How to Listen to a Tarantino Movie
Starting with "Django Unchained"
To begin, start by assuming that Quentin Tarantino knows what he’s doing, because he does. I first started paying attention to his film soundtracks with Django Unchained (2012) and I still think this is the best example. The late great Ennio Morricone complained in 2013 that Tarantino “places music in his films without coherence” and said he’d never work with him again, but changed his mind to write original music for The Hateful Eight (2015). Why? Likely he figured out that Tarantino always knows what he’s doing, even if the audience has little idea.
Everybody’s writing about taste but I think aesthetic deliberation and intentionality are much more interesting, especially in the AI era. To do the work to understand what went into a work of art (and to grasp how the artist is situating the work in a political and aesthetic context) requires more than taste. It takes work.
The soundtrack to Django Unchained uses fifteen songs borrowed from nine films (many notable spaghetti westerns) made between 1966 and 1974. Nobody tells you this; you have to look it up and recognize what was going on during those years. Spike Lee hadn’t considered what Tarantino was doing when he tweeted “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them” (since deleted). Tarantino’s choices are, in fact, deeply coherent, when you look at how they work to create Jamie Foxx’s “fastest gun in the South.”
Tarantino’s method for musical allusion is both obvious and subtle. In general, a musical borrowing, like any other kind of allusion, provokes associations to something: another work of art, a particular genre, and the idea that the work is deliberately in conversation with other works. Allusion means the artist is working in context and wants you to keep that context in mind. Tarantino does this visually for his film buff fans all the time, like with the wanted poster for Edwin Porter, the director of The Great Train Robbery, one of the first movie Westerns.1
Musical allusion works on an emotional level as well as a cognitive one. The point of music in a film is to make you feel a certain way whether you “get” the allusion or not. Many people can sense the era that a film or television score came from. Film music from the late 1960s and early 1970s tended toward a certain melancholy. Think of The Graduate (1967), with “The Sound of Silence;” The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) with “Windmills of Your Mind”; Midnight Cowboy (1969) with “Everybody’s Talkin’”; “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) with “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head,” and the entire score of Shaft (1971).
Note that the non-violent era of the Civil Rights Movement ended with the Watts Riot of August 1965. The mournful scores accompanied a more militant protest era.2
The most important musical allusion from Django Unchained is Luis Bacalov’s theme song from Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 film, Django. Tarantino knows there are people who know Corbucci’s movie well and people who have never heard of it.3 The music works for everyone. Tarantino took it straight from Corbucci’s film to open his own without changing anything. The key is D minor; the ballad begins with a very brief instrumental triple meter introduction followed by compound duple meter accompanying the lyrics. (Compound duple meter, evoking hoof beats, is common in the music of 1950s and 1960s Westerns.) It is conventional, with a male voice, guitar, bass, and drum set, with a dramatic background female chorus, strings, piano, and tambourine. The song’s lyrics are as follows:
Django! Django, have you always been alone? Django! Django, have you never loved again? Love will live on, oh, oh… Life must go on, oh, oh… For you cannot spend your life regretting. Django! Django, you must face another day. Django! Django, now your love has gone away. Once you loved her, whoa, oh… Now you’ve lost her, whoa, oh… But you’ve lost her forever, Django [Chorus] When there are clouds in the skies and they are grey You may be sad but remember that love will pass away Oh Django, after the showers, the sun Will be shining
The drama is Rocky Roberts’s gorgeous tenor joined by the chorus. The song evokes a sense of nobility and tragic dignity, with the rhythmic freedom signaling independence. Take another listen.
In a famous 1973 essay, “After Innocence,” The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael described how the discontent brought on by the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings was overshadowing the summer’s movies, “yet the corruption that Watergate has come to stand for can be seen as the culmination of what American movies have been saying for almost a decade.” Vietnam, Kael observed, “finished off the American hero as a righter of wrongs … movie after movie tells audiences that they should be against themselves.” While she doesn’t mention music, I suspect that’s exactly what Tarantino heard in those films. He wanted to tell a new story.
And so Tarantino borrows Morricone’s “The Braying Mule” from Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), screenplay by the once blacklisted Albert Maltz, starring Clint Eastwood as a former Union soldier who is now a mercenary for the Juarez revolutionaries, and Shirley MacLaine, dressed as a nun to evade French soldiers. Eastwood eventually comes to side with the Mexican villagers beyond the money. Then Tarantino borrows Bacalov’s “His Name Was King,” from Giancarlo Romitelli’s violent revenge drama “His Name Was King” (Lo chiamavano King [1971], starring Klaus Kinski, who starred in over a dozen Italian westerns, often as a bounty hunter operating in a legal gray area.) Later Tarantino borrows again from Two Mules as Broomhilda is taken naked and screaming from the hotbox at Candyland while Django and Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, who portrayed the SS officer Hans Landa in Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds), in order to stay in character, must stand by passively and watch. If you understand the borrowing, you see Tarantino pushing back at what Kael called “the convictionless atmosphere, the absence of shared values, the brutalities taken for granted, the glorification of loser-heroes.”
You can best understand the era’s pulp westerns and thrillers by understanding how they are commenting on the Vietnam war, particularly the ones made after the My Lai massacre. Tarantino borrows Morricone’s “Rito Finale” (“Final Rites”) from Sergio Sollima’s Violent City (1970) (starring Charles Bronson) to underscore King and Django’s bounty contracts and “Norme con Ironie” (“Rules with Ironies”) to underscore Django’s flashback to his whipping and branding by people he’s contracted to kill. Tarantino borrows Morricone’s “The Big Risk” from Phil Karlson’s Hornet’s Nest (1970) as King Schultz and Django travel to Mississippi to rescue Broomhilda after a winter of violent bounty hunting. These songs are mournful, hopeful, and righteous as Jamie Foxx’s Django engages in what Tarantino wants to suggest is necessary violence.
Tarantino also takes three songs from I crudeli, or “The Hellbenders” (1966), about a family of well-armed and well-financed Confederate veterans moving west to start a new Confederacy. He uses Morricone’s “Minacciosamente Lontano” (“Ominously Away”) underneath Django pretending to be a brutal slaver; “Un Monumento” as Django says farewell to King’s body and goes to rescue Broomhilda; “Dopo la congiura” (“After the conspiracy”) underscores Django’s final, brutal, bloody confrontation with Stephen. Underneath what’s going on visually, the music replaces any thoughts of the South rising again with revenge bloodshed.4
One particular musical repurposing stands out: Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name,” the theme to Lamont Johnson’s The Last American Hero (1973). Croce’s song opens the original film at a full 1:30 into the credits. Watch it first and wait for the song. Then watch the Django Unchained version as Dr. King and Django mount their horses and ride off into the cinematic American West, Django tall in his saddle riding toward the snow-topped Rocky Mountains, ascending the peaks at sunset, passing herds of buffalo, still wearing the bloodstained winter coat of the dead Speck brother. Here are Croce’s lyrics:
Like the pine trees lining the winding road I got a name, I got a name Like the singing bird and the croaking toad I got a name, I got a name And I carry it with me like my daddy did But I’m livin’ the dream that he kept hid… [Chorus] Movin’ me down the highway Rollin’ me down the highway Movin’ ahead so life won’t pass me by… Like the north wind whistling down the sky I got a song, I got a song Like the whippoorwill and the baby’s cry I got a song, I got a song And I carry it with me and I sing it loud If it gets me nowhere, I’ll go there proud [Chorus] And I’m gonna go there free…. Like the fool I am and I’ll always be I got a dream, I got a dream They can change their minds but they can’t change me I got a dream, I got a dream Oh, I know I could share it if you want me to If you’re going my way, I’ll go with you… [Chorus]
The Jim Croce song got everyone’s attention and showed up in just about everyone’s review. Few of the critics at the time looked at why.
First to the song, in E major and 4/4 meter, with a standard pop/country-western verse-chorus-verse-chorus-guitar solo/bridge-verse-chorus structure. A minor inflection accompanies the line “and I carry it with me like my daddy did” but the repeated minor-major of the chorus evokes acceptance and hope.
Alan Scherstuhl in The Village Voice called the scene “probably the most moving scene Tarantino has yet filmed,” but didn’t theorize why Tarantino would have chosen it. Scholar Eileen Jones, who teaches film at Berkeley, was angry. “I mean, why not the mellow stylings of James Taylor while we’re at it? …Has the whole world gone crazy?" Roger Ebert thought the choice was “so anachronistically unexpected … that it made me laugh.”
I read Tarantino as posthumously needling Kael (who died in 2001), who focuses in her New Yorker essay on The Last American Hero (based loosely on a 1965 Tom Wolfe Esquire magazine piece on NASCAR driver Junior Johnson) as emblematic of how Vietnam and Watergate, which had intervened between Wolfe’s article and Johnson’s film, had changed movies. The 1973 film version, Kael writes, shows Junior cheating and “tells the story not of a man who fights for his independence but of a man who is smart enough not to sell himself too cheap.” Johnson’s film version “will seem more honest to movie audiences” than Wolfe’s version, “because the new conventions are that you can’t win and everybody’s a sellout,” she observes; “the hero pays a price.”
Jamie Foxx’s Django does not pay the price, riding into the West on a new saddle. You don’t have to understand the whole of the allusion. Tarantino does not presuppose a deep cinematic literacy in his general viewers but when you do the work, it’s something else. The song was a huge Billboard Top 10 hit in 1973 and people mostly remember that it’s folky and Southern. The Last American Hero has been called an example of “Redneck Cinema” in the sense that it depicts a South that is largely white and male.
I see Tarantino’s musical borrowings as rewriting American movie history to say forget the malaise. “We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us,” Kael laments in 1973. The visuals of Tarantino’s historical revenge fantasies are blood-spattered and obvious, as are his visual allusions to other films.
Quentin Tarantino is an acquired taste and many don’t have it. But for me, there’s no other filmmaker who does anything as subtle and fascinating with musical allusion. You have to work to piece it together yet he doesn’t seem to mind if you don’t.
Franco Nero, the actor who played the original Django, appears in a cameo. Tarantino quotes from Birth of a Nation with his satirical (and anachronistic) Ku Klux Klan horseback scene. In a scene set in fictional Daughtrey, Texas, Tarantino uses Tom Wopat (who played redneck moonshiner Luke Duke in the television series Dukes of Hazzard), Russ Tamblyn (from the 1965 Western, Son of a Gunfighter) and Don Stroud (from the 1970 biker film, Angel Unchained) to suggest the rickety nature of the town’s legal system.
The decade prior, from 1954 to 1965, featured non-violence and legal action as the preferred forms of civil rights and social protest, and was termed by Bayard Rustin in 1965 the “classical” period of the Civil Rights Movement. ( See Rustin’s “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary, February 1965). Tarantino said in a December 2012 interview, “I thought being a slave in the antebellum South would be the perfect American representation of a Corbucci West.”
Sergio Corbucci’s Django was famously banned in Great Britain for its violence. Filmgoers could only see clips of Django by watching Jimmy Cliff’s 1972 crime drama The Harder They Come, in which Jamaican gangster Ivanhoe Martin is shown in the theatre watching Corbucci’s film. Tarantino clearly prefers Corbucci’s films over Sergio Leone’s. Corbucci’s heroes rarely have clean hands, but their righteously mournful scores soften the depravity and affirm humanity.
All this had happened before, in Blaxploitation films, of course, but Tarantino saw black heroism transcending the gritty urban heroics of Shaft, Sweet Sweetback (1971), and Superfly (1972). He makes an allusion to the gold chains and flashy white monkey-fur coat of The Mack (1973) with Django’s blue-boy moment.
Tarantino soundtracks are phenomenal, across all his movies ... Stuck in the middle in Reservoir Dogs still is extraordinary. Or pulp fiction. Or man, hotei's awesome piece from kill bill! He clearly takes an enormous amount of pleasure in choosing music.
I remember watching a documentary with my brother in the 70’s about whaling and when it was either an actual whale hunt or the meeting of the international whaling committee meeting to assign national quotas they played the instrumental part of Supertramp’s “Crime of the Century”. We realized it at the same time and looked at each other like “oh that’s clever.” My first inkling that documentaries are never viewpoint neutral.