viz. - African-American history

Reading Django Unchained as Camp

Laura Thain — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:13:13 +0000

Although it’s been two months since its initial release, the internet is still abuzz with social critique of Tarantino’s newest film Django Unchained. Roxane Gay, a staff writer for Buzzfeed, argues that rather than encouraging a national discourse on slavery, slavery is instead “the movie’s easily exploited backdrop.” The movie functions instead as “a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, and one in which white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental.” Finally, she concludes, “Django Unchained isn’t about a black man reclaiming his freedom. It’s about a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt.”

Many of Django’s critics couch their arguments in similar terms—that is, that while Tarantino claims to reignite a discourse on slavery in Django Unchained, he in fact privileges genre over content in a way that dangerously decontextualizes our most central national trauma. I have argued in an early post that privileging medium over content can function as a form of censorship. Here, I want to discuss how the same aesthetice practice can simultaneously suggest and defer engagement with tragedy and trauma.

When Django Unchained was in the drafting stage, Tarantino hinted at his new project to The Telegraph’s John Hiscock:

"I want to explore something that really hasn't been done. I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it…But I can deal with it all right, and I'm the guy to do it."

In trying to find a way to engage with Tarantino’s claims—his claims to authority, his privileging of genre--I found DD’s argument on WhitesEducatingWhites the most provocative. In his article entitled "Whiteness Unchained: When A National Shame Becomes Camp," the author argues that although “[the] movie supposedly centered around a slave turned bounty hunter in pursuit of revenge,” it “stars white people with Black people in supporting roles.” Although DD never unpacks his claim that Django Unchained is campy, it struck me that reading Django Unchained as camp is key to deconstructing some of its problematic relationships to slavery, race, violence, and history. I refer here to Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on Camp” for some basic definitions of the form and its mechanisms.

First, “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp depends on hyperbole and in always privileging form above content. Second, camp requires rhetorical distance: “Things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.” Third, camp is a comedic form, it “proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy.” Following this, it requires aesthetic engagement in the act of detachment: “If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.” The aesthetic experience in camp is formed with a sensual engagement with the artifice—the genre, the medium, the act of mediation—itself, rather than, as in tragic forms, the content of that artifice. And, as Sontag notes, “Detachment is the prerogative of an elite.” Finally, its “essential element is seriousness.” Camp is earnest, even when that seriousness fails. Camp cannot be ironic.

Image Credit: Chief Crew

“Campifying” violence and tragedy becomes especially problematic because earnestness is the defining element of camp. There is no room for irony, critique, or satire in camp as a discourse; rather, respect for the artifice or mediation itself is the militant narrative force. If, as Northrup Frye argues, irony is the central discourse of satire, then sincerity has the same function for camp. The moment campiness attempts irony, it becomes satiric. This is why a movie like The Producers draws on elements of camp but is not campy itself—it instead implements elements of irony to levy critique against the “producers” of Broadway performances specifically by way of aestheticizing the public’s near-universal disdain for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The moment The Producers ridicules Nazism through camp, it becomes satire.

For Tarantino to claim the rhetorical distance that irony provides in addressing the national shame of slavery would be problematic from the onset, but in privileging genre over content, he extinguishes even this possibility. Instead, the film functions to aesthetize a violence so terrible that, as Tarantino notes, we as a nation struggle to “deal with,” especially in filmic depictions. By doing so, he creates rhetorical distance from the content itself. He does not campify the experience of slavery so much as he avoids its portrayal, which exists little outside of highly-mediated (i.e. highly aestheticized) depictions of violence. It is the “campification” of this violence that is so dangerous, because it encourages the reader to indulge in the violent fantasy from all angles—that of the slaver, that of the slave—without interrogating it. In operating on the assumption that slavery is universally rejected by the contemporary American audience, Tarantino defers engaging with violence in an immediate sense. Rather, he hypermediates and hyperaestheticizes violence at the cost of content—and in the case of Django Unchained, that content is any substantial character development for the people of color within the film, as well as any depiction of the actual practice of slavery.

Image Credit: Wondersinthedark

What we receive instead is proto-Klansmen who are humanized through the demotic language that distracts from the intent to commit unspeakable violence. We see women slaves sauntering the plantation grounds or dining aside their masters in the garb of the aristocracy. And we see Django himself executing his first act of revenge in emasculating, Fauntleroy garb. (Sharen Davis, the film's costume designer, designed the valet "uniform" after Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy".) The lives of slaves themselves are mythologized—most explicitly, Django and Broomhilda as Siegfried and Brünnhilde in the Nibelungenlied—while the white characters are humanized, individualized, and given complex characteristics. Because of this dynamic, King Schulz leads the film, acting as its primary agent.

Image Source: Think Progress

Finally, I would like to suggest that the film’s Academy Award nominations serve as further evidence for the dangers of camp and Hollywood’s complicitness in this sort of problematic and incomplete engagement with slavery. The film was nominated for a total of five Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Sound Editing, and Best Supporting Actor. Best Screenplay and Best Picture are all accolades that belong primarily to Tarantino himself and show the Academy’s admiration for Tarantino’s vision, and Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing rely heavily on the film’s engagement with the genre of the Spaghetti Western. All of these nominations demonstrate the Academy’s deep respect for the bare-bones aesthetic of the film itself. But Christoph Waltz’ nomination and win for Best Supporting Actor implies complicitness even with the false premise (of engagement with national trauma, of engagement with slavery) of the film itself. Although Christoph Waltz has the most lines, the most screen time, and the most character development—criteria that in virtually any other film would qualify him as the “lead”—his nomination for Supporting Actor is necessary to support the films’ other Academy-nominated accolades. We must believe that Waltz supports Jamie Foxx as lead to believe in the film. But this is one final fantasy that collapses under scrutiny.

Storytelling in Motion: Jacob Lawrence's "The First Book of Moses, Called Genesis. The King James Version."

Ty Alyea — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Lawrence, no. 1: ("In the Beginning--All was Void") Image From: Bill Hdoges Gallery

Replete with bright flashes of color, the "Genesis" series of Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), currently on display on the back wall of the Harry Ransom Center's King James Bible exhibition, pulled me in like a tractor beam from across the room. It is perhaps only appropriate, then, that the subject of this series is an enthralling spectacle of storytelling and creation.Though Lawrence is perhaps best known for his "Migration Series," a sixty-panel retelling of the African-Americans' migration across the United States, Lawrence's comparatively short (8 panel) portrayal of the narration of Genesis deserves attention for its ability to express a powerful sense of motion in a single place.

Lawrence, no. 2 "(And God Created Day and the Night and God put Stars in the Sky")

Image from: Savannah College of Art and Design

As the Savannah College of Art and Design tells us, Lawrence based his paintings on his memory of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.'s sermons at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York. Throughout the sequence, we can see that while the setting remains the same, the preacher's sermon literally transports the parishoners around the room, and, seemingly through space as well. The world outside appears to totally change, filling in from the "Void" pictured above and yielding to a rich world of plenty.

Lawrence, no. 4 ("And God Said -- let the Earth bring Forth Grass, Trees, Fruits and Herbs") Image from: Savannah College of Art and Design

As we move through the images, we can see how the preacher's expressive motions remain at the front and center of the image, capturing a sense of direct inspiration from above and radiating from the text itself. The shifting colors of his cloak, the flower vase near him, and the room itself capture a feeling of constant transformation as well. We also notice gradual changes in the arrangement of the congregation. Enthralled by the story being told, we see the congregation shifting their seats, sometimes staring at the preacher, sometimes looking up to the heavens, and on other occassions looking out the window. The neighborhoods of Harlem were in fact a major influence for Lawrence's artistic motiffs and color schemes, and their arrays of clothing, frequently synchs up with the varieties of colors inside the church and outside the windows.

Lawrence, no. 5: ("And God created all the fowl of the air and the fishes of the sea") Image from: Savannah College of Art and Design

Another significant image that we can trace throughout the images is a small box filled with tools.

Lawrence: nos. 6 ("And God Created all the Beasts of the Earth") and 7 ("And God Created Man and Woman") Images from Savannah College of Art and Design

As the images progress, we see the box behind and next to the pews (visible at the very top in image 6 and at the rear of the pew in image 7). But in the final image (below), which places the entirety of the congregation near the window showing a completed creation, the box sits in front of the group of parishoners.

Lawrence, no. 8. ("The Creation was done--and all was good") Image from Savannah College of Art and Design

This shift, I suggest points to the passing of the torch from God to the people. With his work completed, it's time for people do their own work as they look at the feast of plentitutde and creation before them. In doing so, Lawrence demonstrates a legacy between the holy text, its mediator, with the community's sense of common purpose.

"When I Rise" Tonight on PBS

noelradley — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:24:42 +0000

Don't miss the premiere tonight of When I Rise from Independent Lens (PBS). The documentary narrates the experiences of Barbara Smith Conrad, African-American opera singer and alumna of UT-Austin. Produced by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the movie documents the bigotry and discrimination Conrad faced while a music student at the University of Texas in the 1950s. The film is featured Feb. 8 (tonight) at 9 p.m., Feb. 10 at 8 p.m. and Feb. 13 at 3 p.m. CST. For UT's coverage of the story, read here, "The Story of a Voice."