Django Film Analysis

While these flashbacks are more frequent in the first half of the film, they occur in the latter half as well. We get four in total:

The first, marked in the script as the slave pen scene, shows the audience how Django got to his current place with the Speck Brothers. It’s our first glimpse at Django’s distaste for white people, and while the audience sees that Django is clearly upset with his situation, the people, the life that he’s forced to live, the script does something much more powerful. It notes that the Western theme song hits a crescendo as Django is brought up on the selling block, and “his heart fills with poison” (Django Unchained, 2).

The second comes as a result of a racist inquiry from Schultz as to whether or not Django could

Schultz are introduced to Calvin Candy. We see two black slaves writhing on the floor, tackling one each other as Candy looks on with a sort of passive interest one might have when two animals fight in their cage at the zoo. Candy begins to encourage one of them, and as the camera reveals another man encouraging the other slave, it becomes clear that they’re betting like it’s some sort of boxing fight. But it’s not a boxing fight, as the script reveals, it’s a “bloody and savage fight to the death in a closed room” (Django Unchained, 74). One of the men gouging the other’s eyes out, to Candy’s pleasure. The fight ends when Candy hands his fighter to bash the other man’s head in. This is violence for entertainment within a film that shows it as violence for entertainment. David Denby consulted historians on this matter and found that there was nothing that even came close to human cock-fighting during the time of slavery (or thereafter, for that matter). Furthermore, he states that, “Slavery was built upon money, and the fortune to be made for owners was in buying, selling, and working them, not in sending them out to fight at the risk of death

The time period and Western elements due in fact lend themselves to the use of the word, but not to the point that Tarantino does. “Had the word appeared any more often it would have required billing as a co-star,” critic Jelani Cobb said (Cobb). She also attributes the usage to a sort of racial ventriloquism. In other words, Tarantino just wanted to use the word. He enveloped his characters in the framing devices of the slave narrative and Spaghetti Western in order to save himself from any sort of repercussion. It gets to the point where not even the genre can allow for the word to be used in the frequency that it