Django Unchained: Repurposing Western Film Music

Abstract

The film music used in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film, Django Unchained signals a deliberate engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the Vietnam and Watergate era and the malignant effects of the era’s malaise on black cinema. The upward trajectory of Tarantino’s Django, a wholesome, self-confident, Southern Black Power hero, repudiates the discontent and despair depicted in films made between 1966 and 1974 and offers an optimistic (if anachronistic) counter-narrative to the grim political landscape of the era’s cinema and to the demise of the Blaxploitation genre. Tarantino’s repurposing of film music from the spaghetti western genre specifically is essential to his project of turning his neo-Blaxploitation hero into “the fastest gun in the South.”