DJANGO, HISTORICAL BUFFOONERY

By Bonnie Stanard Anachronisms are the bane of serious historical fiction writers. If we rack up too many, our validity as researchers if not writers is called into question. For those of us who spend a lot of time figuring out things like whether alcoholic drinks were served with a straw in 1858, Leonardo Dicaprio had us choking on our popcorn in the movie Django Unchained. There he was on the screen, surrounded by his slaves and sipping a coconut daiquiri with a straw. Whatever the blood and gore, that straw was indefensible. As improbable as the straw were some of the situations. Any black person, slave or free, who wore a pistol in 1858 wouldn’t have worn it long. Nor would he sit at a dinner table with white people. And since slaves were considered property worth from $500 to $1500, what owner would damage his own property? And there was a lot of damage here. But wait a minute. Director Quentin Tarantino signals that the movie is unorthodox on the posters used for promotion. How can anybody take seriously a 19th Century cowboy wearing sunglasses? Obviously Django is not intended as a traditional Western. In a review of Django, Stephanie Zacharek of NPR claims that if the movie “takes significant liberties with history … , it also faces certain historical truths head-on.” She doesn’t elaborate on these truths and I’m still wondering what they could be. She also says it isn’t a screed because “there’s too much joy in it.” Huh? Did she say “joy?” Amusement … maybe. Those of us expecting a cowboy adventure of the more typical sort were twisting in our seats by the second half, hardly aware of the playfulness. Early on, I scoffed at the poor approximation of what was supposed to be cotton plants growing in a field. However, Tarantino had everything under control. He hadn’t been so stupid as to accidentally make cotton look like soy beans with blooming boles. Anyway, director Quentin Tarantino is not easy to interpret. The historical inaccuracies are a way of messing with the concept of suspending disbelief. Even as we immerse ourselves in the story, we are kept out of Django’s world. The movie is a tongue-in-cheek offering that dares you to like it. It’s deliberately provocative. It’s listed as an “Action” movie but begs for another label, one that will acknowledge the element of absurdity. It’s been well received by critics and has an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. If it weren’t for the violence, I’d watch the movie again with the hope of more insight into Tarantino’s unconventional talent. For all Zacharek says about Tarantino, her comment about his use of the n-word prompted the most responses, some of them acrimonious (http://www.npr.org/2012/12/24/166898958/tarantinos-genius-unchained). There are critics who reduce Django to that one issue and would throw Tarantino under the bus for using the word. Several weeks ago on my WritePersona blog, I addressed this dilemma, one that haunts those of us who place our stories in the South in the 19th Century. (http://writepersona.blogspot.com -- scroll down to “Tough Words”)

Playing Tennis with the Net Down

By Bonnie Stanard

Robert Frost was quoted as saying, “Writing in free verse is like playing tennis with the nets down.” I would ask, If you’re playing tennis with the nets down, are you playing tennis?

Free verse is usually defined as verse without meter or rhyme. Most poetry I read today is free verse, whether we classify it by form as narrative, lyric, sonnet, etc.

Take a look at the excerpt below from “Nightclub”, written by former poet laureate Billy Collins and printed without its versification. Is this poetry or prose? 

You are so beautiful and I am a fool to be in love with you is a theme that keeps coming up in songs and poems. There seems to be no room for variation. I have never heard anyone sing I am so beautiful and you are a fool to be in love with me, even though this notion has surely crossed the minds of women and men alike.

Prose poems have enthusiastic defenders. This is a poem that “appears as prose, but reads like poetry,” according to www.poets.org. I’d like to know what reads like poetry means. Prose poems throw out meter and rhyme as well as versification. What meaningful difference is there between prose poems and flash fiction? For poets to stake a claim on prose can only mean the genre is desperate for an audience.

Some poets are staking out territory in music. Poetry on Record, a CD collection, includes several poets reciting to music. I have to wonder when some writer will come out with a CD collection of, not lyric poems, but “song poems” with a trio knocking off a beat in the background.

Poetry slams, defined as performance poetry, have emerged as competitive events. In this case, the success or failure of a poem depends not so much on the merits of the writing as the performer’s ability to entertain. Written representations of these poems convey less in terms of drama or substance. 

Fiction writers rehash characters and plots that have been around since the first written words. They’re able to make prose interesting for the contemporary reader without abandoning the devices that serve the style, things like dialogue, foreshadowing, symbolism, narration, point of view, etc.

In the 20th Century, rhyme morphed into assonance/dissonance, and meter went from structured beat/lines such as iambic pentameter to syllabic and blank verse. Innovation in poetry today seems to be missing the mark. Why have we abandoned rhyme and meter rather than pioneer revolutionary varieties? Surely there are more avenues to explore. Aren’t there?