It is okay to isolate the subatomic particles of our culture, and look
at them in turn every which way, compare/contrast, etc. But at some
point we must also see the structures they form jointly. It is not
hard to see that Django and Lincoln form a sort of unity. Neither is
it to see the social roots of this interesting artistic whole.
Historically, Django stresses the indomitable, relentless resistance
to slavery by relatively isolated individual blacks, the pernicious
effects of the hierarchical division of the slaves, the touchiness and
understandable paranoia of the slaveowners against anything other than
full submission, etc. The Lincoln piece focuses on the short-distance
maneuvering on the political surface. Both pieces are remarkable
artistic renderings. But, like all history, it is not really about
what happened back when as much as about the dilemmas of our present.
The real drama that both movies express, however distortedly, is the
gap between the needs of our times and the shortcomings of our
(fragmented) political formation. I guess one way of saying this,
perhaps more clearly for some readers, is that both movies exhibit in
its full pathetism the liberal illusion of a type of leadership that
Obama and the Democrats -- understandably but unforgivably -- cannot
provide in and by themselves. And we know why. In both films, the
organized collective resistance that underpins and sustains the
phenomena rendered on the screen is left too vaguely in the
background. Hollywood is too much an institution of the status quo to
dwell effectively on this most essential aspect of the struggle;
effectively in the artistic sense, of course. For that, we need a
Tarantino and/or a Spielberg of our own -- that is, someone above and
beyond them in several dimensions. Meanwhile, as people now say, it
is what it is.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
