Furthermore, Lincoln champions the president as a martyr of morality who’s deeply abolitionist out of some noble inkling of human dignity. In one memorable monologue, Lincoln references the mathematical principles of Euclid to support his reasoning for ending slavery, saying, “Things which are equal to the same things are equal to each other. That’s a rule of mathematical reasoning and it’s true because it works — has done and always will do.” The screenplay would have the audience believe Lincoln’s sentimentality earned slaves their freedom, but in truth, Lincoln’s soft heart did not guide his political compass as far as slavery is concerned. Historians Downs and Foner both maintain that the president earned the label “anti-slavery,” but certainly not “abolitionist,” a key distinction in the slave-liberation paradigm, the former detailing an economic rationalization to the end of slavery and the latter a moral one, out of some personal principle or Biblical notion. Using the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 as an example, we see that bolstering the Union and weakening the Confederacy was a primary motivation. The proclamation only freed slaves in the Deep South, and didn’t release slaves from bondage in the Border States, such as Maryland and Kentucky — curious considering Lincoln’s unwavering depiction of a morally astute White Knight (no pun intended) of slaves. Because slavery was the economic engine of the South, due to mass wageless labor of enslaved people on plantations, freeing slaves in the Border States as well would have more than likely led to the defection of those states to the Confederacy, effectively undermining the Union.

“You can look at document after document written by military officials during the war and they call for the emancipation of slaves, but only to buttress the Union cause,” Downs contends. “They want to liberate blacks from plantations, allow them to come into camps so that the blacks would work as construction workers, diggers, nurses, and cooks for the Union army. They’re not freeing them because they have this notion of liberation based on the Enlightenment.”

Slavery in the present day is a black-and-white issue: We have the benefit of collectively looking back on the institution with disgust, and denouncing it as a wicked violation of human rights. Lincoln ignores the economic and political context of the 13th Amendment’s passage, instead playing to slavery’s universal contempt and boiling down the narrative to the traditional Hollywood battle of good versus evil. A morally incorruptible president (“the purest man in America,” as Thaddeus Stevens describes) overcoming the odds to win freedom for an oppressed people…well, that just makes for good cinema.

Where Lincoln’s treatment of slavery is benign and distanced, Django’s is raw, exposed and in-your-face, a function of the action occurring predominantly in the Deep South as opposed to stuffy political chambers.

“It’s a piece of our history that generally gets sort of whitewashed or perfumed in a way that this film just doesn’t do,” Samuel L. Jackson, who embodies Stephen, Candie’s head house slave, says of the movie’s unflinching intensity.

Slaves sold at auctions are paraded through the street with masks on their heads, conjuring up imagery of cattle being driven to slaughter (Schultz likens slavery to the profession of bounty hunting, calling it “a flesh-for-cash business”); overseers dole out fierce whippings for such trivialities as breaking an egg, and feed runaways to ravenous dogs as punishment for fleeing; and impressive physical specimens are forced to participate in “mandingo” fights, gladiatorial hand-to-hand battle royales to the death. The film plumbs the satanic hellhole of slavery, depicting pain and suffering to an at-times-unwatchable degree. Observing mandingo aficionado Candie yelling orders at and cheering on his fighter as he beats another man to a bloody pulp is despicable and chilling; Candie even provides a scientific justification for enslavement, espousing in true Social Darwinist form the “fact” that in the African skull, the area associated with submissiveness is larger than in any human or subhuman species on earth. Although Tarantino’s screenplay fabricates the characters and situations, and may therefore feel like an overblown, grittier version of history, Django is a haunting reminder of the atrocities committed on US soil.

“[The film] might be hyperbolic and it might not be true, but the reality is that it could have been true,” says Downs. “Nothing was stopping planters from having a dog eat alive a grown man… It’s possible in the imagination, and it’s possible in an actual occurrence.”

While the corporeal violence is brutal, to say the least, there is arguably another, more savage manifestation of violence at play. The film’s arc centers on a mission of rescue and revenge, as Django seeks to reclaim his wife and pump lead into those who stole her away. He’s not seeking out a gun fight with plantation owners out of some newfound vigilante spirit — it’s purely for familial reasons.

“What touched every African American in the South, what they could all report on, what they all felt and knew was the brutal separation of the family… [which was] a central problem of American slavery,” Downs asserts. “I worry about the cartoonish, overly hyperbolic illustration of violence like the mandingo fight… because if that becomes the signature moment of violence, it actually shuts down what the plot rotates on,” and consequently overshadows a large part of the collective slave experience.

For all the carnage and cruelty directed at slaves in the flick, the screenplay is also highly subversive, framing whites as bigoted buffoons who are good for nothing except spitting dark wads of tobacco and using the “N” word by the mouthful — no doubt byproducts of cinematic retribution against Civil War-era American southerners. (The smooth-talking Schultz, a non-American, escapes any such behavioral blemish.) “Monsieur” Candie, a successful businessman who owns the fourth-biggest cotton plantation in Mississippi, may be the most ridiculous of the bunch (although it’s a tight contest). He’s a self-proclaimed Francophile, yet doesn’t like when people speak to him in French because he finds it embarrassing, and seems to harbor incestuous desires for his “Southern belle” of a sister. Conversely, black characters Django and Stephen possess practically superhuman faculties. Indeed, Django’s lightning-fast gun draw and trigger finger fell a small army of men, in classic Clint Eastwood-esque fashion; he even says of himself, “I am that one nigger in 10,000.” In Stephen, however, Tarantino has created one of the most detestable villains in film history, fitting seamlessly into the ranks of Warden Samuel Norton (The Shawshank Redemption) and Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). Although Stephen doesn’t boast much screen time, he makes his presence known, repeating and reinforcing his master’s exclamations like a collaborating parrot and taking immense pleasure in the misery of his fellow Africans. The scheming Uncle Tom, unfortunately for Django, is the smartest one on the plantation, and when Candie is ready to embrace his visitors with open arms, Stephen is the only one cunning enough to see through the ploy. In fabricating these two Herculean characters, albeit on polar opposites of the good-evil spectrum, Tarantino adds a slight counterweight to a screenplay overwhelmed with white subjugation and bloodlust.

Shortcomings and historical inaccuracies aside, there is a half-glass-full perspective to be ascertained from Django and Lincoln. “Both films [make an] effort to reach the past,” says Downs. “There were four million people enslaved during the Civil War, millions more enslaved throughout the 19th, 18th and 17th centuries, and there’s very little about them… These films are in fact trying to capture a history that otherwise remained invisible.”

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Featured image: Director Quentin Tarantino on the set of “Django Unchained.” Photo Credit/Courtesy of: © 2012 The Weinstein Company.