Django Unchained: Quentin Tarantino's Fairy Tale Disguised as a Spaghetti Western

Django Unchained just might be Quentin Tarantino’s bloodiest movie (although Kill Bill would like a word), but deep down, it’s really a fairy tale. When Tarantino burst onto the indie scene with Reservoir Dogs, he brought the French New Wave’s cool, slick, Parisian subversions of the American crime film back to America. He reinterpreted a foreign market’s reinterpretation of a classic American movie genre.

With Django Unchained, he did it again. Where Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction harked back to the French detective noirs of Godard and Melville, Django Unchained took its cues from the Italian westerns of Sergios Leone and Corbucci. The jingoistic American westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks had presented a sanitized, romanticized view of America’s past.

But Tarantino recognized that Italian directors like Leone and Corbucci had taken those genre conventions and imbued them with bleaker stories and bloodier violence to reflect the true ugliness of American history. He brought Leone and Corbucci’s tricks and techniques back to the United States and used them to highlight the horrors of America’s greatest historical shame: slavery.

Like most spaghetti westerns, Django Unchained follows a badass bounty hunter on a relentless quest for revenge. But that bounty hunter is a freed slave, doling out vigilante justice across the plantations of the South. It’s the perfect application of Tarantino’s brand of historical revisionism. With the power of movie magic, he’s taken down Hitler, the Manson family, and dozens of white slavers.

On the surface, Django Unchained is a satire of American history on par with Blazing Saddles. But it also has a much deeper mythological meaning. Fundamentally, underneath its brilliant satirical conceit, Django Unchained is a fairy tale.

Django Unchained Is A Fairy Tale Disguised As A Spaghetti Western

The premise of Django Unchained sees a noble knight teaming up with a wise older mentor on a quest to rescue the princess from the tower and defeat the evil overlord. Sound familiar? It’s Star Wars and Shrek and The Princess Bride and basically every fairy tale ever written. It’s dressed up as a spaghetti western, but it has the framework of a fairy tale.

Tarantino filters these fairy tale tropes into the mold of a slavery-era Corbucci-style spaghetti western: the knight is a slave, the mentor is a bounty hunter, the princess is the slave’s wife, the tower is a Southern plantation, and the evil overlord is a sadistic slaver. It has all the pieces of a fairy tale, but it’s disguised as a spaghetti western.

Tarantino draws this parallel directly in the text. In one of the film’s slower, quieter scenes, while Django and Dr. Schultz are sitting around a campfire, getting to know each other better, Django tells Schultz that his wife’s name is Broomhilda. Schultz is taken aback, because Broomhilda — or Brunhilde, in its original Germanic form — is the name of a character in a legendary German folktale.

He proceeds to summarize the folk story for Django: Broomhilda was a princess trapped on a mountain, and a gallant hero saved her by walking through hellfire. At the end of the movie, Django creates his own hellfire when he blows Candyland to smithereens with a mountain of dynamite. In the aftermath, he literally steps through the flames to reunite with Broomhilda and ride off into the sunset with her.

The movie makes it very clear that it’s following the beats of a fairy tale. The mentor is killed in the second act to motivate Django on his journey, just like Ben Kenobi. Tarantino’s movies don’t usually follow such a traditional structure, but the standard “hero’s journey” narrative arc works really well for this particular story.

Django Is One Of Tarantino's Only Traditional Heroes

Tarantino rarely follows Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, because he rarely tells stories about traditional heroes. Almost all of his protagonists are morally gray antiheroes, or just straight up evil. The protagonists of Reservoir Dogs are a bunch of jewel thieves double-crossing each other. The protagonists of Pulp Fiction are a pair of mob hitmen who barely flinch when they kill people.

Django is one of the only Tarantino protagonists who’s a traditional hero with a good heart. The Bride is an ex-assassin, so she has plenty of blood on her hands, but her quest to reunite with her daughter is noble and righteous. The lead characters of Jackie Brown, the titular Jackie and her love interest Max Cherry, are both good people, even if they sometimes bend the law.

Mr. Orange spends most of his screen time bleeding out on the floor, but he’s the only good guy in Reservoir Dogs. Everyone else is a career criminal with a sadistic streak, but Mr. Orange is (spoiler alert!) just an undercover cop trying to bring them all to justice. Django and Mr. Orange are arguably Tarantino’s only traditionally heroic characters.

14 Years Later, Has Django Unchained Aged Well?

When it first came out in 2012, Django Unchained was a hotbed of controversy. The film was widely praised by critics and quickly became a blockbuster hit at the box office, but it also drew plenty of negative responses — most notably from fellow director Spike Lee — for its supposed trivialization of the most horrific chapter in American history.

So, after nearly a decade-and-a-half, has Django Unchained aged well? When you go back and rewatch it now, the most notable problem is the pacing. The first and second acts are pretty airtight — even the training montage in the snow doesn’t hurt the pace — but it starts to drag a bit in its third and final act.

The shootout at Candyland is the climax of the movie, but it sticks around for a long time after that as Django is sold back into slavery, escapes his new captors, and returns to save Broomhilda and get revenge. It’s a natural conclusion for the story, but it makes the movie about 15 or 20 minutes too long.

By and large, Django Unchained holds up pretty well. It avoids trivializing its subject matter, because Tarantino switches up the tone of the violence depending on the situation. The inhumane brutality of the white slavers is shown to be appropriately horrific, but Django’s righteous violence against the slavers is glorious, cinematic bloodshed.