Critical Investigation: Project proposal

WORKING TITLE

• Is Django Unchained an exploitation work of cultural appropriation? 
• Django Unchained. Creative Interpretation or Cultural Appropriation?

HYPOTHESIS:

Django Unchained is a work of a creative genius, Quentin Tarantino. He's made a film which his primarily focused on entertainment and giving audience pleasures as it's a story of revenge. It's not a historical documentary to showcase the horrors of slavery, don't expect that from Tarantino. He's put his own spin on the topic of slavery and showed a different side to the story.

LINKED PRODUCTION PIECE

Short film showcasing a school shooting from the shooter's perspective. 

MIGRAIN

Media language/forms:

The film starts with about twenty black men walking across a deserted valley bare feet whilst their owner is on a horse with a carriage behind him. The title 'Django' comes as soon as the camera pans down to Django. We can see brutal whip marks on his back and the back of another fellow slave. This is a very strong opening to a film and it sets off the scene for more to come. Tarantino wants the audience knowing that he is serious and this film is not going to be a joke.

Ideology:

In the film Django Unchained, the biggest value in society is based off of how many slaves and how much money someone owns because it is set in the South. Dr. King Schultz, the bounty hunter and one of the main characters of the movie, puts Django by his side to help assist him with killing three men who have committed illegal acts. However, having a black man as his partner makes many people question him and his own personal values, because he must be crazy if he lets a black man ride a horse and treats him as his equal. Meaning white people, as a convention, would take the role in such movies.This break of convention means that the audience can relate with the main protagonist because of his humanity and weaknesses.

Genre:

The genre for Django Unchained is a Spaghetti western and drama. Usually within Spaghetti westerns the main protagonist is a white American male such as Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; because at the time slavery was a big part of American life but it is a controversial subject to touch on in films. Meaning white people, as a convention, would take the role in such movies.This break of convention means that the audience can relate with the main protagonist because of his humanity and weaknesses. This creates support for Django on his quest to find his wife.

Representation:

Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained both entertains and unnerves the audience by placing America’s complex history with slavery at the centre of attention in the intense setting of the pre-civil war West. Tarantino juxtaposes his unique mix of humour and irony with the horrific contextual violence of the film in such a way that allows the viewer to not be overwhelmed by the film’s violence, or to be lead to a state of denial of the seriousness of the subject matter due to its comical tone. By using characters that pursue their desires ruthlessly, Tarantino aims to make the viewers feel almost morally violated in order to convey the gravity of the subject of the film as it pertains to a particularly painful part of American history. Sadism is a prevalent theme in this film and represents an ongoing feature of human nature. Therefore, Tarantino implies that no matter how far away from the present his characters may seem, their drives to succeed are ours as well, at least in an unconscious, repressed sense.

Audience:

Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is proving hugely popular amongst African American cinema goers despite controversy over the film's depiction of slavery and its liberal use of the "N" word. The Target audience for western films is a wide age category due to a lot of violence being in the films and also because older generations are most intrigued into westerns due to westerns being on TV a lot throughout their childhoods, but the main group they are aimed at is males due to the violence within them. Tarantino’s decision to make a spaghetti western/slave revenge fantasy seemed like a cynical move to generate controversy from the get-go. Now it’s in theatres everyone has an opinion, especially when it comes to the provocative depictions of race. There are those who celebrate the bold representation of Django, the freed slave who fights back against a particularly sadistic slave owner, claiming what is rightfully his (Hilda, his wife), burning the pristine white columns of the mansion to the ground in the process, and riding off into the middle distance.

Narrative:

In 1858, a bounty hunter named Schultz seeks out a slave named Django and buys him because he needs him to find some men he is looking for. After finding them, Django wants to find his wife, Broomhilda who along with him were sold separately by his former owner for trying to escape. Schultz offers to help him if he chooses to stay with him and be his partner. Eventually they learn that she was sold to a plantation in Mississippi. Knowing they can't just go in and say they want her, they come up with a plan so that the owner will welcome them into his home and they can find a way. 

SHEP:

Social: Quentin Tarantino on White Supremacy and Black Lives Matter. He said that social issues are naturally embedded in his creative process and that the topic is inescapable.

Historical: Slavery. The brutal treatment of Slaves

Economic: Compare Django to 12 Years a Slave. One is made purely for entertainment and economic purposes, the other leaning more on a historical interpretation and educational purposes.

ISSUES/DEBATES:

Representation and stereotyping: The main group being represented in Django Unchained are black people as they are seen as the victims and the audience has a sense of sympathy towards them. Another group would be white people who are in total control of everything in this 1858 America. There is a clear difference between the two and it can be very clearly seen in the film and I will be focusing on that for the duration of my critical investigation. 

American nightmare: phrase used by Black Power politician Malcom X to express his sense of the inequalities, particularly with regard to the link between race and opportunity experienced by black people. Significant because there was no equality at the time and Tarantino shows it in the film. Opposite of American dream.  

Capitalism/Exploitation: is an economic system in which the production and distribution of goods and services in society is organised via a free market for the purpose of maximising profits. This was a key feature in 1800s America as it encouraged slavery because it minimised costs and maximised profits as Slave Masters did not have to pay wages at all. It was predominant in the South as there was an abundance of cotton whilst the North enjoyed industrial development. Observed in the production of Django Unchained as there's a particular group in Hollywood who are profiting from a dramatised film about Slavery. 

Hollywood: the centre of the US film industry during the golden age of the studio system. Major film studios still have their corporate headquarters there and it is a major centre of corporate activity and film finance. Hollywood remains a playground for the super rich and their glamorous celebrity lifestyles. This will be important in my critical investigation because I will explore how other similar films exploited past true events in order to make an entertainment product for financial purposes. 

Homege: when one film director pays tribute to another by including images, sense or stylistic features typical of the other director as an acknowledgement of his/her importance influence and importance.  Tarantino does this a lot and it is evident in Django Unchained as he paid homage to the 1966 Django film. 

THEORIES:

Narratology / Tzvetan Todorv: He is particularly known for his work on 'narratology' or the structuring of narrative. His approach is founded on his belief in a common basis of human experience and the underlying narrative behind all human activity. Todorov's sequence is made up of give propositions outlining a basic state of narration, which is disturbed and then re-established. This can be applied to Django Unchained although we start right when Django is a slave however we see flashbacks of his past being with his wife and we subconsciously put everything into context and know that he was forced into slavery as he is searching for his freedom back.  The film starts with a distribution but has a harmonious ending as Django gets his freedom back and reunites with his wife. 

Marxism and hegemony / Sigmund Freud: According to him, your innate desire is to reap the greatest pleasure from living, by gaining an upper hand on people and circumstance. But, to avoid punishment, social rules and laws force you to consider other people’s needs and welfare, so that you have to turn your natural, pleasure-seeking desires into forms that are socially and morally acceptable, if you are to survive in a civilised world. This explains the enforcement of black people to become slaves. There are many examples of Freud's theory of human nature, in this movie. Tarantino gets us to consider the features of human beings that make them most fit to survive. Is it brawn as depicted in Mandingo fighting? Or, is it ingenuity and intellect, like Dr. Schultz, that helps us to survive? Or, perhaps, love and passion is the best expression of human nature and that which helps us to thrive (Django and Brunhilde)? Dr. Schultz' evolution of character informs us as to where Tarantino falls on this matter.

Gender and ethnicity / Blaxploitation / Stuart Hall: first raised concerns about negative representations of black people on British television in 1971 and has since investigated representations of black people in period films, identifying three types: faithful happy slaves, primitive and cunning natives and clowns or entertainers. Hall sees such negative stereotypes as reinforcing dominant ideology by making slavery and colonialism appear acceptable and by inviting black people themselves to accept the hegemonic position. Blaxploitation films have also been accused of reinforcing negative stereotypes.

Colonialism and Post-colonialism: The military, economic, political and cultural domination of African, South American, Australasian and Asian territories by occupying European powers from the sixteenth century through the twentieth century. The system collapsed in the second half of the twentieth century, movements secured the independence of most former colonies. However, the legacy of colonial occupation continues in the form of cultural imperialism, sustained by Western economic domination of global media industries. 

Structuralism and post-structuralism:  Post-structuralist films still tell a story per se, but do so by reneging conventions like the three-act structure – the concept that a film’s structure should consist of, in this order, exposition, complication and resolution, and should progress in a linear fashion. Its also an intellectual movement originating in the 1960s, associated with a number of French writers and characterised by a study of the systems, relations and forms - the structures - that make meaning possible in any cultural activity or text.  The methodology has been applied to literature, language, film, fine art, psychology, anthropology, history and philosophy. Structuralism relies heavily on the terminology developed by semiologists such as Saussure and Barthes. 

RESEARCH PLAN: 

MEDIA TEXTS:

Django Unchained

12 Years A Slave

Lawrence of Arabia

TV DOCUMENTARIES

The Modern Racist Paradigm 
O.J: Made in America
Bowling for Columbine

ACADEMIC TEXTS/BOOKS

Shelly Tochluk: Witnessing Whiteness, 2007
Susan Scafidi, Who owns Culture?: Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law.
James O. Young, The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, 2012
Gerg Tate, Everything But the Burden: What white people are taking from black culture
,2003
Joy Hendry, Reclaiming Culture: Indigenous People and Self-Representation, 2005
Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, 1992

INTERNET LINKS

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/may/05/quentin-tarantino-django-unchained-script
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/jun/07/django-unchained-trailer-tarantino
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/django_unchained_2012/
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/tarantino-unchained
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/spike-lee-django-unchained-is-406313

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00277.x/full
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1401522
http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/37477830/racism_and_colonialism.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1476142300&Signature=jpAmQqGKApXuSIQCNOambHPQkJU%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DColonialism_Racism_and_Representation.pdf
https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=sTzRKLqcmbUC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=racism+hollywood&ots=4y0XKhz6Ef&sig=Xv5ntQuUO0pzJC_k4LtaSwnp5To
https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=saap-Ud6e5gC&oi=fnd&pg=PA67&dq=racism+hollywood&ots=58P1EG6_nG&sig=K01FYvHzSiD2V0p43fidySJ-In0#v=onepage&q=racism%20hollywood&f=false