit, I’m not very fair to Tarantino. I’ve no interest in someone’s who’s work requires a perspective on race I cannot share or appreciate when that perspective also requires me to absorb racist commentary or worse on screen. I don’t understand people who enjoy saying racist things, as Graham describes it, and whatever his motivations Tarantino’s material identifies him in that camp. It’s hard to move past that in my view.
There is a question here, which came up in another thread regarding Tarantino’s use of violence, as to how responsible he is (or should be) for his audience. If, for example, a goon enjoys something, and doesn’t see that it is done by bad people who continuously do bad, stupid, and questionable things (as is often, but as in KB, not always the case in Tarantino’s movies when it comes to violence and racism), I am not sure I would hold the creators accountable for that. Especially where the film itself offers direct critism (which, admittedly, is not the case in RD) of racists or violent people, if the audience doesn’t catch that, it’s *kind* of like calling ‘The Stranger’ or ‘Crime and Punishment’ nihilistic entertainment.
When I saw Tim Roth at a showing of his movie, ‘The War Zone’, he complained about his own meathead following, who didn’t even understand the movies he’d been in, and thought they were really cool. You should have seen his face afterwards, when I asked him to sign a RD poster. I wanted to him, well, the poster shop didn’t have anything from ‘The Trial’, but he looked so disappointed, I couldn’t say anything.
I definitely see the rest of your argument, J. Treating real historical attrocities as a kind of fantasy playland is disturbing and ahistorical. I think Tarantino’s original script for ‘Django’ did a better job of this by being less of a fantasy, being less outlandishly violent, making more sense, and humanizing its characters more (though without really addressing the root problem).
And I concede to Noah that RD could and should have done more in RD to connect the immorality of the chatter to the immorality of the characters–even a line from Roth in his conversations with his mentor, like, “I can’t stand these racist shitbags,” would have helped.
*I wanted to tell him…
J., I don’t think Graham’s saying that Tarantino wanting to be black is exculpatory or anything. I think it’s something he plays with and thinks about in various ways in his films, but fetishizing black people can certainly be just another form of racism.
I don’t think J. Lamb is saying that I’m saying Tarantino’s wanting to be black (or rather, “black”) is exculpatory.
Tavis, I think Tarantino has more to offer moviegoers than violence and racism. You make a good argument about fans who derive perverse thrills from work that condemns and/or questions immoral behavior; I certainly don’t hold Vince Gilligan at fault for people who loved Walter White’s crimes. My problem is that in his more recent work, Tarantino’s embraced violence over nearly every other form of conflict resolution, while he’s tossed various populations (White and non-White) into fantasy meat grinders. It’s one thing if one’s just starting out, and trying to establish a fanbase. It’s another thing entirely if you’ve been a Hollywood fixture for a generation and the color-coded violence only gets worse in your work.
For example, try as I might, I don’t really think it fair to criticize Tyler Perry for colorstruck fans of Diary of a Mad Black Woman. But if light-skinned Black men are still presented as the answer to all happiness in his later films, it’s fair to question Perry’s interest in that dynamic. Tarantino’s love of racial stereotype and violent overreach in recent work deserves the same critique. If playing to the masses means rehashing stereotypes and worse, then yeah, count me out.
And Noah, I didn’t suggest that Graham’s assertion was exculpatory. That entire marketing where Tarantino’s the guy who ‘gets’ race should be discarded in my view; I took Graham as explanatory, if anything.
J. Lamb, ah, okay, that makes sense.
I’ll just say again, I guess, that as a member of the formerly marginalized group supposedly tossed into the meat grinder in Inglorious Basterds, I really think that film is brilliant. It’s maybe my favorite movie ever (at least on some days.)
“to your first comment, that makes no sense. If one bad thing is bad and the second bad thing is also bad and you put them together and say this is bad, tha’ts somehow inconsistent? What the hell?
The murders and torture aren’t real. Racist jokes are real racist jokes.
I mean, it’s in a fictional setting, obviously. And I’m not saying it’s absolutely verboten in every regard. But the movie is actually using racist language. It’s not actually killing anyone.”
J. Lamb’s definition of ultraviolence as something he finds intrinsically bad– and supposedly contrary to his avowed “historical context”– is poorly reasoned, and therefore he has not made his case that ultraviolence is “bad” in and of itself, though of course he’s free to think so purely as a matter of personal taste. If he can’t come up with a better definition of ultraviolence than that it’s allegedly “contextless,” then his analysis of racist ultraviolence is also groundless.
The racist jokes are being uttered in a fictional context. Some audience-member may indeed get his feelings hurt if he can’t divorce fantasy from reality, but such audience members are not the best barometers for artistic validity.
I thought about responding to JL, but decided that my response to NB covered all of JL’s points, except for saying that I don’t think any artist is responsible for people who misinterpret his work, because there’s absolutely nothing under the sun that CAN’T be misinterpreted by SOMEONE.
As Aleister Crowley supposedly said when someone asked him about Jesus Christ: “I hold him entirely faultless for the religion that was foisted upon him.”
A “fictional context” isn’t the same as actually being fiction.
J, I think at least part of what Tarantino’s doing with the meat grinder is laying hard into his fans and detractors to test their boundaries or question their biases. ‘You like it when Nazis are killed, but what if they’re honorable soldiers or there’s a whole theatre of ’em and they’re defenseless? Doesn’t it become too much at some point?’ or, ‘You say you hate all this violence and gore, but if you keep watching–and when will you stop?–doesn’t it become absurd at some point?’ I find this a rewarding line of thought, to some extent, but not one that really excuses the ahistoricity capering of ‘Django’ or the bloody orientalism of KB (particularly volume 1). I am mostly with Noah on IB.
I think it’s worth noting IB violence ) and vengeance) in IB leads to some combination of despair, death, destruction, and insanity for everyone (with the arguable exception of the two remaining basterds, who are still idiotic and inglorious, at best).
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