The moral failures of 'Django Unchained' and 'Zero Dark Thirty'

BY ADAM PARKER

Two Oscar-nominated movies this season simultaneously have garnered critical acclaim and sparked controversy. Both films raise important moral questions, and both ultimately fail to answer those questions adequately.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” is an immensely entertaining takeoff on the Spaghetti Western, set partly in the wild west of the 1850s and partly in the Deep South. A German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) enlists a black slave (Jamie Foxx) to help him identify three criminals and claim the prize money. The two men form a sympathetic bond. Dr. King Schultz is smart, appealing and very much opposed to the institution of slavery; he views Django as a fellow human being, an equal, a partner. And the sentiment is returned. Django quickly comes to trust and esteem Schultz, and the two have a grand time shooting white outlaws and exchanging the corpses for cash.

After a lucrative winter, they decide to find Django’s stolen wife and rescue her, a joint mission that takes them to Candyland, a large plantation in Mississippi owned by a certain Monsieur Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Candie is a brutal psychopath — indeed, all the white plantation men are portrayed without nuance: they are thugs, sadists and murderers.

Of course the slaves on the plantation are exploited for their labor, but Candie goes much further. The pretty women are abused; the strong men are paired to fight to the death for the entertainment of their master and his guests; and runaway slaves are permitted to be torn apart by dogs.

Schultz and Django devise a plan to rescue Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), a gorgeous, terrorized and tortured slave who happens to speak German. Tarantino casts all subtlety aside. He is not interested in enveloping his story in layers of significance or asking the essential questions of human existence. He does not pretend to plumb the depths of the psyche or portray ambivalence and doubt.

Instead he uses humor, cartoon violence (often extreme), caricature and simple storytelling to create his entertainments. In “Django Unchained,” he explicitly refers to the Nordic legend of Siegfried and Brunnhilde, which is a hero myth. Siegfried slays a dragon and breaches a ring of fire to rescue the exiled Brunnhilde because, as Schultz tells Django in the movie, “she’s worth it.”

Tarantino presents the story, Italian references and all, with the ardor of a film scholar obsessed with pulp genres. He dutifully and expertly quotes the original “Django,” even casting its aging star, Franco Nero, in a cameo role.

When discussing Tarantino, critics tend to focus on the excessive violence, accusing the filmmaker of encouraging social acclimation to extreme visual displays of gore, but I think this complaint is misplaced. Is Tarantino desensitizing audiences to violence, or is his violence a result of desensitization? I vote for the latter.

Tarantino is less shocking than cringe-provoking. We don’t really recoil from his visual exploits; we squint or cover our eyes. We have learned to expect them. We know that violence for him is part of the pulp nature of his post-modern assemblages, a repackaging of something old. Plenty of movies shock better, and violence, even gory violence, is hardly unique to Tarantino.

 No, the real problem with “Django Unchained” (and “Inglorious Basterds” before it) is its conceit. I left the theater wondering if I had learned anything (about slavery, revenge, fraternity, love, loyalty), if I had benefited in some way. True, it was fun to revel in the revenge fantasy, to see the proponents of slavery gunned down one after another, and to enjoy the ultimate victory of the lead character. But to what purpose?

Tarantino has argued that he makes no claim to be manufacturing high art and has no intention to produce historically accurate movies. He bristles when asked about his portrayal of violence. He insists that he’s merely an entertainer. That’s fine, as far as it goes. The thing is, once an artist released his product into the free marketplace of ideas, he no longer has control over it.

Tarantino might present himself as only an entertainer, but that doesn’t stop us from analyzing and contextualizing his work, from scrutinizing its messages and implications (intended or not).

And the context of “Django Unchained” is not some invention, it’s slavery, actual slavery, a terrible history of brutality and suffering that produced a persistent legacy of injustice. Slavery in the U.S. raised numerous moral questions, many of which remain unresolved to this day. A filmmaker cannot simply leapfrog over that history into a fantasy land where revenge is sweet and fun to watch. He is obligated to deal with the reality on which he relies, to raise necessary questions and possibly suggest answers.

The whole nation continues to cope with the consequences of that peculiar institution — we all are asked to come to terms with our collective past. Avoiding that requirement may be possible for some, but not an artist who is leveraging that history for his own purposes.

Ultimately, Tarantino is guilty of a cop-out. Indulgence in revenge fantasy scenarios might be temporarily satisfying, but in the long run it does no one any good.

The misuse of history is at the root of the problem in another critically-acclaimed but controversial film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” director Kathryn Bigelow’s intense and exciting representation of the search for and ultimate killing of Osama bin Laden.

Here the conceit is inverted. If “Django” is a fantasy creation dependent upon a historical epoch, “Zero” is a journalistic, real-life, documentary-like rendition of history presented in the broad context of entertainment.

The first thing seen on screen is this claim: The movie is “based on first-hand accounts of actual events.” It is, we have learned, partly the result of unusual access to CIA officials and government documentation, officially granted to the filmmakers by the Obama Administration.

“I don’t want to play fast and loose with history,” its screenwriter and former journalist Mark Boal told The New York Times.

But then he does.

The film begins with voices from the burning Twin Towers, victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks whose desperate calls to 911 shocked operators and proved futile. The human cost of terrorism, therefore, is explicitly set forth from the get-go.

The following scenes depict the torture of detainees at black sites, including brutal threats by the interrogator, water boarding, the playing of loud rock and roll music, food deprivation, chaining to the ceiling and isolation in a tiny wooden box.

“I am not your friend,” the CIA operative tells the prisoners. “I will hurt you.”

Maya, the CIA agent played sympathetically by Jessica Chastain, is a witness to this early torture, ambivalent about it and even rendered queasy by what she sees. But she comes to terms with her distress and, later, is shown in the leading role of interrogator.

The film pretends to portray torture neutrally. We see Maya’s distress. We question torture's effect. We witness its brutality. But, ultimately, the movie makes an extraordinary claim: Torture works, and it led to the discovery of bin Laden. “In the end, everybody breaks, bro,” agent Dan says. “It’s biology.”

This is a back-handed endorsement, and it’s disturbing on three levels. First, to suggest that torture can be effective is to give the lie to the filmmaker’s claim of neutrality. Bigelow says she neither endorses the use of torture nor condemns it. She says that, since torture was employed in real life, she is merely being true to real life. But this argument fails because of the explicit message delivered by the film: Tortured detainees provided necessary information that led to the discover of bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Second, that message is itself a distortion of the facts. It is not true that torture prompted detainees to spill any useful beans about the identity of bin Laden’s courier or the location of the compound in Abbottabad, according to CIA chief Leon Panetta. On the contrary, several government officials, including CIA interrogators, have publicly questioned the use of torture as a means of extracting reliable information from prisoners.

Finally, the pretense of neutrality is itself a moral failure. To imply that, under certain circumstances, torture, whatever its practical or tactical uses, might be legitimate on moral grounds is to deny a fundamental truth. In moral terms, torture is never justified. It’s also illegal. Failing to make this clear is, in my view, to shirk one's responsibility as an artist.

From an aesthetic and entertainment perspective, both “Django Unchained” and “Zero Dark Thirty” are riveting, visually compelling, well-made examples of storytelling. Nothing in my critique is meant to blunt their successes on this score. Both deserve the recognition they have received. Both are interesting works of art — in their different ways — and well worth seeing.

But both fail their respective moral tests. History is important. To claim it as a basis for entertainment is to obligate the artist to uphold a higher standard, one that respects not only the facts, but history’s human toll.

When real events are in play, events that involved human suffering and continue to reverberate across time, the artistic stakes are bigger, like it or not.