Django Unchanged: So conventional its controversial

While waiting for my car to get an oil change, I walked over to the nearby Big Lots and found a DVD of Django Unchanged in the discount rack. I hadn't seen the movie since it was making the rounds of the theaters, and I did hanker to take another look. Having enjoyed seeing it again, I did a few google searches, and found, first of all, that there have been other Django movies before, except, this is the first one where Django was a gunslinger of African descent. Some of the others were a lot bloodier.

After reading a little, I realized that Django Unchained is no more, and no less than a well-done spaghetti western, just one more of the genre. The plot is quite as improbable as all the other spaghetti westerns, but do any of us take those seriously? Django Unchained happens to be a spaghetti western where some of the action happens in The South, and it happens a little before the Civil War, instead of a decade or two afterward. There was truly western settlement going on before 1860, and a good deal of commerce and migration from the southern states to the western territories, and back again.

Django Unchained also happens to assign a lead gunslinger role to a character, and therefore an actor, of known and visible African descent. Adding to all the fantasies and fables that make up the American Western, and of course the spaghetti western, what such a character might have been like, and done, is simply a bit of good clean fun. A bit bloody, but aren't they all? So this time some "white" bad guys get killed by a "black" good guy. About time.

Django Unchained is NOT a movie of great social and political importance. It doesn't pretend to be. It is not forgotten and suppressed history brought at last to the silver screen. That is its significance. We've come far enough down the road that we can now have black characters routinely included in such movies without having to have great social and political importance.

One can certainly quibble with some historical anachronisms. There weren't night riders out in masks or other regalia in 1858 or 1859. It wasn't necessary to have secret organizations inflicting that kind of covert terror. Slavery was legal. Most of the African-descended population was enslaved, and the "free colored" population was moderately prosperous, socially conservative, dependent upon "white" patronage. If the local gentry had wanted to go after Dr. Schulz and Django, they would have done so openly, or not at all. But the scene was good entertainment.

Further, Candie Land would NOT have been around for seventy years. More like twenty, maybe thirty at the most. Mississippi was still a wild frontier in 1835. Half the land in the state was only purchased from the Choctaw nation in 1830. In 1817, Mississippi had a constitution similar to South Carolina, requiring state representatives to own 150 acres of land, and state senators 300 acres. But that was thrown out in 1832 when small family farmers in the eastern part of the state revolted against the elites along the Mississippi River and Gulf coast, what was called the "whole hogs" rebellion.

The 1832 constitution prohibited importation of any new slaves into Mississippi for sale. But by 1840 the politics of the state changed again, as cotton became the dominant crop and large plantations again dominated. So people like Calvin Candie, with pretensions to French culture, but no French, were an upstart nouveau riche elite, having a history of perhaps 18-25 years in their garish imitation of gracious plantation living. If old Ben (whose skull Candie displayed) shaved Calvin Candie's father and grandfather with a straight razor, he did that back in Virginia or South Carolina. Seventy years before 1858 was 1788, and the federal constitution was only a year old. There were still only 13 states.

This is one reason that secession was such an infantile notion, when the Civil War finally broke out. Most of the people who identified so mightily in their independent rights as citizens of the sovereign state of Mississippi had been born somewhere else. Jefferson Davis, for instance, like Abraham Lincoln, had been born in Kentucky. Neither the state nor its residents had any significant history as a distinct people. It was a creation of the United States of America.

Finally, I've never found a significant reference to any universal rule against a person of African descent riding a horse. There were dark skinned overseers who rode horses, among others. Out west, the rather small number of free black settlers rode whatever they pleased.

That said, it was really fun to see the Brittle Brothers get their comeuppance. The careful acting and camera work of the enslaved Jody's expressions as she twisted around to see the overseer about to bullwhip her get a bullet through the heart fired by a tall black man in a bright blue suit was priceless. And the blood splashing across the cotton bolls in the field as the last dead Brittle fell off his horse... exquisite. It was the same kind of thrill as watching Hopalong Cassidy step inside a mining cabin and drill bullets through ten cattle rustlers before they could draw... only with a new twist.

One spelling error recurs in several of the commentaries already available on the internet about this movie: It seems that nobody knows how to spell Brunhilda. Everyone writes it Broomhilda, which is the name of a mid-20th century American cartoon character, a funny incompetent little witch on the comics pages. The legend Schultz related to Django, the good German name that some lady named von Schaft gave to her young slave, was Brunhilda, heroine of one of the finest Teutonic epics. Keep that straight people.

Trayvon Martin: Let It Rest

Personally, I thought George Zimmerman was guilty of some degree of homicide. Not first degree: he did not deliberately set out to target Trayvon Martin with malice aforethought and intent to kill. Not second degree: when he shot Trayvon, he did not shoot with malice. But it wasn't justified self defence either: you don't get to pick a fight with someone, then when the fight goes against you, pull out a gun and kill, and claim "self-defence." If George Zimmerman had stayed in his truck, Trayvon Martin would be alive today.

I do not believe the jury that found George Zimmerman not guilty of all charges was primarily motivated by racism, and I cannot know with certainty that it was motivated at all by racism. Credible accounts that Martin had Zimmerman pinned to the ground, and Zimmerman feared for his own safety are quite enough to explain the jury's verdict.

I wasn't in the court room, and I didn't hear all the evidence. Like most people, I had to sort through what was pumped out in the media, generally with a lot of overlay by people who were either pumping for Zimmerman as a poster boy for something or other, or were demanding that he be convicted. I tried to get the best picture I could, but only the jury heard it all.

The best sense I got is that two people were each afraid the other was up to no good, and lashed out in what they perceived to be self-defense. Zimmerman thought he was following a potential burglar, and he was wrong. Martin thought a crazy man was following him with intent to assault, rob, or otherwise harm him, and he wasn't quite right about that either. Based on a video that's been posted, it is obvious why Martin might have found Zimmerman's behavior bizzare and threatening. Martin probably felt 'this guy's following me down the street on a dark rainy night, driving past me, then stopping, watching me, following me around the corner and around a bend, then getting out of his vehicle and following me.' Zimmerman thought Martin was acting bizarre when Martin ducked out of sight for fear of Zimmerman.

Zimmerman thought it odd that Martin was looking at him. Martin thought it odd that Zimmerman was looking at him. At some point, Martin thought the best way to insure his own safety was to incapacitate this creepy guy following him. That was overkill. So Martin turned on Zimmerman, quite possibly intending to render him unconscious, and Zimmerman, who found that understandably threatening, pulled out a gun and shot Martin.

Nobody who has had a friend or relation in prison, or worked with families who did, could fail to have some sympathy for Zimmerman's parents and wife, and even Zimmerman himself. He believed he was doing the right thing. He really did. But killing someone, in the honest and unreasonable belief that someone poses a danger, is a crime, albeit less than murder. The hard part is, Zimmerman had a reasonable belief that Martin was doing great bodily harm to him at the time he fired. What he did not have was a reasonable basis to behave in the bizarre fashion that led Martin to believe Zimmerman was posing a danger to Martin.

Apparently the jury found Zimmerman's injuries established a reasonable doubt that he was guilty of any degree of criminal homicide. But the fact remains, Zimmerman began the chain of circumstances that ended with Zimmerman shooting Martin. Zimmerman made a faulty assumption about Martin, and acted on it. It is dangerous for people who jump to conclusions to be following other people on dark rainy nights. It is even more dangerous for such people to be carrying weapons. We need protection from people who do what George Zimmerman did. A conviction would have provided a bit of that protection.

Trials are not held to provide the community with catharsis. The jury has a specific duty NOT to respond to any organized body of opinion that Zimmerman should or should not be convicted. They heard all the evidence, and did what seemed to them the best they could do. They clearly weren't happy with it. Even if the evidence was clear and convincing, they had to find proof beyond a reasonable doubt in order to convict.

Zimmerman does come across as a creepy guy. Hopefully he will at least have learned to stay home and stop acting like Superman. The verdict cannot be satisfying to Martin's family, but the fact that there was a trial was a victory. Zimmerman did not get to walk after a routine dismissal by police. He had to face detailed testimony, and the entire matter was examined and sifted. That is a bit more than nothing. Let it rest.