By Alexandra Edwards

As you read this, there are a lot of words being written and posted to the internet about Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.  A new Tarantino is an occasion, a dumping ground for all kinds of opinions, a hanger for our hang-ups.  Out there, right now, someone is comparing this one to his last one, or the ones before that; someone is charting the synergies and differences between Unchained and its obvious predecessor, 1966′s Django, or its other obvious predecessor, 1976′s Drum, or probably a host of other, less obvious predecessors.

Me?  I’m thinking about Moby-Dick.

Yeah, I know: that’s simultaneously the most obvious and the most unenlightening comparison point imaginable.  Nothing is Moby-Dick in American culture because fucking everything is Moby-Dick.  You, me, Tarantino, movies about MMA fighting and B-movie scifi and everything in between.

But hear me out.

I’m thinking about Moby-Dick because I’m thinking about whiteness (yes, yes, that big obvious white whale smack in the middle of the book), about Valerie Babb and her book Whiteness Visible.  I don’t think anyone would argue with me when I say Django Unchained is a movie about race.  But all too often, when we talk about race, we’re only talking about the Other.  Django is, but it is definitely not just, a movie about African-Americans.

Most movies that aren’t about the Other are kind of also about race, except that race—in this case, whiteness—is presented as universal.  It’s invisible.  That makes it weirdly hard to talk about, or at least it makes it easier to just not talk about it.  What is whiteness?  I agree wholeheartedly with Babb: “Part of the difficulty in characterizing whiteness lies with its having no genuine content other than a culturally manufactured one, developed unevenly over a period of time, influenced by and responding to a variety of historical events and social conditions” (16).  We can talk about what white people like until we’re blue in the face and have an Urban Outfitters book deal, but we still aren’t talking about what whiteness is.

Enter good old Herman Melville.  The problem of talking about whiteness was already a pressing concern: “By the time Melville was writing, the nebulous representations of whiteness as something vaguely English or vaguely Christian that are found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sermons, histories, travel, crime, and captivity narratives were giving way to fully fleshed literary characterizations in nineteenth-century fiction.  Yankees, frontiersmen, Southern cavaliers, greenhorns, sexless and morally pure white women—all became standard models of white identity” (Babb 90).  A large part of Melville’s project was, to borrow a thoroughly modern screenwriting term, to hang a lampshade on the notion of whiteness.  He wanted readers to be fully, even uncomfortably, aware of it.

Thus Moby-Dick is, among other things, “an exploration of what whiteness means in a culture of many races” (Babb 95).  And Melville is “a white racial identity in sympathy with the ideals of the American democratic project yet keenly aware of the undemocratic nature of its race relations” (Babb 95)—a lot like Tarantino, don’t you think?

But 161 years is a lot of time, a lot of change, and a lot of history.  Tarantino has no need to restage the questions and concerns about whiteness that Moby-Dick posed in 1851.  Django Unchained isn’t an examination of whiteness; it’s an indictment of it.

We know from the film’s title, from its genre, and certainly from its marketing who the hero is—Django himself, obviously—so it follows that we know the villain as well.  We have no trouble wrapping our minds around Leo DiCaprio as the evil slave owner who must be defeated, just as we have no trouble understanding that slavery is bad, freedom is good, and exploitation cinema will stage lurid violence for our voyeuristic pleasure against the bad and in pursuit of the good.

But this is where Tarantino plants his most interesting social message while simultaneously solving the problem of how to make a film with anything new to say about antebellum America and our supposedly post-racial contemporary moment.  Tarantino’s major concern isn’t slavery, and it isn’t exploitation.  It’s how to make whiteness visible.

We expect blood in a Tarantino film.  To a lesser extent, we expect certain markers of the antebellum South in a movie about slavery set primarily in Mississippi and Tennessee.  The cotton, the horses, whitewashed columns and walls of the plantation big house.

Tarantino’s graceful answer to the question—how do you make whiteness visible?—is almost so obvious you’d be forgiven for not paying attention.  The white cotton, the white horse, the whitewashed walls: he soaks them in blood.  Whiteness in Django Unchained is made visible by the effect of the violence whiteness has wrought.

Whiteness in Moby-Dick might “[embody] a host of symbolic associations from purity to terror” (95), but Django Unchained is significantly more brutal.  There is no purity here.  There is no such thing as clean whiteness.  And so DiCaprio menaces by sneering to reveal tarnished, rotting teeth in place of the gleaming A-list pearly whites we would expect.  And lest we think that Waltz’s Dr. Schultz is the exception to the rule, it’s worth noting that though he is a dentist, the bouncing tooth that adorns his carriage is just as dirty as those in DiCaprio’s mouth.  The analogy is a stretch but it plays out: Schultz is no anachronistic doctor in the business of repairing the rotten teeth that symbolize the moral decay.  He is, rather, of the brutal, period-specific old school, more likely to rip those dirty teeth right from your head.  Or explode one with dynamite, as the case might be.

Compare these images to the stunning, clear beauty of Kerry Washington’s Broomhilda.  Compareas well Sam Jackson’s Stephen, the only white-haired African-American in the film, who takes on ‘whiteness’ in the only way he can—by playing directly into minstrelsy stereotypes of the time.*

Stephen’s death, and Broomhilda and Django’s measured triumph, see the plantation transform into that rotten tooth writ large on the landscape.  The only cure for that decayed spot, that whiteness soaked in blood, is finally to dynamite it into oblivion.
*I’m thinking here of a thesis put forth by Robbie McCauley in her masterful one act play about race and sexuality, Sally’s Rape: “I believe white is a condition that anyone can take it.  It causes one to feel superior in order to be okay” (224).