{"id":57852,"date":"2013-11-04T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2013-11-04T17:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=57852"},"modified":"2014-06-09T20:59:48","modified_gmt":"2014-06-10T01:59:48","slug":"the-revenge-fantasy-django-unchained-vs-12-years-a-slave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/11\/04\/the-revenge-fantasy-django-unchained-vs-12-years-a-slave\/","title":{"rendered":"The Revenge Fantasy: Django Unchained vs. 12 Years a Slave"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many critics are praising\u00a012 Years a Slave<\/i>\u00a0for its uncompromising honesty about slavery. It offers not one breath of romanticism about the ante-bellum South.\u00a0 No Southern gentlemen getting all noble about honor and no Southern belles and their mammies affectionately reminiscing or any of that other Gone With the Wind crap, just an inhuman system.\u00a012 Years\u00a0<\/i>depicts the sadism not only as personal (though the film does have its individual sadists) but as inherent in the system \u2013 essential, inescapable, and constant.<\/p>\n

Now, Noah Berlatsky at\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a>\u00a0points out something else about\u00a012 Years<\/i>\u00a0as a movie, something most critics missed \u2013 its refusal to follow the usual feel-good cliche plot convention of American film:<\/p>\n

If we were working with the logic of Glory or Django, Northup would have to regain his manhood by standing up to his attackers and besting them in combat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Django Unchained\u00a0<\/i>is a revenge fantasy. In the typical version, our peaceful hero is just minding his own business when the bad guy or guys deliberately commit some terrible insult or offense, which then justifies the hero unleashing violence \u2013 often at cataclysmic levels \u2013 upon the baddies. One glance at the poster for\u00a0Django<\/i>, and you can pretty much guess most of the story.<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the comic-book adolescent fantasy \u2013 the nebbish that the other kids insult when they\u2019re not just ignoring him but who then ducks into a phone booth or says his magic word and transforms himself into the avenging superhero to put the bad guys in their place.<\/p>\n

This scenario sometimes seems to be the basis of U.S. foreign policy. An insult or slight, real or imaginary, becomes the justification for \u201cretaliation\u201d in the form of destroying a government or an entire country along with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of its people. It seems pretty easy to sell that idea to us Americans \u2013 maybe because the revenge-fantasy scenario is woven deeply into American culture \u2013\u00a0 and it\u2019s only in retrospect that we wonder how Iraq or Vietnam ever happened.<\/p>\n

Django Unchained<\/i>\u00a0and the rest are a special example of a more general story line much cherished in American movies: the notion that all problems \u2013 psychological, interpersonal, political, moral \u2013 can be resolved by a final competition, whether it\u2019s a quick-draw shootout or a dance contest.\u00a0 (I\u2019ve sung this song before in this blog, most recently\u00a0here\u00a0<\/a>after I saw\u00a0Silver Linings Playbook<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

Berlatsky\u2019s piece on\u00a012 Years<\/i>\u00a0points out something else I hadn\u2019t noticed but that the Charles Atlas ad makes obvious: it\u2019s all about masculinity. Revenge is a dish served almost exclusively at the Y-chromosome table.\u00a0 The women in the story play a peripheral role as observers of the main event \u2013 an audience the hero is aware of \u2013 or as prizes to be won or, infrequently, as the hero\u2019s chief source of encouragement, though that role usually goes to a male buddy or coach.<\/p>\n

But when a story jettisons the manly revenge theme, women can enter more freely and fully.<\/p>\n

12 Years a Slave<\/i>\u00a0though, doesn’t present masculinity as a solution to slavery, and as a result it’s able to think about and care about women as people rather than as accessories or MacGuffins.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scrapping the revenge theme can also broaden the story\u2019s perspective from the personal to the political (i.e., the sociological):<\/p>\n

\u00a012 Years a Slave<\/i>\u00a0doesn’t see slavery as a trial that men must overcome on their way to being men, but as a systemic evil that leaves those in its grasp with no good choices.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From that perspective, the solution lies not merely in avenging evil acts and people but in changing the system and the assumptions underlying it, a much lengthier and more difficult task. After all, revenge is just as much an aspect of that system as are the insults and injustices it is meant to punish. When men start talking about their manhood or their honor, there\u2019s going to be blood, death, and destruction \u2013 sometimes a little, more likely lots of it.<\/p>\n

One other difference between the revenge fantasy and political reality: in real life results of revenge are often short-lived. Killing off an evildoer or two doesn\u2019t do much to end the evil. In the movies, we don\u2019t have to worry about that. After the climactic revenge scene and peaceful coda, the credits roll, and the house lights come up. The End. In real life though, we rarely see a such clear endings, and we should know better than to believe a sign that declares \u201cMission Accomplished.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many critics are praising\u00a012 Years a Slave\u00a0for its uncompromising honesty about slavery. It offers not one breath of romanticism about the ante-bellum South.\u00a0 No Southern gentlemen getting all noble about honor and no Southern belles and their mammies affectionately reminiscing or any of that other Gone With the Wind crap, just an inhuman system.\u00a012 Years\u00a0depicts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":58126,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,36,329,253,129,343,3920,8118,285,1760,1757,37,3504],"class_list":["post-57852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture","tag-economics","tag-emotion","tag-history","tag-media","tag-tvmovies","tag-nation-united-states","tag-organizationsinstitutions","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-social-psychology","tag-social-structure"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/11\/Screenshot_15.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57852"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62929,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57852\/revisions\/62929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}