Django Unchained

I have not been writing much on my blog these days. Reason is that I find it hard to concentrate when I have quite compulsive obsessive worries about the pressure sensation in my head because it does not seem to go away. If it were just a tension headache, as what most doctors would tell me, I would have expect to be more episodic in nature rather than this constant pressure sensation that I get. It scares me silly to go onto the internet to do research and read on medical forums of people who suffer from similar symptoms and who were diagnosed with serious maladies like brain tumor or brain aneurysms. But I suppose I shouldn’t be worried so much about these things since the neurologist I went to cleared me after an MRI scan of suffering from such maladies. Nevertheless, I came across a condition known as pseudotumor cerebri while researching online a few days ago, which is a condition of increased intracranial pressure that is not attributable to brain tumor or abscesses, and hence not detectable by MRI scan. Left untreated, it may lead to vision loss. I have arranged an appointment with a neurologist for consultation a few months from now so as to clear my worries that I might not be suffering from such condition. In the meantime, I am trying to keep away from my tendency to obsess over health-related worries. I am trying repeating a mantra whenever I find myself obsessing. I repeat the words “forget it” to myself 7 times to distract my thoughts away from the worry. Why 7 times? I suppose I believe 7 is a good holy number, and I would like God to be with me in my struggles.

I went to watch the movie Django Unchained yesterday with my mum, featuring the star-studded cast that included Leonardo Di Caprio, Jamie Foxx, and Samuel L Jackson. I thought I would give it a watch since I have read raving reviews about the film on the newspapers. I have never watched a Quentin Taratino film before, even though I did purchase a Kill Bill DVD a long time ago which I have left languishing in my cupboards. I did expect violence in the movie, but certainly not as much violence as what I did see in the film. The amount of gore was simply gratuitous. The last time I saw something as gratuitous in violence content was in the movie Ninja Assassin featuring the actor/singer Rain. I mean, a movie with violence is one thing, but one which depicts gore with such gratuitous abandon is quite something else. Frankly speaking, I would prefer to give movies with lots of violence and gore a miss. Certainly not a movie to take a girl out to watch

Nevertheless, I thought the film gave an intimate picture of the time of slave-owning America, the days of the cowboys where bounty hunting was a law enforcement measure, and the government issued out warrants for the capture or execution of fugitives with a dead or alive bounty on their heads. And those were the days where property owning aristocratic white men runned plantations with bastions of black slaves under their supervision, they make their sport and living from the free labour of the black people working under them. The film features some of the most barbaric treatment that the white people inflicted on the black people, such as slaveowners whipping black female slaves out in the open fields for running away or making mistakes, and aristocratic white slaveowners making the male black slaves pit against each other to death in ‘mandingo fights’  while they wager bets and cheer on. There was this scene where the white slaveowner, played by Leonardo Di Caprio, set his dogs to maul to death one of his mandigo fighting slave for running away.

Basically, the story is about this black slave who was freed by a white bounty hunter, who was an exception amongst his white community in that he opposes slavery. Together, they went on bounty hunting, and then on a quest to free a black female slave who was the wife of the black slave held in the mansion played by the Leonardo Di Caprio slave owning character. There was much gunning down of white men in the process, and it could be said they painted the house red, literally!

One of the most poignant part of the film for me was when the Leonardo Di Caprio character was mocking the black people at the dinner table by taking out a souvenir of a skull by a former house slave that had looked after his family, and sawing it up to explain how there were certain dimples behind the area of the skull of the black people. This, according to him, was the scientific explanation for the submissiveness of black people as those regions of the brain was responsible for submissive traits. He mockingly asked why all those black slaves under him did not rise up to kill him all those years when they were working for him.

I am not sure how scientific this claim by the Leonardo Di Caprio character is. It is certainly politically incorrect. I was wondering whether there is indeed such things as genes that is inherent amongst the various races that influences their inherent behavior – such as aggressiveness or submissiveness, or intelligence level etc. I have mixed conception of the characteristic of the white people. From most of the movies and television shows that I watch, and from the white people whom I have dealt with in Singapore, they seem like nice people with a congenial disposition. But from hearing about history and how the western foreign powers treated Asia, there are those white people who have a streak for wanting to dominate other races and who treat other races with condescension. Django Unchained features white people at their worst, with the lack of compassion and Christian generosity that I sometimes come to associate with white people. But I think Asian people are really no better, and can be quite ruthless, authoritarian, and war-mongering amongst themselves as well. I remember reading a quote by the eminent philosopher Bertrand Russelll who said something about how humans have the tendency to see virtues in their own race, and vices in others. The truth probably is, that there are both good and bad people in every race. I certainly hope for good people to take charge of their society, and make the world a more peaceful one.