Seeing in the Dark: Film and the Slave Past
- Seeing in the Dark:Film and the Slave Past
Curiously, earnestly, anxiously we peer into the dark, and wish even for the blinding flash, or the light of northern skies to reveal him. But alas! he is still enveloped in darkness, and we return from the pursuit like a wearied and disheartened mother, (after a tedious and unsuccessful search for a lost child,) who returns weighed down with disappointment and sorrow. Speaking of marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities, we come before our readers.
—Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave1
The incongruity of the grotesque…comes to a focus on the oxymoron: one hears silence, peoples loneliness, feels distance, and sees in the dark.
—Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Towards History2
Django's Mirror
About halfway through Django Unchained we get one of those Quentin Tarantino scenes, and yet it is a trick reminiscent of Velásquez: Jamie Foxx's Django, dressed in a shiny blue Lord Fauntleroy outfit, kills a pair of white overseers, one of whom has a shirt festooned with tacked-on bible pages, just as they prepare to bull-whip a terrified female slave for breaking eggs.3 In this sequence, Tarantino creates a strange visual triangle. We see the scene from [End Page 71] Django's perspective: the surprised black woman and shocked white man look directly at him; just to the right of the tree to which the woman is tied, an old, cloudy mirror leans against a pile of bricks; it points directly at Django, reversing his gaze. Yet the mirror reflects Django's image only partially: we see his body, his cartoonish costume, but his face is strangely obscured. We cannot quite see his face in the mirror. It is a deeply unsettling shot that seems to take apart the very act of looking—there must be something in that mirror. What are we looking at? Who is doing the seeing and who is being seen?
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Django's mirror. Django Unchained, Weinstein Company, Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures, 2012.
Perhaps the confusion here has something to do with the shock these antebellum characters feel at this sudden intervention into their generic scene. It is as if they see through the impossible Django, to the camera and the film crew as well, or even to the cinema audience itself, as if Tarantino is reminding us, live, that this is a fantasy of historical revenge, that film has here intruded on history. In the actual past, there was no Django, no stopping it; indeed, there was no camera, no record even, only that hazy blankness. But when Tarantino mirrors this absence back on to us, with the naturalizing perspective of the camera revealing only a blind spot at the precise location of historical subjectivity, the scene comes to visualize our own blankness, our own strange absence: it is also our face that is missing in Django's mirror. How, the shot makes us ask, can we be retrospectively absent from our own past? The narrative satisfactions of Django's impossible presence (and vengeance) are undercut by a literally forced reflection on our own impossible absence. Film itself has been troubled in some fundamental way by the subject of historical slavery, and vice versa.
Django was one of three major studio films about slavery released in 2012 and 2013; the others were Steven Spielberg's Lincoln4 and Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave.5 These films, however, do not all pursue the same strategy. Lincoln, yet another entry in a long line of white savior films aimed at the consciences of contemporary liberals—a reboot of Amistad6 with fewer black characters—is an unconsciously retrograde film, and an exemplar of what I want [End Page 72] to call the neo-abolitionist film genre, in which black humanity and white virtue are ritually and problematically re-established under the auspices of slavery. This pattern is familiar in recent Hollywood treatments of both slavery and, by analogy, Jim Crow, and also includes films such as The Help, Cloud Atlas, The Free State of Jones, and Green Book.7 All of these films feature historical...
