The Confessions of Quentin Tarantino  Joseph Vogel
The Confessions of Quentin
Tarantino: Whitewashing Slave
Rebellion in Django Unchained
Joseph Vogel
In a promotional interview for his 2012 film,
Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino claimed
that while he had “always wanted to explore slav-
ery,” his primary motivation for making the film
“was to give black American males a western
hero, [to] give them a cool folkloric hero that
could actually be empowering, and actually pay
back blood for blood” (Interview by Krishnan
Guru-Murthy). It is a revealing, if brazen, state-
ment of purpose. It assumed, first of all, that black
men needed and wanted a cool western slave hero;
secondly, that a revenge film could somehow right
the wrongs of the past and “pay back blood for
blood”; and thirdly, that Tarantino was uniquely
positioned to do it.
On the surface, Tarantino’s cultural politics fell
firmly within traditional liberal counter-narra-
tives: in place of previous cinematic histories that
omitted, devalued, or marginalized the racial
Other, Django Unchained offers, in theory, a
story in which the roles are reversed. The
oppressed are empowered, and the oppressors are
destroyed. For many critics, both black and white,
his revisionist history was largely successful. The
late film critic Roger Ebert called it a “brilliant
film,” extolling Tarantino as “a consummate film-
maker.” Cultural critic Tour
e described it as “a
heroic love story” that offered “that rare Holly-
wood thing: a film about Black history where a
Joseph Vogel is Assistant Professor of English and co-director of Film Studies at Merrimack College. He is the author of several books,
including Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson (Sterling), This Thing Called Life: Prince’s Creative Revo-
lution (Bloomsbury Academic), and James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era (University of Illinois Press).
The Journal of American Culture, 41:1
© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
17
Black person has agency and is central to shaping
his or her destiny rather than playing the foil for a
white person.” Public scholar Henry Louis Gates,
meanwhile, described it as “the best postmodern
take on slavery” in cinema to date. The fact that it
frightened and enraged the sensibilities of most
white conservatives only seemed to add to its
efficacy.
For others, however, the film’s very premise
was problematic. After reading the script, film-
maker Spike Lee, who had long taken issue with
Tarantino’s appropriations of black culture and
identity, refused to see the movie. “American
Slavery Was Not [a] Sergio Leone Spaghetti west-
ern,” he wrote on Twitter. “It Was [a] Holocaust.
My Ancestors [are] Slaves. Stolen [from] Africa. I
Will Honor Them.” Others agreed that it not only
cheapened and reduced the experience of slavery,
but that its storyline and characters largely con-
formed to old formulas and types, including
“magic negroes” (Django), hypersexualized
women (Sheba), Uncle Toms (Stephen), and white
saviors (Dr. King Schultz). These issues were fur-
ther exacerbated, claimed critics, by how few cin-
ematic accounts existed of slavery. Django
Unchained became the most popular visual depic-
tion of slavery since the Roots television mini-ser-
ies in the 1970s. Released in late December 2012
(just over a month after the re-election of Barack
18 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 41, Number 1  March 2018
Obama), the film earned over $160 million in the
United States (and $400 million worldwide) in its
first three months, making it Tarantino’s highest
grossing film to date and one of the most success-
ful movies of the year. It was also the recipient of
multiple Academy Awards, Golden Globes and
BAFTAs. According to review aggregation web-
site Rotten Tomatoes, audiences gave it a 92%
positive viewing rate. The public’s broadly shared
enjoyment of Django’s representation of slavery,
however, raises the question: why?
Filmmakers, of course, by trade, must try to
imagine other human beings, crossing barriers of
race, gender, class, and sexuality, as well as time
and place. “Anyone has the right to write about
any subject available to be written about,” writes
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “That’s what art is all
about—that’s what the pursuit of truth and the
representations of historical events imaginatively
of necessity must be about” (De Silva). Having the
right, however, is different than being effective. As
a white male scholar, I have the right to write
about literature and film created by individuals
from all kinds of identities, experiences, and per-
spectives; but that does not guarantee the results of
my engagement. It simply offers the opportunity
to work to understand—and then listen to the
response. Historically, for white American schol-
ars, critics, and artists alike, engaging with black-
ness has been particularly perilous territory,
plagued by a persistent incapacity for openness,
curiosity, and exploration beyond types. In addi-
tion, the quality of such works is often judged and
evaluated by standards that feign universality but
are in fact deeply racialized and gendered.
This indeed was the case with perhaps the most
infamous literary attempt by a white male author
to portray slave rebellion: William Styron’s 1967
novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Like
Django Unchained, Styron’s novel was a cultural
phenomenon that incited a heated national debate
about race, representation, and the appropriate
uses of history. Unlike Django, however, the
debate was largely divided along racial lines.
Released at the height of the Black Power move-
ment, many African Americans saw The Confes-
sions as a deliberate attempt to rob and distort the
identity of a revered black icon. “No event in
recent years has touched and stirred the black
intellectual community more than this book,”
wrote pan-Africanist historian John Henrik
Clarke in the introduction to his influential col-
lection of essays, William Styron’s Nat Turner:
Ten Black Writers Respond (1968). Like Taranti-
no’s, Styron’s professed objective was to, in
essence, become a black man and tell the story of
slavery and slave rebellion from the vantage point
of the slave. White critics and readers overwhelm-
ingly believed Styron accomplished this aim. The
New Republic called it the best treatment of slav-
ery in the history of American literature (qtd. in
Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives 18). In 1968, he
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He subsequently
received a staggering $800,000-dollar contract
from Twentieth Century Fox to adapt the novel
into a major motion picture. The film, however,
ultimately never materialized due to pushback
from black communities, including the Black
Anti-Defamation Association.
Released over forty years later, Django
Unchained demonstrated how such issues of iden-
tity, representation, and reception remain the sub-
ject of fierce contestation. In the case of visual
representations, since the television phenomenon
of Roots in 1977, very few attempts have been
made to account for slavery; and those few
attempts prior to Django Unchained—including
Glory (1989), Amistad (1997), Beloved (1998), and
Amazing Grace (2006)—were all directed by
white men. Interestingly, that trend finally chan-
ged following the release of Django, with the arri-
vals of 12 Years a Slave (2013), directed by Steve
McQueen, and The Birth of a Nation (2016),
directed by Nate Parker. Yet the disparate
responses to the two films highlight how racial
identity is not determinative. While both film-
makers are black, it was British director Steve
McQueen’s film, an adaptation of the 1853 slave
narrative by Solomon Northrup, that became a
box office and critical success, winning an Acad-
emy Award for Best Picture, while American
director Nate Parker’s film, about the Nat
Turner-led rebellion in Southampton County,
Virginia, in 1831, flopped. Many believed the
 The Confessions of Quentin Tarantino  Joseph Vogel
primary reason for The Birth of a Nation’s com-
mercial failure was due to resurfaced rape allega-
tions against the film’s director, writer, and star,
Nate Parker. Yet some believed it also had to do
with the film itself. Not only did the film fall prey
to some of the same traps as Django Unchained in
its emphasis on the strong, charismatic individual
at the expense of fellow slaves, including women;
it also, significantly, given the allegations against
Parker, presents rape and its consequences, as
Richard Brody notes, “entirely from their signifi-
cance to men.” Why such flaws would so damage
the reception of one film and not the other is
worth further exploration. At least part of the
public’s resistance to the film seemed less about
Parker than about its mostly black cast and histor-
ically grounded depiction of black slave rebellion.
For the purposes of this article, however, the sali-
ent point is simply that films about slavery from
black directors are also susceptible to blind spots
and mixed results.
Ultimately, this essay contends, Django
Unchained succumbs to major pitfalls not merely
because of Tarantino’s race or gender, but rather
because of how his background, experiences, and
identity inform his artistic choices. Tarantino
inflates Django into a gun-slinging, questing
cowboy who, partnering with his white mentor,
Dr. King Schultz, triumphs over all obstacles.
This triumphalism corresponds with the film’s
“postracial” Obama era context—a time in which
much political rhetoric interpreted Barack Oba-
ma’s ascent to the presidency as indicative that
racial injustice had been defeated for good. In
addition to such triumphalism (or, perhaps, in
part, because of it), Tarantino is unable to see his
black protagonist as fully human, as part of a
community, or as part of a broader struggle for
liberation. His project further goes astray when
attempting to imagine black characters beyond
his individualist heroes, particularly black
women. While the film attempts to offer a
revised history from the perspective of the non-
white racial other, then, presumably shifting dis-
positions of power, it ultimately reveals the
American desire to be done with slavery and its
legacy once and for all rather than confront its
19
complexity. It represents, that is, a way for Tar-
antino and his audience to redeem the racially
troubled past and, by doing so, evade the racially
troubled present. In this way, it is, to paraphrase
James Baldwin’s critique of William Styron, less
the “confession” of an actual black subject in the
time of slavery, than it is a (perhaps unwitting)
confession by and about the director, Quentin
Tarantino.
Riffing on History
It is no secret that Quentin Tarantino has long
been fascinated by African-American culture and
history. Often decked out in Wu Wear apparel, a
hip hop fashion line created by Wu Tang Clan, his
persona, style, and language casually dips into a
kind of affected black identity. In an interview with
GQ, he went so far as to claim he was probably a
black slave in America in a previous life (“Tarantino
Embraces Past Lives”). His comfort level—some
read it as a fetishization of black culture—has eli-
cited a diverse range of responses from African
Americans. From Reservoir Dogs (1992) to Pulp
Fiction (1994) to Jackie Brown (1997), his films are
populated with intertextual allusions to 1970s-era
Blaxploitation cinema. Characters like Samuel L.
Jackson’s Jules Winnfield and Pam Grier’s Jackie
Brown are genre types transplanted from the past
and recast in new contexts. Tarantino’s settings, dia-
logue and slang (including frequent use of the N-
word by black and white characters alike), as well
as his use of black music, including funk, R&B and
hip hop, all signify a particular conception of black-
ness that for Tarantino is both hip and camp; it
embodies a kind of neo-Mailerian, postmodern
black cool. Tarantino says such material is a natural
outgrowth of his lived experience. “I grew up com-
pletely surrounded in the 70s by black culture,
probably the greatest time of black culture in this
nation’s history,” he explains (qtd. in Interview
with Charlie Rose). Raised in Torrance Harbor
City, just outside Los Angeles, he recalls attending
a mostly black school, his mother often dating
black men, and growing up infatuated by black pop
20 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 41, Number 1  March 2018
culture. “It is part of me,” he claims. “I’m not a visi-
tor to it” (qtd. in Interview with Charlie Rose).
Such assertions have become a controversial part
of Tarantino’s public identity. His supporters—
black and white—often praise him for “keeping it
real” and sidestepping “politically correct” expec-
tations. “Quentin sees something cool about the
way we live our lives and deal with our prob-
lems,” says actor Samuel L. Jackson. “Quentin
actually lived in a black lifestyle for a while” (qtd.
in Allen-Taylor). Tarantino is also praised for
unabashedly featuring black culture and charac-
ters in his work, while other white directors often
seem to forget that black people exist in America.
“To dismiss Tarantino,” writes Tour
e, “because
his aesthetic embraces—in a bear hug—Black cul-
ture because he feels Black culture is part of his
cultural legacy is, to me, a bit precious” (“A
Heroic Love Story”). For his critics, however,
that “embrace” is less a bear hug than it is shame-
less exploitation. Long before the release of
Django Unchained, Spike Lee criticized the direc-
tor for his excessive use of the N-word following
the release of his 1997 film, Jackie Brown. “Quen-
tin is infatuated with that word,” said Lee. “What
does he want to be made—an honorary black
man?” (qtd. in Allen-Taylor). For Tarantino, the
answer was probably “yes.” His conception of
black masculinity, however, was less aligned with
understanding and intimacy than it was with Nor-
man Mailer’s belief that “the source of hip is the
Negro” (340). For Tarantino like Mailer, the sur-
faces of blackness offered cultural currency, a cur-
rency that could be adopted and appropriated
across racial lines. “The hipster,” writes Mailer in
his provocative 1957 essay, “The White Negro,”
“absorbed the existentialist synapses of the
Negro, and for practical purposes could be con-
sidered a white Negro” (341). Performing black-
ness, that is, or identifying with what one believed
it represented, made one, for all intents and pur-
poses, black. Thus, for Tarantino, his proximity to
and identification with black culture made him
“not a visitor,” but, as Lee sarcastically put it, “an
honorary black man.”
Before Django Unchained, however, Taranti-
no’s exploration of blackness mostly steered clear
of penetrating beyond the surface, focusing
instead on style. As bell hooks wrote of the direc-
tor in her 1996 book, Reel to Real:
Tarantino has the real nihilism of our times down. He
represents the ultimate in ‘white cool’: a hard-core
cynical vision that would have everyone see racism,
sexism, homophobia but behave as though none of that
shit really matters, or if it does it means nothing ‘cause
none of it is gonna change, ‘cause the real deal is that
domination is here to stay, going nowhere and, every-
body is in on the act. . .Tarantino’s films are the ulti-
mate in sexy cover-ups of very unsexy mind-fuck.
They titillate with subversive possibility. . .but then
everything kinda comes right back to normal. And
normal is finally a multicultural world where white
supremacy is intact.
(59–61)
Choosing to tackle a serious historical subject
matter like slavery, then, seemed to be a big
departure for Tarantino. “I think people need to
look at things like this,” he explained. “I mean, I
actually think that would be the beginning of
healing—if people dealt with it more. . .I know it
is a problem for both blacks and whites” (qtd. in
Guru-Murthy). This sentiment of confronting
rather than evading or glossing America’s trou-
bled racial history would seem welcome enough
in the “postracial” Obama era when many white
Americans acknowledge wanting to drop the con-
versation altogether. Yet Tarantino’s claims for
his project frequently took on a disturbingly
paternalistic tone. “I am responsible for people
talking about slavery in America in a way they
have not in 30 years,” he boasted. “There is actu-
ally a dialogue going on about slavery right now
that has not been happening at all. It is a subject
people are afraid to talk about, and now because
of this movie people are not afraid to talk about it.
People are talking about it” (qtd. in Guru-
Murthy). In Tarantino’s mind, that is, no one
really cared or talked about slavery in any kind of
depth until his film arrived in a blaze of healing
glory.
While Tarantino often spoke of his project in
“White Man’s Burden” terms, however, he shows
far more passion about the genre and aesthetics of
his film than the lived reality and after-effects of
slavery. He speaks of wanting to see the way
blood looked splattered on cotton, or hearing the
music of Tupac and James Brown accompany an
 The Confessions of Quentin Tarantino  Joseph Vogel
epic shootout (Horn). He speaks of a lifelong
dream to “recreate cinematically that world of the
antebellum South” and of making slavery into “an
exciting adventure” (qtd. in Interview with Henry
Louis Gates, Jr.). He wanted 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” (qtd. in Hiscock). Big issue
movies, he said, “feel like dusty textbooks” (qtd.
in Interview with Terry Gross). Those who have
tackled slave narratives in the past—Tarantino
specifically singles out Roots as not having the
“ring of truth”—he claimed, are “usually done on
television, and for the most part. . .they are histor-
ical movies, like history with a capital H” (qtd. in
Interview with Terry Gross). Tarantino’s goal
was to deal with slavery as a kind of a historical
fantasy, a pastiche that used as primary source
material other films—including the Spaghetti
westerns of Sergio Corbucci’s (Django) and Ser-
gio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars); Blaxploitation
films starring Fred Williamson (The Legend of
Nigger Charley and Boss Nigger); and the black-
white buddy films of the 1980s (Lethal Weapon
and Beverly Hills Cop)—rather than trying to
approximate or recover in any way the realities of
the past. Tarantino describes his process as “tak-
ing what already exists and riffing on it” (qtd. in
Interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.).
His project, accordingly, refused to be bound
by historical responsibility, asserting absolute
artistic license with his subject matter: “I demand
the right to write any character in the world that I
want to write. I demand the right to be them, I
demand the right to think them, I demand to tell
the truth as I see they are. To say that I cannot do
that because I am white, but black people can is
racist” (qtd. in Interview with Charlie Rose).
Even questioning Tarantino’s choices in repre-
senting blackness, that is, was “racist.” Yet Taran-
tino played both sides of the fence when it came
to historical veracity. At times, he was adamant
that his film was just that: a creative fiction that
used slavery as a backdrop to tell a great revenge
fantasy/love story. At other times, however, he
got angry at the suggestion he was distorting or
exploiting history. This is the way things actually
21
were, he claimed. “If you are going to make a
movie about slavery and are taking a twenty-first
century viewer and putting them in that time per-
iod,” he explained, “you are going to hear some
things that are going to be ugly, and you are going
to see some things that are going be ugly. That is
just part and parcel of dealing truthfully with this
story, with this environment, with this land” (qtd.
in Interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). Conse-
quently, he justified his recurrent use of the word
“nigger” not for the character “authenticity” of
his earlier films, but for the historical authenticity
of 1858 Mississippi. No one, he argued, could
claim that he used the word more in the film than
it was used at that time. His point was valid
enough. But it did not explain why historical
veracity mattered in the case of the N-word, but
did not in several of the film’s fantastical elements,
including, perhaps most gratuitously, the Man-
dingo fighting and the climactic bloodbath.
Indeed, Tarantino hardly bothered consulting his-
tory books to “free himself” to imagine slavery.
He was perfectly content drawing on previous
films.
For many audience members—of all races—his
approach seemed to work. Django became the
must-see film of the season and received over-
whelmingly positive responses from film critics
and spectators alike. Among scholars and cultural
critics, however, the discourse was more divided.
In the first wave of responses, the criticism of
Django was most commonly centered around five
issues: (1) its historical inaccuracies and anachro-
nisms, (2) its use of the N-word, (3) its use of
genre (i.e. the Spaghetti western/Blaxploitation)
to address the horrors of slavery, (4) the white
male identity, and sometimes inflammatory com-
ments, of its director, and (5) the exploitation of
trauma for entertainment. The debate was often
framed by pitting filmmaker Spike Lee and his
comments about refusing to see the film out of
respect for his ancestors against Tarantino’s
claims to artistic freedom. It became, that is, a
debate eerily similar to the one that surrounded
William Styron over The Confessions of Nat
Turner forty years earlier. Who has the right to
tell stories of the oppressed? How should they be
22 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 41, Number 1  March 2018
told? What happens when slavery—an institution
created and perpetuated for centuries by white
American men—is subsequently renarrated by
white men? Have we reached a point when the
racial identity of the director or author is some-
how above race or irrelevant?
Tavis Smiley—who, like Spike Lee, refused to
see the film, but read the script—argued that iden-
tity could not simply be discarded in matters of
representation. “There is clearly a level of arro-
gance with what Tarantino does, and what he
thinks he can get away with,” he said in an inter-
view with Newsweek. “There is a level of comfort
that Tarantino has with appropriating and reimag-
ining black culture and black history, and that is
what I find offensive” (qtd. in Stern). Tarantino,
he explained, had the right to make whatever films
he wanted, but Django was an example of
how you take the teeth out of the truth. . .If you can
make that torment more and more palatable by putting
the right soundtrack around it, by casting the right
actors, by throwing in a few jokes here and there, you
can make slavery easier to swallow, and you can sell it.
But it completely distorts the truth about our history.
(qtd. in Stern)
Several white reviewers agreed. “Tarantino is
dangerously in love with the look of evil,” wrote
the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, “and all he can
counter it with is cool—not strength of purpose,
let alone goodness of heart, but simple comeup-
pance, issued with merciless panache.” The trans-
formation of slavery from horror to cool fun
adventure was further exhibited when it was
announced that the National Entertainment Col-
lectibles Association, Inc. (NECA), in tandem
with the Weinstein Company, would release a full
line of action figures based on characters from the
movie, including both slaves and slaveowners
(Daniels). The release was eventually cancelled
due to public pushback, but the fact that it was
green-lighted by Tarantino and Weinstein execu-
tives in the first place, raised serious questions
about the commercialization of slave history in
the twenty-first century.
In many of the responses to the film, one
could hear the impact of postmodern thought
(“It is not history per se, but so what?” said one
reviewer) (Fisher). Spike Lee, in particular, was
ridiculed for his hardline position of refusing to
see the film out of respect for his ancestors,
which was perceived as tethered to old-fashioned
notions of historical realism and identity politics.
Cultural scholar Mark Anthony Neal pushed
against “Black American gatekeepers committed
to a politics of Black respectability, and Black
cultural hardliners invested in rigid realist inter-
pretations of ‘the Black Experience.’” The expe-
rience of slavery could never be fully “captured”
or “recovered,” no matter how “realistic” or
racially authentic the filmmaker, he argued; it
could only be reimagined. Furthermore, it was
not just the (white) director that gave the film its
meaning; audiences also participated in its signi-
fication. Visualizing the slave narrative in fresh
ways allowed (potentially) for fresh responses.
The case that genre itself was inherently disre-
spectful was problematic. Ishmael Reed’s Flight
to Canada and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, after
all, were just as experimental with genre and
aesthetics in their respective representations of
slavery.
While some critics of Django did indeed feel
that a kind of historical “realism” with the
proper “tone” was the only appropriate way to
depict slavery, others clarified that it was not
the fact that Tarantino was addressing slavery
as a “genre film” that was the problem; nor
was it his whiteness, his use of the N-word, or
even necessarily its historical anachronisms.
Rather, it was the subtle choices that made this
particular rendition of slavery so seductively
popular and palatable for audiences. The basic
outline seemed acceptable: a liberated super
slave exacts revenge on a cruel slaver, rescues
his wife, and rides off to freedom. But what
else was going on in this revisionist history?
What myths did it actually subvert and what
myths did it leave intact? How, as Toni Mor-
rison compels us to ask, does Tarantino’s cine-
matic utterance arrange itself the way it does
when it tries to imagine blackness, slavery, and
slave rebellion? The reading of Django that fol-
lows attempts to address such questions.
 The Confessions of Quentin Tarantino  Joseph Vogel
One in Ten Thousand
Django, of course, is a fictional slave. He is,
that is, a discursive embodiment of what Taran-
tino imagines the black male slave (at least the
“special” black male slave) to be. [He envisioned
Django as the ancestor to the fictitious Blaxploita-
tion hero Shaft.] While we never hear Django’s
interior thoughts, his actions throughout the film
suggest he is much different than the other slaves.
In the opening scene, Django (played by Jamie
Foxx) is walking in shackles with fellow slaves in
the woods at night, led by the hillbilly Speck
brothers, when they are met by Dr. King Schultz
(played by Christoph Waltz), a charismatic Ger-
man dentist-turned-bounty-hunter. “Hello, you
poor devils,” he addresses the slaves, before
inquiring if any are former property of the Carru-
can Plantation. Django emerges as the “chosen
one.” Dr. Schultz asks him if he can identify the
Brittle brothers; Django responds affirmatively.
His fellow slaves quickly become mere props—
nameless and voiceless. Schultz is the star here,
coolly bantering with the Speck brothers, chatting
with Django (whom we soon discover is not the
film’s hero but the sidekick) and eventually shoot-
ing one of the Speck brothers and their horse.
After freeing Django, he tosses the keys to the
other slaves, offering them the choice of taking
the remaining injured Speck brother to the nearest
town or unlocking their chains, killing their slave
master, and escaping “to a more enlightened area
of the country.” The slaves do not communicate
with each other or Schultz, but rather, as actor
and critic Jesse Williams notes, stare up, mouths
agape, like children as Schultz condescendingly
teaches them where the North Star is. Rather than
unlock their shackles, they immediately seek ven-
geance, preying on the injured Speck brother.
Their key attributes, then, are slow-wittedness
and violence. We never see them unchained; we
never hear them speak. Django, meanwhile, has
nothing at all to say to his fellow slaves with
whom he has presumably spent a good portion of
his life. They are easily left in the woods, without
23
subjectivities, personalities or agency, never to be
seen or thought of—by Schultz, Django or, most
likely, the audience—again.
Django is referred to at least twice in the film as
“one in ten thousand” blacks. We are meant to see
him as special and different. He is not like the
other docile slaves who accept their lot in life.
Indeed, the most distinctive black character
besides Django is the fiercely loyal “house
Negro,” Stephen. Played by Samuel L. Jackson,
Stephen is presented as outspoken and intelligent,
but also as sinister. Not only is he hostile to fellow
slaves and a self-satisfied servant to slave master
Calvin Candie (played by Leonardo DiCaprio),
he is also the brains of the plantation and arguably
the most prominent defender of the status quo.
When Samuel L. Jackson first read the script, he
reportedly said to Tarantino, “Do you really want
me to be the most despised Negro in cinematic
history?” (qtd. in Sullivan). Jackson ultimately
embraced the part, reminding that he played
“pretty despicable characters in most of [Taranti-
no’s] films. People loved Jules (Pulp Fiction) but
he is a murderer. People loved Ordell (Jackie
Brown) but he is a murderer. Stephen has an unu-
sual take on slavery. He is okay with it” (qtd. in
Hammond). Why Jackson decided to take the
role, however, is less relevant than why Tarantino
created the character in the first place. Why, in
other words, in a film about slavery did Tarantino
decide to make a black man as villainous, if not
more so, than slave master, Calvin Candie? Why
was a black man represented as arguably the most
significant enemy to slave rebellion and
liberation?
Certainly, the character type Malcolm X
famously described as the “house Negro” existed
during the time of slavery. Tarantino’s defenders
pointed to this “historical fact” to explain why
Stephen had to be in the film. Yet, the question of
inclusion is less relevant than the specific nature
and prominence of the role, and perhaps most
importantly, what other roles we see black char-
acters playing in the film. In Django Unchained,
Samuel L. Jackson’s Stephen has more lines and
screen time than any other black character besides
24 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 41, Number 1  March 2018
Jamie Foxx’s Django. Django, of course, eventu-
ally kills him in the climactic bloodbath. The
scene elicited loud cheers in the theater where I
attended the movie.
Yet this black-on-black violence raises serious
questions about Tarantino’s racial politics. Why,
in Tarantino’s mind, does black liberation demand
intraracial murder? Why is blackness presented as
equally culpable for the institution of slavery?
Why is Django, the film’s hero, so consistently
uninvested in black liberation or transformation?
Why are there no humanizing or intimate conver-
sations with fellow black slaves? Why no compas-
sion for them? Django looks on with no emotion
during the horrific Mandingo fighting scene,
which once again exploits black-on-black violence
for white amusement. Yet, Tarantino is not even
content with making Django silently complicit. In
a subsequent scene, when Calvin Candie and his
caravan come across runaway slave and former
Mandingo fighter D’Artagnan, who is trapped in
a tree, surrounded by ravenous dogs, Django, like
Stephen, demonstrates active disregard and cru-
elty for the man’s life. Django’s white partner, Dr.
King Schultz, clearly panged by conscience,
attempts to buy D’Artagnan from Calvin Candie.
Throughout the film, Schultz embodies rational-
ity, decency and compassion. By contrast, Django
is calloused and single-minded. Not only does he
refuse to go along with Schultz’s humane offer, he
revokes it and looks on with indifference as D’-
nan is viciously torn to pieces by the dogs.
Throughout the latter half of the film, Django
possesses superhero-like poise and courage and
“succeeds” in his quest. But his success is clearly
individualized and exceptionalized. It cannot be
considered a “rebellion” in the social sense
because it never includes other black people.
Django’s partners, including his most intimate
friend, King Schultz, are white. Toward the end
of the film, when Django is sold to Australian
miners, he refuses to get in the Cage Wagon with
a group of former Mandingo fighting slaves, call-
ing them “big ass garboons.” When he miracu-
lously escapes his death fate by tricking and
killing the Aussies, rather than bring his fellow
slaves with him, or even unlocking their cage, he
simply asks them for dynamite, and leaves them
stranded. As in the opening scene, the slaves do
not speak or communicate; they simply gawk at
the special superhero, who clearly was not
intended to be confined to cages as they are. Even
in the final scene, after Django has blown up the
plantation, the most he can offer the remaining
slaves is “to get as far away from these white folks
as you can.” He does not ask them to join him
and Broomhilda on their trek north; they are not
part of a similar emancipation, a similar move-
ment, a similar struggle. The ordinary slaves are
left to their own devices in the heart of
Mississippi.
Among the features of the film most praised by
critics is the “love story” between Django and his
wife, Broomhilda, played by Kerry Washington.
Yet Tarantino’s handling of this love story affords
Broomhilda little agency, identity, or growth. For
the first half of the film, we see her through flash-
backs. She is portrayed as a distant damsel in dis-
tress, a kind of mirage that motivates Django’s
quest, alternately appearing in flowing dresses,
swimming in lakes, or being victimized by white
men. In a promotional interview, Kerry Washing-
ton defended this role, saying, “I know it is not
the most feminist idea to be a woman in a tower
wanting to be rescued, but for a woman of color
in this country, we have never been afforded that
fairy tale because of how the black family was
ripped apart.” Washington’s reference to fairy
tales is significant. This was intentional on Taran-
tino’s part. In our introduction to her character
Broomhilda, we learn that she was raised as a spe-
cial “house slave” by an educated German family
and is bilingual, speaking German and English.
Her name clearly derives from an imposed Ger-
man heritage. Moreover, for Tarantino, her entire
identity and role in the film seems to be about ful-
filling the purpose of a German fairy tale, a quest
explained earlier in the film by Schultz to Django.
In this limited role, she is the object of others’
desires and ambitions (whether European stan-
dards of refinement or Django’s European-
inspired quest). She has very few lines; very little
character development; and very little agency.
The first scene in which she is not a figment of
 The Confessions of Quentin Tarantino  Joseph Vogel
Django’s imagination, we see her naked in a hot
box, where she is being punished, presumably for
attempting to escape the Candie Land plantation.
She is referred to by Calvin Candie as a “black
pony,” and offered to Dr. King Schultz as a gift of
“Southern hospitality.” When she first sees
Django, she faints. At no time do we actually wit-
ness an intimate conversation between Django
and Broomhilda or learn anything about their
relationship. Indeed, during his killing rampage at
the Big House, Django seems to completely lose
sight of the fact that his entire mission was pre-
sumably to save her life. The bloodbath compro-
mises everything. Tarantino’s hypermasculine
fantasy, then, comes at the expense of presenting a
meaningful role for black women. Where Styron
outright erases Nat Turner’s wife, Tarantino sim-
ply makes Django’s wife a passive cipher.
The other black women in Django Unchained
are likewise presented as extensions of male plea-
sure and power. On Big Daddy Bennet’s planta-
tion, as Jesse Williams observes, we see “a fleet of
slave women stroll the grounds giggling, in floor-
to-shoulder gowns, like they are in Versailles”
(Williams). At the Cleopatra Club, Django and
Schultz are greeted by a hypersexualized, nubile,
black French maid. Once inside, we see an array
of sultry, glamorous black women—they are
referred to in the film as “ponies”—draped and
fawning over rich Southern white men. It might
be argued that such representations, disturbing as
they are, are a real part of American history; yet
in Tarantino’s presentation it feels more like a liv-
ing white fantasy (followed, it should be noted,
by an excessively violent, and historically inaccu-
rate, Mandingo fight). As David J. Leonard
observes, the cinematic gaze in these moments
seems “to be about eliciting pleasure from its
(white) viewers” (“A Critical Conversation”).
Indeed, it feels eerily similar to a 2012 photoshoot
for W magazine, in which a sneering, silk-robed,
Hugh Hefner-like Tarantino is draped by a nude
black woman, who happens to be the fictional
“Sheba” (played by Nichole Galicia) from the
Cleopatra Club scene in Django. The image,
which was used to promote Django Unchained,
carries deeply disturbing connotations about
25
domination and exploitation not far removed
from the era he is theoretically trying to critique.
Rather than offering a fresh, honest, and respect-
ful cinematic depiction of black women during
the time of slavery, then—an era in which they
showed enormous strength, endurance, and
resourcefulness—Tarantino offers seductive
stereotypes that reduce black female subjectivity
to fetishization and fantasy.
Such choices raise important questions about
whose “slave revenge fantasy” Django Unchained
actually represents. As Roxane Gay writes of her
experience watching the film amidst a mostly
white audience: “What struck me most, sitting
there in that theater, was how Django
Unchained was a white man’s slavery revenge
fantasy, and one in which white people figure
heavily and where black people are, largely, inci-
dental.” Indeed, many critics (including Gay)
argued that the film’s real hero/savior was not
even Django, but Dr. King Schultz. As a rational
European, Schultz is portrayed as a total outsider
to the South. In contrast to the ignorant rednecks
and sadistic slavemasters that populate the film,
he is intelligent, benevolent, witty, and moral. He
cannot fathom the logic of slavery and frequently
flinches at its barbarity. The implication, of
course, is that he—and by extension all of Europe
and perhaps even the North, referred to in the
film as a “more enlightened part of the coun-
try”—have nothing to do with the institution of
slavery, racism, or white supremacy. It is just a
crazy Southern invention. Schultz may clearly
benefit from his white skin; he may care little
about black liberation on a larger scale; he may
even participate in the system; but he is ultimately
absolved because he senses it is not right. In one
scene, he casually dismisses slavery as “malarkey,”
which, while perhaps acknowledging its absurdity
also seems to dilute its horror.
Schultz’s relationship with Django is one of
instructor to pupil. Schultz has the power. Schultz
sets the terms. Schultz writes the script. Django
gradually gains more autonomy as the movie
takes on the blueprint of the classic black-white
buddy film, but Schultz is always superior, always
the mentor. When they enter a Texas town
26 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 41, Number 1  March 2018
together by horse, Schultz offers the symbolic
shield of protection that would otherwise allow
Django to be killed. Django is only free insofar as
he follows Schultz’s instructions. It is an appro-
priate metaphor for how Tarantino’s black char-
acters actually operate in the film: they belong to
him; they operate within his guidelines and imagi-
nation. They are extensions of the director.
Unlike in Blaxploitation films or in actual slave
rebellions, black people play supporting roles;
Schultz (and Tarantino) lead the way.
In the crucial climactic scene, the pattern of
white centrality holds. It is Schultz, not Django,
who, racked by conscience, kills Calvin Candie,
and in doing so, sacrifices his own life. When
asked by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. why he decided
to make King Schultz the Christ figure, Tarantino
claimed he was simply drawing on the tropes of
the western. Schultz had to die, he explained, to
liberate and empower Django. Yet this explana-
tion demonstrates that genre itself is not race-free;
the logic of the western, that is, cannot be sepa-
rated from a long history of racially inflected
tropes that represent white men as the “good
guys,” the heroes, the saviors, a point James Bald-
win often reminded. Tarantino’s explanation also
reveals how deeply entrenched the “White Man’s
Burden” remains in film and in American culture
more generally. Schultz is portrayed as not only
morally and intellectually superior to Calvin Can-
die, but also to Django. Where Django is repeat-
edly presented as desensitized to the horrors of
slavery, Schultz is finally too pure to endure it.
He has witnessed too much suffering and deprav-
ity and can no longer play it cool like Django. His
hatred for Calvin Candie, and what he represents,
is impossible to mask or contain. “Schultz,”
explains Tarantino, “is coming from almost a
twenty-first century perspective. He understands,
intellectually, slavery, but he has never seen the
everyday horrors and degradation of it” (Inter-
view with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). Schultz, that
is, is a kind of stand-in for Tarantino. Just as Sty-
ron needed a white savior to justify Nat Turner’s
rebellion, Tarantino needs one to justify the “pro-
gress” and emancipation of two slaves on screen.
White people, not the slaves themselves, must
show the moral way and make the sacrifice that
ushers in “healing.”
Final Confessions
“We all write and speak,” reminds cultural
critic Stuart Hall, “from a particular space and
time, from a history and culture which is specific.
What we say is always ‘in context,’ positioned”
(392). This “positioning” is often forgotten or dis-
missed, by white male authors and directors in
particular. White critics, likewise, tend to be quick
to defend an artist’s “right” to transcend identity
categories. Yet while race may be socially con-
structed, it still profoundly shapes our world—in-
cluding our literature and film. As much as
Quentin Tarantino or William Styron insist on
being “free” to create their respective histories,
they cannot entirely get “outside” the histories
and ideologies that created them. No one can.
This is not to say that it is utterly impossible and
futile for artists, including white artists, to imagine
across barriers of race. As Toni Morrison notes,
there is really no way around it, no escape that is,
from representing American history without
implicitly or explicitly saying something about
race. “All art,” as James Baldwin once put it, “is a
confession, more or less oblique” (Conversations
21). This confession includes how we understand
race and the racial other. “The subject of the
dream,” writes Toni Morrison, “is the dreamer. . .an
extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful
exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the
writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of
longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of mag-
nanimity. It requires hard work not to see this”
(Playing in the Dark 17 emphasis in original).
What, then, do we see in Tarantino’s “dream”
Django Unchained is plagued from the outset by
a lethal combination of arrogance and ignorance.
His interest in the actual lives, struggles and
souls of black people pales in comparison to his
enthusiasm for surfaces, style, and spectacle. Tar-
antino’s “gift” to black people in Django is ulti-
mately himself. The film does not represent
 The Confessions of Quentin Tarantino  Joseph Vogel
compassion for the other so much as it
announces Tarantino as white hip savior, who
liberates the slaves by cool virtuosity—not
unlike his protagonist, Dr. King Schultz. “That
is why the movie has a happy ending,” Taran-
tino explains. “Sometimes film can right the
wrongs” (qtd. in Hirschberg). This, ultimately, is
the director’s confession: that Django’s triumph
should make us all feel better about our country’
long racial nightmare—that, even better, it might
“right the wrongs.” For Tarantino, that is,
Django Unchained miraculously transforms the
horrors and injustices of real history into pop-
corn-chomping, guilt-free catharsis. It is, in this
way, more reflective of the present than the past.
Similar to the postracial rhetoric that surrounded
Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House, it
represents a cultural desire in America to be rid
of our atrocious racial history, to rewrite it in
simpler, more heroic terms, rather than seriously
confront its enduring legacy.
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