Sitting on a Keg of Dynamite: Tarantino Discusses his New Slavery Revenge Fantasy Film "Django"

PLAYBOY: In the movie, slaves are raped and men fight against each other like pit bulls. When you made Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction, you were criticized for liberal use of the N word. There’s plenty of that here. Are you sitting on a powder keg? 

TARANTINO: Now I’m picturing myself sitting on a keg of TNT like a Looney Tunes cartoon. It remains to be seen, I guess. If we are, it’s not because I’m trying to be inflammatory. I’m just telling my story the way I’m telling it. I’m putting it in a spaghetti Western framework and highlighting the surreal qualities inherent in the material. I’m highlighting them mythically and operatically, and in terms of violence and gruesomeness, with pitch-black humor. That’s all part of the spaghetti Western genre, but I’m doing it about a section of history that couldn’t be more surreal, bizarre, cruel or perversely comedic when looked at from a certain view. They go hand in hand.

I am a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino's work. He is one of the most talented filmmakers of his--or any other--generation. In some ways, even more so than Pulp Fiction, I would argue that Kill Bill is a master work of pastiche and post-modern aesthetic conventions. In total, Tarantino's film opus is a love letter to cinema and geek culture. As a ghetto nerd, I hold him in the highest regards.

However, the more I learn about his newest "exploitation" revenge film Django, which is set in the antebellum South, the more I am concerned about his ability to match his genre sensibilities with the primordially difficult issues of race and representation that are embodied by popular culture's relationship to the Black Holocaust and chattel slavery.

As he shares in a recent interview with Playboy, Tarantino is playing with some combustible elements in Django:

PLAYBOY: But the idea of portraying these slave women as prostitutes—

TARANTINO: Well, they’re not 100 percent prostitutes. The Cleopatra Club in the film is not a brothel. It’s a gentlemen’s club, a bring-your-own-bottle kind of place. There it’s bring your own pony, and you can have dinner with her.

PLAYBOY: Pony is the term for an attractive slave woman?

TARANTINO: Yeah.

PLAYBOY: And that really existed?

TARANTINO: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s the cornerstone of slavery, or one of the things that made it work. Aside from the labor force, it was the sex on demand. The minute people own other people, we all know that’s definitely part of it. Did they do that back then? Yes. They do that right now—go to Bangkok. The thing about the Cleopatra Club is, if you like your slave girl you can take her there. You can have dinner. You can socialize. If you are a guy who wants to take your pony and just fuck her for a night on the town, okay, you can do that. But maybe you actually love your girl and she’s kind of your de facto wife. This is a way to take her out and show her a good time.

My principle worries about Django are centered on how audiences will receive and interpret the film. Every time I have seen the trailer in the theater there is an uncomfortable moment of awkward silence, then curiosity, obligatory laughter, and excitement.

People take away meaning from popular culture in their own ways.

Some will see Django as harmless fun and a signal that it is okay to laugh at a tale of slavery, rape, and one of history's great crimes which has still not been given a full accounting of. Others, will be offended not so much at the text itself, but that a white filmmaker dared to play with such a controversial and provocative subject. I imagine that many young viewers who are already socialized into a color blind lie will enjoy Django because slavery was "so long ago anyway" and why not have a good laugh at it?


The idea of black revenge is a source of great anxiety in American society. Historically, whites were terrified of black slaves rising up and unleashing a righteous and holy jihad against their oppressors. This was a reasonable fear given that slavery was an existential crime against the humanity of black people--one which African American bondsmen and free people revolted against at almost every opportunity.

Some blacks were terrified of "bad niggers" who would transgress the color line and make things more difficult for the "good" black folks who either because of realpolitik, choosing a strategy of small and quiet acts of resistance, or human fear, chose alternative means of navigating white terror and white oppression.

Fears of black revenge and demands of righteous justice still occupy a large part of the (white) American collective psyche. The conspiranoid fantasies about Barack Obama, talk of secession, and the Tea Party GOP entertainment complex's fantasies of white oppression are reactions to a deep fear that black folks, and people of color more generally, will seek justice against white people. The White Right's fears are paradoxical: they deny the existence of racism against people of color, except when there is some imagined act of "racism" against white folks, or their anxieties about being a "minority" in the United States are activated by a "threat" to white privilege and White Power.

My favorite recent moment of cinematic black revenge took place in Boardwalk Empire's first season when black political machine boss Chalky White tortured a KKK member in an act of singular revenge, and group punishment, for how white bigots killed his father. The scene was real because it was cathartic, dark, and therapeutic for those members of the public who can read themselves into Chalky White's character.

How many black folks have a story of racial violence, lynching at the hands of persons unknown, or "moments of schooling" that have been seared into their group consciousness as the descendants of human property who made themselves free?

Chalky's tutelage of the Klan member in the science and art of pain also revealed that such acts of vengeance also take a great toll on he or she who is the inquisitor. Actions have consequences for all parties involved.

Apparently, Tarantino's Django had consequences for the extras in the film too:

TARANTINO: Sociologically one of the most interesting things went down when we were on the Don Johnson character’s plantation, Bennet Manor. He has cotton fields there, and he has cotton pickers—girls, men, children, old people. But he also has ponies, and he’s the one who sells pretty girls. That’s his big stock: He is a plantation pimp, and people come from far and wide to his plantation to buy one of his pretty girls. We had a bunch of extras from the community, St. John the Baptist Parish.  

It was cool, re-creating this history with black Southern extras whose families have lived there forever. They knew what went on back then. Then there was a social-dividing issue between the extras that mirrored the ones between their slave characters in the movie. 

The ponies were pretty, and they looked down on the extras playing cotton-picker slaves. They thought they were better than them. And the people playing the house servants looked down on the people playing the cotton pickers. And the cotton pickers thought the people playing the house servants and the ponies were stuck-up bitches. Then there was a fourth breakdown, between the darker skinned and the lighter skinned. Obviously not for everybody, and it wasn’t a gigantic problem, but it was something you noticed. They started mirroring the social situations of their characters, being on this plantation for a few weeks.

Tarantino's exploitation Jewish-Nazi revenge film Inglorious Basterds "worked" because it was a product of the many World War 2 movies, made over at least 7 decades, that preceded it. The audience knows what to expect from a World War 2 man on a mission adventure film. Consequently, a director can play with those genre rules and expectations.

Because films teach audiences how to react to them, the public instinctively knows how an action movie will play out; American audiences are very well trained to World War 2 movies because it was 1) the last "good war" and 2) as such, is a moment central to our cultural myth of American Exceptionalism.

By contrast, in the United States films about slavery do not constitute a genre. Americans have Roots. The blaxploitation film Mandingo remains popular. Few folks saw Sankofa or Quilombo. The Mondo Cane "classic" Goodbye Uncle Tom has been studied by cinema students, and is also popular among exploitation film aficionados (Tarantino will likely have many signals to it in Django). Blazing Saddles is an indictment of white racism. But few know that it was written by Richard Pryor and channels his singular wit and darkly comic sensibilities; moreover, it is even more likely that most audiences do not appreciate Blazing Saddles' deep mockery of white racism.

[Did anyone even see The Skin Game? How many of you have read Max Brooks' Recorded Attacks? The latter graphic novel has a story about a zombie outbreak on a slave ship during the Middle Passage that is worthy of Romero.]

Django's peril comes from the fact that the "slavery genre" of film is rather thin. The audience for this movie lacks the cinematic training and exposure to distinguish between historical fact and cinematic license and fantasy. In short, they may know some of the rules of race in America, but this same public has not internalized the rules of slavery in American film as an exercise in genre and tropes.

I do not believe that filmmakers have an obligation to educate. Their primary obligation is to entertain the viewing audience. Of course, many filmmakers transcended this most basic responsibility and have created socially relevant art. Such choices should not be taken as a litmus test for the value of popular culture.

In the trailer for Django, Leo Dicaprio asks "why don't the blacks just rise up and kill the whites?" Such a question is a fair one. Students of American history would likely know that slave resistance was commonplace. They would also be able to give an answer about the role of terrain, geography, and how the South was organized as a military state oriented around preventing just such mass uprisings from occurring. I wonder if the average viewer of Django could give such a ready answer--especially in the context of a culture and educational system which does a horrible job of teaching its citizens about the Black Freedom Struggle, the Middle Passage, and the long tradition of black resistance (both non-violent and through arms) to white supremacy in the United States.

Popular culture is a reflection of the socio-cultural moment which produced it. Django is not a film about 19th century America. It is a movie made by a white filmmaker in response to the post-civil rights moment and the Age of Obama. Tarantino's revenge narrative is channeling a sense of black folks' triumph over formal white supremacy and the final, symbolic death of Jim and Jane Crow at the hands of Barack Obama, and those who helped to elect him twice.

Django is also playing on a particular type of white fear, and a yearning to move past a real engagement (one that has not occurred in the United States to this day) with the institutional, cultural, and political legacy of centuries of black enslavement into the world of counter factuals, fantasy, and popcorn revenge flicks.

I want Tarantino to succeed with Django. But, if given a choice between a revenge flick that plays on B-movie sensibilities about black revenge against two-dimensional white slave owners and their house negro servants, and a solid drama that exposes the reality of American slavery with the care and concern that Spielberg, for example, has shown in regards to the Jewish Holocaust, I would take the latter. Ultimately, the American people need to learn some basic facts about the Maafa before they are ready to indulge in escapist fantasies.