Violence's Ambiguity in Django: "Dead Alive" in the Antebellum West

Rating: 8/10 (27 March 2013)

The title of my review references Peter Jackson's utterly unhinged zombie infestation cult horror classic. In "Dead Alive", the unlikely hero decimates zombie hordes until the screen literally floods with blood. In a way, "Django Unchained" (hereafter "Django") reflects "Dead Alive"'s "go nuts with killing until you stop being scared and disgusted and just have to laugh" sensibility. As Django (Jamie Foxx) ascends from slave to bounty hunter to talented gunslinger to determined avenger and savior, the viewer is inundated with so many killings, humiliating tortures, mutilations, and explosions, he/she may stop being disgusted and overwhelmed, and simply laugh at the brutal inanity of it all. I think that was director Quentin Tarantino's intentional satiric objective.
Reviewer M. Oleson also alludes to "Blazing Saddles" as one of "Django"'s inspirations, and I think he is correct. However, satirizing the West's violent ignorance and flimsy attempts at justice were, I believe, Tarantino's secondary targets. Even the abominably shameful institution of pre-Civil War slavery and the unscrupulous but dense Southerners who strained to uphold it is a secondary, easy-bullseye for "Django"'s satire. As other posters here have mentioned, Tarantino, as he has done before, is slyly satirizing our near-sexual fetish for and obsession with and gradual desensitization to violence in general.
Many people are shot in "Django". The lucky ones die quickly with little blood. The unlucky ones realistically scream with pain as blood erupts from them like geysers. Initially, the audience may recoil or cheer in response, depending on whether the character shot "deserves" it or not. But eventually, poetic justice does prevail in "Django" and we laughingly and apparently appropriately cheer as decadent, immoral Southern plantation society is literally blasted to smithereens. But will we necessarily respect ourselves the following morning? No matter how you feel later, I think "Django" viewers will be entertainingly uplifted, not only by Django's composed, steely determination to avenge his bondage and to be reunited with his abused but beautiful and equally resilient wife Brunhilde (Hildy) (Kerry Washington), but also by the unflappable reasoning and eloquence of Django's own deliverer, the deceptively unassuming Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). But even Django's reprehensible villains are also humorously captivating, such as the unctuously effete but vicious pseudo-Francophile Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the slimy "Candieland" (ho ho!) plantation owner who holds Hildy in thrall, and especially the obsequious but treacherous Candieland slave retainer, played by the endlessly versatile Samuel L. Jackson. Of course, they suffer shocking deaths, but Candie and Stephen come so skillfully close to being such cartoonish heavies, again we permit ourselves to cheer and laugh when they die.
Tarantino in a sense has it both ways with the violence. We are allowed to enjoy the violence when a villain buys it, but we do shudder with loathing when the "good guys" suffer. When Hildy is locked naked in a hot box for some perceived slight, or Django is hung upside down naked with castration imminent, I'm sure almost no viewer will laugh. So there's our ambivalence towards violence and death - are they cathartic or poisonous? If violence's victims are faceless zombies as in "Dead Alive" or foolish Southern whites (who cant even make KKK masks with peripheral vision) as in "Django", we laugh with relief. If violence's victims are the geeky hero in "Dead Alive" or suave slave-turned-avenger Django or wily, rational bounty hunter Dr. Schwartz, we cry with despair. Especially in light of recent serial killings, this evocation of violence's dual nature merits further debate.