Friday, January 04, 2013

"Django Unchained": Neo-Confederates hate it and they should

I saw Django Unchained last weekend at the movie theater. It was basically a spaghetti western in many ways. There were numerous anachronistic elements in the film which I ignored.

The movie had two strongly expressed messages: (1) Antebellum slavery was horrific. (2) Antebellum slave owners and slave traders were criminal lowlifes worthy of being shot down like rabid dogs.

The horrors of slavery are made clear in the movie. Racists are portrayed as intellectual idiots. Slavers and slave owners get what's coming to them in the movie, mostly being shot dead when not being dynamited. The plantation house of a sadistic slave owner is blown up completely in the end.

Jamie Foxx, who plays Django, triumphs over white supremacists.

This has gotten the neo-Confederates up in arms and they are leading campaigns against the movie. They are using the strategy of attacking Tarantino personally. Representing the film as some anti-white racist film which it isn't. Django's good friend and partner in the movie is a German immigrant dentist named Dr. King Schultz turned bounty hunter who is favorably portrayed as Django's good friend.

The real opposition to the movie is that it is a complete rejection of Lost Cause mythology about slavery before the Civil War. More importantly it isn't some sentimental pacifistic rejection of slavery weeping over the horrors of slavery and wishing couldn't we all be nicer people in history. It is a film which sees slave holders as worthy as being shot dead as criminals.

Some links:

The League of the South had this comment. Their blogger uses sarcasm and name calling when he doesn't really have anything to say.

http://lsrebellion.blogspot.com/2012/12/scary-jamie.html

The Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) has these postings:

http://topconservativenews.com/2012/12/boycott-django-unchained/

http://topconservativenews.com/2012/12/quentin-tarantino-loves-rape-porn/

Any assertion made in any CofCC posting has to be taken with a grain of salt. The story line is explained in the movie as being a parallel to the German mythological story of Brunhilde and Siegfried. Django saves his lost love from monsters. Django isn't out to get all white people but the slave owners who oppress, in particular his love.

However, facts don't weigh much with neo-Confederates who are delusional and hysterical regarding race.

What upsets the neo-Confederates is that there is emerging a public which doesn't accept the Lost Cause view of slavery at all and really regards slave holders as criminals.