Why I walked out of 'Django Unchained'

I have had an up-and-down appreciation for Quentin Tarantino over 20 years, ever since "Reservoir Dogs." It goes up when his movies are driven by characters I want to know more about ("Pulp Fiction," "Jackie Brown") and down when the director mainly wants us to delight in sadistic behavior ("Kill Bill," "Death Proof").

The opening 40 minutes of "Django Unchained" seemed to put it in the first group: The characters were often funny, and stars Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx had charisma. I overlooked the fountains of blood -- which I'm sure Tarantino would describe as "stylized," rather than crude -- to see where his latest revenge fantasy would take us. (Have you noticed? Every one of his movies over the last 15 years has been a bloody revenge fantasy. I'll let his shrink work on that.)

Then came a scene where two black slaves were wrestling to the death for the amusement of their owners. One finally broke the other's arm, then gouged out his eyes, then splintered his skull with a hammer. At that moment, the film became torture porn, a movie whose main function is for us to enjoy the suffering of others. I don't watch torture porn, so I left. We will run a review from a wire service when the film opens, and someone else will choose it.

(A side thought: Tarantino has been rebuked for throwing the word "nigger" around, so he set this film in 1858 -- "two years before the Civil War," as the title card erroneously states -- and shoves the word down our throats dozens of times. But how can we object? It's period realism, right? The naughty little boy has done a clever thing!)

Violence in the hands of a master can be cathartic or give us insight into the human soul. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Haneke all introduce violence into stories to make us better understand the human condition. But torture-porn artists want to titillate, not illuminate. I'd guess Tarantino would claim to be exposing the horrors of slavery, showing how evil it really was, as if that hadn't been done countless times before. But he's not enough of an artist to get us to think, just enough of one to get us to flinch -- or, if we're twisted, to open our eyes wider in glee.

The movie, TV and video game industries have long played down the links between dehumanizing violence onscreen and acts of extreme violence in our societies, although virtually every medical group that's not in their pay contradicts them. But the show business magazine Variety reported yesterday that Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, has finally admitted his industry needs to be part of "the national conversation about violence."

I'd guess he was motivated by the murders of more than two dozen people at an elementary school in Connecticut, the state he represented in Congress for 36 years. But as long as Tarantino's movies top $100 million at the domestic box office, I don't believe Hollywood's contribution to that conversation will be worth a wooden nickel.