Thousands of multiracial moviegoers across the U.S. lined up for hours to see Quentin Tarantino’s Christmas blockbuster Django Unchained. Django is a slave-narrative revenge flick done in a style that combines spaghetti westerns and 1970s Blaxploitation. With so few Hollywood films about slavery and fighting back, how this story is told matters to the working class.
Some have called Django a “liberation” narrative. But to what extent is the capitalist Hollywood industry able to tell a story of true anti-racist liberation? Hollywood has historically been the main manufacturer of racist and sexist ideas. Films that are truly anti-racist or anti-sexist rarely make it to the silver screen. So is Django an exception to the rule? And what are the consequences to the working class of Tarantino’s take on racism and slavery?
The reviews for the film have been overwhelmingly positive, and in the film there is much to root for. In the opening scene a white, German bounty hunter, Dr. Shultz kills the slavers who own Django and offers Django and his wife freedom in exchange for helping him hunt slave masters. They set off, leaving dozens of dead slave masters in their wake! This multi-racial duo echoes the legacy of John Brown, the white preacher who fought slavery with violence.
In one of the most memorable scenes of the film, the head slave master, Calvin Candie, insists that Dr. Shultz shake his hand to complete the buying back of Django’s wife. In a true show of uncompromising multi-racial unity, Shultz extends his hand but pulls a gun and blows Candie away. Shultz is killed and Django battles the slave masters’ minions for his and his wife’s freedom. He blows them away one by one. As Django rides away with his wife into the sunset it is hard not to applaud this anti-racist hero.
But the question remains, what is the image that the audience will take away from this film: is it of Django as an anti-racist fighter or of a gangster who must prove his manhood with his gat?
Tarantino’s use of the Blaxploitation genre is problematic and does more to promote racist stereotypes rather than undermine them. Following the civil rights movement, Blaxploitation films replaced images of black unity with racial stereotypes. In the same vein, Django’s character is “chained” to racial stereotypes that cast black men as hyper masculine, prone to violence and out to “get theirs.”
Aside from the excessive violence, Tarantino attempts to shock the audience with his excessive use of the N-word (110 times in the film!). Tarantino claimed he wanted to present an accurate portrayal of the racism in the South. But the problem was with how the word was used. It was used not to evoke the horror and inhumanity of slavery, but to evoke cheap laughs. By keeping the N-word alive through comedy, it makes everyday racism more palatable to people because they can perceive it as “just a joke.” Racial slurs produce racial stereotypes and allow workers to dehumanize one another rather than organize together.
Throughout the film, Django is described as unique and by the head slave master as “one in ten-thousand” because of the way he stands up for himself. The phrase suggests that those who stood up to white supremacy and slavery were the exception and not the rule. From the Haitian slave rebellion to the hundreds of slave rebellions that shook the U.S. South and the Caribbean  before 1860, slave rebellion was an everyday fact of life. It involved masses of slaves, men and women, not an elite few. To present Django as exceptional and rebellion as individualistic, undermines the true history of anti-slavery fight-back.
None of the female characters in the movie, including his wife, are portrayed as fighters. Women instead, are shown to be victims that must rely on men to liberate them from slavery. Throughout history women, such as “Nanny” of the Jamaican Maroons and Harriet Tubman, have been paramount in the struggle for freedom from oppression.
Django lured audiences with the promise of racist “liberation,” but in the end sold them individualism, racism and sexism in a new package. The audience roots for Django because he is fighting slavery. But his battle with slavery is driven not by anti-racist solidarity, but by hypermasculine individualism that plays on the stereotypes of Blaxploitation films and gangster rap. These racist stereotypes served the bosses following the civil rights era as they sought to rob the gains won by a militant black working class. And these stereotypes continue to serve their needs today as they seek to justify racist unemployment, racist mass incarceration, and racist police killings.
The mass appeal of Django shows that working-class people possess anti-racist ideas and want to fight back. In fact, the true heroes are not Django and Shultz, but the multiracial groups of workers and students who saw the film hoping to be inspired by a story of anti-racist fight back. Ultimately Django does not deliver on its promise of “liberation” just like the bosses and Obama do not and cannot deliver on their promises for “change.” The working class cannot rely on the capitalist Hollywood industry to tell our stories. We must tell our own stories about fight-back, learning from past struggles as an inspiration toward building a truly anti-racist communist future.