Short Subject: Why the Violence in Django Unchained is Brilliant

Short Subject - editorials on a random filmic subject, short enough for you to read in one sitting.

When Quentin Tarantino's seventh feature film Django Unchained was released in 2012, I have no doubt many members of the fun police protested the film's violence. They probably called it excessive, exploitative, sadistic, sickening, and many other negative, hyperbolic adjectives.
These people have missed the point completely.

The most violent scene (at least in terms of bloodiness) in Django is the shootout at Candieland where, without spoiling anything, Jamie Foxx goes on a bit of a rampage, doing a pitch-perfect impression of me whenever I play Red Dead Redemption 2 (I wish). I remember thinking that Tarantino must have used half of the fake blood population of the world as red fills the frame, splattering the walls and characters, the relatively small wound caused by a revolver's bullet exaggerated by about a thousand times.

On the surface, the easy explanation for the huge amounts of blood on-screen is that it simply adds to the dark-yet-slightly-campy tone where you are as much invited to laugh at the massacre as you are to wince.

But there's more to it than that.

For the first few decades of the twentieth century, America was treated to bloodless, safe, censor-appeasing Westerns such as High Noon, The Magnificent Seven and The Searchers. If the gun violence is exaggerated in Django, it is understated in these films. This is not a reflection of those films' quality, it's just how it is.

Or, rather, was, as the late Fifties and Sixties brought in a new kind of adventure in the Wild West: the spaghetti western, the slightly racist-titled Westerns made in Italy, starring Italians with their voices dubbed over with English, plus the odd American star, like Clint Eastwood. Although they shared a genre with the American multiplex Westerns, the spaghetti variants were a different beast; darker, with more morally ambiguous characters, and much bloodier.

The fun police are right about one thing; the violence in the Candieland shootout does make you a little uncomfortable. You're simply not used to seeing this much blood on screen. And that is completely intentional.

I can only imagine what American audiences used to Stagecoach thought of For a Few Dollars More or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Tarantino's favourite film of all time) when they first saw them. They were probably horrified by the amount of blood and violence. The reaction was probably the same as it was for modern audiences seeing Django Unchained.

With Django, Tarantino set out to replicate the feeling of watching a spaghetti western back in the day. Part of that was replicating the way American audiences must have felt about them at the time. Current audiences wouldn't be shocked by the level of violence in '60s spaghetti westerns, so Tarantino had to up the ante. Basically what I'm saying is that we had become acclimatised to the level of blood in old westerns and so Tarantino had to dial it up to eleven to recreate that feeling. It may seem completely ridiculous and exploitative, but there's a point to it.

And that's why the violence in Django Unchained is brilliant.