#14: Hamlet Blog Post 2: Django and Hamlet would have been friends.

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Vengeance.”

Django Unchained is a film about a man seeking to wreak havoc on the man who ripped his wife away from him. After being freed from slavery, he is rescued and befriended by a man with whom he embarks on a journey to rescue his wife. He is often tested to the limits of his humanity and the quest to retrieve his wife is a bloody, expletive filled one.

Within this film, parallels exist that convey a similar message as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For example, the line “I'm curious what makes you so curious” (Tarantino). Directly mimics the feelings of apprehension and nervousness at the play’s beginning, with the line “Who’s there?” (1.1.1).They both demonstrate feelings of paranoia and intensity in their respective works, but the film conveys this meaning in a more explicit way than the text, which is surrounded by context and background. Another example is the line “ I don't know what 'positive' means,” whose confusion and verbal irony matches the crazy behavior Hamlet adopts when interacting, as he says such statements as “man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.” To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who respond in a similarly confused way (Tarantino) (2.2.299-301).  The film establishes the same through verbal irony and the violence of the ironic positive identification of an evil slaveholder who is shot by the protagonist of the movie—creating chaos around this verbal irony.

O, sweet Hamlet how confused you must be—adrift in love or madness? Reasons exist as to why we trail you so, Your semblance changed, dear boy, “the exterior nor the inward man resembles that it was” (2.2.6-7). Suspicion runs rancid; Claudius grows weary of your “antic disposition” (1.5.73). For ‘tis this that prompts our haste; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get along well enough—consider it leisure. May their presence and “practices be Pleasant and helpful” (2.2.37-38). My son, I only hope you liven soon. Consider them not spies, but friends. On the subject, I hear gossip of our good Lord Polonius inquiring counsel on his eldest son, Laertes. Seems he has asked a man, Reynaldo to keep his son’s “Wanton, wild and usual slips” (2.1.22). To ask another to “make inquire of … behavior” of our kin is questionable (2.1.5-6). Though I do not regret my choices, I must ask what the state of Denmark is coming to—The royal family observing on one another like spiders on the wall. There exists no wonder, then, why we all feel such paranoia.