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The Weinstein Company
Jamie Foxx, left, and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Django Unchained.”

According to Movieline.com, Samuel L. Jackson is describing Stephen, the character he plays in Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” as “the most reprehensible negro in cinema history.”  But when it comes to Hollywood depictions of black men as slaves, there’s plenty of reprehensibility to go around.  So how does Stephen measure up?

D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” (1915), an early and notorious example, created a pro-slavery paean by contrasting stereotypes of free and enslaved black men, all played by whites in blackface.  Slaves are docile cotton pickers, singing and dancing to entertain their owners.  But black men, submissive and simple-minded within the institution of slavery, embody more insidious stereotypes once they’re liberated.  The film’s freemen are both laughable political buffoons and hyper-sexualized threats, kidnapping one white woman and causing the suicide of another.  A masterpiece of innovative cinematic technique, Griffith’s film was more than just an apologia for slavery.  The first movie to be screened at the White House, it spawned the twentieth-century resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.  “Birth of a Nation’s” reprehensible negroes ushered in a century of white America working out—and often working up—its own anxiety about black manhood through films about slavery.

Griffith based the film on Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman,” a novel written in part to refute the depiction of slavery in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, itself the source of one of America’s most contentious depictions of black manhood, inspired many film adaptations.  The one most relevant to “Django” may be the 1933 animated short “Mickey’s Mellerdrama,” a coon-show retelling in which Mickey Mouse, originally conceived as a blackface character, plays both Tom and the slave girl Topsy.  Although Stowe’s Tom is strong and youthful, in the cartoon he’s white-bearded and stoop-shouldered—a physical, if not an emotional, precursor for “Django Unchained’s” Stephen.  (Stephen is more of an “Uncle Tom” than Stowe’s character ever was.  Indeed, the fraught legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” looms so large over subsequent depictions of slavery, I make a joke of it in my novel “The Secrets of Mary Bowser.”  Mary—a former slave turned abolitionist and Union spy— responds to Stowe by wondering why anyone cares “what a white lady writes in her book.”  This authorial self-deprecation foregrounds the significant roles that real African Americans like Bowser played in challenging slavery.)

Everett Collection
“Gone with the Wind”: From left, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh in 1939.

Many films presented slaves who were entirely submissive, ever grateful to slaveholding whites.  In American cinema’s most enduring romanticization of the slaveholding South, “Gone With the Wind” (1939), the male slaves Pork and Uncle Peter are so passive and forbearing in their devotion to slave-owning whites, they never even gained the notoriety of Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy and Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy.  “The Littlest Rebel” (1935) elevated the stereotype of the singing-and-(tap)-dancing happy darky to the level of co-star, with Bill Robinson playing the faithful slave Uncle Billy opposite Shirley Temple.  The movie’s slaves contentedly dedicate themselves to protecting their owners from Yankees, even disguising Temple’s character in blackface when Union troops search the plantation for her father, a Confederate spy.  Temple’s minstrelsy, coupled with the film’s buffoonish slave character James Henry, reveals a different kind of reprehensibility, in which the sinister elements of “Birth of a Nation” became comic staples in American culture.

“Django Unchained” (they couldn’t screen the movie for me here in Portland, so I read the screenplay) takes its name and revenge-plot from Sergio Corbuccio’s 1966 spaghetti Western “Django,” but it draws as much inspiration from “Mandingo,” a 1975 American film that achieved new heights—or lows—in reprehensible depictions of slavery.  In “Mandingo’s” morally depraved slaveholding South, male and female slave owners are repeatedly shown raping slaves, including children.  Whites indulge in sibling incest.  Vicious slaveholders pit male slaves against each other in bare-knuckled death-matches (Tarantino, who in 1996 called “Mandingo” one of his favorite movies, incorporates “mandingo fights” as a major plot element in “Django Unchained”).

Although none of “Mandingo’s” individual black characters are as reprehensible as “Django Unchained’s” Stephen, both films use the spectacle of black men’s murderous violence, black women’s nubile sexual vulnerability, and black male sexual prowess to titillate their audiences.  But “Django Unchained” also offers Tarantino’s hallmark irreverence, plenty of comic dialogue, and NAACP-award-nominated performances by Jackson, Jamie Foxx, and Kerry Washington.  Whether that makes the film less reprehensible than those that preceded it will be in the eye of the beholder.

Lois Leveen is the author of “The Secrets of Mary Bowser,” a novel based on the true story of a free African-American woman who poses as a slave in the Confederate White House during the Civil War to spy on President Jefferson Davis.

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