Summary
At night-time, dozens of masked members of the Ku Klux Klan ride on horseback, hollering and holding torches. They gather in a circle, and Bennett tells the rest of the group that they must be careful to outwit Schultz and Django. Bennett pulls his mask down, a potato sack with eyeholes, and complains that he can't see, accidentally ripping a hole in it. Other men start to complain about their shoddily cut masks, made by the wife of a man named Willard, and Willard takes offense and storms off.
After an extended argument about whether or not they should use their masks, Bennett overrules the men who want to take the masks off, and they ride off to raid Schultz and Django's horse and carriage, but find no one inside. Hiding nearby, Schultz fires at the carriage as the men are circling, detonating an explosive that sends them fleeing. Schultz hands his rifle to Django, who kills Bennett at long range as he rides away, impressing Schultz.
Gathered around a campfire, Schultz tells Django the German fable of Broomhilda, daughter of the God Wotan. Broomhilda, Schultz explains, disobeys her father, who places her atop a mountain, where a dragon keeps her encased in a ring of fire. A hero named Siegfried scales the mountain, slays the dragon, and withstands the fire to save Broomhilda. Schultz asks Django what he thinks of bounty hunting so far, and Django responds, "Killing white people and getting paid for it? What's not to like?" Schultz calls Django a "real life Siegfried," and persuades him to work with him through the winter before heading to Greenville to look for his wife.
The men continue to ride together as winter falls. Django hesitates before killing a gang-leader named Smitty Bacall, seeing that his son is nearby. Schultz hands Django Bacall's warrant, which enumerates his crimes and advertises a bounty of $7,000. Django kills Bacall, his first official bounty killing, and Schultz hands him Bacall's handbill as a keepsake. Later, Django practices his quick-draw on a snowman. The two men ambush a group known as the Wilson-Lowe gang, heaping their corpses on a third horse they add to their cavalry. A friend of Schultz, living in the wilderness, invites the men in for coffee.
Scrolling text reveals that Schultz and Django have a profitable winter before traveling to Mississippi. In a record book there, Schultz finds that Broomhilda Von Shaft was sold to a plantation owner named Calvin Candie, who oversees a notorious plantation named Candyland. Django explains that Broomhilda was once a house slave, given her beauty and intelligence, but after having her face branded, is liable to become a "comfort girl." Django wants to abscond with Broomhilda, but Schultz warns him that they need a legitimate bill of sale to avoid legal prosecution. Knowing that Calvin Candie is an avid fan of "Mandingo fighting," where male slaves fight each other to the death, Schultz proposes that they pose as a pair of Mandingo fighting purveyors. Although he loathes the idea of posing as a black slaver, Django agrees.
The two pay a visit to Calvin Candie's house, where they are greeted by Candie's lawyer, Leonide Moguy. Moguy explains that Candie's grandfather paid for his legal education, and Django wryly suggests he's akin to a slave. Moguy also tells them that Calvin is a Francophile, but doesn't speak French. In a parlor upstairs, Candie and a few associates watch two "Mandingo" slaves wrestle in front of a fireplace. Under his breath, Django scolds one of the men, named Butch, for wearing a hat inside the house. While Moguy offers Django a drink at the bar, Candie and the other men cheer as the winning wrestler gouges the loser's eyes out, before killing him with a hammer.
After rewarding the winning wrestler with a beer, Candie asks Django about his expertise with Mandingo fighting, and Django's curt tone irritates Butch. Candie eases Butch's temper and orders the servants to leave the room, except for one woman named Sheba. Django and Schultz explain to Candie that they are only interested in purchasing Candie's most prized Mandingo fighters, which Candie refuses to consider, until they offer him $12,000.
Analysis
Before Django Unchained's release, Tarantino stated that although he wanted to write a film that dealt with the historical legacy of slavery in the United States, he did not want to make a conventional historical drama, like Steve McQueen would do a year later with 12 Years a Slave. Instead, Tarantino wanted to make a genre film, one that synthesized elements from "lowbrow" genres like blaxploitation, Spaghetti Westerns, anime, and the ultra-violent grind-house cinema of the 1970s, to craft an entertaining but also morally serious narrative about the racist atrocities of the nineteenth-century American South.
The "Spaghetti Western" was a sub-genre of Italian-made, English language Western films that dealt obliquely with fascism in Italy during and after World War II. Whereas Italian directors in the 1960s used the "Wild West" as a landscape to explore themes of power, violence, and control, Tarantino has referred to his film not as a Western, but a "Southern"—that is, one that imports the political and thematic touchstones of Spaghetti Westerns and applies them to the white supremacist world of the antebellum South. Thus, rather than rehash the archetypal and racially retrograde "cowboys and Indians" tropes of old Westerns, Tarantino instead focuses on the uneasy disruptions in entrenched power dynamics that play out between white and black Americans due to Schultz and Django's unlikely alliance.
Django quickly learns how to practice the kind of lethal skills that Schultz deploys as a bounty hunter, such as shooting at a moving target from a great distance, and performing a quick-draw. Django watches Schultz carefully pause to line up the last remaining Brittle brother in his scope, before killing him in one shot, a maneuver that Django repeats when killing "Big Daddy" Bennett. The mentor-protege relationship between Schultz and Django is ironic in multiple respects, not least of which because Schultz (as a white German man) represents a national culture that would go on to perpetrate one of the most massive ethnic genocides in history less than a century later. Moreover, Christoph Waltz himself played a vicious Nazi in Tarantino's previous film, Inglorious Basterds.
The allegory of Siegfried and Broomhilda is central to the plot of the film, which is essentially a re-telling of the German myth. In Tarantino's version, Django is Siegfried, who must scale a mountain and pass through a ring of fire (the antebellum South and the Candyland plantation), to rescue Broomhilda, a namesake of the powerful German princess. Broomhilda's full name in the film is Broomhilda von Shaft, which is a reference to Gordon Parks's 1971 blaxploitation film Shaft. Tarantino has stated that in the fictional universe of Django Unchained, he conceived of Django and Bromhilda as being distant ancestors to the title character in Parks's film, played by Richard Roundtree.
Tarantino's inclusion of the Mandingo fighting sub-plot is a reference to the 1975 big-budget exploitation film Mandingo, directed by Richard Fleischer. The word "Mandingo" is an Anglicization of Mandinka, the name for West African ethnic group historically centered in and around present-day Mali. Like Django Unchained, Fleischer's film is also set in the antebellum South, and follows an enslaved prizefighter named Ganymede who belongs to a slaver named Charles Hammond. Tarantino's depiction of the dandyish, Francophile Calvin Candie, alongside the enslaved African-American men whom he forces to fight, exploits preexisting racial stereotypes about white and black masculinity, the former being viewed as "civilized," and the latter as "bestial." The film subverts these stereotypes by revealing Candie, who actually cannot speak French, to be the most monstrous and impulsive character in the story, whereas the level-headed Django continually maintains his moral center.
