Poems and Prose #26: Animated

The cartoons flicker
   on the CRT screen,
Macabre in their mixture
   of slapstick and obscene.
I stifle a chuckle
   and dunk my spoon in my beans,
Pondering exactly
   what Bugs Bunny's smirk means.
Certain he's with me,
   I recline, now serene,
Thoughts now discolored
   with a brightly hued sheen,
Popping and bopping
   to a quartet of strings,
My living room fit
   for both jesters and kings.

Poems and Prose #25: Corrosion

His veins corroded
  by too many sweets,
He finds he's got
  all kinds of time to retreat,
To say he's a sinner,
  at home with the least,
That he was blind to the signs
  till his fate was unsheathed.
Now here on his hospital bed,
  he repeats
The ninety-nine hundred and nine
  ways he was fleeced.

Poems and Prose #24: Woolen

Have you no decency?
No moral compass?
No qualms at all
with sins so suffixed?
I have a hunch
your eyes are buttressed
by your books and essays
and word-filled ruckus,
leaving you much like a
furnace gone ductless,
or, more aptly,
a preacher turned tongueless.

Blowing Up Tara

I recently watched a hot-off-the-presses DVD screener (because I'm poor and cheap; sorry, Weinstein brothers and your financial backers) of Quentin Tarantino's latest revenge-centered movie, Django Unchained, and was struck by a few loosely related thoughts surrounding the movie, the time period it depicts, and various other matters. Hopefully I'll be able to tie these things together and make an interesting writeup that covers just the right amount of ground.

Warning: There be spoilers ahead.

I've always enjoyed Quentin Tarantino's movies, though I wouldn't go so far as to consider myself a fanboy. They've always been well-directed, stylized movies, chock-full of intriguing plots and characters with depth that you don't find in many other blockbuster films. It wasn't until a couple of years ago, when I saw Inglourious Basterds, that I began to consider his movies a little more deeply. The opening scene between Colonel Landa and a farmer in occupied France who is housing Jewish refugees is amazingly tense and has some awesome dialog. A later scene that occurs in a barroom, where Americans clothed as SS officers rendezvous with a German turncoat, is also a great, intense sequence. These two scenes alone made the other two hours of the movie (which were also pretty good) worth watching. The climactic scene near the film's finale fills the screen with the haunting image of a Jewish woman laughing maniacally as a theater full of Nazis burns alive and machine-gun fire rains down upon an unarmed audience, an excellent example of the kind of gut-punch iconic imagery Tarantino's movies can dole out when he's at the top of his game.

Apologies, Herr Goebbels...

Without a clever segue to insert here, I'll now begin discussing Django Unchained, Tarantino's newest movie (as of this writing). There's been a lot of controversy about the movie from various corners of the critical and non-critical world (from big-name directors like Spike Lee, even), mainly centering on the the way the movie seems to be more about making entertainment out of the business of slavery instead of treating it as the cancer on this nation's history that it is. As an aside, it's interesting that the extreme violence depicted in the movie isn't really garnering much negativity as it has in so many of Tarantino's other movies, which I guess is just a sign of the times, where violent entertainment has become mainstream and broadly celebrated. I won't really make any comments on whether the criticism levied by people like Spike Lee is justified, though he raises interesting points, but merely note that it exists and that it's understandable considering the touchy subject matter.

A subtitle at the opening of the movie states that the events depicted occurred two years prior to the Civil War, which dates the story to the time period around 1959. This is important to keep in mind, as it helps you understand the atmosphere of the time and the mindsets of the characters shown on the screen, who are in the midst of an era in history where it was becoming less and less palatable to the civilized world to treat human beings as property and hold them in bondage, though many went to great lengths to make justifications for it. This is one of the things I think the movie does quite well, showing the pseudoscience and hand-waving that those involved in the slave trade used when discussing the business and why it was okay to keep certain human beings in shackles. There's a great scene near the end of the second act where a plantation owner named Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, attempts to show the guests at his dinner party that the reason black slaves didn't rise up and overtake their owners could be proven by phrenology, for their skulls had a certain sequence of dimples at their base that white mens' skulls lacked, showing that the "submissive" parts of their brains were naturally larger than those of white men. He, of course, has the skull of one of his former slaves in his hand and saws the back of it off, showing the dimples off as undeniable, scientific proof of this theory.

"Let me prove this through the wonders of the science of phrenology..."

Which leads me to the movie's depiction of the antebellum South, its cultures and customs, and the enslaved people that were at its foundation. The plantation owners who lived in the Southern United States during the first half of the 19th century weren't hard-nosed bootstrappers who brought themselves up from nothing and pushed the economic engine of the United States into the future. They were wealthy aristocrats who owned huge swathes of land that were handed down from their fathers and their fathers' fathers, and they used their money and influence to purchase land and expand their agricultural output. Since they were able to buy human beings, to whom they didn't have to pay a living wage, they were able to make excellent profits on their crops. Many lived in lavish mansions, and their every whim was attended to by unpaid servants. I won't go into much further detail about this, since this is the Internet and there are many other sources from which to read up on it. The preceding few sentences were probably a more in-depth overview of the topic than anything I was exposed to as a kid in elementary, middle, and high school, though, which is darkly amusing. (Then again, I attended a high school whose school board ordered that the biology textbooks have the pages discussing evolution glued together, to avoid exposing developing minds to un-Christian scientific notions.)

Southern hospitality dictates a proper table setting.

Interestingly, Django Unchained treats the pre-Civil War plantation in a similar manner to the way in which Gone With the Wind (the movie) does. Unlike the latter, though, Django looks at it with a jaundiced eye. Gone With the Wind focuses on the drama surrounding the white residents of the Tara plantation, with black servants serving as mere background, inconsequential players. In Django Unchained, the servants/slaves are ever-present specters in almost every scene that takes place on the plantation, constantly irking viewers as they listen to the witty banter and witness the high-society dealings of the upper-class Southern gentlefolk in the foreground.

The plantations shown in each of these movies bear a similar appearance, though that's mostly due to the nature of them being constructed in similar eras. Below are some images of each for reference.

Tara, from Gone With the Wind

Candie Land, from Django Unchained

As I stated before, one of Quentin Tarantino's best traits as a director is his ability to craft iconic imagery that cuts to the heart of the matter at hand, and in the final scene of Django Unchained, he does so in a spectacular way. Django returns to Candie Land, the plantation where his wife is being held, and slaughters her armed white enslavers. After placing bundles of dynamite at various places in the mansion, he stands outside and watches the building explode in a massive fireball of wood, marble, and mud (and presumably the blood and gristle of his fallen enemies), before riding off into the moonlit night, a free man, with his newly-freed wife.

When I saw the mansion go up in flames, I immediately thought to myself, "Holy shit! They blew up Tara!" To me, that is part of what makes this movie so compelling. I believe Gone With the Wind is a movie that, though it is dramatic and has a somewhat gripping story, has been used for years as a way to whitewash the past as it relates to the pre-Civil War South. Watching that film, viewers can say, comfortably, "Well, it wasn't so bad back then. Look at how nicely they treat Mammy! She's doing a lot better than a lot of black people did back then, I'm betting. Imagine the hell she'd be going through if she was still living in Africa! And look at how nice those folks are! Such Southern hospitality! Things sure were a lot simpler back then!"

Seeing Candie Land (as a stand-in for Tara) being blown up, thus, is like tearing down this artifice that's been held up for so long by cultural artifacts like Gone With the Wind.

Boom.

Many revisionists on the right side of the political spectrum today like to proclaim that the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery; it was fought to protect the Southern way of life and its storied culture. A cursory examination of the culture of the South at that time proves how disingenuous such a claim truly is, however. The "Southern way of life" pre-Civil War, as shown in Django Unchained, was based almost entirely on unpaid labor, in the form of slaves. The aristocrats who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line built their fortunes and their massive land holdings on the backs of shackled human beings, and the Civil War was fought to protect their interests, not the interests of the common Southern white man. Just as has happened many times throughout human history, the rich convinced those in the lower social strata to go along with their schemes to ensure that their wealth wasn't dented. So, yeah, the Civil War was fought to protect Southern culture from the federal government's meddling hands, but this wasn't a culture worth protecting, unless you were a rich white man who owned hundreds of acres of farmland and dozens of slaves.

I wish I had a nice way of concluding this piece with some clever quip or reference, but I don't, unfortunately. I'll just end this by recommending Django Unchained to anyone (excepting small children, perhaps) who's interested in seeing an entertaining take on the era in question.