Who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how.

When you have a great passion, it dramatically changes your willingness to spend energy and take risk.  When the stakes are a large sum of money people don’t take great risks. When the stakes are love and life and that which has incalculable value, people go the extra mile.

A great passion is the epicenter of everyone’s hero’s journey story. Passion is one of the three foundations of good storytelling  

Without passion, no character in a book, or movie or in art would do anything interesting, meaningful, memorable, worthwhile. Without passion, our hero’s journey story has no meaning. It has no coherence, no direction, no inexorable momentum. Without passion, our life still ‘moves’ along – whatever that means, but it lacks an organizing principle. Without passion, it is all but impossible to be fully engaged. To be extraordinary.

Consider the curious character of Dr. King Schultz. He is an itinerant dentist who works from his little wagon, traveling the backroads of the pre-Civil War South. As Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” opens, we see a line of shackled slaves being led through what I must describe as a deep, dark forest, because those are the kinds of forests we meet in fairy tales. Out of this deepness and darkness, Schultz appears, his lantern swinging from his wagon, which has a bobbling tooth on its roof.

Schultz explains himself with the elaborate formality he will use all through the film. He has reason to believe one of the slaves might be of interest to him. This is the slave named Django. He enters into negotiations to purchase Django, who he has reason to believe may help him in finding the Brittle brothers, for reasons involving the doctor’s late wife.

Let us leave Dr. Schultz engaging in one of his several financial transactions during the film, fueled by a generous supply of cash. Let us explain him. He is a wizard from a fairy tale, a man capable of knowing about people’s lives, steering their fates, seducing them into situations in which they receive the destinies they deserve. Although there is a great deal of the realistic in “Django Unchained,” including brutal violence, King Schultz is not real in the same way as the rest.

I require the term deus ex machina. A “deus,” is a person or device in a story that appears from out of the blue and has a solution to offer. I quote Wikipedia: “The Latin phrase deus ex machina comes to English usage from Horace’s Ars Poetica, where he instructs poets that they must never resort to a god from the machine to solve their plots. He refers to the conventions of Greek tragedy, where a crane (mekhane) was used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage.” Imagine Tarantino, his feet braced on clouds, lowering Dr. Schultz into “Django Unchained” and using him as a wonderfully useful device to guide the plot wherever it must go.

In the film we’ll find that Dr. Schultz, who we never see pulling any teeth, is a bounty hunter, searching for men who are wanted–“dead or alive.” Here is a plot that requires a lot of information, and doesn’t have any time to lose in introducing it or searching for it. Schulz not only knows who and where Django is, but he knows where certain wanted men can be found, living under aliases. He shoots a sheriff and calmly explains why. He produces the Wanted posters from his bottomless wallet. His knowledge allows Tarantino to set up perfectly entertaining scenes in which it appears Schultz digs himself into holes and then escapes from them.

He also becomes the friend and partner of Django, gives him his freedom, and after a winter spent in using Django as his partner in bounty hunting, joins with him in trying to win back possession of Broomhilda Django’s wife. Why does he do this? Because he likes Django and hates slavery. This is a convenience making QT’s story telling much easier.

Dr. King Schultz:
Well, Broomhilda was a princess. She was a daughter of Wotan, god of all gods. Anyways, Her father is really mad at her.

Django:
What she do?

Dr. King Schultz:
I can’t exactly remember. She disobeys him in some way. So he puts her on top of the mountain.

Django:
Broomhilda’s on a mountain?

Dr. King Schultz:
It’s a German legend, there’s always going to be a mountain in there somewhere. And he puts a fire-breathing dragon there to guard the mountain. And he surrounds her in a circle of hellfire. And there, Broomhilda shall remain. Unless a hero arises brave enough to save her.

Django:
Does a fella arise?

Dr. King Schultz:
Yes, Django, as a matter of fact, he does. A fella named Siegfried.

Django:
Does Siegfried save her?

Dr. King Schultz:
[Nods] Quiet spectacularly so. He scales the mountain, because he’s not afraid of it. He slays the dragon, because he’s not afraid of him. And he walks through hellfire… because Broomhilda’s worth it.

Django:
I know how he feel.

The film is often beautiful to regard. Tarantino’s Southern plantations are flatlands in spring, cloud-covered, with groups of slaves standing as figures in a landscape. His film leads us all the way to Candyland, where the odious Calvin Candie owns Django’s wife Broomhilda von Shaft. Candie stages fights to the death with slaves called Mandingos, and Schultz says he wants to buy one of the fighters. He says he’ll throw in a little extra for Candie’s slave women Broomhilda, because she speaks German and he yearns to speak his native tongue.

That’s clever misdirection with the mandingo as a cover story. Candie believes it. Not everybody at Candyland does. This is such a flamboyant film that the most challenging performance in it, the one that rubs it in the most, actually runs the risk of being overlooked. That is Samuel L. Jackson’s work as Stephen, Calvin Candie’s most favored and privileged slave. He acts as butler and chief of staff at Candyland. He is well-dressed, treated with (relative) respect by Candie, and seen by the other slaves as no better than a racist white–worse, because he betrays his race. He is the classic Uncle Tom, elevated to Granduncle Thomas, Esq.

There’s a telling scene where Stephen and Calvin relax behind closed doors at the end of the day, sharing snifters of brandy. In these closed quarters, they might be equals. No doubt Stephen leads the most comfortable life possible for a slave at that time, but what a price he pays! No one has glowering eyes that threaten more than Jackson’s, and we can all but read his mind as he regards Django, Broomhilde and Schultz and sees through Schutz’s story that he wants to pay a preposterous price just for someone to speak German with. He confronts Calvin with the obvious: It is Django who loves Broomhilde and desires her.

Revealing this truth involves Stephen in a betrayal that in some respects is the most hateful action in the movie, because he sins not only against the others but against himself. He confirms that in some putrid sinkhole of his soul, he regards himself as white. How Tarantino deals with the consequences of his betrayal sets the whole ending of the film into motion, with its satisfactory Quentonian celebration of violence, explosions, all that stuff. Stephen is also, if you will, a deus, cranked down onto the stage so his realizations can cut through revelation of the secret the others share. He works for that purpose, but also, in a film that condemns white racism, is also capable of seeing black racism