rbstewart7263 said:
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I felt the movie covered alot more bases than roots or amistadt. Roots was sort of masturbatory in its depiction of the slave struggle back then. I felt that django did a better job of outlining who all was involved back then in promoting such a culture and who indeed was not. While not one to one accurate all the players are here whether mandingo fights was a confirmed pasttime or if hotboxes were used to subjugate slaves or whatever.
first we have the white slave owners thats obvious all the films dealing with this have those.
But an Uncle Tom who is just as bad if not worse as the slave owners themselves! thats new. Now the white man isnt the only one. Add to that djangos comment about there being nothing lower than a black slave owner(or seller cant recall) and we have a broader view of who all is responsible for this cruelty instead of just the white devil.
It was everyone. Which is an important distinction if you want to get past the usual gradeschool observations of slavery. Ie: swavery is wong....its baaaaaddddd....
Now we can ask some really daring questions. Since white people are taught to on occasion feel really really bad about something that they didnt and in most cases couldnt do because ancestors right? Now we can ask about those whose ancestors were uncle toms about there share of the burden. The ones who sold there own.(To be fair race wasnt exactly the strongest glue that kept any culture together. Dont think africa is the only one) as well as those bastard ass slave owners who sat around drinking sweet tea while other men did there work.
Or maybe we can all finally start afresh. Treat each other as men and women and as equals instead of pointing fingers and guilt tripping and creating separation. Something some of our not so best civil rights people are good at.(spike lee Im lookin at you)
Well, I think the problem is that there aren't enough people who actually want to strive for equality or co-existance. There is always the entire issue of someone feeling that they need to be special for religious, social, cultural, etc... differances. It's kind of odd, but for something better to come along really bad things need to happen to basically force everyone together. This is one of the reasons why I am such a bastard in a lot of my politics (and get called racist, bigot, etc...) of course because of the basic realization that certain cultures and points of view need to basically need to be broken if we're ever going to acheive a human unity.
To put things into perspective, you'll notice that pretty much every science fiction concept which shows a hypothetical situation where humanity has gotten together as one, and racism and the kinds of tensions we have now are a thing of the past, involves some kind of apocolypse, extremely strong handed facism in the beginning, or even a combination of both to get things to that point. Typically explained through historical exposition which is overlooked by in favor of the present tense of the story. A good exmaple (but hardly the only one) with be Star Trek, where basically you had an apocolypse, a eugenics based war, and then finally a facist regime that basically told everyone "adapt to our society or die" and followed through with the mass murder. The result was the development of The Federation, and a sort of utopian period of human history, it's easy to overlook that cost, and to be honest a lot of later Trek writers tried to get around or re-invent that side of things. Roddenberry said a lot about it back when he did the first episode of "The Next Generation" which was called "Encounter At Farpoint" with Q's little history lesson about what assholes humans had to be to get to the point they were at. While Roddenberry was no longer around he had also apparently already planned out the basic themes there and the general ending for the show, which was Q's revelation about humanity being tested due it's potential to evolve to be even greater than the seemingly omniponent Q continuum. The basic point being that Q was being such a complete arsehole, and even killing millions upon millions of people at times (by say starting wars with The Borg) to pretty much make humanity ready to fit in at an even higher level. A lot more can and be said about that but it's food for thought when it comes to your last bit about everyone getting along. The bottom line is that it's a sad, sick, reality but the bottom line is that I think before any good can happen a lot of evil has to happen first, people are generally not capable of just evolving on their own through the passage of time to put everything aside and blend into one culture, as much as most people would like to see it happen on an academic level. On a lot of levels tolerance becomes counter-productive to creating a society where tolerance is viable (if you catch what I mean). I think a lot of principles of countries like the USA, especially the left wing, are good ones, but happen to be ahead of their time, we're a few steps, and a lot of nastiness, before such a point of view is practical. It's sad when being good is "out of context" to the rest of society... of course this is going beyond the actual point of the discussion, you just made me think of it.
At any rate, in the big picture I think my problem with "Django" is that it throws out just enough to have pretensions of being something other than a blaxploitation movie, with 'edgy' content, while never rising above that level. A few comments here and there for the sake of claiming depth really doesn't give it that much depth. Especially when you get down to the bottom line that it presents this as being something worthy of vengeance, at a time when what society needs is for the people victimized by this to just get the hell over it and fit into the rest of a society that has more or less re-defined itself and bent over backwards to allow it.
Also while irrelevent to the basic point, or my feelings on the subject in a "practical" sense, I think half the problem is that slavery is usually not presented with much context. Generally speaking slavery is always presented in very simplistic terms, focusing entirely on the idea of one person owning another. Little is ever said about why things got to that point to begin with.
We can get into the entire issue of changing morality, wars, etc... but the bottom line is that in the ancient world slavery largely came to exist when you had one people defeat another. Just left to their own devices the defeated would simply re-build and attack the people who defeated them, survivors seeking vengeance if nothing else. This pretty much gave your ancient civilization the question of what to do with the survivors of a defeated enemy, you could for example put them all to the sword, but that's not as easy to do as you might think, and even ancient warrior codes (and religions) tended to have rules about reckless slaughter of those who couldn't currently fight back. Slavery was largely a solution to this as it allowed a people to be "broken" and remove them from being a threat, especially when it came ot large empires, scattering the people accross a huge landmass in of itself was a massive weapon. You wound up with no enemies, and of course a way of controlling the defeated.
This is of course very basic, and differant ancient cultures got to this point, and were differant in their specifics, but that's more or less how it started. Of course once you had slaves you had issues like what to do with their children, since the owners of the slaves became responsible for the care and feeding of the children leading to questions like whether those children were slaves, ir should rather be considered indentured until they paid off the amount of money invested in them. Again, differance places handlded it differant ways. With slaves acknowleged to be property and traded, you also inevitably started to see operations and even entire military campaigns intended just to take slaves and make money.
The point of this though is that I think half the problem with even addressing this issue is the elementary school handling of slavery in general as in "it's evil". Presented in context, one has to ask things like oh "is it more evil than genocide?". In response to "it's better to be dead than a slave" there is also the question that can be asked of nearly anyone if they themselves would rather not exist, because if someone had embraced that, we all pretty much have forefathers who would have been wiped out by now, meaning most of us, and entire ethnicities, cultures, and civilizations wouldn't exist at all.
In the context of even American slavery, the slaves basically came from tribal infighting, and Arabs making inroads against non-islamic savages and wiping them out/absorbing them, and all kinds of things. When you say slavery is wrong, it can be argued anyone screaming about injustice against their forefathers is basically argueing against their own existance since the alternative would have likely been their death in some petty little skirmish or another.
Most notably there probably wouldn't be any white people at all, since the Romans would have killed every one of us. They really did a job on the peoples that grew to become what we consider "white".
The basic point is that the perfect solution of course would be for us to all live in utopian harmony, under one culture, full of peace, understanding, and plenty, so there would be no war, and issues like this would never come up, since it all starts with people disagreeing enough to come to conflict begin with.
Of course the bottom line is that humanity evolved in seperate groups, everyone became their own distinct flavor of asshole, and that's not going to change until the king of all assholes pretty much shows up to out bastard everyone else and force everyone together.
At the end of the day movies like "Django" are intended to make money off of being inflammatory and divisive. That doesn't mean they aren't still good movies though. It just means that there is no real constructive message present, and anyone tryin to lionize it on those levels is simply wrong. It teaches nothing, it presents nothin in the way of a valid viewpoint or commentary, it does however have some entertaining fight scenes. Claiming Django is some kind of message movie worthy of all kinds of praise, is like saying the same thing about the "Saw" movies and how they teach viewers to appreciate life more... no they do not, they are pure out wrong, and are entertaining for that reason (if your into that) you watch a movie like "Saw" because it's twelve differant kinds of screwed up at once. The same can be said about "Django", the set up it's socially relevent, it's an excuse to watch a dude shoot a bunch of people and go "wow, they will never top that... oh look they just did". I put it in the same basic catagory as "Machete" or "Hobo With A Shotgun" all pretensions aside, if you think there is actually a message there other than a thinly vieled attempt to string together a bunch of "WTF did I just see" moments (like dudes being hunt from the ceilling with nooses attached to crossbow bolts, or some dude swinging from one floor to another out the window of a building using some other dude's intestines as a rope), I think you have a problem. Basically if Django is supposed to be a deep, and important commentary on slavery, I actually think we should probably consider "Saw" the deepest and most socially relevent thing ever, since it probably spelled out/repeted it's message more... you know, instead of just saying it's a thinly vieled excuse to watch people be forced to torture themselves to death and make the audience oooh and ahh about how wrong it is that someone filmed these scenes.