I finally get Quentin Tarantino. It hasn’t been easy. To understand an auteur is to try and creep beneath a layer that is hidden, sometimes deliberately so. It is to disregard temporarily the creation and focus instead on who created it. Only then does one realise that behind a body of work stands a body.

Before 12 Years a Slave came Django Unchained – Tarantino’s masterpiece, and it is strange but the overriding emotion after seeing 12 Years was to demand – yes, demand – from my mind that it play to me the scenes of not the film I had just watched, but those of Django Unchained. Why? Stranger still, I wanted to obliterate from my mind the images of 12 Years – this minutes after I had sat through it. As the end titles rolled, my eyes were fighting back tears of rage, a rage so powerful that I wanted immediate revenge, and payback, and a desire to commit unspeakable violence towards those who had committed unspeakable violence towards Solomon Northup and Patsy and other slaves in 12 Years. I wanted my eyes to bleed and nostrils to flare and my trembling hands to get hold from somewhere a goddamn whip so I could lash those white bastards, to shred their bare backs just as they had shredded Patsy’s and I wanted to clasp the hollow of my hand on the pouting mouths of all those corseted wives who supported their dastardly husbands in this enterprise and I wanted to suffocate them and watch their legs thrashing wildly then jerk to stillness and I wanted to scorch that godforsaken Dixieland and all the cruel crackers who inhabited it and I wanted to, I wanted to…

…Kill, whip, suffocate, scorch, white bastard, cracker – this from someone who is an unwavering disciple of Bapu, who considers Mandela an inspiration. Oh, I was ashamed at the raw violence seething in my heart, my mind, rawness that was oozing out from my every pore. I was ashamed of it while at the same time I wanted to commit it. I wanted the taste of blood no matter how distasteful its sight. It was then that I remembered Django Unchained and my senses calmed a little and I understood what Quentin had really achieved.

12 Years is a very good film. It is shot beautifully and sensitively, and every actor has given the performance of his or her lifetime. No doubt it will win many awards in the coming days. Steve McQueen, the director, is an artist. Few today can match his skill of story-telling. But should a film as great as this invoke in me an urge to recollect a different film? I consider the falling of the curtain to be the same as the closing gently of a book after one has read the last sentence. For it is then that the mind really goes to work. The eyes stare at the ceiling, searching for an answer that may or may not come. Art disturbs you – it is meant to. Then why think of Django? Why not 12 Years? And this here is the answer: Just as violence is committed by the mind first, hands later, revenge, too, follows the same path. In a macabre way, revenge fructifies brotherhood. I am no longer separated by 65,000 years of superficial genetic changes. I am every inch an African and I want to kill those white sons of bitches. It helps that I have even begun to sound like one of Quentin’s characters.

Man is a violent animal, terrifyingly so, but what sets him apart from other animals is his propensity to inflict violence on his own brothers, violence that must be explained if it is to be encouraged. Every perpetrator throughout human history has tried to explain why he felt the need for violence. And it is not that a violent man isn’t wrecked with thoughts of committing a sin – he is. This is the reason why the sanction of violence is crucial. For the murder of six million Jews the sanction was Mein Kampf; for the murder of 60 million Africans the sanction was The Bible.

“…He had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired, or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, patrollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers…”

But to explain violence is not the focus of this article. What I want to understand is Revenge – the mad urge and the primeval need for it. The unspeakable horrors of slavery I had seen before in Spielberg’s Amistad, or read in Morrison’s Beloved and Hailey’s Roots. Horror, though, has an odd characteristic: it does not shock any less while it is being revisited.

“…When he heard the distant baying of the dogs, a rage flooded up in him such as he had never felt before. He ran like a hunted leopard, but the barking grew louder and louder, and finally, when he glanced back over his shoulder for the tenth time, he saw them gaining on him. The men couldn’t be far behind…

“The lash began cutting into the flesh across Kunta’s shoulders and back, with the ‘oberseer’ grunting and Kunta shuddering under the force of each blow. After a while Kunta couldn’t stop himself from screaming with the pain, but the beating went on until his sagging body pressed against the tree. His shoulders and back were covered with long, half-opened bleeding welts that in some places exposed the muscles beneath. He couldn’t be sure, but the next thing Kunta knew he had the feeling he was falling. Then he felt the coldness of the snow against him and everything went black.”

All the horrid accounts of Paul D (first quote; Beloved) or Kunta (second quote; Roots) cannot stifle the revulsion at view in 12 years, frame after frame, minute upon minute. 12 Years a Slave is, ultimately, a horror story, of a well-heeled black man who is kidnapped and taken to the American South and sold many times as a slave by white men who seem to redefine the meaning of horror with every new atrocity they commit. What makes this worse is that it is a true story.

Django Unchained, on the other hand, is the story of a black man, a slave, who squashes such vile white men with impunity. He is tall, black, and handsome, and he reaches for his gun faster than a white man’s blue eyeball can twitch. He stabs, shoots, slashes at the horror he comes across every sordid plantation. A terrible thing to say but it is cathartic to watch. The body count can’t cope with the craving. More, more! Yes, that’s it – crush that cracker’s skull, shoot it to smithereens. A bullet for each whiplash that landed on your back, Django!

But things aren’t always this clear-cut. As I stated earlier, horror requires sanction if it is to become norm, and approval if it is to become a custom. The approval for slavery came from science. What other option did the southerners have when the scientists of the day assured them that the whites and the blacks never shared a common ancestor, and that God intended it so? In an earlier article, while trying to grapple with this idea of sanction but in a different context, I had written: “Empires necessitated a slow percolation of racism to the subconscious, so that even the congenial and the sympathetic were programmed not to disrupt the status quo that was ultimately rewarding to them and their race. Newton, Dirac, Curie, Focault stood not on the shoulders of giants in order to see further. They stood on the dead bodies of millions of coloured men and women. They prospered because their nations allowed them quietly to prosper at the expense of a mind-crushing vacuum that was forced upon all subjugated lands. They helped peddle this vicious cycle. Every invention, every new thought, new idea, was touted as a natural result of an advanced mind, an advanced civilisation at work, spurring the notion of superiority that ultimately rusted their Arab spring.”

Leading scientists of the mid-nineteenth century were resolute in their assertion that whites and blacks were not of the same race. Naturally, their theories gained wide acceptability in America and other parts of the world where slavery had still not been abolished. Now, not only did The Bible validate slavery, science did too – a necessary and sufficient condition if ever there was one.

One man decided to counter them. Charles Darwin. It took time, and effort -“Science proceeds funeral by funeral”. But 30 years of slow and steady convincing was little price to pay for the outing of an idea that changed the world – Darwin’s The Descent of Man.

Back in 1845, though, the young Darwin was traumatised by his brush with slavery. In his book, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, he wrote: “To this day, I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco [Brazil], I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate…Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves…I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye.”

Darwin soon found an ally in Charles Dickens, who intentionally and famously quoted the Lookout notices from local Southern newspapers in his book American Notes, notices such as these:

“Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.”

“Ran away, my man Fountain. Has holes in his ears, a scar on the right side of his forehead, has been shot in the hind parts of his legs, and is marked on the back with the whip.”

Dickens was soon termed by the Southerners as “a vulgar cockney”. Undeterred, the two men set about dismantling this evil any which way they could. The irony was that Darwin’s own book, Origin of the Species, had been hijacked by the proponents of slavery as a scientific validation of sorts. Outraged, the fight against slavery became his sacred cause (described in vivid detail by Desmond & Moore in their brilliant book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause). The result was his landmark work, The Descent of Man, which once and for all demolished all arguments of a separate origin of white and black men. In the end, the quiet, unassuming, yet unyielding ways of Charles Darwin had turned the tide against slavery.

But revenge – what of it? Why the need?

When crimes are committed, when criminals go unpunished, when justice is denied, when nations forget, when History and Law and Science look the other way – that is when love dies and revenge is born. Tarantino knows this. He knows no amount of re-reading or re-telling or re-watching of American history can heal the festering wounds of the slighted as gratifyingly as a revenge flick can. And how right he is. Naipaul’s path-breaking study A Turn in the South demonstrates this grotesquely – of how the American South is yet to denounce fully the misdeeds of their ancestors, of how they have preserved the monuments of slave-drivers, how they collect around these desolate shrines in search of an identity their forefathers lost for them.

Sixty million blacks perished during the slave trade. For hundreds of years, the American economy ran on the blood and sweat and ruptured flesh of ghosts. What is America’s responsibility – moral or legal? Is forgiveness justice? Should a Truth & Reconciliation Commission have replaced the Nuremberg trials? Were six million Jewish ghosts looking for moral reconciliation? Can one forget and forgive men like Eichmann? Is evil, just because it is sanctioned, not evil anymore?

Midway through 12 Years comes one of the most harrowing scenes ever to have been filmed for a motion picture – a long-shot that lasts five minutes. Solomon hangs from a tree, the noose round his neck making him gag and gasp even as he keeps himself alive by managing to ground his toes on the slippery mush beneath. He sways, the branch creeks, crickets chirp, the rope crunches, his toes slip and slither, then gain a toe-hold, just. Time passes. Excruciating, unwatchable time. Then, ever so slowly, other slaves emerge from sheds and walk past the hanging Solomon, or move about as though he doesn’t exist. Painful? Searching for Django? You bet.

Actor Morgan Freeman says he will not watch 12 Years. “I don’t want my anger quotient exacerbated, you know? Things are bad enough as they are. I don’t want to keep punching myself in the face with it.”

I get you, Morgan. But do you get Tarantino? Watch 12 Years – it’s a great film. But remember to watch Django Unchained afterwards. I did. And recovered my senses.

The author can be reached at anand.icgeb@gmail.com or on twitter @ARangarajan1972