Django and Calvin Candie: when cruelty is the norm

Some villains are frightening because they enjoy evil. Calvin Candie, the landowner in Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012), is frightening in a different and worse way: he is frightening because he doesn't believe he is doing anything wrong. On his Candyland plantation, where he buys and sells people the way one collects horses and stages fights to the death between enslaved men as after-dinner entertainment, Candie moves with the gracious smile of a cultured host. He surrounds himself with books he hasn't read, quotes Alexandre Dumas without suspecting he was of mixed race, and boasts of his French manners. He is not a lone psychopath who has stepped outside the rules of his world. He is the opposite: a man who embodies the rules of his world to perfection.

Before we go on, the house rule: to explain is not to excuse. Dissecting how a human being comes to regard torture as normal does not lighten his responsibility by a single gram; it serves to understand the most uncomfortable mechanism in all of criminology: that most of history's atrocities were committed not by monsters, but by ordinary people convinced they were behaving as they should. And for that phenomenon criminology has a precise name.

// The theoryWolfgang, Ferracuti and violence as a shared norm

In 1967 the criminologists Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti published The Subculture of Violence, a book that changed the way violent crime was understood. Their thesis starts from a statistical observation —certain groups concentrate rates of violence far above the average— and offers an explanation that appeals neither to madness nor to biology, but to culture. According to the subculture of violence theory, within a broader society there can exist groups with a value system of their own in which violence is not perceived as deviance, but as an expected, legitimate and sometimes obligatory response to certain situations.

The key lies in that word: expected. In a subculture of violence, resorting to force in the face of a slight, a debt or a challenge generates no guilt, because the group itself approves of it; what generates shame is not doing so. The individual who responds with violence is not breaking the norms of his environment: he is fulfilling them. Wolfgang and Ferracuti stressed that whoever kills within that code often shows no remorse, because their moral framework does not classify the act as a crime, but as correct conduct. Deviance, seen from outside, is conformity seen from within.

// The characterCandyland: a subculture that turns torture into etiquette

The slaveholding South that Tarantino portrays works as a laboratory case for the theory. It is an entire society organized around the idea that violence against a group of human beings is legitimate, everyday and respectable. Candie does not hide his slave fights or his attack dogs: he displays them proudly before his guests, because in his world that does not stain honor, it confirms it. Atrocity comes wrapped in manners, fine china and erudite conversation. Horror does not contradict good breeding: it is part of the good breeding of Candyland.

This is where the most sinister detail of the film comes in: pseudoscience as a cultured alibi. Candie resorts to phrenology —the false science that claimed to read character in the shape of the skull— to "prove" the inferiority of the enslaved. It is not a whim of the script: in the 19th century such racial theories gave the slaveholding elite a facade of rationality for what was pure barbarity. The subculture of violence does not only normalize cruelty; it also manufactures an intellectual justification that allows its members to feel like enlightened people while they practice it. It is the mechanism by which a torturer can look in the mirror and see a gentleman.

// From the screen to the streetCultures of honor: normalized violence exists outside fiction

The theory did not stay on paper. The sociologist Elijah Anderson, in Code of the Street (1999), documented how in certain marginalized neighborhoods there is a tacit "code" according to which responding to a lack of respect with violence is not an anomaly, but a necessity in order to survive and gain status: the one who fails to do so is marked as easy prey. On the other hand, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen described a "culture of honor" in which a perceived affront demands an aggressive response so as not to lose reputation. In all these cases, as in Candyland, violence is not an individual short-circuit: it is an internalized social norm.

Here it is worth being extremely careful not to draw too close an equivalence. Tarantino's Candyland is violence institutionalized from a position of power: an elite that oppresses a defenseless group under the cover of law and custom. The "code of the street" that Anderson describes often arises from below, as a defensive adaptation to an environment where institutions do not protect. They are distinct phenomena that share the same psychological engine —violence as expected conduct within a group— but not the same moral sign. Understanding the common mechanism does not mean placing the slaveholder and the person surviving marginalization on the same plane.