A review of the recent movie "Django Unchained," with commentary by the reviewer.

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Tarrantino is at it again with this sequel to his "Inglorious Basterds." And like it, Django too is a  lush  cinematographically, even lavish, almost epic "victim redemption story." Only this time the victimology does not involve bringing closure to Jewish revenge against Nazi ovens, but black revenge against white Southern plantation slave inhumanity and brutality.

The vehicle here, as before, is the now familiar but somewhat worn Western Spaghetti trope -- slightly updated and modified: A slave is rescued from a chain gang heading deeper South -- meaning to an even more brutal and inhumane Plantation in Mississippi. Django gets rescued by, and then hooks up with a German-speaking bounty hunter and they ride into several towns where Django "gets to kill white people and get paid for it."

As a pretext for what Tarentino's movies do best, they raid and kill their way across the plantation landscape from Texas to Tennessee. Ostensibly their loud blazing guns, derring-do, and even dynamite in one instance, are in search of certified "bad guys." But in truth (and this is the underlying subtext of the movie) their overall mission is to "even the score" between the crisscrossing stripes etched on Django's back, and the peace and tranquility of the Southern plantation way of life. Violence is used here in the traditional American way: as a perfectly normal and purposeful morality-rectifying instrument.

As this dynamic duo goes about the symbolic business of "even-ing the moral score for all times," they also are in search of Django's wife who was "sold South" along with Django, both for being repeat escaped slaves. Along the way, they wreak untold havoc on plantation owners across a wide swath of Southern peace, tranquility and hospitality. In short, in one single symbolic stroke of the screenwriter's pen, the picturesque exploits of a single symbolic slave/cowboy/bounty hunter, Django, sets the moral world upright against. 

Five stars for the movie because the acting throughout is academy Award-level, but Leonardo DiCaprio's and Samuel L. Jackson's acting is as usual, "off the charts!" Academy award or not, you will see this cast again in another blockbuster, and I can't wait.

Commentary on the Movie and our fragile times

At any time except the Christmas Holiday season and the aftermath of the wanton murders at "Sandy Hook," Connecticut, this would have been an uninterrupted "feel good movie:" A complete celebration of Black redemption against America's "original sin, slavery. However, with Christmas and Sandy Hook as heavy-hearted backdrops, American violence can no longer be taken as being a "normal and sane given" for a postmodern nation. For me, this movie was a chance for some serious collective national reflection.

In all of Tarrantino's movies, including this one, he has been trying to tell us obliquely (which is the only way you can tell us Americans anything about ourselves) that the level and utter glee and enjoyment of violence in our culture may be normal for us, but it is utterly insane for any other culture with its moral and human sensibilities and its humanity still intact. Somehow, we have failed to get this, Tarrantino's important underlying message.

We love violence like we love the proverbial American Apple Pie because its primary instrumentality in our culture, the gun, is the closest thing we have to holiness, closest to our hearts, intertwined with our history, and as always, is the arms-length answer to all our fears, prayers and problems. We worship the gun like most religions worship its virgins or its prophets, like most athletes worship their trophies, perhaps even more so, since there is only one Amendment to our Constitution that is prior to "the right to bear arms."

If this is not the very definition of an insane culture, then would someone please stand up and tell me what is?

Why do we speak of video games, rap music, and violent movies or even about insane people getting guns (Insane people normally are less violent than the normal population at large? And anyway, it is the act of gun violence that best defines one as being insane?) as being the source of violence in our culture when our history and our everyday life is drenched in blood right outside our doors. I am taking about mind-numbing violence that we willfully shut our ears to, that we choose to remain blind to?  Does anyone remember the murder of Kitty Genovese? (I do!)

Anyone who wants to know why random acts of brutal wanton murders happen in this nation, need go no further than to look directly into the mirror: We are a hate-filled nation in collective denial about who we are and what we really stand for -- still living on moral credit. We are good and moral only to the extent we tell ourselves it is so.

Everyone else sees us for what we really are: a declining nation running on past fumes of temporary greatness, and constantly running away from our own brutal historical shadow. The truth about our violent and brutal past and its consequences that continue into the present, cannot be spoken of out loud, or either in mixed company, or even to each other? To do so is an unforgiveable sin: a treasonous unpatriotic and unpardonable crime, a crime against our most enforced hidden rule: Never tell the truth about America, because we might not be able to survive it? We do not allow, nor will we ever abide being told anything other than what the twisted, distorted flag draped mirror, mirror on the wall tells us: that we are the fairest, greatest, most peace-loving nation of them all.

BS: It is an incomprehensible lie; a cruel fantasy, a psychological hoax that we play on ourselves that has become an unwritten article of faith, and we know it; and now with Sandy Hook, we also feel it deeply. 

The cold-blodded truth is that we Americans are always nervously busy trying to "distance" ourselves from the culture that defines us best to outsiders: the Jeffery Dahmers, the Charles Mansons, the David Berkowitzes, the Ted Bundys, the John Wayne Gacys, the Ted Kaczynskis, the Timothy McVeighs, the Richard Ramirezes, the Wayne Williams, the Albert DeSlavos, the Jim Jones', the Colin Fergusons, and now the Ryan Lanzas -- all from our mostly "safe white" protected communities.

But is it not fair to ask: While we are frantically "distancing" ourselves from our more malignant parts, should we not also include the thousands who have died due to mob violence, or worse yet, rampant domestic violence -- where every other week, there is at least one new missing young white woman killed and disposed of by her nearest significant other? And last and always least in the American hierarchical academy of violence, should we not also be "distancing" ourselves from the mass urban violence that goes on in every American inner city ghetto and has been going on now since the Chicago riots of July 27, 1919? [Oh, I forgot, most white Americans have already physically "distanced" themselves from urban violence, that is why they moved to "safe white" communities like Sandy Hook, right?]

In any sane, self-respecting nation truly concerned about reducing violence, this procession of violence at every level, within every class, across every inch of our nation's history, and across every societal stratum, would be seen at least as a small clue that maybe there is something wrong with the society itself? Maybe with its established norms? With its rules? With its own collective denial about the role of violence within the culture? Perhaps even with the very basis of its humanity? 

But no, perish the thought! For in the twisted logic of what has become the "established American norm," it is always a case of "never mind the reality out there" in our everyday cultural interactions: That reality is not what it looks like, but it is "whatever we define it as, or whatever lens we choose to look at it with, or the angle we choose to turn it, or what we choose to call it. 

As George W. Bush Jr., once in a fit of unguarded honesty said: We are an empire, we get to make up our own reality: reality is whatever we choose it to be. 

No matter what Junior says, one thing we know from our blood-soaked history, Sandy Hook did not "come from out of the blue." We are no longer virgins, that list above is who we are. It is American reality staring back at us from behind the flag-draped mirror on the wall.

But twisted defensive logic, like the lies about why we have 310 million guns, is our own private collective lie too. For the truth is that we stand alone as the country that has been in more wars than any nation in the history of the world; that the murders we commit against each other every year since WW-II (and average of more than 25,000 per year) is by a "factor of ten" more than all of the European countries (with Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and Australia thrown in) combined; that we are one of the most ego-sensitive yet hate-filled nations in the world; and that random, wanton and rampant gun violence such as occurred at Sandy Hook, Connecticut  is just the "new normal" for us. [We'll get over it and go back a new normal in a few days, right?]

Each year, the threshold of American violence just getting lower as we become deader and deader to the violence committed in our collective names. We become numb in reverse order to our race-based hierarchy. Only when white kids are killed in large numbers do our hackles rise above the noise level, or causes our President (mulatto or otherwise) to shed a solitary tear down his left cheek.

That is why the guns in Tarrantino's movies keep getting louder: He is trying to get our attention: to awaken us from the deep sleep of our own inner fantasies about ourselves and about how good we are (minus a few nutcases, of course, that is). He does this even as he makes tons of money off of our collective fetish. Tarrantino's overarching message is that ours is a "profoundly sick culture." Period! (No, not period, exclamation mark !)

Already, our second term "faux progressive" mulatto President (who managed to shed one tear) has "outsourced" the investigation of Sandy Hook to his Vice President to "study the problem," and we know what happens when Barack Obama outsources a problem to Joe Biden, or a Presidential Commission is formed to "study a problem?" (You've got it, absolutely nothing!)

Anyone who really wants to know why the "Sandy Hooks" keep occurring in the U.S. should read David Courtwright's book "Violent Lands." In Courtwright's book we get a very different and I think a more honest angle on U.S. history -- from the frontier up through the urban violence that we have long since become completely numb to.

Courtwright's theory is a compelling one. It is that the genesis of American violence has nothing at all to do with video games and Hip-hop music, or violence in movies since these are just symptoms of a deeper much more primitive and pervasive cultural problem. That problem, according to Courtwright has to do with the consequences of the lop-sided male-to-female demographics of the European Settlers and the effect those demographics have had long-term on our cultural development and evolution.

The fact that both North and South American frontiers were populated ten to one in favor of large numbers of armed young mostly dumb but adventuresome and sexually aggressive colonial white men, with excessive amounts of testosterone, and a survival need to dominate, to Courtwright's mind, proved to be the seminal constellation of factors in America's social development that explains everything anyone ever needs to know about American frontier life. In short violence is in America's DNA. Even if there were no guns, due to Americans violent DNA, we would still be trying to find ways to kill each other.

It was this tableau that led inexorably to the U.S. becoming a violent white male dominated colonial culture. Once removed, it is still that today. Add to this Frontier tableau of a drastic shortage of women, especially white women and the fact that a handful of wealthy white men had imported four times as many physically robust and sexually potent black slaves as there were white men on the continent, and 100 times the number needed for white men to control them, and it does not take Rocket Science to understand where the fears that require constant gun vigilance in the U.S. comes from.

When race, sex, and religion intersected on the frontier, the white man had a serious "penis management problem." Gun vigilance and gun violence are well known for their ability to solve many penis management problems, a "draw," and a duel are but good examples. This is especially true when the penis management problem resides primarily inside the heads of sexually-repressed men, especially white men with a "small penis complex" and fragile egos to match. If you don't believe it ask some of those white women we are still unable to find every other week in the USA? Or those kids whose pictures we see weekly on the milk cartons?

But these are matters best left out of the news cycle. They are to forever be left unsaid. They will be ignored, and Joe Biden's study of Sandy Hook will be orchestrated by a compromise with the NRA --which is to say no compromise at all. And Mr. Obama will announce, with great fanfare, solemnity and another gauzy limp-wristed speech, that the size of the clips in those automatic weapons "so sorely needed for our sacred white hunters," will be changed from 100 bullets per clip to 50 per clip. Obama will declare it a historical victory for us Progressives, and the Sandy Hook wheel will just keep on turning, rolling on America's river of violence.

Where is Michael Moore when we need him?

Authors Bio:
Retired Foreign Service Officer and past Manager of Political and Military Affairs at the US Department of State. For a brief time an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Denver and the University of Washington at Seattle. A graduate of the National War College and a Phd from the University of Southern California.