Django Unchained: A Follow-up Post

Update 1/25/13: Find the original post here

Spike Lee also says that Django Unchained is "disrespectful" to his ancestors, with the implication that any white man trying to communicate something artistically about the black experience is a fool (not to mention probably a racist), and automatically disqualified from any serious consideration by right thinking people.

The idea that no person of a different race, gender, creed, etc. etc. etc. has any place writing about the experiences of a different race, gender, etc. etc. etc. is abhorrent. I'm pretty sure I don't even have to say this, and I feel like most people who might conceivably read this (a vanishingly small number, to be sure) are on board with this, but I'm gonna say it, just in case.

A given author/artist may have the paucity of imagination and empathy that makes their attempt to portray the experience of the "other" (whomever that might be for them) lie there like a corpse on the page, but that is their failure, and not necessarily a failure to be imputed to all authors of a given race etc. etc. etc. Jesus. Look at the way I have to torture these sentences to even talk about this shit. That should give you an idea of how twisted the logic behind it is. 

Regardless, if Michael Chabon wants to write from the point of view of a black person, if Quentin Tarantino wants to have a black, or Jewish, or female, or Basque, or Muslim, or whatever-the-fuck main character, and they can pull it off, then more power to them. God knows, I don't have the stones for it, but I'm no Michael Chabon, so there's that.

Update: Please note that, in many cases, these failures of imagination and empathy are functions of systemic, and often unacknowledged, racism. This does not absolve artists of the obligation to attempt to confront and root out these unacknowledged biases and write as honestly, creatively, thoughtfully, and above all, engagingly about any facets of human experience with which they choose to wrestle. The question as to whether they have done so successfully is entirely other to whether or not they should do so at all.

Django Unchained and the Uses of Catharsis

In Tucson, Arizona, where I grew up, there weren't a whole lot of black people. Not none, certainly, a handful in my high school graduating class, for example, but not a huge number (less than five percent of the total population, actually). But even so, everybody learned the word you were never to use when referring to blacks, and of course my parents never used that kind of language around me.

There are other words that one could use besides that word to refer to black people in a derogatory sense. I'm not going to bother listing them here when a quick perusal of a YouTube comments thread will give you plenty of choices. However, I never really knew those other words until college, where I learned a whole bunch of them from one movie. 

Here's a scene from "Do The Right Thing" by Spike Lee that probably got taken down. You know which one, and you've got google, so go find it, if you want.

Doing the right thing? Sure. Why not.

Which is why I was surprised to hear that, sight unseen, Spike Lee had decided to declare against Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Surely an artist who understood the power of language would want to see how it was used before condemning a movie. Not doing so would make Spike Lee the equivalent of the right wing demagogues who picketed the gallery displaying Serrano's Piss Christ. They wouldn't see it either, as, to them, it was blasphemy. 

Leaving aside the questions of mental/spiritual/political purity that Spike's objections might raise, let's talk about why someone might use that word in a movie like Django Unchained.  

Is it historically accurate? Many people argue that word was used to refer to black people during the period during which Django takes place, and is, therefore, perfectly acceptable. But, many others might counter, there are plenty of other words that were current during the period. Why not use those, mix it up a little?

This counter argument brings to the fore the reason why Quentin might have chosen to use that word over others. It is not, surely, a paucity of imagination or vocabulary. The reason why Tarantino uses that word is because this is not a period piece. 

Django is a Quentin Tarantino movie, bearing more similarities to, say, Inglorious Basterds than to, I don't know, Lincoln. This is a fantasy movie, specifically a revenge fantasy movie, and its primary goal is catharsis.

At the risk of pedantry, catharsis can be defined as, "The process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions." Like Inglorious Basterds, Django takes a horrible story (the Holocaust for Inglorious and the history of people owning other (black) people in the United States in Django) and re-imagines the narrative. This re-imagining provides, not a happy ending, per se, but a cathartic reversal: the wrongs are, if not righted, at least avenged. We identify with the victims and then, with them, take the power back. Hitler is finally given the ass-kicking he so richly deserves; the slave kills, not only the master, but the hateful ones who colluded with the master. These things never happened in the "real" world, at least not in such a satisfying fashion, but through an act of magic (for what else is story telling?) Tarantino allows us to go back and have our revenge.

Many people objected to the humor in Django, as well as the language. How could slavery be presented in a comic context? While certainly not all of Django is humorous (and much of it is deliberately horrifying), parts of it are quite funny. Why?

Humor is, especially in Tarantino's world, another mode of catharsis. Where Mel Brooks famously parodied Hitler to rob him of his power, and used that word in Blazing Saddles to point up his parody of racists, Tarantino uses humor as mini-catharsis, to relieve the tension (slightly) as he builds up towards a bigger payoff. Where for Brooks, humor was the point and the weapon, for Tarantino, humor is a dramatic tool, with an eye toward the larger catharsis.

And this brings us back to our original question. Why say it at all? Like the stories these movies retell, the word is more than just itself. It is an uber-narrative, containing an entire history of injustice and repression in a very tight package. It is the one of the few words that still bear a bit of that old black magic (if you'll forgive the pun), that power to wound. Those other words he could have used instead might have been more period-accurate, but period-accuracy is not what Django is about (as the modern soundtrack should clue us in). The point here, as I said earlier, is catharsis. 

Using the word itself is cathartic, in its own way. No other word would do. It's the one word you can't say, and by saying it upwards of one hundred times, Tarantino goes for that hot, transgressive button right in the amygdala. He simultaneously amps up our adrenaline, getting us, the audience, primed for the explosive payoff, and robs the word of its power over us. That is also the point of the violence, and of the relieving humor. He is working us up so that, when the bad guys get what they so richly fucking deserve, we stand and cheer. He creates that space where we can deal with the feelings of unfairness, and our own conflicted attitudes towards race, in a manner where we participate vicariously in the righting of a wrong.

Tarantino is not just a white guy who likes to say transgressive things (though, let's be honest, he is that too). He's an artist who is using the tools at his disposal in an artful way to potentiate and deliver a specific emotional payoff. People who object to this use, while they have a right to their emotions and perceptions, are missing a big part of what he's doing and why.

Update: 05/14/18 - Some of this is pretty unnuanced, and some of it is just wrong. Also, having lived through the last five years, I am REAL uncomfortable with the amount of times I wrote (quotes or no) a word I would never let in my mouth.

That being said, I'm gonna let this stand. Catharsis is still something I'm struggling to understand (see "This is America/Call Me Maybe") especially as regards to race, so this post, despite its didactic quality, is me trying to figure it out.

Update 10/06/18: I can’t stand it. I took them out.

Towards a Poor (and miserable) Theatre

On the recommendations of a friend I worked with at Cortland Repertory Theatre this summer, I bought a copy of Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre, from which I realized I stole some, if not all of my ideas for my last post. I’ve been reading it with some interest.

So, not one to let close reading or analysis stand in the way of putting my foot in my mouth, here are some initial thoughts.

It sure seems dour. This is theatre of the hairshirt and the flail. He constantly speaks of a “holy theatre” that requires sacrifice and self-immolation (that phrase “self-immolation” may actually be a quote. Can’t be bothered to look it up right now). A digging into the psyche and laying bare of the roots of action and emotion. My God. How many more times do we have to go through this? Perhaps, as so often happens with gurus (and especially acting gurus) there is a slight disconnect between the technique and the practice, but it sure sounds like he is a patriarch daddy-type who practices psychology without a license, putting his actors through the wringer in an effort to wrest great performances out of them. I have had teachers like this and I find them reprehensible. If Grotowski is of that stripe, I have no use for this technique of his. Good DAY, sir!

Well, this may be my own daddy-complex (often wounded by imperfect men and women who have experimented on me in their well-intentioned attempts to “mould” me) complaining. He may have aught to teach me, so I will keep reading, but I read with a skepticism that I did not possess when I was younger.

I have read about the great British actors, Olivier, Gielgud, and Guinness for example, and they had no recourse to such techniques, no need to put themselves through such fresh hell with every performance. The texts were tough enough, the physical demands plenty to engage and leave them worn out and frazzled. Perhaps that is what Grotowski speaks of, that the great Brits did unconsciously. Perhaps what helps to make the greats great is an emptying out. An engagement with the audience, with their fellow actors, and with the material that exhausts the mind and body, leaving a certain purity to shine through.

Regardless, when I was a Christian (or rather, when I was religious-mad), I would have taken to Grotowski’s theories like a drowning man takes to water. I loved the idea of sacrificing myself. I was all about that, and especially for art, love, “God”, or whatever. Now, I look on theories like this one with a certain distaste.

One of the things I love about theatre is that it is fun. Not fun in the sense of “Ha-ha, ho-ho, hee-hee, aren’t we having a wonderful time.” Fun in the sense of play, a concentrated engagement with the subject at hand that allows one to push oneself to the fullest. The way children play. Not forced, not straining and painful and “intense” but fun! I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun.

Now, I know that, in many of the circles I run with, when I’m at work, I tend to be the less-fun guy. When everybody is getting goofy, starting to get slappy, I am the one saying “C’mon, guys, let’s just get through this!” Yeah, I’m that guy. Always have been. So when I say I’m having fun in theatre, to me that means doing the work as best I can, and being totally engaged and trying to become more than I am right now. Always striving. Even the failures and mistakes and wrong turns are part of the fun, for me. Everything else is just sorta distraction.

So perhaps there is something to the Grotowski fellow’s theories. I’ll keep reading and find out, but truthfully, what I’m looking for is something that treats the process, not as pain and suffering, but as play. It can be painful, of course, in much the same way that an athlete is in pain when he pushes himself in training, but pain is not the same as hurt, i.e. aches are not injuries, and hitting the wall and going on is not the same as vomiting up blood. Acting should not be an assault on the psyche of the actor. We’re not strip-mining. We’re panning. The river will bring us what we need.

but is it art?

Based on a discussion I had with Patrick the other day, I thought I should post this. I’m not under any illusions that I’m widely read (unlike some of the folks that I’ll be discussing in this post), but I thought I’d put in my two cents.

I was perusing my list of theatre blogs on bloglines, and a thought struck me. Of the theatre blogs I read on a regular basis, there were none by actors. Directors, yes. Playwrights, yes. No actors.

Now this got me thinking yet further. The discussion on most of the blogs often revolves around what makes for good theatre. A recent discussion, for example, had folks from all over the New York scene weighing in on the relative merits of “production values” and what the term meant. It was an interesting discussion, to be sure, and one near and dear to my heart. A lot of times, people will be talking about theatre’s place in society, declining audiences, relevancy to other media, etc. And sometimes the question is as simple as: what is theatre, really?

Well, what is it? A friend of mine recently expressed interest in getting involved in the extensive performance poetry scene in New York, and asked me to sort of introduce him to some of the better venues and groups working in them. I’ve had some experience with these groups, and I knew some of the folks pretty well, so of course I agreed. The angle of the performance of poetry interested me pretty intensely for a while a few years back, but I found I didn’t cotton to it as much as I enjoyed traditional theatre. But if you really think about it, aside from the conventions (verse instead of “natural” speech (though not always!), physicality based on gesture rather than full expression with the body (again, not always!), roots in hip-hop and its culture) what’s performance poetry but a different kind of theatre? At its essence, it’s a person using their voice and body to tell a story.

Is anything else necessary? Not costumes, not lights, not microphones, not sets, not pre-written, naturalistic (or otherwise) texts, not directors, not props, not musicians, not really even a stage. Nothing but someone with an audience telling a story using their voice and body.

The voice distinguishes it from dance, the body distinguishes it from radio. Other than that, it’s fair game. Anything else is convention. That gives a lot of leeway. TV shows and movies could be considered a subset of theatre, since the story is told using broadcast images of people telling stories. Animation could (I suppose) also be considered a subset, since representations of bodies are used… though one would have to argue about the more surreal elements of, say, Looney Tunes, and I don’t intend to do that here.

Performance poetry, is, obviously under this definition, another subset. The text is verse, the gestures have their own conventions, but the story is still told (or even only evoked) by a person using their body and voice.

I love working with directors. I love to take direction and work in collaboration with people who have differing visions than I. But under the definition I’ve posited directors are definitely non-essential. Witness the phenomenon of the “actor-manager” in British (and, I’m presuming American) theatre up until very recently.

Playwrights (and, in fact plays as conventionally understood, as in: stage directions, so-and-so speaks, such-and-such also speaks, they are told to do things, all as words on a page) are also not essential. Which is not to say I don’t like reading plays. I LOVE reading plays. I’m just trying to peel things down to essentials, here, and by this definition, not so much.

So that begs the question. Why is theatre being defined online by people who are, as far as I can tell, non-essential to the matter? This is also not to say that they shouldn’t. On the contrary, everyone should come up with their own definitions, and I love a good debate over ideas, even ones I agree with. But why are they the face of theatre? Where my actors at?

Well, I talked to both Stephanie and Patrick about this matter, and they both pointed out the same thing. Most actors are not writers. That’s all. In fact, many actors I know could be considered by some definition to be functionally illiterate. And lazy.

When I count the number of plays I’ve heard and seen ruined by an actor who couldn’t be bothered to speak the words of the play as the author wrote them, or who blazed past the meaning of the lines by completely ignoring such elementary considerations as punctuation, I’ll admit to becoming a little steamed.

Well, I can write (somewhat), and I can read (a bit), and so I guess I’m gonna write a little about that.