Django Unchained as Catharsis: Pity, Fear and Celebration

 

Aristotle said the essence of tragedy is “pity and fear.” Django Unchained--Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti western about a former slave’s revenge--has much of that, and like Greek tragedy, the film unites viewers in a shared catharsis and goes beyond to celebration.

We find the following definition of tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics:

“Tragedy then is the imitation of a good action, which is complete and of a certain length, by means of language made pleasing for each part separately; it relies in its various elements not on narrative but on acting; through pity (eleos) and fear (phobos) it achieves the purgation (catharsis) of such emotions.” (translation: G. M. A. Grube)

In Tragedy and Philosophy, Walter Kaufmann questions the usual translations for eleos and phobos, but if we take the traditional English equivalents at face value, Django Unchained certainly fits Aristotle’s definition. The horrors of American slavery--the lashings, the imprisonment, the split families, the sexual humiliation, the general abasement, the servitude--cannot fail to awaken a great deal of pity and fear in any who learn about them.

As the title of a book by philosopher Cornel West states, race matters. In America, we have grown up with the history of slavery and a subsequent century and a half of racial segregation, discrimination, prejudice, stereotype and hate. Racial tension persists today and has taken new forms and refreshed urgency in the blogs, forums, tweets and comments of cyberspace. For decent folk everywhere who have never questioned the dignity of all human beings, this ugly past that persists in staying is depressing.

And that’s why Django Unchained can provide catharsis. Catharsis is that moment in a highly dramatic film when you are in deepest, fully in tune with the characters and feeling their pain. It’s the emotional peak of Schindler’s List, The Shawshank Redemption, Legends of the Fall, Philadelphia or 12 Years a Slave. You’re riveted, you sneak a finger behind your glasses to wipe away tears, you take a deep breath . . . and then you feel as if a weight has been lifted. It’s all over now and the world looks different, starker somehow.

Much of the catharsis in Tarantino’s latest is achieved through the director’s trademark violence. Django blows holes in slave-owners, slavers and racists by the dozen. All the killing of white people caused some critics to complain that the film is a call to race warfare, but that misses the point. The film is, to my mind, primarily about killing, killing, killing the hell out of the awful legacy of racial prejudice.

And that feels good.

Tarantino’s uses of violence are anything but conventional. In Django Unchained, he uses violence as a tool for subverting narratives about race in America today. Many in America like to pretend that racial discrimination is behind us, so there is no need for discussion, while others sugar-coat talk of race with appeals to shared humanity and calls for dialogue. Django’s violence undercuts all that. The effect is not a literal or even metaphorical call to war, it’s a shared purging of past and present tensions through sublimation in art.

Thus it’s only fitting that Django Unchained moves beyond fear and pity to celebration. The film concludes with Django riding off with his wife, ending this tragedy with a happy marriage, if not exactly the traditional wedding of comedy. In art, an end is possible, but in real life the fight goes on.