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In honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday this year, I treated myself to a movie marathon, watching “Django Unchained” and “Zero Dark 30″ back-to-back. And it was like a cold slap in the face.
“Django Unchained” allegedly took place in 1858 — and here we are now, 160 years later, where things have apparently changed and we’re now being all civilized with our I-phones and our electric cars and our digital TVs. Nobody enslaves “colored” people any more and tortures them like that any more, right? This is the 21st century!
No one ties “colored” people up with ropes and beats them and beats them and beats them and then sics dogs on them any more, right? That’s barbaric. That’s why Lincoln freed the slaves and Dr. King marched in Montgomery, right? What happened to Django was old skool.
But hold onto your popcorn, guys. “Zero Dark 30″ is about to come next.
When the theater screen darkens, suddenly here we are again, right here in the 21st century, but still tying up “colored” people with ropes, beating them and beating them and then siccing dogs on them.
“Hey, but that’s different,” you might say. In what way?
In “Django Unchained,” we saw a man have all that he owned taken from him — simply because he wasn’t White — and then we saw him beaten and tortured when he fought back against the Master.
In “Zero Dark 30″ we also see the end results of years and years of “colored” folks in the Middle East having everything taken from them by the Master too — and then when they too fought back, they too got beaten and tortured.
So how come we cheer Django Freeman on but hate Osama bin Ladin? Both are “colored” men fighting for their very lives.
But I digress.
This commentary is not about whether bin Ladin was or was not a good guy. Obviously he was a bad guy — even making his wives do his laundry by hand, according to “0D30″. Wouldn’t even buy them a washer and dryer.
This commentary is about how far Americans have progressed, between 1858 and now, along the path to moral evolution. Not an inch.
In 1858 we had Candyland, where Leonardo di Caprio’s character used torture to maintain his power over people of color who rebelled against their own exploitation.
And now, 160 years later, we have the CIA instead — with Jessica Chastain’s character using torture to maintain her power over people of color who rebelled against their own exploitation. On past Martin Luther King birthday holidays, I’ve honored the day by watching “The Long Walk Home” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-YwJKIqyOE or “The Help,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbuKgzgeUIU, listening to Joan Baez sing the hauntingly immortal “Birmingham Sunday,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ0y-vO9QLE and/or remembering back when I myself marched with Dr. King in Montgomery in 1965 — while seven months pregnant with my first baby.
During past MLK birthday celebrations, I was always filled with hope.
On this MLK birthday celebration, however, I was only filled with despair.
4 Comments
Excellent point.
I just got back form Django Unchained. I too was just blown away by how cruel humans can be. When I think of the dog scene in Django Unchain I also think about the way dog were used on colored people in Abu Ghraib.
Sick.
Of course it does help to know that Barak Obama is our President today, that we have made some progress, but the fact that he continues policies and are cruel is hard to take. They are still wrong no matter who does them.
Is this supposed to be a serious question?
“Obama Unchained?
Abstract: Kneading a violent, but, sadly, factual movie of Tarantino with Obama in an explosive conceptual mixture…
Quentin Tarantino, in his best movie so far, explores how slavery worked in the USA. It exposes slavery as not just a grotesque paradigm of plutocracy, but also its essence.
The violence of slavery in the South was deliberately engineered to appear as insane and as terrorizing as possible. There was a deep reason for the apparent insanity. Insanity sometimes has its reasons that reasonable reason can’t reach. ”
says Patrice Ayme in
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/obama-unchained/
an interesting essay on plutocracy.
Because we elect a President every four years in America. Part of the job description is keeping people who want to kill me and my family from doing so. Unlike the previous administration, this President has done just that. We may not like the methods used, but it is quite possible it was the only way. And unlike ZD30, the truth is torture hindered that process, not helped it. If it comes down to them or me and mine, if I am paying you with my tax dollars, it better damn well be them.
I went to see “Django” with some good friends and found zero likeness between him and OBL. That said, several young women actually ran out of the theatre crying during the depictions of the barbarism of slavery. I read “The Book of the Night Women” a while back, written by a Jamaican Professor about life on a plantation on that island. I found the depiction of the same to be remakably accurate in “Django”. The movie was great on every level imho – it was a spaghetti western, it had great humorous scenes (the bags on the head, for example), and it was hardcore in the depiction of slavery – if anything, it was too easy in that sense, but what Tarentino would have said would never get past the censors. My best hope is perhaps it will make some people rethink their view on black people.