Title: “Django Unchained”: Ambiguous Ethical Response and the
Principle of Double Effect
Abstract:
The overwhelming, contentious responses to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained provide a reason for
examining the limits of ethical criticism of modern and contemporary
literature. As an anachronistic collage, the film sponsors the illusion that
its primary subject is history, the history of American slavery. The film is so
open to competing interpretations, however, that it must be viewed as a work of
art that brings questions of what is morally permissible to the foreground. Any
ethical criticism of the film must deal with the principle of double effect.
While Tarantino may have intended to expose undesirable aspects of excessive
violence, the film can seduce viewers to embrace excessive violence as a
desirable means for achieving justice. Ethical criticism is obligated to
endlessly shuttle between propositions about good and bad effects. In this
sense, ethical criticism is forced to be self-reflective regarding its own
ambiguities and limits.
Django Unchained: Ambiguous Ethical Response and the Principle of Double
Effect
The overwhelming public responses to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained during the first two
months of 2013 provide one reason for examining the limits of ethical criticism
of film as literary expression that infrequently transcends its social location. We might argue that criticism is itself an ethical
activity. We make judgments about what
is good or bad both in theory and in the more immediate space of lived
experiences, often using multiple rhetorical strategies to conceal the utter
subjectivity of judgment. We want others
to accept our constructions of reality as depictions of what is actual. Our
strategies enjoy some success in the protected territories of academic space,
but in public spaces those strategies are vulnerable. Logic rarely obtains in
public discourses. The public responses
to Django Unchained have been
passionate rather than coldly reasoned.
They provide evidence that ambiguity or uncertainty is dominant in our
immediate viewing of and subsequent commentary on this film.
We can minimize responsive ambiguity by virtue of prolonged
negotiations, but we never succeed in eradicating it. We do not minimize the ideological functions
of film by saying cinema is no more than entertainment. Entertainment imprints memory more than we
might want to admit. It gives birth to
value-laden emotions. We may or may not be conscious of the effects, but those
emotions deserve to be accounted for as matters of ethics.
Just as our reading
of a poem culminates in our provisionally liking or disliking the accumulated effects
of clustered words, our witnessing of
speech, music, and visual images in Django
Unchained brings matters of ethical import to the foreground. Music in Tarantino’s films, for example, can
manipulate our sensibilities with subliminal force. “More than mere
accompaniment, ironic commentary, or contradiction,” as Lisa Coultard observes,
“music in [Tarantino’s] scenes of violence is instrumental and essential in the
audiovisual construction of spectatorial enjoyment and engagement”(2).[1] Such construction allows us to treat
Tarantino’s film as a surreal, incendiary poem. Any ethical criticism
of the film as poem must deal with the principle of double effect.
As an anachronistic
collage, Django Unchained projects
the illusion that its primary subject is the history of American slavery. Heated arguments about the film have focused
on its inaccurate representation of that complex history. Counterarguments have
nailed the point that Tarantino never
intended to recreate history; he intended
to create a spectacular display of ultraviolence as a work of art. In the
battle of arguments, the opposing forces are art and history as oppositional
forces. In this contested space, concern for intention is not a fallacy but a necessity.
It is
impossible for viewers to dismiss their socialized ideas about history, ideas
which encourage seeing things as either/or
rather than as both/and. The
alternative to a reductive reading (or interpretive viewing) of the film
involves realizing that American slavery is a pretext for a subversive
treatment of the film’s real subject: the history and “legitimacy” of American
bounty hunting. Without special prompting, only a few legal scholars and
American historians are predisposed or sufficiently informed to notice this
fact.[2] The
problematic effects of Django Unchained would be clearly understood by
the legal scholar Rebecca B. Fisher. As
she observes, American bounty hunting as “a profession virtually unregulated
for hundreds of years, is certainly relevant to understanding how increased
privatization in the criminal justice system will impact the least empowered in
our society” (233). What she examines is germane to considerations of how the both/and relationship of slavery and
criminal justice complicate response and critical commentary on response. Tarantino’s
film succeeds, either by accident or intention or both, in reaffirming the
Constitutional entitlement of Americans to bear arms and make havoc among
themselves and those deemed “fugitive outlaws” in the United States. The
Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which enforced the Constitution, Article IV,
Section 2, “legitimized” bounty hunting, as did the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
Thus, slavery and bounty hunting were entangled.
Django Unchained is so overdetermined, so open to competing interpretations,
that it must be processed as a work of art which brings questions regarding
what is morally permissible to the foreground. While Tarantino may have intended to expose undesirable
aspects of excessive violence, his film can equally as well seduce viewers to
embrace excessive violence as a desirable means for achieving justice. Ethical
criticism navigates between propositions about good and bad effects.[3] In
this sense, ethical criticism does not achieve certainty; indeed, it is forced
to reflect upon its own ambiguities and limits.
Our interpretation of Django Unchained is largely determined
by the angles, prejudices, and ideological luggage we bring to the acts of
viewing and talking. If the film is
approached as an effort by a white director to tell a black story, the viewing
is shaped by assumed expectations about how a black story of enslavement ought
to be written and reconstructed or translated into film. It is more profitable
to assume the film is a story about white American historical fantasy that uses
dominant black elements to intensify a terminal vision of white power. This
assumption makes possible a multiethnic representation of American history
circa 1858-1859. Our attention is better drawn to the paradox of violence in
the shaping of the United States from 1619 to 1776 to the present. The indivisible presence of the black story
functions as an inner light to reveal what is gross and vulgar on the surface
of American democracy’s saga. The film
fails to challenge the exhausted and exhausting black/white binary conventions
of America sufficiently, but it does begin to expose a fantasy of oppositional
progress. It is neither good nor
accurate history, nor was it meant to be.
It is an exposure of how American entertainment nurtures national
pathology. That fantasy undermines
or erases fact works against
sympathetic reception of the film, but it does not prevent our understanding
why violation of the human body and the worship of violence is an innate
element in our historical being.
Ultimately, Django Unchained
is an anatomy of the imperfections of whiteness, the hypocrisy of Euro-American
founding dreams, and America’s violent soul. It is a violent cartoon that magnifies
the ironic aesthetics of the spaghetti Western genre and American social
history as wife and husband, Broomhilda and Django ride off into the bliss of
fugitive darkness.
We have been trying, without much
success, to have a conversation about what it means to be an American since the
nineteenth-century publication of Alex de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
Although any awakening of consciousness occasioned by Django Unchained will be somewhat limited,
the grounds for a crucial conversation have been “immortalized” as a richly
satiric cartoon, a cinematic allegory that divides spectators into pro-Django,
anti-Django, and disingenuous neutral camps.
Since mid-2012, the Django conversation snowballed. It has now melted.
We are left, at least for the anticipated future, to make judgments about the
ethical problems the film brought into being.
These ethical problems are
dramatic. We are troubled to remember
that the philosophical principle of double effect asserts that it is sometimes
morally permissible to do what is ordinarily forbidden by natural law. I borrow
an example of the principle from the textbook Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995) by Barbara MacKinnon. The example refers to the violence of killing
in wartime. A pilot who bombs an enemy’s
munitions facility does risk killing innocent civilians. The pilot may intend
the good end or effect of minimizing the enemy’s ability to cause massive
destruction and thus facilitating the saving of lives. The bad effect is the killing of innocent
people. Under the rules of Western ethics, the pilot must not intend to kill
the innocent. Moreover, the act of
bombing must contribute to a positive outcome of the war, and this good end
“must outweigh any harm that is done.
The principle of double effect requires that three conditions be met: 1)
the act itself must be morally permissible; 2) the good end must be the
intended goal; 3) the good end must outweigh the bad end (MacKinnon 87-88).
What frustrates the application of
ethical criticism to Django Unchained
is the dealing with an imagined literary artifact, the making of normative
(evaluative) judgments. We are really
applying descriptive (empirical) judgments to reaction and response as factual
matters. The film at once escapes the
three justifying requirements even as it invites their application. It magnifies a viewer’s relatively primitive
ideas about justice and revenge. Viewers who make vested historical or
ancestral identifications with the enslaved characters in the film may
gleefully embrace violence as a good means of achieving a good end. Viewers who
have no such identifications may just as gleefully fail to critique how excessive
representation of violence assaults moral judgment. Under these circumstances, ethical criticism
must question whether catharsis (release of psychological resentments)
outweighs the damage of intensifying the “love” of violence. The answers can never
be conclusive. Ethical criticism comes
to recognize its own ambiguity, its own philosophical limits. It figuratively bashes its head against the brick
wall of audience response, because it is complicit in not divorced from that
response. Ethical critics realize they
are not objective instruments of judgment.
They are bound by human subjectivity and cultural relativity in the very
act of making judgments. Django Unchained as a provocative poem invites
us to engage the principle of double effect, but it leaves the trained critic
and the ordinary viewer/reader treading the treacherous waters of human
uncertainty.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Central China Normal University
[1]
Coulthard, Lisa. “Torture Tunes: Tarantino, Popular Music, and New Hollywood Ultraviolence.”
Music and the Moving Image 2.2
(2009): 1-6.
[2]
See Fisher, Rebecca B. “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.
[3]
In philosophy, the principle or doctrine of double effect
pertains to conditions that allow us to justify actions which on the surface
appear to be dubious cases in the frames of morality and ethics
