On Friday’s broadcast of Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, National Review columnist Mark Steyn said filmmaker Quentin Tarantino irresponsibly depicted brutal violence and trivialized the Civil War in his latest movie, “Django Unchained.”
According to Steyn, author of “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” Tarantino is an overly self-referential and uneducated director.
“Tarantino is an idiot,” Steyn said. “I didn’t think ‘Reservoir Dogs’ was a great movie. I think in a sense he’s the Mantovani of violence. He kind of makes it into easy listening music. And if you look at what he’s done with the Civil War — this latest film, he’s not in the least bit interested in the Civil War, because that would require reading a book [and] would require doing something other than watching other movies. So he’s used the Civil War as a pretext for his kind of homage to spaghetti westerns. And that’s kind of cute, in a sort of post-modern joke-y kind of way.”
Steyn went on to say Tarantino should not be so quick to dismiss critics who suggest the themes in movies like “Django” are tied to mass shootings.
“But of course in doing that, you utterly trivialize the actual living experience of 19th century America,” Steyn continued. “He’s utterly trivializing that in order to make a film about how he feels about other films. And that kind of ironic pose is not disconnected to the kind of twerps you see deciding they’d like to go out in a blaze of glory shooting up a schoolhouse. That is a film about nothing. And when you have films about nothing, then suddenly you start having violent school shootings about nothing, where people are prepared to kill people, not for any cause or anything, but as an act of theater. I think that is worth pondering, and he should be defensive about it.”