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Poison Pill Politics l Charles Blow NYT

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OP-ED COLUMNIST

Poison Pill Politics

The deadline has passed. The sequester is in effect. And Congress is not in session.

By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: March 1, 2013

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Charles M. Blow

We now know that our political system is broken beyond anything even remotely resembling a functional government.

The ridiculous bill was designed as a poison pill, but Republicans popped it like a Pez. Now the body politic — weak with battle fatigue, jerked from crisis to crisis and struggling to recover from a recession — has to wait to see how severe the damage will be.

(The director of the Congressional Budget Office estimatesthat the sequester could cost 750,000 jobs in 2013 alone.)

This is all because Republicans have refused to even consider new revenue as part of a deal. That includes revenue from closing tax loopholes, a move they supposedly support.

As Speaker John Boehner said after his Congressional leaders met with President Obama on Friday:

“Let’s make it clear that the president got his tax hikes on Jan. 1. This discussion about revenue, in my view, is over.”

Boehner’s intransigence during the talks drew “cheers,” according to a report in The New York Times, from his chronically intransigent colleagues. But their position is a twist of the truth that is coming dangerously close to becoming accepted wisdom by sheer volume of repetition. It must be battled back every time it is uttered.

Let’s make this clear: it is wrong to characterize the American Taxpayer Relief Act as a “tax hike.” In reality, much of what it did was allow 18 percent of the Bush tax cuts — mostly those affecting the wealthiest Americans — to expire while permanently locking in a whopping 82 percent of them.

But of course, that misrepresentation fit with the tired trope of Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals. It also completely ignores that it was Bush-era spending that dug the ditch we’re in.

Republicans have defined their position, regardless of how reckless: austerity or bust. However, as economists have warned, austerity generally precedes — and, in fact, can cause — bust. Just look at Europe.

But Republicans are so dizzy over the deficits and delighted to lick the boots of billionaires that they cannot — or will not — see it. They are still trying to sell cut-to-grow snake oil: cut spending and cut taxes, and the economy will grow because rich people will be happy, and when rich people are happy they hire poor people, and then everyone’s happy.

This is the vacuous talk of politicians trying to placate people with vacation homes, not a sensible solution for people trying to purchase, or simply retain, their first homes.

Now the president is trying to make the best of a bad situation and bring expectations in line with what is likely to happen.

When Gallup this week asked Americans to use one word to describe the sequester, negative words outnumbered good words four to one. The top three negative words or phrases were “bad,” “disaster” and “God help us.”

At a news conference after Friday’s meeting with Congressional leaders, the president tried to tamp down some of the most dire predictions about the sequester’s impact. He said:

“What’s important to understand is that not everyone will feel the pain of these cuts right away. The pain, though, will be real.”

The president knows well that if the sequester’s effects are so diffused that the public — whose attention span is as narrow as a cat’s hair — doesn’t connect them to their source, people might think the administration cried wolf.

That’s why he said, and will most likely continue to say for months, “So every time that we get a piece of economic news over the next month, next two months, next six months, as long as the sequester’s in place we’ll know that that economic news could have been better if Congress had not failed to act.”

He must yoke this pain to the people who invited it. It’s not as though most Americans don’t already think poorly of Republicans anyway.

A Pew Research Center report released this week found that most Americans think the Republican Party, unlike the Democratic Party, is out of touch with the American people and too extreme. And most Americans did not see Republicans as open to change or looking out for the country’s future as much as Democrats.

The president said Friday that “there is a caucus of common sense up on Capitol Hill” that includes Congressional Republicans who “privately at least” were willing to close loopholes to prevent the sequester.

Those privately reasonable Republicans might want to be more public before their party goes over another cliff and takes the country with them.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me atchblow@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 2, 2013, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Poison Pill Politics.
Go to Columnist Page »

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

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Three Ways to Consider Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” l Amy Alexander

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SUNDAY, JANUARY 6, 2013

Three Ways to Consider Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”

Two weeks after it opened,  “Django Unchained”continues kicking up a windstorm of commentary, critiques and rants.  It has also earned more than$100 million at the domestic box office, not exactly small change for a spectacularly complicated film that opened at the height of the Christmas season.

I’d read the reviews in The New York Times and other outlets and sat it out, opting for a Christmas holiday free of blood-splatters.  During the film’s first week, I followed and sometimes chimed in on the discussions that clogged my social media channels. Many of the writers, academics and media folks who are the core of my network expressed — sometimes in heated language — widely diverging opinions about the movie.  Insummary:

— Tarantino foolishly makes light of the horrors of slavery. (Susan Fales Hill.)
— Tarantino delivered a liberating revenge fantasy, disturbing but legitimate (TaRessa Stovall.)
— Tarantino wrongly suggests that an eye-for-an-eye philosophy would have been an acceptable antidote to slavery, i.e., slaves or former slaves killing whites in retribution. (William Jelani Cobb)
— Tarantino is talented but woefully immature. (Me.)

Now that I’ve watched it, here are two points on the film, brief analysis on the buzz surrounding the film, and observations on the filmmaker’s comments about how and why he made it.

1) Story
“Django Unchained” is a love story wrapped in an action-packed revenge fantasy set against the backdrop of slavery in the Deep South and in the Southwest.

Or is it?

As a postmodern, edgy action movie, it is wildly successful. As a love story it is weakened by excesses that Tarantino either didn’t notice, failed to reign in, or willfully created. As a revenge fantasy-cum-commentary on racism, it succeeds moderately.   There are strained metaphors and over-long scenes that hamper the action  (Fales Hill, for example, quite astutely noted the ‘hamfisted’ inclusion a reference to Wagner’s “The Ring Cycle,”  within the plot).  But the  biggest story deficit is that the film’s spine — it’s core meaning — isn’t clear. Is it foremost a love story? A revenge fantasy? A buddy film? Tarantino’s reputation as an enfant terrible of modern film auteurs springs from his ability to produce jarring, swift acts of violence, unexpected moments of tenderness, and black humor laced with creative explosions of colorfully profane language.

All are present here, but given the incendiary frame (slavery, the ultimate third-rail in American cultural politics), identifying the genuine point of the story is difficult. Tarantino’s biggest weakness as a filmmaker (in my book) has long been his inability or unwillingness to honor the tradition of linear cinematic storytelling, i.e., plots that have clearly defined beginnings, mid-sections, and endings. His elliptical style, in which flashbacks and future developments pop up randomly, swing around and double back on each other, sometimes at a dizzying pace (“Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction”) is used, I believe, as something of a dodge: He may indeed be capable of writing a linear narrative and simply elects not to. But as I view his catalog, Tarantino is more interested in encouraging incipient ADHD in the audience than in steadily building our investment in the characters, in cultivating a gradual, creeping tension as plot developments logically unfold. (No, I am neither inflexible or inherently opposed to ‘non-traditional’ storytelling tactics, I merely prefer the former method and Tarantino has yet to produce a film that  has this flow.)  The story within “Django Unchained” is obscured; it takes a back seat to the main theme that Tarantino is promoting — blacks avenging the cruelties of slavery. That is not a ‘story,’ it is a political statement.

2) Artistry

Other reviewers — film scholars and smart movie-goers alike — have correctly identified the film’s obvious homage to the “Spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone.  Unmentioned, though, is its liberal borrowing of motifs from a host of other films and filmmakers, including Hitchcock, John Ford,  Gordon Parks, Mel Brooks, and in a fleeting reference, David O. Selznick. Taken individually, the references to Leone, Hitchcock, Parks, and to Brooks are not problematic.  Collectively though, they diminish the opportunity for a truly original film that might have been enhanced by deploying fewer (or by a more subtle deployment) of references to past films or other genres. As it is, the driving artistic feature of “Django’ is that it is a mash-up, however slick, visceral and humorously drawn the total sum of its parts.

There are liberal doses of Peckinpah in the grisly images of spurting blood and rending limbs; reminders of Parks in the many shots of  Django’s quick-draw skills and bad-ass lines of dialog; hints of Ford in the back-lit, sillhouettes or heroic shots of Jamie Foxx’s Django swaggering away from the camera framed by looming mountain ranges;  big splashes of Hitchock in Django’s intense, tunnel vision focus on rescuing Kerry Washington’s Brunhilda, a character who serves as the proverbial ‘McGuffin’ — that item or person identified by the Master of Suspense as the driving momentum of a plot (really, Brunhilda in “Django’ may as well have been a mysterious uranium formula, a la Cary Grant’s and Ingrid Bergman’s ‘McGuffin’ in ‘Notorious”). The scene in which the Klansmen — led by Don Johnson’s character —  disagree over their hoods is an updating of the bandit’s ‘beans for dinner’ scene in “Blazing Saddles” — unexpected, hilarious and decidedly un-PC.

And the appearance, mid-way through the second reel, of the word “Mississippi” in all-caps, slowly crawling (or is it ‘wiping?’) majestically across the screen from right-frame to left-frame, indicatingthe protagonist’s traveling into the Deep South is clearly a reference to Selznick’s “Gone With the Wind.” Much has been made of the possibility that Tarantino is attempting with “Django’ to reap a kind of cinematic payback upon that epic film and presumably other ‘Golden Age of Hollywood”  tales of the Old South in which blacks were portrayed as simpletons and victims. This may be the case and Tarantino and modern directors are of course welcome to update that hoary genre at will. Yet, while “Django” is indeed a ‘fun,’ moderately cathartic revenge fantasy-take on slavery, it is also ultimately a fairly cold-hearted film, unlike “Gone with the Wind.” Tarantino istremendously talented, and I enjoy his films — within limits. I do though eagerly await the moment when his output begins to show signs of genuine maturity, artistically and in the ability to explore the human condition with a stronger emphasis on compassion rather than cynicism. At least in “Django,’ Tarantino has improved on a basic skill of mainstream film auteurs — constructing mis en scene that is visually arresting, if ultimately in need of editing.

3) Buzz, Criticism, Tarantino’s Comments

As I said up top, lots of very smart people are chattering about “Django Unchained,” with most of the heat apparently arising from Tarantino’s decision to take on slavery. Part of the challenge — and I say this with all due respect to my peers! — is that academic experts in black studies are not necessarily experts on film, while film scholars are not usually known for their expertise on black American history. Thus, we’ve had a huge amount of teeth-gnashing in the media ecosystem about “Django Unchained,” but not very much in the way of genuinely useful analysis.

Even so, a common  point of contention is the violence and surfeit of images showing Washington’s character being whipped and of another slave character being ripped apart by dogs after attempting to escape.  These scenes are upsetting, although, yes, they are meant to be and they should be.  What is objectionable is Tarantino’s decision to return to them gratuitously in the second and in the final reel.  The fact that the characters use the word ‘nigger’ with abandon does not bother me — it is, after all, a story that unfolds in a era when that word was widely used.  What does rankle me is what appears to be the author’s insistence that he deserves a pass on his continued appropriation on black pain (as we have endured it throughout the brutal physical abuse of the antebellum era and in the deep psychological and emotional scarring that has accumulated in the decades since thanks to Jim Crow laws, and more recently, persistent, low-grade racism that permeates American institutions including corporations, the law, and education.) Also, Tarantino does not get a ‘ghetto-pass,’ just because he grew up among blacks in Southern California, or because his mom ‘dated Wilt Chamberlain,” as he recently disclosed in an interview. I don’t abide anyone using the word ‘nigger’ in conversation in my presence; and while Tarantino’s film characters are obviously fictional, it is not acceptable that he apparently believes that he has earned a license to continuously deploy that word and that he seems to have the impression that by doing so he is diminishing its power.  I argued nearly a decade ago that there was something sick about the proliferation of the phrase ‘ghetto-fabulous’ in popular media and culture and this appropriation of the word ‘nigger’ by Tarantino or other artists — black and white, truth be told — is in the same category of outsized entitlement and general Dumb Assery.

Moreover, I find Tarantino’s insistence that the gleeful depictions of over the top violence that he often highlights in his film are ‘fun’ to be terribly ill-considered.  Even Clint Eastwood — who rightly caught lots of hell for the splatter-fests that distinguished his “Dirty Harry’ films of the ’70s and ’80s — eventually gave up the argument that such violence didn’t have any negative impact on our national consciousness.  Eastwood grew out of such displays, likely in no small part because as he matured to fatherhood and grandfather-hood he could no longer justify producing films with the potential to negatively inform the behavior of individuals within his off-spring’s cohort.

On January 2, Terry Gross, the veteran host of  NPR’s “Fresh Air” published a riveting interview with Tarantino.  I am always rooting for artists, even those who produce high profile work that garners lots of press, generates high heat but which is often stubbornly flawed.  Tarantino, as I’ve said, is genuinely talented, and I root for his success. Yet his response to one of Gross’s questions was very troubling: Gross asked if Tarantino ever considers the the possibility that the violence and brutality in his films may have any connection to or influence over the mass shootings that have increased in the U.S. in the past decade, in particular, the recent horror of 20 dead children and six dead teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. Tarantino replies that he is ‘annoyed’ by such a question, and that even asking it is, ‘insulting to the memory’ of those who died at Sandy Hook Elementary.

If I were writing a script about a public figure who produces mass media designed to resonate with millions of viewers…..but who also denies that his product has lasting influence on any audience members, I would include a version of this interview.  It would take place in the beginning of the third reel, at the crucial moment when the protagonist finally receives profound enlightenment, matures, and finds the strength and maturity needed to infuse his mission with clarity of vision, the bright light of hope, and the beauty of compassion.

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OCG Read Recommendation: ” Dry Bones” Screenplay by Deadria Farmer-Paellmann

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Dry Bones – A Screenplay Based on a True Story

eBook (PDF), 108 Pages
An 18th Century burial ground is discovered on modern-day Wall Street filled with the bones of enslaved Africans. A young woman wages a cutthroat battle to unearth the role that corporations played in slavery and to make them pay. Inspired by a true story. Winner of the Women In Film and Video of New England Screenwriters Award, Finalist in the Beverly Hills Film Festival Screenwriters Competition

Formats for this Ebook

PDF
Required Software Any PDF Reader, Apple Preview
Supported Devices Windows PC/PocketPC, Mac OS, Linux OS, Apple iPhone/iPod Touch… (See More)
# of Devices Unlimited
Flowing Text / Pages Pages
Printable? Yes

Buy ebook HERE

About Deadria Farmer-Paellmann

Author Image

Deadria Farmer-Paellmann is a legal strategist and human rights advocate. In 2002, she filed a landmark class action lawsuit for slavery reparations against blue-chip corporations.

Farmer-Paellmann is credited with popularizing the slavery reparations movement through her groundbreaking research exposing corporate complicity in slavery. In January of 2000, she exposed Aetna Incorporated for writing insurance policies on the lives of enslaved Africans with slaveholders as the beneficiaries in the 1800’s. Her research linking JP Morgan Chase/Bank One to slavery led to the company making a public apology in January 2005, and committing to pay $5 million in reparations over the next five years in college scholarships to slave descendants residing in Louisiana.

She earned her B.A. in Political Science at the CUNY Brooklyn College in 1988; her M.A. in Lobbying from The George Washington University in 1995; and her J.D. from New England School of Law in 1999.

The American Reader : HOW THE FBI PRE-READ AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITING

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TOTAL LITERARY AWARENESS: HOW THE FBI PRE-READ AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITING

This essay appears in the November issue of The American Reader (on newsstands now).

✖

J. Edgar Hoover’s “Charismatic Bureaucracy”

Ellen Schrecker, liberalism’s semi-official chronicler of McCarthyism, hints that this dark episode of modern American history deserves a name change.  “Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] opened the [FBI’s] files,” she speculates, “McCarthyism would probably have been called ‘Hooverism.’ ”[1]  Schrecker’s case depends on a high regard for the functioning of J. Edgar Hoover’s charismatic bureaucracy—the FBI’s design, management, and marketing of a “machinery of political repression” able to install anticommunism as a touchstone of good government during the Cold War.[2]  Providing undercover informers to Smith Act prosecutors set on jailing Communists was just one part of this machinery.  Under a secret “Responsibilities Program,” established in 1951, the Bureau also dispatched file-based, not-for-attribution blind memoranda to governors and other “appropriate authorities,” warning of possible Reds on the payroll.[3]  Well-honed Bureau techniques for indexing dissent directly fed the classic sin of the blacklist, fingering over 400 public employees for firing, most of them school and university teachers.  The names the FBI could not legally communicate to state officials it delivered to the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, and other wholesome quasi-publics.  At least until 1953, when Hoover began to fear the senator’s sloppiness, the FBI supplied Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee with everything it could: public praise; back-channel advice; prejudicial information on enemies culled from Bureau archives; and a former FBI agent, Don Surine, to serve as chief investigator.  In the McCarthy who fell from grace, Hoover met an anticommunist more media-drunk than himself, and did not enjoy the reflected glare.  Even HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), the director wrote, seemed to care more about headlines than national security.[4]  Ironically, thanks to Hoover’s relative discretion, his term as McCarthyism’s comptroller-in-chief only enhanced his appeal.  Buoyed by popular anticommunism, public esteem for the director reached its apex, envisioning an untouchable among law-and-order untouchables.  In the appraisal of one contributor to Kids Letters to the F.B.I.(1966), a little classic of youthful obedience, Jesus was indeed a “hero,” but “Mr. Hoover has done more toward helping to keep down juvenile delinquency, as well as other crimes.”[5]

Full Commentary appears  in The American Reader

 

ABOUT THE AMERICAN READER from the NYT

Uzoamaka Maduka Leaves a Paper Trail With the American Reader

“Between cocktails, thick slices of pink roast beef were plated and passed around, and Ann Marlowe, the writer and critic, approached a young African-American woman seated at a long kitchen table.

“You’re the woman with the magazine, aren’t you?” she asked.

She is. As the editor of the fledgling literary journal, The American Reader, Uzoamaka Maduka, a 25-year-old Princeton graduate, is proof that even in this iPhone age, some paper-based dreams have not died: bright young things, it seems, are still coming to New York, smoking too much and starting perfect-bound literary journals.

On the night of Mr. Asen’s party, The American Reader was just a week away from deadline for its third issue. The fact the magazine has printed anything at all has left many to wonder: how did this young woman, with no special family or literary connections, manage to wrangle some big names around the unlikeliest of projects — a monthly literary magazine?

The answer is that Ms. Maduka, or Max to her friends, has combined an unusual charisma with sheer determination to meet the right people, find the right parties and propel herself into the city’s literary set, even before the magazine has produced much in the way of writing. Her personality presents a stark contrast to the clubby and often critical literary party scene, with a warm, open nature that has built a parade of new best friends — along with admiring profiles in The New York Observer and The Daily Beast.   “

Race-Talk | A Kirwan Institute Project

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Django Unchained & Tarantino’s Quest for the “N-word” Pass

January 2, 2013 | Filed under: African Americans,Culture,Featured,Pop culture | Posted by: Guest Author

By @Robtheidealist, Carleton College Law Student,

Originally posted on Orchestrated Pulse

The following is a two part series that examines Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Part 1 explores Tarantino’s approach to the film, while part 2 will explore the content. I’m writing these articles because media plays a pivotal role in cultural production. Django Unchained has real-world implications.

Both the racial representations in the film and the racialized audience receiving them are mutually constitutive. That is, audiences make active meaning of movies while movies are produced to engender what audiences desire and find relevant. Mathew Hughley “The White Savior Film and Reviewers’ Reception” 478

Legends are stories passed along and accepted as historical. Legends often serve as “myths” because in addition to being historical, these stories also function as a repository of cultural imaginings and practices.

A usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon- Webster

The cultural space of myth-making is a contested landscape. Historically, oppressive regimes have used violence to secure their power, and they like to tell their history as the myth of massacre and domination of powerless (read: inferior) foes. Even today, these same power interests work diligently to erase resistance practiced by marginalized groups, whether in the past or present. Through myths, revolutionary violence becomes an archetype of resistance alongside noncooperation and other nonviolent tactics. As with all archetypes, there is a spiritual significance in resistance myths. There is a sense of kinship and connection to the past as the myth informs marginalized people not just of who they were, but of who they are and who they may become. Each time these myths are told they not only erase the dominant narrative that marginalized people passively accepted subjugation, but the myth also arouses the contemporary revolutionary imagination, thus threatening existing power relations.

Unfortunately, I believe that Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” is a myth that does more harm than good. First, I want to make a few things clear. I have no problem with myths of revolutionary violence, and I don’t automatically object to White people telling and/or experimenting with those stories. In fact, I was very excited about Tarantino’s film until I saw the trailer this past summer.

via Race-Talk | A Kirwan Institute Project.

Django Unchained: A Critical Conversation Between Two Friends | The Feminist Wire

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Django Unchained: A Critical Conversation Between Two Friends

December 31, 2012

By David J. Leonard and Tamura A. Lomax

There have been so many great discussions on Django Unchained, so many thoughtful and engaging articles, and even more critical engagements within social media.  We’ve seen everything from harsh critiques to high praise, and of course everything else in between.  The analyses, conversations and comments have all been challenging.  Rather than write a review per se, we thought we’d have a public conversation.  Regardless of how we individually interpret the film, we agree that Django needs lots of discussion.  There’s still a fair amount of unsullied ground to cover, or perhaps, previously examined ground to rehash.  Whatever the case may be we invite you to join us.

DJL:  Let me start with this: I am not a fan of Quentin Tarantino (QT), Westerns, or action films.  This is not my wheelhouse so it is no wonder that I left the movie with both questions and concerns about its message and representations, and a MEH feeling about the film.  I just didn’t feel it.  More importantly, I find QT to be really arrogant and problematic as a filmmaker and as a PERSONA on a number of levels.  His responses to critics, his self-aggrandizement, his lack of critical self-reflection, his lack of growth as a filmmaker (the fact that this film is so much like his past films is not a ringing endorsement), and his comfort in cashing in on his privileges trouble me.  My reading of the film is clouded by all of these feelings.

via Django Unchained: A Critical Conversation Between Two Friends | The Feminist Wire.

OCG Feature l “The House I Live In” l A MUST SEE MOVIE l “Must Change Realities”

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January, 2013

OCG Feature

 

The House I Live In

From Executive Producers DANNY GLOVER, JOHN LEGEND, BRAD PITT & RUSSELL SIMMONS

A FILM BYEUGENE JARECKI

As America remains embroiled in conflict overseas, a less visible war is taking place at home, costing countless lives, destroying families, and inflicting untold damage on future generations of Americans. Over forty years, the War on Drugs has accounted for more than 45 million arrests, made America the world’s largest jailer, and damaged poor communities at home and abroad. Yet for all that, drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available today than ever before. Filmed in more than twenty states, The House I Live In captures heart-wrenching stories from individuals at all levels of America’s War on Drugs. From the dealer to the grieving mother, the narcotics officer to the senator, the inmate to the federal judge, the film offers a penetrating look inside America’s longest war, offering a definitive portrait and revealing its profound human rights implications.

While recognizing the seriousness of drug abuse as a matter of public health, the film investigates the tragic errors and shortcomings that have meant it is more often treated as a matter for law enforcement, creating a vast machine that feeds largely on America’s poor, and especially on minority communities. Beyond simple misguided policy, The House I Live In examines how political and economic corruption have fueled the war for forty years, despite persistent evidence of its moral, economic, and practical failures.

EVERY DAY MORE PEOPLE AGREE
THE WAR ON DRUGS HAS FAILED
JOIN  THEM AND MUST CHANGE

Comprehensive in scope, heart wrenching in its humanity, and brilliant in its thesis, Jarecki’s new film grabs viewers and shakes them to their core. The House I Live In is not only the definitive film on the failure of America’s drug war, but it is also a masterpiece filled with hope and the potential to effect change. This film is surely destined for the annals of documentary history.

– SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2012

FEARLESS! A model of the ambitious, vitalizing activist work that exists to stir the sleeping to wake.

– NEW YORK TIMES

2012′s BEST DOCUMENTARY! The House I Live In should be seen by everybody.

– FORBES

SEARING! One of the most important pieces of nonfiction to hit the screen in years.

– LOS ANGELES TIMES

Expertly researched, brilliantly argued and masterfully assembled, it is easily the documentary of the year.

– TIMES PICAYUNE

Eugene Jarecki’s incisive and incendiary The House I Live In, which won the U.S. documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and might win next year’s doc Oscar, will blow your mind.

Join the movement, Get INVOLVED !!!

Learn More

LEARN MORE HERE

Host A Screening

Look for the 2-Part OUR COMMON GROUND Special Broadcast with the Producers and Consultants on this film in January, 2013.

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Django Unchained l Commentary by Professor Karen Johnson, Coordinator of African American Studies, Univ. of Utah

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Django Unchained: Historical Inaccuracies and Racial Tropes Abound

Django Unchained

Django Unchained (Photo credit: Pink Cow Photography)

by Prof. Karen Johnson

Django Unchained, the latest film by Quentin Tarantino (QT), tells the story about a rescued enslaved person named Django (Jaime Foxx) who teams up with his rescuer, a German-immigrant bounty hunter, named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), in efforts to capture criminal fugitives ‘dead or alive’ as a way of acquiring monetary awards. Django and Schultz ultimately devise a scheme to liberate Django’s enslaved wife, Broomhilde (Kerry Washington) from the brutal slave-owner Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The film takes place in the South, from the 1858 to 1859 timeframe.

Although Django Unchained is supposedly a depiction of slavery, it isnot a historical period piece. Instead, this film is more truly a Spaghetti Western genre, in every sense of the word; even the title, Django, is the same name of a 1960s Spaghetti Western film, made by Italian filmmaker Sergio Corbucci. Tarantino’s Djangoreflects the typical QT derisively mocking, sardonic storyline motif, wherein which the aestheticization of violence is reverberated throughout the entire film; and is carried out by the main character, Django, and the other significant supporting characters of Schultz, and Candie. In true QT stylistic fashion, Django represents the antihero—a neo-noir personality type, who is a tormented and conflicted individual, due to the brutal horrors of slavery and to the separation of the love of his life, Broomhilde.  Django is willing to engage in any liberatory means necessary, albeit nihilistic acts of violence, to rescue Broomhilde from Calvin Candie’s plantation. For me, the only redeeming aspect of the film is Django’s unbridled love for Broomhilder and his desire to travel to the bowels of the earth, if you will, in efforts to free her from the holocaust of enslavement. That type of commitment to black love is rare on Hollywood screens. It is a powerful story plot, indeed!

Still, this is a White-American masculinist-authored fantasy about an “exceptional” bad-ass freed man, who is supposedly “different” from other enslaved men or women. Tarantino’s re-imagined Django stands out and alone from the other enslaved in that he is bold, fearless, and has some level of agency, albeit he is still subordinately tied to Schultz. The viewing audience is not given an understanding as to why Django is “exceptional” and the other well-dressed enslaved men and women are docile, idiots, fearful, happy, and have internalized their bondage.

In addition, the enslaved women in the film are characterized as weak, passive, obedient, damsel-in-distress and complicit in their own sexual exploitation. Such myths and depictions run counter to the numerous slave narratives that reveal Black women who were resilient survivors who actively embarked on obliterating slavery. I argue that the erroneous and controlling stereotypical images of Black women as the happy servant or the willingly whore serve to set Black women aside from her humanity and justify and rationalize, to the viewing audience, her bondage.

Tarantino rightfully took artistic liberties to create his film but unfortunately presented a piece that is historically inaccurate and one that drew on racial tropes as a filmic formula. I argue that his film tapped into a particular set of Post Emancipation retrogressionist racial beliefs about the U.S. enslaved person. It appears that he rarely relied on the historiography of U.S. slavery, slave narratives, Civil War widows’ pension testimonies nor other empirical support for his discursive structure or character depictions. If he had tapped into these sources, he would have learned that the enslaved engaged in all sorts of acts of resistance in efforts to undermine slavery. The Nat Turners, Gabriel Prossers, Harriet Tubmans were abundant and they worked in concert with each other, rarely alone, to fight for their people’s liberation. In fact, history reveals that slaverydid not work because of the ongoing various forms of resistance to it. In addition, the time frame in which the film takes place (1858-1859) is a pivotal period in the controversy over slavery in the U.S. and the free and enslaved Black was at the “heart of it all,” in their struggle to put a death knell to this monstrous system, one and two years before the bloodiest battle in American history, the Civil War.

Although Tarantino attempted to break the mold with this film and present a raw and in-your-face visual imagery of the vile abomination of slavery, he interjects lots of satirical humor as a way to diffuse the brutality and degradation of slavery, in attempts to make it more palatable and acceptable. The loud and boisterous laughter my niece and I were surrounded by in the predominately white theater in which we saw the movie was perturbing! Nothing is humorous about human bondage and degradation. At the end of the film, I overheard audience members making comments such as, “that was a funny movie” or “that was entertaining.” With these types of comments, what does that say about the (mis)re-presentations about history in films regarding U.S. slavery? Whose and what representational images are worth depicting accurately in film? Why do we, in this country, continue to tolerate the distorted history about the holocaust of enslavement in film, pop culture, and even in the K-12 school textbooks? At what point will this nation seriously come to grips with its ugly past? Such distortions that Tarantino presented inDjango Unchained do not diminish or challenge the Eurocentric hegemonic regime of truths that invalidate or de-legitimatize Black folks legacy of liberatory struggle in this nation! Taken as a whole, Tarantino’s Django Unchained fails on so many levels! It is not a classic historical film about slavery, but one white man’s imaginary gory and violent video game!

Karen A. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Education & Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah

Professor Karen Johnson is Coordinator of African American Studies, a division in the Ethnic Studies Dept; Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies; Associate Professor of Education in the College of Education at University of Utah. She earned her PhD at UCLA · Los Angeles, California  email:  johnsonkarenann@facebook.com

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Hollywood’s Nigger Joke » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

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JANUARY 01, 2013

Tarantino’s “Django: Unchained”

Hollywood’s Nigger Joke

by CECIL BROWN

I had little dog, his name  was Dash

I’d ruther be a nigger than be white trash

–African American saying

In order for a joke to work, Mary Douglas, the eminent British anthropologist, wrote, one had to have a social context for it to operate in. “We must ask what are the social conditions for a joke to be both perceived and permitted,” she asked in her wonderfully little essay, “jokes,”

“My hypothesis,” she goes on “is that a joke is seen and allowed when it offers a symbolic pattern of a social pattern occurring at the same time.”

With Django: Unchained, the symbolic pattern–I’d call it historical context–is Hollywood itself. “If there is no joke in the social structure,” Mrs Douglas observed, “no other joke can appear.”  In Hollywood, there are lots of jokes in the system!

The social pattern that allows Quentin Tarantino’s “Nigger joke” to work is  set in the South, two years before the Civil War, but my point is that this is only a pretext for Hollywood itself.

Some critics, like Betsy Sharkey, in the Times, think this film is a masterpiece. Sharkey calls it,   “the most articulate, intriguing, provoking, appalling, hilarious, exhilarating, scathing and downright entertaining film yet.”

African American critic Wesley Morris hated it. He called it “unrelenting tastelessness — […] exclamatory kitsch — on a subject as loaded, gruesome, and dishonorable as American slavery.”  Ishmael Reed, the novelist, pointed out how the Weinstein Company promoted an advertising campaign to get a black audience by promoting  Jamie Foxx as the star. In fact, Foxx is only one of the stars, along with Christoph Waltz and  Leonardo DiCaprio. As Reed points out, Foxx spends most of his time looking at Mr.Waltz and then looking at Mr. DiCaprio, with a puzzled look on his face, as if to say, What’s dese white folks, talkin ‘bout?

via Hollywood’s Nigger Joke » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

Netflix Blacks Out the Revolution

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Netflix Blacks Out the Revolution

Thursday, 20 December 2012 15:05

By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Op-Ed

 

You might want to think twice about streaming that “subversive” documentary about the Weather Underground on Netflix. If Republicans have their way, you just might end up on a watch list somewhere.

This week, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the 1988 Video Protection Privacy Act, which forbids movie rental companies from sharing or selling their customers’ viewing history. The Senate is expected to take up the amendment soon.

If this passes, what you watch on Netflix may soon become public information that your friends, employers, and even the government will have access to. Are you regretting streaming the latest Harold and Kumar yet?  Or all those soft-porn chick-flicks?

Netflix favors the law change because it will help them branch into social media and connect Facebook customers to each other based on their similar tastes in films. Unmentioned by Netflix is the enormous profit-potential in selling your viewing history to advertisers who can target specific demographics based on your preference in movies. Also unmentioned by Netflix is just who else might get this information once it’s taken out of the privacy lockbox.

The current version of the amendment does include a provision requiring Netflix to get their customers’ consent before sharing their viewing history. That’s helpful to those of us who are aware of the online threats to our privacy. But the vast majority of Americans, especially younger generations of Americans, are completely unaware that their privacy is in danger when they plug into the Internet. And it’ll probably end up being part of those notorious “terms and conditions” that you check the “I agree” box for, just to get onto the site.

via Netflix Blacks Out the Revolution.