[By Jerry Ward]

Negative
and positive responses to Django Unchained and other commodities illuminate
the complexity of popular disagreement in the United States.  The film is so multi-faceted, so open to an
enormous range of readings and interpretations, that we must focus on small
portions of Tarantino’s collage. 
Representation of the institution of slavery, and the anger-making
options of enslavement, serves as a distracting background for looking at the
cultural triplets named Injustice, Violence, and Justice.  The family portrait of the triplets is more a
painting than a photograph in the context of the film.  No amount of trompe-l’oeil succeeds in hiding how complicit the triplets are
with bounty hunting, the primal center of Django Unchained and other films
that invite us to be spectators of law and disorder.  Common sense informs us that we are looking
at incriminating evidence that pertains to the perverse, historical criminality
of the American criminal justice system. 
The visual and literary surface of the film is dense with familiar and
obscure allusions.  What is fully
available for popular discussion is a sop, a cheap sop.  It retards access to and robust public
discussion of the dynamics of law and bounty hunting that so strongly impact
the quality of our everyday lives.  As
acts of interpretation, our responses shade off into hunting for violated
boundaries or into quests to identify how the film insults our sensing of
history.  Our interpretive responses
wrestle less than they should with the ideology and economy of bounty
hunting.  That fact, to borrow language
from Tony Bolden, is “one of the signatures of our time.”