It is on course to be its director's highest-grossing film and has been nominated for five Oscars. But one rightwing US group sees an opportunity in Quentin Tarantino's anti-slavery polemic Django Unchained that the film-maker is unlikely to have imagined when he wrote it: promoting the importance of gun ownership rights to African American audiences.
Political Media, which recently raised eyebrows in the US in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut shootings with the launch of a controversial Gun Appreciation Day (complete with strident slogan: "Hands off my guns!") sees Tarantino's tale of a firearm-toting freed slave-turned bounty hunter as the perfect vehicle to convince black voters to support anti-gun control measures. The group's president Larry Ward told the Hollywood Reporter his latest campaign would be dubbed "What Would Django Do?", though he admitted he had not sought permission from the film's creators to use the name.
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," Ward said. "We'll make sure we aren't violating copyrights, and if we are, we'll have to change the name. But Django is perfect for what we're trying to do, which is to promote gun rights to minorities. We'll tackle the issue on the Democrats' own turf."
The news is likely to draw raised eyebrows from Tarantino, his Django Unchained star Jamie Foxx and Harvey Weinstein, the Oscar-winning head of studio the Weinstein Company, all of whom have signalled their preference for increased gun control following the massacre of 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School last December. Django Unchained's director has angrily denied suggestions of a link between movie violence and real-life killings, arguing: "Obviously, the issue is gun control and mental health." Weinstein said recently: "If we don't get gun-control laws in this country, we are full of beans." Foxx said simply that he would like to "get the guns off the streets".
The inspiration for Political Media's latest campaign is an article by Jonathan David Farley, a black mathematics professor and political activist, titled What Would Django Do? Arms and "The Man", which was published on the website AbsoluteRights.com. In it Farley, who has written for the Guardian and is a member of the ostensibly progressive Warren Group in the US, cites historical precedent to suggest that African Americans should favour gun rights. Key black figures who favoured gun ownership included Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Ida B Wells-Barnett, author of Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, he argues.
"Wells, who, like me, had to flee Klan supporters in Tennessee after writing a newspaper article, said that 'a Winchester rifle should have a place of honour in every black home,'" writes Farley in his article, which was republished on Political Media's Gun Appreciation Day website. "Racism in America is now gone like an exorcised ghost, but African Americans would do well to remember our history when it comes to gun control," he adds.
Farley also argues that slavery would not have existed in America if blacks had been armed. His suggestion tallies, rather ironically, with a comment by evil plantation owner Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained, who wonders out loud why the oppressed blacks don't simply "rise up and kill the whites".
Neither the Weinstein Company nor Tarantino has yet made any public comment on the proposed "What Would Django Do?" campaign.
