Tarantino's pyrotechnic emptiness

Django Unchained (2012), Quentin Tarantino's latest little flop, has only one merit: sparking the interest of new generations in the Italian Western, which was truly important.

Tarantino's pop hodgepodge, however, is far from it. An obvious film buff, he uses and abuses references to the past because he has nothing significant to say about the present.

His style can be summed up in two words: pyrotechnic emptiness. That is, recalling William Shakespeare's immortal phrase, they are films that are nothing more than fables told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Django (dir. Sergio Corbucci, 1966), from which he drew the source material, had at least three memorable sequences:

The arrival of the brooding Django (Franco Nero) in a decaying, muddy town, on foot, dragging a coffin; the confrontation with Major Jackson's (Eduardo Fajardo) 42 followers, when he finally opens the coffin and retrieves a providential rotary machine gun; and his agonizing efforts to fit the Colt to his wounded hands and attach it to a cross, as the last six enemies arrive for the final duel.

In other words, despite the low production value and unremarkable cast, Corbucci shone brightly in three moments that remain among the most memorable of Italian Westerns to this day.

And, at a time when right-wing extremists were far more active and dangerous, he had the audacity to characterize Jackson's forces as a mixture of the Ku Klux Klan (the hoods and burning crosses) and Tradition, Family and Property (the red scarves around their necks).

Django Unchained, all things considered, will leave no legacy when it falls into well-deserved oblivion in a few months. Aside, perhaps, from the remarkable performances of Christopher Waltz (Dr. King Schultz) and Samuel L. Jackson (Stephen), a counterpoint to the inexpressiveness of Jamie Foxx (Django) and the hammy acting of Leonardo DiCaprio (Calvin Candle).

Spike Lee complains about the excessive use of "niggers" in Portuguese. It's the obsession of the politically correct, demanding that we use euphemisms, as if the important thing were to change how we refer to things in the world, and not to change the world itself...

Much worse for the image of black people (if nobody calls them African Americans in the streets, why should I do it artificially in my writing?) is a former slave (Stephen) becoming the most devoted servant to his master and another (Django) becoming a vile bounty hunter.

It is clear that reality is far less edifying than that desired by the Manicheans. They say, for example, that the quilombola people of Palmares also owned slaves; and we all know that it was the Africans themselves who supplied the slave ships, selling enemies captured in tribal wars.

But Tarantino goes further, attributing to his Django an extremely repulsive and historically baseless ignominy (there is no record of a black person working as a bounty hunter). And what's worse, he presents it as perfectly justifiable.

Similarly, in Inglourious Basterds (2009) he defended the most cowardly executions and the most heinous tortures, as long as they were inflicted by Jewish guerrillas on German soldiers. If Brilhante Ustra were to make a film about DOI-Codi versus resistance fighters, it wouldn't be much different...

But let's not exaggerate. Opportunism and calculation (a blatant pursuit of scandal) aside, Tarantino really just wants to make a lot of money, with the blessing of the cultural industry.

So, it strayed far, far from another emblematic characteristic of the Italian Western: sympathy for revolutions. Kicking a dead dog (racism, Hitlerism) is always more convenient.

And it's even more advantageous when the president of the Republic is black.

Article published on the blog Shipwrecked by Utopia