Django, in Netflix and Palestine

 He feels like Ivan

Born under the Brixton sun

his game is called survin’

at the end of The Harder They Come

You know it means no mercy

They caught him with a gun

no need for the black Mariah

good by to the Brixton sun

You can crush us, you can bruise us

but you have to answer to

oh-oh guns of Brixton…

I

The important thing about Sergio Corbucci’s Django is that, in The Harder They Come when Jimmy Cliff’s Ivan arrives in Kingston from backwoods Jamaica, the FIRST thing he does is go see Django in a movie theater. Again, it’s the FIRST THING Ivan does. And the film stays with him for the rest of his short life-- providing inspiration and a blueprint for the gunfight that ends it.

...oh, you haven’t seen The Harder They Come?… well, this just got difficult...

Sergio Courbiccis’ Django was reimagined or something and released on Netflix. Its not the first time it’s happened (I don’t think it’s even the first time it’s happened on Netflix), and ‘Django’ is a barely original character in the first place (Clint Eastwood with a dash of Django Rhinhart), but Corbucci’s Django is a functional starting point-- indeed, the SINGLE thing that all subsequent creators of Django media agree on is that Corbucci and Nero are the originators and NOT Leone and Eastwood, even though Nero is-- to the point that it’s sort of painful-- just doing a Clint Eastwood impression.  The current Django-- being an Italian production company-- makes somewhat of a bigger deal about being a Corbucci successor than other Djangos, but to claim that any Western with a character named Django is not in dialog with Corbicci is ridiculous. 

Who or what is Django? It’s a hard question and it’s as hard as it’s ever been in 2023. You’d be tempted to start with the Corbucci movie, but I caution against that since it seems, going merely off of the images and sounds that it consists of, like a terrible movie. 

A better starting point is Franco Nero, because they just used a damn Italian guy as the gunfighter who wondered into town-- and you can make the case that THAT is the important departure from Leone. Leone had succeed in picking up the “West” and moving it into a quasi-real mind-space, but he still needed to import his cowboys. Obviously, you needed European grown cowboys if you were ever going to have an economy of Westerns that sustained itself without any contact with America. 

But Nero was not the first European to play a cowboy-- there had been, at least, a Winatou movie made in the early 1960s with a German cowboy and Frenchmen as a Native American and the fact that they could all get together and run around like dopes with no shirts was seen as a big sign that they might be able to get past that whole “second World War” thing.

And, if Nero was just doing a Clint Eastwood impression, Clint Eastwood was just doing a Toshiro Mifune impression; it was a more ambitious impression, and Clint was better at it-- but the actors are, pretty clearly, not what is going on here. 

Corbucci’s Django has two and a half characteristics that set him apart from other gunfighters. It is possible that an earlier gunfighter had two of these characteristics but they have been lost to time because they lacked Django’s panache. [How can an actor excude panache while turning in a terrible performance? You’d have to ask Franco Nero: he’s still alive! I’m pretty happy for him.]

What Django had was 1) an articulated stance against Ku Klux Clan style racist/religious/facisim and a 2) GODDAMN MACHINE GUN which he 2.5) kept in a coffin. 

It’s tempting to make the coffin a characteristic of its own because the coffin is very, very cool and the source for a kind of “metal-goth” aesthetic that you find in some Italian Django movies. And that certain Djangos have a little bit of a metal/goth thing going-- to the point that the character is either undead or the script completely incoherent¹-- is a big deal because a dash of the supernatural was something that had generally been missing from the West, and another area in which you can see Corbucci’s Django as an originator. 

But you don’t need the coffin, as cool as it is. All that really matters, what Django is, (and the character would tell you this, if you asked him) is the forty five seconds or so that made it into The Harder They Come of Django blasting the hell out of those Clan-type losers with his sweet machine gun. 

“Fuck you, racists, I’ve got a goddam machine gun!” That’s all Django has to say. That’s all anyone NEEDS to say. 

Django was Ivan’s hero. Ivan/Jimmy Cliff was Joe Strummer’s hero. And if Joe Strummer (or Jimmy Cliff) isn’t YOUR hero you are probably a Republican with rotten taste in music. 

II

In the beginning, violence was an exclusive privilege reserved for of white men, who used it to protect their shit-- a process generally referred to as “justice.” In case there was any confusion about the rightness or inevitability of this, about a billion westerns were filmed to remind the world that this was, in fact, right and good. 

But the real violence was always in our hearts, and the violence-monopoly was a thinly sustained illusion. In the cinema, and the world, violence will be deployed in the name of liberation, or terrorism, as it will be employed in the name of the ‘justice’ which whose real name is oppression. 

Weather you think of John Wayne as an oppressor or a protector, you have to admit that whatever forces he represents were not as good a shot as the guys John Wayne plays in the movies. If you sign up for a world where people sort things out by gunslinging, you are signing up for a world where people who do not ‘deserve’ it get shot. 

It is inevitable, it is right, and it is just-- it might be the only good remaining to humanity-- to point Django’s machine gun at the Clan. But Django is a very silly movie. The idea that only Clan members would be hit by the machine gun was always fucking stupid; as real as John Wayne on a white horse, saving the day. 

Free Palestine.

1The script IS incoherent. But is it an incoherent script ABOUT a zombie gunfighter or a script that is SO INCOHERENT that it seems like the gunfighter was a zombie despite the screenwriters intentions? We might never know….