If you’ve been on the internet in the last week, you probably heard of the shocking news that Quentin Tarantino not only completed his new script—a major event in the Hollywood trades— but that it leaked online and, even further, due to that leak was cancelled. It was as recent as November he announced he was making another Western, joking after making one he wanted to make another after learning all the tricks. The Hateful Eight is the title, and after seeing that Gawker had uploaded it (and since took it down), I became curious to see what innovations he’s further made to the Western genre. So, I downloaded it. And, with great restraint, only read about two-thirds, hoping to save some for the cinema if he ever elects to direct it. It’s a great screenplay that won’t be to everyone’s taste, where the script is part stage play and part whodunit where nobody’s actually done anything yet. It’s a ticking bomb plot where you don't know the time of the bomb’s explosion, the placement of the bomb, or who put it there. But it will explode, and you sit figuring out how. Since it was a comparison Tarantino himself invited, I couldn’t help but contrast The Hateful Eight to Django Unchained, and while I read I continued to recall his previous Western, or “Southern” as he calls it, with increasing frequency. So, hungry to revisit and reevaluate Django Unchained, I spent my Saturday night in the man-cave with the Blu-Ray and some homemade popcorn.

Yes, it’s got the score, the blood-gushing shock in the set pieces, the unconventional plotting, and great performances, but what first struck me was, despite its reputation to the contrary, what a linear journey Django’s arc proves to be. Saying linear in Tarantino terms carries different meaning than with other filmmakers, given his iconic implementation of the New Wave Auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s famous phrase: “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” Yes, as a film, Django is Tarantino’s most direct and linear narrative, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that Django’s story has clear steps, as though he’s climbing up the ladder of social hierarchy one step and one scene at a time. The film opens with a montage of enslaved African-American men trekking across epic and beautiful landscapes set to the catchy epic tune of Luis Bacalov’s original Django theme, the original Spaghetti Western from which Django Unchained draws its title.

By contextualizing images of a beaten and broken slave who we know as our soon to be hero with grand vistas and a stirring operatic score, two words come to mind: hero worship. In the context of storytelling, hero worship is how storytellers imbue a mythic quality to certain characters key to the story, a device employed constantly in cinema. Any moment Character A does something impressive and character B sits in awe and admiration, it’s hero worship. But at this stage in the story, Django hasn’t done anything impressive, and thus no awe or admiration is directly earned from viewers. What Tarantino’s doing is setting out Django’s dramatic arc before us, and points to its finish as though it’s Django’s North Star. This where we’ll arrive by the story’s end: Django will have become a gun-slingin’ badass with a mythic persona of such intense fame and profundity he has entire songs devoted to him, where his mere name is a call for celebration. This has several purposes, all of which are vitally important. One is that by juxtaposing Django’s humble beginning with his eventual greatness, viewers already have a credible sense of scale through which to perceive the story.