Django Unchained: Repurposing Western Film Music

Abstract

The film music used in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film, Django Unchained signals a deliberate engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the Vietnam and Watergate era and the malignant effects of the era’s malaise on black cinema. The upward trajectory of Tarantino’s Django, a wholesome, self-confident, Southern Black Power hero, repudiates the discontent and despair depicted in films made between 1966 and 1974 and offers an optimistic (if anachronistic) counter-narrative to the grim political landscape of the era’s cinema and to the demise of the Blaxploitation genre. Tarantino’s repurposing of film music from the spaghetti western genre specifically is essential to his project of turning his neo-Blaxploitation hero into “the fastest gun in the South.”

Keywords:

• Tarantino
• film music
• allusion
• spaghetti westerns

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dana Phillips, Michael Johnson, Will Hayes, Linda Delibero, Meg Guroff, Peter Jelavich, Cody Ernst, and Andrew Talle for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I offer special thanks to the remarkable composer Andrew Posner for his tutelage and guidance in writing about music.

Notes

¹ Eric J. Lyman, “Italian Composer Ennio Morricone: I’ll Never Work With Tarantino Again,” Hollywood Reporter, March 15, 2013, Hollywoodreporter.com.

² See Spike Lee’s tweet for December 22, 2012 at Twitter.com “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.” See also Jordan Zakarin, “Spike Lee: ‘Django Unchained’ is ‘Disrespectful,’ I Will Not See It” Hollywood Reporter, December 12, 2013, Hollywoodreporter.com.

³ Vivian C. Sobchack, “Tradition and Cinematic Allusion,” Literature Film Quarterly 2.1 (Winter 1974): 59

⁴ Scott Foundas, “Quentin Tarantino: On Django and Jimmy Cliff”, 10 December 2012, Blooddirtandangels.com.

⁵ Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary (February 1965): 25–31.

⁶ Randy Lewis, “Quentin Tarantino Discusses the Music of ‘Django Unchained,’” LA Times, December 25, 2012, Articles.latimes.com.

⁷ Will Perkins, “Quentin Tarantino on Reports that ‘Django Unchained’ was Meant for Will Smith: ‘A Little Blown out of Proportion.’” Canada Holiday Movie Guide, December 13, 2012, ca.movies.yahoo.com.

⁸ Pauline Kael, “After Innocence,” The New Yorker, 1 October 1973, 113–118.

⁹ See Andrew J. Huebner, Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

¹⁰ Elvis Mitchell, Baadasssss Cinema, Directed by Isaac Julien. 2002. Film.

¹¹ Clayton Riley, “A Black Movie for White Audiences,” New York Times, July 29, 1971, D13.

¹² Junius Wilson, Quoted in Henry W. McGee, “Black Movies: A New Wave of Exploitation.” Harvard Crimson, 10 October 1972, Thecrimson.com.

¹³ Craig Lambert, “The Blaxploitation Era.” Harvard Magazine, January–February 2003, Harvardmagazine.com.

¹⁴ Baadasssss Cinema (2002).

¹⁵ Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice, 17 April 2013, Villagevoice.com.

¹⁶ Eileen Jones, “Free Me from Django Unchained” (6 January, 2013). Exiledonline.com.

¹⁷ Carole Mallory, “Django Unchained: A Review”, 2 January, 2013, Huffingtonpost.com.

¹⁸ Roger Ebert, “Faster, Quentin! Thrill! Thrill!”, 4 January 2013, Rogerebert.com.

¹⁹ Esquire republished the essays online at Esquire.com in 2010.