For anyone who needs a good read this morning (and some intellectual shade) check out my friend Aarons latest article. With the recent release and acclaim of Oscar-favorite 12 Years A Slave, I found myself mentally revisiting Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino. Not because I think there are any worthwhile parallels to draw between the two films, but rather because the brilliance and scope of 12 Years actually exposed Django for what it truly was, a base and reductive spectacle of the horror that was slavery. Django was nothing short of a post-racial caricature of slavery that could only be brought forth by a white male imagination. Proof being that many of the characters remained one-dimensional, the torture was over-the-top, and horrid elements of our racial past like the KKK were presented lightly as jokes, and I could go on. Point blank, the film revealed the true limited racial complexity of Tarantino’s imagination, and showed what little understanding he probably has of himself as a white man in a privileged position, and subsequently how under-qualified he was to even breach the subject of slavery on the national stage. I say all this to espouse the importance of us marginalized individuals taking command of our own stories. In contrast to the hipster fantasy that was Django Unchained, 12 Years, with its Black director Steven McQueen, and Black screenwriter John Ridley, presented a film imbued with so much nuance and humanity that the complexity of the film is almost palpable. At its onset, we are presented with what is, at the start, a commitment to a true story—a film adopted from an actual slave narrative by Solomon Northup. Of course, often spearheaded by white patrons, slave narratives as historical artifacts are not to be taken as full-proof authentic forms, but we are at least treated with a film that was grounded in an effort to be truthful....
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 12:11:59 +0000