Incriminating Evidence and Interpretation
Negative and positive responses to “Django Unchained” and
other commodities illuminate the complexity of popular disagreement in the
United States. The film is so
multi-faceted, so open to an enormous range of readings and interpretations, that
we must focus on small portions of Tarantino’s collage. Representation of the institution of slavery,
and the anger-making options of enslavement, serves as a distracting background
for looking at the cultural triplets named Injustice, Violence, and Justice. The family portrait of the triplets is more a
painting than a photograph in the context of the film. No amount of trompe-l’oeil succeeds in hiding how complicit the triplets are
with bounty hunting, the primal center of “Django Unchained and other films
that invite us to be spectators of law and disorder. Common sense informs us that we are looking
at incriminating evidence that pertains to the perverse, historical criminality
of the American criminal justice system.
The visual and literary surface of the film is dense with familiar and
obscure allusions. What is fully
available for popular discussion is a sop, a cheap sop. It retards access to and robust public
discussion of the dynamics of law and bounty hunting that so strongly impact
the quality of our everyday lives. As
acts of interpretation, our responses shade off into hunting for violated
boundaries or into quests to identify how the film insults our sensing of
history. Our interpretive responses
wrestle less than they should with the ideology and economy of bounty hunting. That fact, to borrow language from Tony
Bolden, is “one of the signatures of our time.”
Rebecca B. Fisher’s “The History of American Bounty Hunting as
a Study in Stunted Legal Growth” (N.Y.U.
Review of Law and Social Change 33.199: 199-233) helps us to narrow and
sharpen our interpretations. Without
drowning us in eight centuries of discussion about bounty hunting, Fisher
directs attention to the American core: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which
reinforced Article IV, Section 2 of the United States Constitution regarding
the return of runaway slaves, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, an item of
great importance in studies of slave narratives and abolitionist literature and
those narratives that function in our nation under the color of history. Fisher’s conclusion is sobering and
troubling, for she convincingly asserts that
The history of American bounty hunting, a profession virtually
unregulated for hundreds of years, is certainly relevant to understand how
increased privatization in the criminal justice system will impact the least
empowered in our society (233).
Fisher’s critique of how any of us might become targets of
mistaken identity for bounty hunters is frightening enough, but what she
exposes about the legal system’s violation of its own ethics is frankly
chilling! Keepers of power do not encourage us to connect acts of literary and
cultural interpretation with that kind of ice. Wake up. Our Constitution
entitles us to hunt down those who wish to neuter us with law and
entertainment.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. February 4, 2013
