The D Is Silent: Django Unchained and the African American West

^*This article is a revised version of “Conclusion: The D Is Silent,” in Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West, 234–41, by Michael K. Johnson. Copyright © 2014 by University Press of Mississippi, www.upress.state.ms.us.

Abstract

Although director Quentin Tarantino has described Django Unchained as belonging to a “new, virgin-snow kind of genre,” the African American western is not new at all. Following Tarantino’s lead (his claim of striking out into virgin territory with Django), reviews of the film suggest a too ready willingness to attribute to a white screenwriter and director a generic innovation that African American writers and filmmakers have been creatively inventing and reinventing for centuries. As a post-spaghetti western, Django Unchained also extends and revises (but does not invent) a signal trope of the spaghetti western, the casting of African American actors—from Woody Strode to Jim Brown to Fred Williamson—in films with western plots. My presentation looks at Django Unchained not as something new but as an interesting variation on something old—the African American western—examining Tarantino’s contribution to a genre that has long been in existence. Only against the backdrop of that representational history can we fairly judge what Tarantino’s film does and does not accomplish.

Keywords:

• Tarantino
• Django Unchained
• African American West
• post-western
• slave narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^* This article is a revised version of “Conclusion: The D Is Silent,” in Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West, 234–41, by Michael K. Johnson. Copyright © 2014 by University Press of Mississippi, www.upress.state.ms.us.

¹ In McGrath, “Visionaries.”

² Campbell, “Post-western Cinema,” 409, 413.

³ The winter scenes in Django Unchained are a direct reference to Corbucci’s The Great Silence (1968), which similarly uses a snow-covered winter landscape as a backdrop for a story of western bounty hunters.

⁴ See Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence and Gunfighter Nation.

⁵ The group of disgruntled southern racists in Django (1966) prefers its KKK-like hoods to be red.

⁶ Another precursor text to Django Unchained is Skin Game (1971), starring James Garner and Lou Gossett, a film that similarly sets a black and white pair of con artists in the context of slavery. The “game” in Skin Game is that Garner’s character repeatedly sells Gossett’s character (and then helps him escape) to various marks across Missouri and Kansas. The Skin Game plot also has its source in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—where one character continually turns another into the sheriff’s office for the bounty and then, at the last moment, saves him from hanging.

⁷ Hell on Wheels, during its fourth season (2013) on AMC, at least has the good grace of having its southern hero finally admit that he has been lying about setting his slaves free.

⁸ Koven, Blaxploitation Films, 14.

⁹ Ibid., 10–11.

¹⁰ McGrath, “Visionaries.”

¹¹ The “one hundred rifles” gathered by the Marshal outside the saloon where Django and Schultz have taken refuge may be a reference to the title of the Jim Brown film, 100 Rifles. Similarly, the astonished response of the townspeople when Django and Schultz ride into a Texas town (they have never seen, Django explains to Schultz, a black man on horseback) suggests dozens of similar scenes in African American westerns, although the reference is probably specifically to Boss Nigger or The Legend of Nigger Charlie—and Shultz and Django’s commandeering of the saloon when the bartender refuses to serve Django directly replays a scene from The Legend of Nigger Charlie. Although related in a general way to the trickster tale, Django Unchained’s undercover infiltration of “Candie Land” is predominantly that of the con game or caper genre, and the emphasis is on role playing (“stay in character,” as Schultz advises) rather than on “the spontaneous wit” and “verbal dexterity” that Mel Watkins sees as the central element of African American trickster tradition; Watkins, On the Real Side, 41. However, Scott Reynolds Nelson suggests that Django Unchained draws on the “bad nigger” archetype of African American folklore (especially as that archetype was rendered cinematically through blaxploitation films), and thus, the film might be connected to African American tradition through that archetype rather than through the trickster; Nelson, “Django Untangled.”

¹² Scott, “The Black, the White and the Angry.”

¹³ The idea of an African American bounty hunter in Django Unchained seems to have developed from Tarantino’s adaption of the bounty hunter stories from Sergio Leone’s films rather than from any specific awareness of how that character type has developed in African American westerns. For a discussion of the bounty hunter as an African American western archetype, see Johnson, Hoo-Doo Cowboys, especially 174–76, 179–82, and 223–24.

¹⁴ In Everett’s Wounded, for example, John Hunt comes to the conclusion that “Sometimes things were just simple. … The people you expect to do the bad thing did the bad thing. I believed the rednecks had done something to David and I was going to find out. Maybe I should have called the sheriff, but I didn’t know whom I could trust” (199). The novel ends with a showdown and a burst of violence.

¹⁵ Marrant, “Narrative,” 88.

¹⁶ Ibid., 91, 92.

¹⁷ The explicit joining of a commentary on slavery with western tropes to make a “southern” western is perhaps most fully realized in Hopkins’s Winona, which, like Django Unchained, sets its story against the backdrop of the period right before the Civil War.

¹⁸ See especially Frances E.W. Harper’s 1864 poem, “Bury Me in a Free Land.”

¹⁹ Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 22.