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| Adolph Reed, Jr. |
Django
Unchained, or The Help
On
reflection, it’s possible to see that Django
Unchained and The
Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both
dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and
interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery
and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem is not so much that each film invents
cartoonish fictions; it’s that the point of the cartoons is to take the place
of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts.
In The Help the
buffoonishly bigoted housewife, Hilly, obsessively pushes a pet bill that would
require employers of black domestic servants to provide separate, Jim Crow
toilets for them; in Django
Unchained the
sensibility of 1970s blaxploitation imagines “comfort girls” and “Mandingo
fighters” as representative slave job descriptions. It’s as if Jim Crow had
nothing to do with cheap labor and slavery had nothing to do with making slave
owners rich. And the point here is not just that they get the past
wrong—it’s that the particular way they get it wrong enables them to get the
present just as wrong and so their politics are as misbegotten
as their history.
