Monday 14 January 2013

Tarantino's Works the Word Nigger Like a Slave

I'm tired of "Lame Rationalization Game" Tarantino has been playing in defense of his (ab)use of the word nigger in Django Unchained.

It begs the question:

What exactly is realistic about a movie whose plot pivots on the cartoon contrivance of a bounty-hunting dentist who rescues a slave in exchange for help in identifying the principles in a particularly lucrative bounty. And if that weren't implausible enough, the beneficient bounty hunter (His name is Dr. King Y'all!)  offers to further assist by offering to teach said slave the fine art of gun slinging and to rescue his wife from the clutches of a leering Mandingo fight loving slave owner.

In any realistic movie Django would have been the bounty. Runaway slaves practically sustained bounty hunting business in the day, almost as much as they did the field of advertising. (but that's another story)

It seems disingenuous in the extreme to assume that in a film as contrived as candy floss, the word nigger is taxed with the burden of sustaining the realism of the film. That's a lot of work for nigger to do.

You could almost say that tries Tarantino works the word nigger like a slave!

While that fact may not be literally true, it is certainly literarily true: The word nigger was uttered 110 times in Django Unchained.

Are we supposed to believe that the number 110 was the actual result of some rigorous formula devised by Tarantino for tallying the exact amount of times the word nigger could be uttered in a 2h45 minute movie so that it corresponds "realistically" to the amount of times a that slave would have heard the word in hs day, month, year lifetime? Or is he just playing a lame rationalization game knowing that no interviewer would have the sand to stand up to him, like the guy from Channel 4 did. (Would that Tarantino had the sand to stand up to a major American Interviewer in that manner...in the weeks leading up to the release of his film...when the controversy was in full rage?)

Whatever his reason for exploiting the word as vigorously as he does in his film, it certainly couldn't be because of a preoccupation with the "real". Otherwise he wouldn't have stopped there and realism would have pervaded his production.

No. His lame excuse is just a rationalization for abuse.

What's the point of the being a "provocateur" if you lack the courage to cop to your deeds.



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