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ENTERTAINMENT VIDEO SLAVERY DJANGO UNCHAINED

'Django Unchained' Mandingo Fighting: Real Or Not?

Is Key 'Django Unchained' Plot Point Historically Inaccurate?
Dec 26, 2012, 03:26 PM EST | Updated Dec 26, 2012

FILE - This undated publicity image released by The Weinstein Company shows Leonardo DiCaprio as Calvin Candle in "Django Unchained," directed by Quentin Tarantino. (AP
Photo/The Weinstein Company, Andrew Cooper, SMPSP, File)

If you haven't seen "Django Unchained" and are super averse to

knowing anything about the film's plot, now would be a good time to
click elsewhere.

A key plot point of Quentin Tarantino's western-blaxploitation-

revenge movie is the supposed sport of Mandingo fighting, in which
two (black) slaves fight in a bare-knuckle death match, for no reason
other than the (white) slaveowners' enjoyment. The search for the
perfect Mandingo, or wrestler, is the vehicle Tarantino (who, of

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5/22/23, 3:39 PM 'Django Unchained' Mandingo Fighting: Real Or Not? | HuffPost Entertainment

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course, wrote and directed the film) builds the rest of his movie
around. But a bevy of historians say it probably never happened.

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One expert tells Slate (which says that "no slavery historian we spoke
with had ever come across anything that closely resembled this
human version of cockfighting") that the very notion that Southerners
would send off their slaves to die is logically flawed. Given the entire
structure of slavery was based on economic expedience, it just
doesn't make much sense that a slaveowner would be willing to lose
one of his strongest and healthiest men to death for sport.

NextMovie cites Edna Greene Medford, a professor and the chair of

Howard University's history department. Turns out she hasn't seen
any evidence of Mandingo fighting either:

"My area of expertise is slavery, Civil War, and

reconstruction and I have never encountered something like
that. It was rumored to have occurred. I don't know that it
was called Mandingo Fighting, however, but there were all
sorts of things going on in the South pitting people against
one another. To the death, I've never encountered anything
like that, no. That doesn't mean that it didn't happen in
some backwater area, but I've never seen any evidence of
it."

Slate notes that a number of films have used Mandingo fighting as a

plot device, including the 1975 film "Mandingo" -- one of Tarantino's
"favorite" movies.

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Of course, Tarantino is free to embellish history as he sees fit. Adding

color to a piece of historical fiction is more complicated, however,
when one suggests the film was not even as violent as slavery.

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Tarantino bristled at criticism that "Django" is too violent by
reminding audiences that slavery was much worse than anything
depicted in the film. Via the Guardian:

"We all intellectually 'know' the brutality and inhumanity

of slavery, but after you do the research it's no longer
intellectual any more, no longer just historical record – you
feel it in your bones. It makes you angry, and want to do
something … I'm here to tell you, that however bad things
get in the movie, a lot worse shit actually happened ... When
slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical
with a capital H, with an arms-length quality to them. I
wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect, I wanted
to throw a rock through that glass and shatter it for all
times, and take you into it."

It may well be true that "a lot worse shit actually happened." Just
(probably) not Mandingo fighting.

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