Quentin Tarantino is a critical darling, because he does things in an unusual way in his movies, and though sometimes it makes George Lucas seem like a master of plotting and story development, the good aspects of his movies seem to have created an Emperor's New Clothes situation with the movie critics: if they can't see the brilliance of his work, they must be "stupid or unfit for their jobs" to quote the original tale. This probably is a result of his winning them over by spending the very first scene of his first movie indulging in pop culture deconstructions, and then getting in the audience's face and daring them to just try criticizing his film, and then maybe he'll come over and cut your ear off and douse you with gasoline. I submit that Tim Roth's training to go undercover in that movie was a meta-thingy of Quentin Tarantino's strategy for conquering Hollywood.

Anyway, he next introduced anyone who had sinfully neglected to watch Loaded Weapon 1 to Samuel L Jackson, and then for his next film, did a rehash of a forgotten-for-good-reasons film genre, starring a dumpy middle-aged black woman, which not only confused people, because that's not who's supposed to star in movies, although I don't see why not, because if the real stars of the movie are going to be Blood, Gunshots and Explosions (the favored performers of Tarantino's repertory company), the attractiveness or relatability of the perpetrator should not come into question. Can any of us relate to Arnold Schwarzenegger? Do any of us in that coveted 21-40 male demographic want to have sex with him? Well, we still go to see movies co-starring him with Blood, Gunshots and Explosions (The Last Stand, coming to theaters 2013! ), and most of us could probably relate a lot better to, and would prefer to have sex with, Jackie Brown. So that casting choice was not nearly as risky as Hollywood pretends it was, but it appears to have forever immunized him to accusations of racism and to a certain extent, sexism. That latter point was reinforced by casting an ugly woman as the lead in his next (two)film(s). I can't comment on those, because despite the impression I might have given with my dispassionate analysis, I'm just fine with sexism (or at least prefer my ninjas with yellow skin to yellow track suits). But they apparently worked for the director. "He made a tribute film to Blaxploitation movies! He casts women in badass roles! Finally a non-sexist filmmaker!" the critics chanted with joy. And now Quentin Tarantino can do whatever he wants, because now we Know that he is not sexist or racist.

His last two films have continued playing to this perception, being ridiculous, cartoony, over-the-top films reveling in violence against politically correct targets. I believe they have also, 20 years into the game, revealed the racist behind the mask. He has earned his Not Racist cred and now, like Sid Sawyer "happy in his immunity", has broken Aunt Polly's sugar bowl.

The mess in the kitchen is "Django Unchained". The film opens in the same sort of painstaking historical accurracy Tarantino had previously employed depicting Adolf Hitler's death, being machine-gunned by Jews in a burning French movie theater, with the caption "1858 - Two years before the Civil War." A pair of horsemen escort a half-dozen chained black men at a painstakingly slow pace through a desert and into the night (that's when the trees come out in the desert). Then Tarantino falls back on his reliance on a lovable character portrayed by a German actor (Mr. White, the Wolfe, like 2/3 of Inglorius Basterds), introducing Christoph Waltz as King Schultz, bounty hunter whose accent makes ordinary conversation and out-of-place courtesy amusing.

Schultz needs Django to find some suspects and so obtains his freedom in order to enlist his aid. A friendship forms between the two men and their interracial buddy-pairing alternately encounter prejudice (when the plot needs some amusing violence) or general acceptance (when they need to live with the guy for a few months). Then they set out on a quest to find and free Mrs. Django who just so happens to have a Germanic name which tickles the fancy of Schultz, and provide a convenient excuse for him to get access to her in an unecessarily complicated scheme to trick her owner, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, into selling her to Schultz & Django. When their scheme is undone at the last second by Jackson's Uncle-Tom-like character, and the slave owner figures out what they are up to...he sells them Django's wife, only for everything to go pear-shaped by an absurd plot twist, and necessitate a lot more shootouts and violence, bringing Tarantino's inevitable and strictly unnecessary cameo as an Australian slave driver (whose accent at first made me think he was supposed to be an Afrikaaner, which might have had some relevance, but nah... we'll just stick with Australians which makes no sense, and incidentally, undercuts Django as a sympathetic character when he rather unnecessarily murders Tarantino & his companions), whose role is the same as all of Tarantino's other cameo appearances - make the artist seem self-deprecating, through an on-screen humiliation and/or death. And so the movie lurches on to its gratuitous secondary climax, reveling in gory deaths and "feel-good" belated vengeance scenes. In a completely baffling and pointless distinction, Django lets the servile household slaves who are female leave, and murders the the people who only meet a part of that description, including an old man and a white woman, presumably for being white and/or related to the villain. The black female domestic overseer and presumptive mistress of the villain are no less complicit in the enslavement or abuse of their fellow slaves than the elderly man Django murders, but get a pass for some reason.

So anyway, the racism. Well, it's not really racism, so much as the same sort of sloppy attempts at "Yay, Black People, Down with Slavery" that other pop culture gets lambasted for by the self-appointed champions of their little brown brothers, and the dusky-hued versions of Timothy McVeigh who can be found in our nation's university professoriats. "Django Unchained" is about a black guy who, thanks to the aid of a kindly white person, and under his guidance and instruction, escapes bondage and rises above his oppressed station. He then goes on to exact revenge and demonstrate his prowess and agency by weilding a magic gun that shoots whatever he points it at, whenever the plot needs it to, and mostly encountering really, really stupid and/or entitled white people. Hardly the most resounding of victories, and strongly suggesting that there is something wrong with the 99.9999% of his race who succumbed to victimization at the hands of these same incompetents.

It feels like there might have been a story to tell regarding the protagonist's lack of agency, by contrasting him with Stephen, Jackson's obsequious old major domo of the plantation, who is even more stringent about keeping blacks to their place than his masters. DiCaprio's Calvin Candie is perfectly willing to deal with a black man, and host him at his table and board him in his guest rooms, and most whites offer no more than a token protest at Django's failures to keep to his place, but Stephen is all but apoplectic at the very sight of a black guy on horseback and at the prospect of his being treated much like any other business associate. As the film develops, Stephen is revealed to be shrewd and insightful and capable of manipulating his masters, and engages Candie in extremely frank and even equitable discussions behind closed doors. Throughout the film, we are never entirely certain how much of Stephen's attitude towards his masters is genuine loyalty, calculated obsequious behavior as a survival tactic, or a cover for his secret contempt for the at-times obtuse people who nonetheless have power of life and death over him.

Given the short shrift with which his character is ultimately treated, I can't help but come to the conclusion that Stephen was simply an excuse to include outrageous dialogue in the film. The inhumanities and cruelties heaped on slaves in the film are not there to illustrate the misery of their situation, rather they exist in an attempt to justify the excessive indulgences in vengeance against the perpetrators, and quite possibly, to revel in depictions of brutality under the guise of exposing horrors. In many ways, it feels like a white guy reveling in using the word "nigger" in a rap song, because, after all, he's just singing the words a black man wrote, and he's not really using it in a pejorative sense, but my, look at that smile on his face whenever the chorus with that word comes around...

There is also the portrayal of the white participants in the slave culture, which whitewashes the institution to a certain degree by depicting every single such individual as a redneck ignoramus. Even the genteel Candie, born and raised in a multi-generational planter family, is subtly associated with the white trash, by the implied too-affectionate relationship with his widowed sister, and his francophilia that nonetheless does not extend to actually learning the language, tolerating its use in his presence or even possessing any rudimentary knowledge of French culture or writers, suggesting that Candie is merely a well-dressed ignoramus who affects only the appearances of culture or education. So then the subtext you can take away from this movie is that there was slavery, but everyone involved was universally despicable, and only inbred morons would have supported it anyway. Life is once again neatly resolved into Good Guys and Bad Guys and nothing need be contemplated or considered, because We are not Them, and we are watching the Good Guy do horrible things to the Bad Guys but we still root for him, so we must be Good ourselves! Hooray! Thanks, Hollywood!

As I said above, there are many places where it looks like Tarantino thinks about making a point, but then gets distracted by an opportunity for blood splatters. Are Schultz's final actions the representation of well-meaning do-gooders who make things worse for their black beneficiaries by their morally indignant posturing, or were they just an excuse for Tarantino to wrench the plot back to another 30 minutes of gun fights, cartoon villainy and gore? Is Django's empowerment being entirely a gift of a benevolent white man supposed to be indicative of how blacks were deprived of agency in a racist society, or was it simply a shallow filmmaker falling back onto a common trope of the White Savior, because he thinks he's too clever to make such elementary mistakes? Am I overthinking this in looking for messages in what is supposed to be a dumb action film? Well I really hope not, because taken at face value, the action is fairly idiotic. An extended gunfight features a many lying behind a prone corpse on the floor of a room, shooting at, and being shot at by, men standing in the doorway of that room, who nonetheless, only hit the body lying in front of him. A man standing on top of a stair case shoots a woman standing in a doorway at a right angle to the staircase, and she goes flying directly backwards, or sideways in response to a straight shot, from the perspective of the shooter. The good guys' guns are all magic and they can hit anything the plot requires them to, after a few months of training on Django's part. No, the violence and action aspects of the film only work if we're going to call it a stylistic choice, which of course we will, because the critical media adore Tarantino. Can't question the Emperor's outfit, or someone might think they aren't fit for their jobs, after all.