Corbucci Unchained: Miike, Tarantino and the Postmodern Discursivity of Exploitation Cinema

This chapter explores both Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and Miike Takashi's Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) as they reference the Spaghetti Westerns, specifically the films of Sergio Corbucci. In an interview that first appeared in The New York Times, Tarantino cited the influence of Corbucci on Django Unchained; not only because he directed the Italian Western to which both Miike's and Tarantino's films make direct reference in their titles (Django (1966)), but also because ‘his was the most violent, surreal and pitiless landscape of any director in the history of the genre’. While Tarantino's claim may be mildly hyperbolic, his citing of Corbucci as an explicit influence is central to the present discussion. The chapter first offers a synthesis of some key ideas within postmodernism, followed by textual consideration of Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django and Tarantino's Django Unchained as two different kinds of postmodern texts.