I got ahold of the script for Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and was mildly smug about it till I found out everyone’s read it already. Apparently it got leaked ages ago. Nobody tells me anything.

So what’s everyone saying about it? Basically, that it’s the coolest thing ever, or else it’s a fiasco of epic proportions. Nothing in between.

Me, I’m on the fiasco side at the moment. I tend that way in general. When I order a cup of coffee, I bet the coffee will be a fiasco of epic proportions, too. Though it often turns out to be okay.

In case you’ve slept through all this film-anticipation (and why shouldn’t you?) Django Unchained is the Tarantino film that takes on slavery in America, turning it a kind of Spaghetti Western bloodbath relocated to the Deep South. It’s in production, won’t be out till next Christmas. Probably a mistake to look at the script. Film scripts are an odd, stripped-down form; they don’t make it easy to imagine what could result onscreen. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself, because like I hinted earlier, I’m not wild about the script for Django Unchained.

And I’ve got a lot riding on this radical “Southern.” Big emotional investment, partly because of how rotten American films are lately and how much a new genre is needed to breathe a little life into them. And partly because I have so much faith in genre film as The Better Way to approach cultural history and experience, better because genre actually works. It has an impact, influences how people feel. History lessons and documentaries and high-minded period dramas, when they can’t be avoided, sometimes have their place in making us think dutiful thoughts. But an effective genre film (or book or program or game) can go right into our nerve centers and make us love things, and hate other things, and long for a scenario in which to act on our feelings.

That all might be very deplorable or even dangerous—some people think so, anyway—but there it is.

Anyway, the Django script is very long—166 pages long, and reads even longer, like an oddly formatted, scattershot pop novel. Tarantino is no respecter of proper script form as mandated in all those How to Write a Rote Screenplay books. His title page is a handwritten scrawl, and I have no doubt it’s his own big-kid handwriting, because Tarantino always favors these showy auteur gestures, like running a pompous credit on Kill Bill I putting it in numerical order, “The Fourth Film by Quentin Tarantino.” Why not Tarantino Opus #4 while he’s at it? Even Hitchcock didn’t have a directorial ego that size.

On the other hand, you can never laugh Tarantino off. And I’ve tried. But he’s too good. At intervals, anyway; certain films; certain sequences from certain films. Big bloody chunks of Inglourious Basterds sit there daring you to say he’s not good.

Django Unchained is about how the slave Django (to be played by Jamie Foxx) is unexpectedly freed by an urbane German bounty hunter, Dr. Schultz (Basterd‘s celebrated Christoph Waltz), and teams up with him to go on a plantation raid to free Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). The despicable plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) uses his spread as a giant “house of ill-repuke,” as Popeye would say, for white Southern gents hankering after “ponies,” generally light-skinned female slaves judged the best-looking. “Candyland” also showcases a slave-fighting ring featuring “mandingo” gladiators who battle to the death.

Obviously all that has to be stopped in the goriest way possible. Fine, good. Necessary, even. An ultra-violent, vengeful “Southern” can be the pop media form of “the fire next time” James Baldwin promised us: “We are going to burn down your house,” on film, anyway.

Make that house a plantation in antebellum Mississippi and what decent person, black or white, doesn’t want to help torch it?

But the problem is, it all reads so…stupid. Tarantino’s script is everything his detractors say he is, derivative, obnoxious, juvenile. There are terrible scenes of cornball humor, like when Django is forced to wear a blue satin Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit in order to impersonate Dr. Schultz’s valet, and is confronted by a slave:

Betina: What’cha do for your massa’?

Django: Didn’t you hear him tell ya, I ain’t no slave.

Betina: So you really free?

Django: Yes.

Betina: You mean you wanna dress like that?

Django fumes.

You come to dread the scene descriptions because they’re so embarrassing:

The men go to different stores to purchase Django’s wardrobe….Django looks damn handsome in his new duds. Brown cowboy boots, Green Corduroy Jacket, Smokey Grey shirt, Tan Skin Tight Pants, and Light Brown Cowboy Hat. He looks a bit like Elvis in “Flaming Star” and a Little Joe Cartwright on “Bonanza.”

Or this one:

Stephen has been Calvin’s slave since he was a little boy. And in (almost) every way is the 2^nd most powerful person at Candyland. Like the characters Basil Rathbone would play in swashbucklers, evil, scheming, intriguing men, always trying to manipulate power for their own self interest. Well that describes Stephen to a tee.

The Basil Rathbone of House Niggers.

Tarantino writes like some of my students, and he’s getting way too old for that. All that writing-like-talking can be great if you’ve got control over it (see Mark Twain), but it’s godawful when you suffer from logorrhea and have the sensibility of a stoat. Tarantino’s ain’t-it-cool gloating is just as hot for the joys of Candyland, which he seems to wish he could visit personally—maybe he and Leo having a pony-party—as it is for the burning of Candyland. He writes as gleefully about Broomhilda getting flogged naked through the streets as he does about Django’s revenge upon the floggers, because it’s all equally awesome, man. As Broomhilda, Kerry Washington is going to spend the movie nude and whipped, nude and raped, nude and sold. I bet she’s hitting the gym right now, toning up all that “chocolate” flesh, as Tarantino describes it, the better to realistically represent the miseries of the slave girl.

Not Kerry Washington

But everything equally “awesome” gets boring fast, and finally has no impact. Django’s revenge just tails off into nothing—I can hardly remember it. There’s no slave uprising, no Nat Turner action. Django and Broomhilda are somehow going to escape from the Deep South on their own after wasting everybody at Candyland, and lead really cool lives somewhere. Maybe head to California, open a store on Melrose Ave., sell the Django Look, corduroy jackets and skin-tight pants, chocolate make-up for the ponies?

Hell, Tarantino’s half-convinced me the PBS types are right: you can’t deal with slavery in a genre film, it’s insulting. You think of every photo of a slave you ever saw, and wonder how Tarantino could write such crap. And here’s the guy who wants to make a movie about John Browne! It’s laughable!

Still, I hope I’m wrong. Maybe it just reads stupid, and all the sound and visuals will transform it. Or maybe he’s on the set desperately rewriting the script between takes. He should be.

It took me days to battle my way through Django Unchained, cringing most of the time. But when I got ahold of the script for Inside Llewyn Davis, I sat right there and read it through in an hour. Damn, those Coen Brothers can write.

Here’s an early bit of dialogue between the protagonist, Llewyn Davis, and his agent Mel:

Llewyn: How we doin?

Mel: We’re doin great!

Llewyn: Really? New record’s doing well?

Mel is instantly sad:

Mel: Oh—you mean how we doin. Not so hot, I gotta be honest.

Do you hear that? Do you HEAR that? That effortless rhythm achieved by people who can write? Can’t be taught. It’s like perfect pitch or something.

Inside Llewyn Davis is the Coen Brothers’ latest, which won’t be out till 2013. First point to stress about this film: you might’ve heard it’s going to star Justin Timberlake, but you can breathe easy, he’s not the main character. Whew! Big relief. Instead, it’s that guy named Oscar Isaac who played the ex-con husband in Drive. Inside Llewyn Davis is about the folk music scene in 1961 Greenwich Village, right before Bob Dylan takes it by storm. The Llewyn Davis character is based on the real-life folk singer Dave Van Ronk, before Dave Van Ronk became the “Mayor of MacDougal Street,” mentoring Dylan and Phil Ochs and Joni Mitchell and, apparently, loved by all.

Our Llewyn Davis is a hapless fuck-up who lives on the couches of friends and acquaintances and, sometimes, strangers. He’s also a serious musician, which doesn’t make him any easier to get along with. He’ll periodically erupt into righteous lectures about his dedication to music and others’ lack of same. He also keeps impregnating young women who then need abortions and monetary help paying for them, which he has to raise somehow.

One of them, Jean (Carey Mulligan), is the wife of Llewyn’s friend Jim (Justin Timberlake)—Jean and Jim make up a fairly successful husband-and-wife folk duo who’ve been helping Llewyn. Llewyn is always betraying and alienating people who help him, then repenting and trying to make up for it, then re-betraying and re-alienating them.

Anyway, Jean can scarcely draw breath without expelling it immediately in reviling Llewyn:

Jean: …I should have had you wear double condoms. Well—we shouldn’t have done it in the first place. But if you ever do it again, which as a favor to women everywhere you should not, but if you do, you should be wearing condom on condom. And then wrap it in electric tape. You should just walk around always, inside a great big condom. Because you are shit.

I think we’ll enjoy seeing Carey Mulligan play this part after her sweet waify performance in Drive.

In general, Llewyn Davis is failing so badly he tries to rejoin the merchant marines and fails at that, too. He’s stuck with folk music, which he loves/hates. In fact, the narrative frame is Llewyn getting beat up in an alley by a folk music fan from Kentucky who takes offense at Llewyn’s disrespectful comments about the genre.

Llewyn’s shambling couch-to-couch odyssey is lovingly, inventively documented. If you’ve ever been desperate in your life, trying to get a foothold anywhere when you’ve got no money and nothing’s clicking, you’re going to be both impressed and slightly sickened by how accurately the Coens capture that appalling state of being. One of the things that happens to you in that state is that you wind up on wild goose chases after the merest, slightest whiffs of opportunity. You get involved in deeply weird, suspect situations with deeply weird, suspect people. But you’re trapped—even when you can see clearly that some bizarre scenario is unlikely to get you anywhere, you’ve got nothing else going on, so you have to play it out. The farcical and the dreadful meet, and you only get to laugh about it much, much later. If you survive, and if you can ever bear to recall it. But bystanders get to laugh right then and there.

Which is a long way around saying that there’s a central sequence in the script involving Llewyn’s road trip from New York City to Chicago, where he might get an audition which might get him a real gig, that’s so hilarious and awful I can’t praise it highly enough. Llewyn’s ride-mate is Roland Turner, a fat old jazz singer and heroin addict (probably the John Goodman part) who walks with two canes, plus an impassive blonde driver, Johnny Five. Turner is constantly taking restroom breaks of suspicious duration, “herky-jerking” his way back and forth, and making Llewyn pay for the gas. When he’s back in the car he has lots of conversation:

Roland Turner: What’s the N stand for? Lou N. Davis?

Llewyn: Llewyn. Llewyn. L-L-E-W-Y-N. It’s Welsh.

Roland Turner: Well it would have to be something, stupid fuckin name like that. Here, this would interest you, Johnny and I were in Seattle, playing the High Spot—remember this, Johnny?—and I became indisposed after eating a toasted cheese sandwich. May well have been a rancid slice of bacon. Found myself purging from every orifice—one of them like a firehose—I said to the manager, What do you call that thing I just ate? He said, “Welsh rarebit.” I said, Okay, does everything from Wales make you shit yourself or just this piece of toast. He said, and I’ll never forget it because it almost made the experience worthwhile, he said Mr. Turner—Holy Jesus, what is that thing?

He has seen the cat, peeking over Llewyn’s shoulder.

Because of the cat, we never do find out what the manager said to Roland Turner that almost made his Welsh rarebit experience worthwhile. It’s a Persian cat that Llewyn is tending for his friends. This is a serious through-line in the script, the cat, or rather cats—there turn out to be two cats that look so alike Llewyn mixes them up. In the way of desperate people who can’t get control of anything important in their lives and get fixated on one possible act of redemption, Llewyn tries very hard to make things right with the cat, or cats. And fails. I won’t say how, but it’s that mixture of the harrowing and the funny and the haunting that the Coens have got nailed down tight by now. You won’t forget when and how Llewyn abandons the cat to its fate.

The script is great beyond my poor power to describe, of course. And by all accounts the Coens’ plans for handling the music are almost as ambitious as for O Brother Where Art Thou? So barring something odd derailing them, this looks like another Coen masterwork. But God knows how it’s going to play with audiences. It’s so specific, so relentless, so casually honest about things that are never handled casually or honestly in American movies—abortions, drugs, failure, loneliness—that I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a total flop on their hands. The Big Lebowski all over again—a dud at the box-office, but later on everyone claims they always loved it.

So no surprise, the Coens win. And more importantly, we know there’s one good movie being made somewhere in America. It ain’t over yet!

It’s Jesse James’ birthday today, September 5th. I mean the famous “frontier outlaw,” sometimes referred to as “America’s Robin Hood,” but actually an obnoxious Missouri sumbitch still venerated and romanticized by an addled public. In movies he tends to get played by pretty studs like Brad Pitt and Colin Ferrell and Rob Lowe and Tyrone Power. There’s an occasional “revisionist” attempt to come to grips with James’ less lovable qualities, such as Robert Duvall’s fake-pious looney in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, or Brad Pitt’s fame-swollen paranoiac in  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. But it’s still Brad Pitt, for God’s sake, all gleaming and starry, and you can’t hide the hero-worship by claiming to do a serious critique of celebrity culture 19th century-style.

We generally get the Western-hero version of Jesse James as bold bandit and manly martyr, on accounta it’d be awkward to focus too much attention on the true-life particulars of secession-mad Border State Jesse James, the virulent racist Jesse James trained up in terror tactics by Confederate heroes William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson, the Jesse James whose gang wore Ku Klux Klan hoods during one train robbery.

It’s no accident that the Nazi-loving, motorcycle-customizing TV jackass Jesse James claims, based on no evidence, to be a descendant of the famous cut-throat cracker.

The main reason we’re stuck with the heroic legend of Jesse James is the same reason we’re still putting up with the whole crazy “Lost Cause” narrative of the noble South, which is because a bunch of post-Civil War Confederate loyalists generated and promulgated it in phony history books and rank novels and windy political speeches and anyplace else a gullible public can be found, which is everyplace.

James was an ideal “Lost Cause” hero. His exploits were defended during his lifetime by former secessionist politicos trying to return to political power in post-Civil War Missouri, and turned into lugubrious fables by newspapermen sympathetic to the Southern cause. They ginned up the portrait of Jesse James as poor victimized farm-boy, nobly battling on behalf of the little people against corrupt railroad corporations and Northern-controlled banks.

They did such a good job, Jesse bought it himself. Here’s one of his op-ed letters to the newspapers, throbbing with self-pity, engorged ego, and punchy politics:

“Some editors call us thieves. We are not thieves — we are bold robbers. It hurts me very much to be called a thief. It makes me feel like they were trying to put me on a par with Grant and his party. We are bold robbers, and I am proud of the name, for Alexander the Great was a bold robber, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and Sir William Wallace — not old Ben Wallace — and Robert Emmet. Please rank me with these, and not with the Grantites. Grant’s party has no respect for anyone. They rob the poor and rich, and we rob the rich and give to the poor….I will close by hoping that Horace Greeley will defeat Grant, and then I can make an honest living, and then I will not have to rob, as taxes will not be so heavy.”

Needless to say, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Jesse James ever gave a dime to “the poor.” It appears all the takings were reserved for Jesse W. James, Bold Robber Deluxe, and his gang.

So Jesse James’ goddamned birthday reminds me that we need a new film genre, which Quentin Tarantino has already helpfully named: The Southern. It’s just about time we came to grips with that sorry region and countered that insane but remarkably persistent “Lost Cause” narrative, especially now that the ol’ Confederacy is flying its flag so proudly again, and saber-rattling about States’ Rights, and saying how slavery wasn’t so bad, doing those African immigrants a favor, really, exposing ‘em to a genteel white-pillared civilization, and how Jim Crow was a pretty good time had by all, too.

You unregenerate fuckers!

Pretty much the only big popular movies of the Old South we’ve got so far are the ones initiated by the Lost Causers. Most famously Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, two of the biggest events in American film history, making teaching American film history a fricking delight, let me assure you. That sickening moment watching Birth of a Nation when the students realize that the Ku Klux Klansmen are the actual heroes of the film, and are being enshrined as our new Founding Fathers! They turn their horrified eyes upon you as if to say, “Why in hell would you show us this depraved relic?” But it’s gotta be done, because I don’t make the history, I just report it.

We also need this new genre The Southern because it’s clear The Western is dead—at least in cinema, at least for now. (TV’s done some ambitious things with it lately, first Deadwood and now Justified.) Even if sagely hybridized with other, more popular genres like science fiction and animated comedy, films with Western themes and imagery dry up at the box-office like daisies in the desert. The recent flops Cowboys and Aliens and Rango have made studios skittish about anything remotely Westernish, which is why the Gore Verbinksi-Johnny Depp-Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration Lone Ranger is stalled.

(How I get the story is, Disney won’t make it at the proposed $250 million budget; Gore Verbinski won’t make it for less; Johnny Depp won’t make the film without Gore Verbinski; and so on into the sunset.

It’s a maddening snapshot of Hollywood 2011, any way you look at it. First, what the hell about a film version of the sparse old TV show The Lone Ranger costs $250 million? What could possibly need that much CGI? Is Tonto going to have magical shamanistic abilities to turn outlaw bands into snakes or horny-toads or something? Or is it just the Verbinski-Depp-Bruckheimer are taking $150 million off the top?

Next, if Depp and Verbinski want to do it so bad at that price, why don’t they just pitch in their lunch money of $100 million or so, take executive producer credits and a percentage of the gross, and carry on? You know, in Old Hollywood, people used to actually put their money where their mouths were. Producer Sam Goldwyn mortgaged his own house, twice, to finance Goldwyn Studio films. Alfred Hitchcock famously wrote a check for Psycho when the studio heads got cold feet, in exchange for gross profits, and the profits were gross all right. He wound up in Fat City, or anyway, Fatter City. But now the pious adage “Never put in your own money” is one of the first things you hear in Hollywood; it’s about the only moral they have and uphold there. It might as well be embroidered on samplers and hanging on the walls of every mogul’s mansion.

And finally, if Disney isn’t going to bankroll these guys, who’ve made them sickening amounts of coin on the Pirates of the Caribbean films, who the hell are they going to bankroll? What films are worthy of Disney money? Well, you’ll never guess. One’s called John Carter—another Confederate hero, by the way!—based on a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs of Tarzan fame, and lame previews for it featuring loads of generic-looking sci-fi/fantasy CGI have been running in theaters forever. And the other scintillating feature film is Oz: The Great and Powerful, starring James Franco as the Wizard. And if that ain’t exciting enough for you, it’s also got Zach Braff in it!

I know, this was a very long parenthetical, wasn’t it? I was going for the record.)

It’s an odd thing, how absolutely The Western seems to have exhausted its appeal. No charge in it at all for kids these days; try showing them a Western and they’ll watch it with glazed eyes and haggard faces; try showing them another one and they’ll claw their way out of the room if they have to maim you to do it. All those long shots of gunfighters dwarfed by the landscape, standing there not shooting for several seconds, and then maybe shooting just once or twice? They hate that. Long shots, landscape, not shooting. All bad. And as for the whole thing about The Western contemplating America’s violent founding and its relationship to our notions of freedom and the rule of law…? Yeah, they don’t care, certainly not if they’ve gotta see it played out in such old-fashioned terms involving six-guns and posses and horses and cactus and all that. For them, the whole iconography’s played out.

But The Southern, that’s still got a world of fresh potential, because it’s amazing how studiously we’ve avoided making lively films about the central drama of slavery and emancipation from the slaves’ point of view, or about the chaos of the Border States during the Civil War, or really anything about the Civil War that doesn’t involve the time Mammy done tole Miss Scarlett she couldn’t wear that low-cut dress to the barbecue. Some harsh historical accuracy about Southern madness makes everything new again, and also recovers elements of the Western, which was always heavily informed by the history and mythology of the Civil War South anyway—just check out the Western novel and film The Virginian sometime.

Quentin Tarantino laid the groundwork for all this on the Charlie Rose show back in 2009:

“I’d like to do a Western. But rather than set it in Texas, have it in slavery times. With that subject that everybody is afraid to deal with. Let’s shine that light on ourselves. You could do a ponderous history lesson of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Or, you could make a movie that would be exciting. Do it as an adventure. A spaghetti Western that takes place during that time. And I would call it ‘A Southern.’

“I want to explore something that really hasn’t been done. I want to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.”

So Tarantino is getting the ball rolling on The Southern, with his upcoming slave-liberation film Django Unchained. And the Coen Brothers get an honorable mention for the Border State movie True Grit. Now maybe somebody ELSE could make an interesting move cinematically, for once? Say, a move from West to South?