"I like the way you die, boy": fantasy's role in Django unchained

The meeting of these three characters is tense mainly because Django rides up in front of Big Daddy's white house on a horse, a capital sin in antebellum America, but once Schultz mentions big money, Big Daddy welcomes both, though he is markedly less polite to Django. Corbucci's film opens just after the Civil War when the titular hero, still wearing part of his Union Army uniform, comes upon a bloody scene: a bound woman is being lashed by a group of Mexican outlaws who soon after get shot by a rival gang, a group of southern rebels still fighting the Lost Cause on the Mexican-U.S. border. The comedian and activist Dick Gregory cites both the mythical proportions of Django and Hildie's romance and the sheer pleasure of seeing a black man in the role of a bad-ass cowboy (as an octogenarian he well remembers when both were utterly alien in American popular culture) as two of his favorite aspects of Tarantino's film, which he claims to have seen a dozen times. Tarantino sets up Django's initial reunion with Hildie to the sound of Elisa Toffoli's mournful but beautiful love song, "Ancora QuF ("Still Here"), which both reinforces the allusions to Corbucci, since it is sung in Italian, with music by the great film composer Ennio Morricone, famous for his spaghetti Western soundtracks, but also gives you a sense of Hildie's perspective: a female voice sings of her lover's return after a painful separation, during which she thinks she sees him in the very nature around her: l'erba verde, l'aria calda sui miei piedi, e sopra i fiori si alza un vento tra i colori sembri quasi tu anche il cielo cambia nome cosí bianco quel cotone che veloce che si muove perso in mezzo al blu. the green grass,