preview

Django Unchained

Decent Essays

If I was alive in this time period and had the chance to become a bounty hunter I would take it because of how much money you would earn and how when you get good at killing you would be pretty much invincible as you would know how to help yourself. The hero of Django Unchained is the freed slave Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx), who working as a bounty hunter gets to exact revenge on white slave owners. However, it is Django’s partner Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) who stands out as the alter ego for the film’s writer and director Quentin Tarantino. As an outsider who has come to America to make his fortune in the ‘flesh for cash business’, Schultz is how Tarantino imagines himself in relation to Hollywood. He is playing the game, but …show more content…

One style is gleeful and based on the fantasy of a slave rising up against his tormentors, the other is gruelling and demands the audience recognise and respect the history that the film is engaging with. Tarantino has his cake and devours it. Another important characteristic of the film is the frequent use of the word ‘nigger’. Tarantino has been previously accused of using this loaded and destructive word too carelessly, especially in Pulp Fiction(1994), allegedly without fully appreciating the historical context of the word to undermine and oppress an entire racial group. Regardless of whether anybody believes that about Tarantino’s previous films or not, it is difficult to accuse him of misusing the word in Django Unchainedwhere it is directly tied to the calculated way that black people were viewed as sub-human, even to the extent that some of them believed it themselves. And then the film even goes one step further when the character Stephen (Samuel L Jackson) is introduced. Fiercely loyal to his white master Calvin J Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), Stephen embodies many of the stereotypical traits that have been used throughout cinematic history to ridicule black characters. He is a despised character within the film designed to show the audience how loathsome many representations of black identity have been, from The Birth of a Nation onwards. Jackson also gives an extremely funny performance,

Get Access