Django, Law, and Wotan

My wife and I caught a showing of Django Unchained last Friday, and rather than drone on about my editorial progress I thought I might talk for a bit about the Wagner in this movie.  I don’t know how much Tarantino & crew kept Wagner in mind while making Django, but there are a lot of cool parallels, as @mattjmichaelson and I found when we sat down to compare notes.

The Ring Cycle first shows up in Unchained during the campfire scene where Django mentions his wife’s name is Brunhilde (or Broomhilde), and Dr. King Schultz labels him a “real live Siegfried.”  Beyond that Wagner disappears from the script, but he does hang around in the air, present though not evoked, especially as the story deals with questions of Law.

Both Django and Wagner’s Ring Cycle revolve in a way around the nature of laws.  Dr. Schultz has the ultimate power, to kill joyfully, without remorse or consequence, because of his position under the law.  Each of his murders (up to the last) occurs within a carefully defended legal framework.   When he offers Django the bounty hunter’s job, Django takes a new legal position, and new powers as a result.  (These are the only new powers he gains in the film, in fact—while we do see him target shooting, we never see him miss!)  Schultz’s power depends on his legal position—for all the lengths the movie goes to show him being a badass with rifle, shotgun, pistol, dynamite etc., it goes even further to demonstrate his skill at using the law to his advantage.  He doesn’t even plan to steal Broomhilde from her owners; he schemes to buy her.  His first explicit violation of law is Candy’s murder—also his last act in the film.  By transgressing law, he has broken his power.

In Wagner, Wotan, the father (and King) of the gods, holds his position through law—at the beginning of time, he traded his eye for the knowledge of runes (writing, needed for contracts), and took from the World Ash Tree a shaft of wood from which he made a spear.  On that spear, Wotan carved bargains and deals with all things.  This was his law, the law of contract, and it binds everyone and everything.  Including Wotan himself!  And this is Wotan’s great tragedy.  He is stuck inside the laws he made to build the world, the same laws that give him his might.  He cannot break free without breaking the world—even when by breaking his promise he might stop a great evil, such as the Ring of the Nibelungs, which grants its holder absolute power provided that he or she renounce love.  About a third of the Ring Cycle is dedicated to Wotan seeking a way around a promise he made—bound by his own spear—not to steal the Ring back from the dragon who holds it.

So here we have Schultz / Wotan, realizing the evil that exists in the world (Slavery as the Ring, which grants immense power to its masters if they renounce love / human compassion—we never see a normal loving relationship among the slaveowners in Django, even Candy’s sister is a widow), but that he can do nothing about it because of the Law.  (In the opera, Wotan starts off desiring the Ring; in the movie, Schultz starts off saying he will ‘make this slavery business work for [him]‘.  Schultz comes to despise slavery and slavers.  Wotan’s story is less clear and explicit, though I think he does, in the end, want Ring and Spear both broken.)  So in the end, he must break the law.  In the opera Siegfried, Wotan opposes the hero with his law-Spear, which Siegfried breaks with his sword Nothung (‘Needful’; maybe this is the Will-Sword?  Though that’s a bit of a reach), shattering Wotan’s power.  In the movie, Schultz shoots Candy, shattering his own power (and protection) under the law.

Opera and film both deal with the absence of law in their final acts.  Maybe (and I don’t have a fully defended thesis here, just spitballing based on my knowledge of the opera) one goal of Wagner’s Goterdammerung is to show the world with no law but that of the Ring, which is to say cruel desire: the gods are silent, and the hero Siegfried falls into the clutches of the scheming Gibichung family, who abuse his faith in their hospitality to enchant him, steal his wife, and ultimately murder him.  Brunhilde responds to Siegfried’s death by claiming the Ring and jumping onto Siegfried’s pyre, which consumes the Gibichungs as well as Valhalla, the abode of the Gods.  The Ring breaks forever, and the world, cleansed, is free to begin again.  (At least, this is one interpretation, very Schopenhauer-ish.  Wagner’s a slippery fish, though.  If y’all have your own opinions about what’s going on in the Ring Cycle, feel free to tell me!)

Obviously in Django Unchained our Siegfried does not die.  But Schultz’s death does end of the world of law, and leave Django in the hands of tormentors and traitors who seem immune to the hand of God.  (Who’s Hagen in this analogy?  Maybe Samuel L Jackson’s Stephen, who, as the head house slave, is ‘pretty low’ in Django’s own words…  Don’t know if I want to press the argument that far though.)  Anyway, Django escapes, and returns—to destroy the Ring (at least part of it) and wreak destruction on the world that forged it.  If we carry the symbolic logic out this far, I think it’s fair to equate the burning of Candyland with the burning of Walhalla and the Gibichungen Hall.  I wonder how the movie would have felt if Django indeed died, leaving Brunhilde to finish the job / destroy Walhalla.  Weirder, certainly, and less like a triumphant Western.

(Another parallel: we first see Brunhilde in the hot box; in Wagner we meet her on the mountaintop, surrounded by fire—hotboxed in a different way.)

This interpretation isn’t complete by any stretch.  There’s a lot in the film that doesn’t fit here—especially the intertextuality between this film and Inglorious Basterds, in which the backwoods sumbitch and the hypercompetent German swap good guy / bad guy roles.  (I wonder if Tarantino tried to get Brad Pitt in Django…)   In addition to all the intellectual games above, I thought this was a great movie, well-acted, compelling, human in the depths of its inhumanity, accessible and complex in the ways it deals with questions of law, power, morality, and justice.  Plus, Tarantino just keeps getting better at directing gunfights.

But the Wagner stuff is pretty cool, too.