Brockporter Film Of The Week - Django Unchained

Director Quentin Tarantino is known for his violent films. The violence is a caricature of vengeance. It is as if Mr. Tarantino is making fun of the human penchant for vengeance by making the violence so violent that it startles and repulses the viewer. This seems to be his schtick in Django Unchained which is a film about Dr. King Schultz, a dentist, who makes his money as a bounty hunger in the pre-civil war south. Schultz finds a slave who can help him identify his next targets and in return for the slave's help promises him not only his freedom but is assistance in locating his wife who was sold to a different slave owner as punishment when Django and his wife attempted to run away. The movie is one violent altercation after another with enough sickening scenes to give every holiday vengeance junkie his fix.

After viewing this film with its constant depiction of violent vengeance as the antidote for injustice, it helps me understand at a deeper level how Newtown and Webster can occur in our society. We are a society that not only easily turns to violence as the response to injustice but revels in it with a sadistic joy reminiscent of the orgasm Americans had with "shock and awe" when U.S. troops obliterated Bhagdad in self-righteous justification for the myth that the Iraqis had perpetrated 9/11. At the moment of "shock and awe" the rational reality check no longer held sway, it was the sadistic emotional arousal Americans were after.

It is films like Django which validate this sadistic joy in violent vengeance which is so much a part of the American culture that I am sure Django will be a big hit and already is nominated for multiple awards.

If you like cinematic depiction of graphic violence such as dogs tearing apart a screaming run away slave, white plantation owners betting on their slaves beating each other to death in their gaming rooms for the sport of it, and multiple scenes of geysers of blood spouting from gun shot bodies, then Django is the best pornographic film of the season available for your viewing pleasure right here in Brockport's downtown Stand theater.

As you might guess by now, I don't recommend it, and certainly don't recommend it for children, adolescents, and young adults who have chips on their shoulder and a penchant for solving their morose problems with violence. It is this kind of "entertainment" which is the backstory if we are searching for understanding of how violence occurs in our society.