Django Unchained was meant to make the viewer enjoy violence against certain people. To do this, they needed to make those people as awful and unsympathetic as possible.
To be honest, I'm shocked that you're willing to make these sorts of comments with your name attached to your account. You don't think this would make your employer uncomfortable?
But it doesn't mean that slavery isn't evil.
What I don't get is what about our perceptions of how slavery worked in the US might not be accurate. Except maybe in negligible ways. I mean, people were born into slavery. They could be given freedom. But they typically had no way to earn it. What am I missing?
Actually, what's arguably missing is how widespread debt bondage was. Poor white immigrants were sold just like black slaves, and typically worked ten years to pay for their passage. And children who came with them had to work until 18, and could be sold separately.
Edit: typo
What you are missing is that the sadistic behavior seen in Django Unchained was uncommon. Slaves were expensive. People don't usually destroy a $40k Lexus for entertainment - they usually take good care of their expensive capital investments, and they treat their own car far better than a rental.
In fact, slaves were often treated comparably or better than freeman laborers. Here is a modern treatment: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/slavery/JLE-1977.pdf
Or you can read a contemporary treatment, from a northern unitarian abolitionist who visited the south: http://www.authorama.com/full/pdf/A-Southside-View-of-Slaver...
Note: none of what I've said here should remotely be interpreted as a defense of slavery. Just an acknowledgement that my modern mental picture of American slavery is likely not that accurate.
In fact people abuse their cars and slaveowners abused slaves. Both by ignoring human needs, committing acts of brutality, including rape, beating and execution. Following your car analogy, slaves were also leased out, and their renters treated them like rental cars -- even worse.
Like every business decision, chattel life had ROI. Eventually old milking cows are sent off to slaughter. In the case of chattel slavery, read about the Caribbean slave economy, you'll read of high "turnover" among slaves in the sugarcane. I'll assure you they weren't going to school and getting better slave gigs -- "turnover" was mostly from death.
There are good, first person accounts of this world. Read them. The first link is from interviews with former slaves in the 1930s. The second is the tale of a slave auction and the third is the related, very readable acccount of the wife of a plantation owner.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/n...
The Weeping Time https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-wee...
Fanny Kemble diaries: https://archive.org/details/journalofresidenceongeorgianplan...
> In 2007, Tarantino discussed an idea for a type of Spaghetti Western set in the United States' pre-Civil War Deep South. He called this type of film "a southern", stating that he wanted "to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to."[3] Tarantino later explained the genesis of the idea: "I was writing a book about Sergio Corbucci when I came up with a way to tell the story. ... I was writing about how his movies have this evil Wild West, a horrible Wild West. It was surreal, it dealt a lot with fascism. So I'm writing this whole piece on this, and I'm thinking: 'I don't really know if Sergio was thinking [this] while he was doing this. But I know I'm thinking it now. And I can do it!' "[4]
An educated mind does not interpret Django as a trustworthy source for information about slavery in early America and knows it shouldn't be cited in any essay on the subject except to make a comparison to actual events. If people are taking Django into account in their view of American slavery then that is an issue of education and not propaganda on behalf of Tarantino.