Still, after more than two weeks, acclaimed director Spike Lee’s tweet seems to perfectly encapsulate viewer anxieties surrounding one of 2012’s most successful films, Django Unchained.

“American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western.It Was A Holocaust.My Ancestors Are Slaves.Stolen From Africa.I Will Honor Them” (sic).

In Quentin Tarantino’s latest picture - a pop violence exposé set in the southern United States at the apex of slavery - Jamie Foxx portrays Django, a slave who is freed by a German dentist-turned-bounty-hunter played by Christoph Waltz before embarking on an epic and bloody quest to be reunited with his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).

Lee’s comments are an important place from which to begin any discussion of Django.

The filmmaker partly responsible for the revitalization of afrocentricity in the United States, manifest in works like Do the Right Thing (1989) and Crooklyn (1994), famously confronted Tarantino in 1997 after the release of his fifth film Jackie Brown - a critically acclaimed crime drama that, similar to Django, featured gratuitous use of racist language and imagery congruent with 1970s blaxploitation flicks like Shaft and Superfly.

Lee took issue with Tarantino’s haphazard use of black actors in the service of white audiences and considered his screenplay and subject matter problematic on many levels.

In a now well-known interview with Variety magazine, Lee asked of Tarantino, “What does he want to be made? An honorary black man?”

Expectedly, no response was elicited.

But Lee would remain a staunch critic of Tarantino’s for years, never shying away from a war of words that invariably centered around race, and remaining one of the few dissenting voices in an industry overwhelmingly supportive of the latter’s work.

Now the confrontation has begun anew, focused this time on a film that - regardless of its historical context, adult language and gory violence - is a classic redemption story with an ensemble cast including Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson.

So is Django a racist film?

Is it even a social commentary at all?

Does it exploit its black actors - as Lee claims it does - for the benefit of giddy white audiences who, lacking any spiritual, cultural or ethnic connection to slavery, perpetuate intolerance and apathy?

Did Spike Lee just miss the point?

The answer to all of the above is conclusively no.

Django Unchained may contain over 100 instances of the n-word, explicit portrayals of slavery and unsightly bodily harm, but it is also situated within a fantasy world largely disconnected from reality.

The result is a surrealistic homage to film history - and a tip of the hat to cinephiles everywhere - rather than a focused depiction of 19th century American society.

Just as Tarantino’s 2009 effort Inglourious Basterds was not a film designed to comment on the Second World War and the Jewish experience, Django is not at all a film about slavery vis-à-vis the African American condition as it exists today.

In this capacity, Django is not a social commentary. It is a raunchy escapade of violence and over-the-top racism that reaches the point of farcical interpretation; Foxx’s character riding on horseback through the cotton fields of one Texas plantation dressed in vibrant royal blue costume, gunning down his old slave masters, is a striking example.

Some critics have even toyed with the addled and surely lofty assessment that Django represents post-racial attitudes in modern America - a sign that, surely, if such a film can be made, “we have come a long way.”

It seems that these overtly academic critiques miss the point of Tarantino’s film even more blatantly than Spike Lee, a man who has never seen it.

Whatever the case, Django is an entertaining film.

It features stellar acting, elaborate costume design, hilarious dialogue and an ending befitting of any Tarantino production.

It may not solve, or even comment on, racial and class stratification in the United States, or the entrenched consequences of historic slavery, but it doesn’t really have to, either.

For the rest of us whose names are not Spike Lee, perhaps it is time to turn the lens away from innocuous filmmaking, and onto social action for the problems of history, race and society to be dealt with in a real way.

Harrison Samphir is The Uniter’s online editor. He has a history degree from the University of Manitoba.

Published in Volume 67, Number 16 of The Uniter (January 16, 2013)