There’s no denying that Django Unchained is a tremendously violent movie. There’s no avoiding the gruesome depictions of the brutality waged upon slaves. To say that these scenes are excessively violent, or more violent than necessary, is to minimize the actual brutalization that would have occurred in that time and place, which was far more abundant and brutal by all accounts. The violence of the slave owners, in particular the DiCaprio character, Calvin Candie, is difficult to watch. It should be difficult. It’s meant to make us cringe and get angry and want retribution. There’s a reason Django shouts “D’Artagnan” when he fires his first shots in the film’s explosive conclusion. The mandingo fight scenes, especially horrifying to witness, make Candie a character beyond mercy; the only thing to make up for the violence he has dished out is to punish him with violence in turn.
It changes when Django turns the violence against the villains (also when Schultz shoots the bad guys in the opening scene); the visualization of the assaults now becomes cartoonish. It’s not meant to be taken as any sort of literal revenge, no more than killing Hitler was meant to be literal. It’s deliberately cartoon-like violence to express the fantasy desire of a former slave shooting up a plantation housing the most heinous villains in all the South. This is not meant to be real life justice; it’s cinematic justice, returning whips with whips, bullets with bullets, flipping the balance of power for a few fleeting moments on a movie screen. There is a way of being expressive through artistic violence, and Tarantino masters this in a way no other American director is capable of today.
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