"I get paid to shoot white men?" asks Django, the slave rescued by the German dentist-cum-bounty hunter, as his rescuer recruits him to his new profession in the antebellum US south. This is the premise of Quentin Tarantino's latest movie, Django Unchained, and it gets better from there. Django is rescued by King Schulz, who promises to help rescue his (Django's) wife from a sadistic Mississippi planter, in return for his help in hunting outlaws.
For Tarantino fans, the boy is in form–as evidenced by Spike Lee et al bristling about the gratuitous use of the "n-word," more than 100 times, during the movie. So it's funny, in an appalling kind of way, if not as funny or appalling as previous Tarantino gore-fests.
Django is of a piece with Tarantino's previous anti-historical romp, Inglorious Basterds, in its homage to B-movies of the 1960s and 70s and its evocation of "regenerative violence," fictional violence deployed to salve real wounds. Which makes it of interest to Trini culture. (Aristotle called it catharsis.)
In Basterds, Tarantino seeds ridiculous fantasy into history, creating a Jewish American unit to wage guerrilla war on Nazis in occupied France. In a cathartic paroxysm, Hitler is riddled with bullets, and blown up, along with many Nazis. Django aimed for a similar thematic restitution through the lens of outrageous violence and dark, bodily humour (blood, faeces, dismemberment and so on) perpetrated on slaves and enslavers alike.
But with a difference: in Basterds, Tarantino's anarchic humour romped, not always with artistic success, but with great effect. In Django, he is self-constrained by a politic morality. Tarantino feels obligated to give the story a moral centre, in the improbable Schulz, a 19th-century German abolitionist.
Gratuitous n-word use aside, this substitution of conventional morality for what should have been Rabelaisian amorality, tinged what should have been an eruption of grotesque humour and violence with dramatic sentimentality. The viewer, seeking pulpy entertainment, is now obliged to genuflect to the orthodox moral and emotional cues of slavery.
For example, the love between Django and his wife was conventional, a predictable emotional drama of a man enraged at the violation of his wife, without the sense of the ridiculous that warped the response to Beatrice Kiddo's many violations in Kill Bill.
There's nothing wrong with conventional emotion, but that's not what a Tarantino movie is for (unless it's Jackie Brown). A Tarantino movie is an orgy of primitive emotions like revenge and lust, tar-black humour, and gleeful amorality. The positive tension among these elements was most fully realised in Kill Bill. In Django, sentimentality aside, you do get the delicious bloodlust, tasty cathartic violence, and gore–bullets pop blood vessels like blood-filled balloons.
Men die with alarming, noisy bodily expostulations and are goaded to death with obscene or sadistic coolness–"I like the way you die, boy." Schulz's opening scene, where he liberates Django, is chock-full of Tarantino's prolix, funny psychopathy, which ends with a group of freed slaves advancing on their former enslaver with clubs.
And this sensibility is of tremendous artistic importance to Trinis. The mode Tarantino is most comfortable with is known as the grotesque, where excessive violence, sexuality, language and behaviour invert conventional morality and allow the imagination into transgressive and transformative experience and emotions.
You might be saying: this is what Carnival is supposed to do. Ideally, yes. But looking around the land of Carnival, it's pretty clear that the absence of the grotesque (or its confusion with social realism) is the most glaring deficiency in Carnival and local art and its consumers' collective perception generally.
Carnival kicks off with the rage-filled performance of Canboulay, an angry clown show sold as history (thanks to local "historians"), which provides neither humour nor catharsis. It continues with sexual depravity and consumerist contempt (all-inclusives and mas bands), and very unartistic, literal violence in all its activities.
From panyards to fetes to calypso tents, the desire seems to be to ignite and incite rage and animus without humour or wit, and to no end but self-destruction, and certainly not catharsis.
This is largely the fault of UWI and its coalition with the ethnic, uhm, lobby. At a seminar after a tiresome production of a slavery play some years ago, I asked one of the producers why not a comedy about slavery? Whether they weren't tired of the humourless rage and suffering that pervades these enterprises. They weren't (they said); they were still "too close" to slavery to joke about it.
Strange and ridiculous since slavery ended in Trinidad in 1838 and black people have occupied positions of status, if not power, since the late 18th century. When African-Americans were on the back of the bus, Eric Williams was king of Trinidad.
By contrast, slavery's final chain in the US–the psychological–was only broken in 2008, with the election of Barack Obama.
Yet (African) American culture produced comedy about slavery–Dave Chappelle comes immediately to mind–in addition to the morally justified anger visible in Shaft and Superfly. Mel Brooks, who also produced Django's doppelganger/precursor, Blazing Saddles, produced comedies about Nazis–the Producers, and To Be or Not to Be.
And this ability of artists to create, and convincingly inhabit, worlds like the Absurd and the Grotesque, which turn tragedy into dark comedy and rage into outrageous laughter, is a crucial function of art in a society like Trinidad. The requirements of artists and consumers to realise this are open-mindedness and a well-nourished imagination.
But this enterprise requires good teachers and critics to open possibilities, which, not to be vain, aside from these 950 words, you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in the land of calypso, especially in the Carnival season. And so the games begin.