whatchusay.com: Bamboozled and Befuddled

December 31, 2000

Bamboozled and Befuddled

By cheo tyehimba

"I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!'" --Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network

Like the 1976 Academy Award-winning film Network, which satirized the lurid depths to which TV execs will go for ratings, Spike Lee's latest big screen coda, Bamboozled, takes a trenchant swipe at network television's love affair with modern day minstrelsy. The film, which centers on a blatantly racist show created by the only African American television executive at a major network, delivers a satirical blow so brazen and un-PC that it nearly blows the very genre to bits.

Feeling pressure to produce a hit show for the network, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) finally comes up with "The Mantan New Millennium Minstrel Show," a variety show set on a plantation (in a watermelon patch) replete with tap-dancing, chicken-stealing, shuffling and smiling black performers in blacker-face.

The show, initially conceived as his only way out of an industry steeped in cynicism and corrupted values, catches afire and becomes a ratings and pop culture sensation. Soon everyone from trick-or-treating kids to gentle old ladies parade around in blackface touting his or her "blackness." Heavy-handed? Melodramatic? Perhaps, but name one Spike Lee film without traces of these elements.

The votes are already in. Bamboozled is a film most would like to brush off as too polemic to be entertaining and too race-obsessed and divisive to be enlightening. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the film captures so many nuances of America's non-disposable racial baggage that, like all good satire, it lies like the truth.

And this is a truth many wish would just hide its ugly face. But to Lee, America's shameful racist past and present should not be so easily vanquished. Like the black-faced, red-lipped, bug-eyed, grinning caricatures that were once seen as novel, innocent-if-real (mis)representations of black people, Bamboozled shoves a symbolic plateful of fried chicken and juicy watermelon down America's throat until it chokes. But in the land of plenty, where we gorge ourselves on our obsessions, digestion is an overrated luxury. And this is precisely why Bamboozled still resonates.

The problem, Lee implies, is despite our millennial sophistication and longtime effort to free ourselves of slavery's shackles, nothing has really changed. Some white people still objectify black people and black culture in their desire for the "Authentic Negro Experience" and some blacks still happily play the role of modern-day Stepin' Fetchits.

Bamboozled hits the screen at a time when America's racial stew has simmered to a revelatory boil. The Civil Rights movement, integration, music videos, hip hop, and the Information Age has allowed many whites to come out of the closet with their singular expressions of "blackness." Today, the list of "black-when-convenient" white people is far too long to name.

Everyone from President Clinton (America's first "black" president), Tommy Hilfiger, and Eminem to the Backstreet Boys and their clones, and every hip hop-loving suburban white teen who thinks simply by "talking" and "acting" black (today's version of black-face) they can cross the color-line is subject to a wake-up call about what it really is to be black in America.

While getting a dark tan or collagen-injected lips, wearing faux-dreadlocks, tattoos, a nose-ring and bling-bling jewelry while getting jiggy at an MTV dance contest might make one hip, "ghetto" or possibly even resemble some Shaft-Foxy Brown-Bob Marley "Blackenstein," none of these representations have anything to do with being a person of African descent.

Interestingly enough, the most telling characters in Bamboozled are two white men who deem themselves "honorary" members of the Black race. One is the member of a faux- revolutionary rap group who is "1/16th black" and the other is a culture-vulture network VP who brags to the Harvard- educated Delacroix that he "was raised in the 'hood, has a black wife and two bi-racial kids" which undisputedly make him "more of a nigger" than his uptight subordinate.

In a sly aside to the permanence the minstrel's influence, Lee's white slang-dropping VP adorns his office in African sculpture and art and has large framed pictures of black athletes (Muhammad Ali, Willie Mays, etc.) behind his desk. The message is clear: What's the difference between this millennial assimilationist and his roomful of black "collectibles" and the 19th-century black-faced white actors who stammered their lines onstage and alternately cherished their black lawn jockeys at home? Do 21st-century "wiggers" mock stereotypes and parade (read: exploit) black culture only when convenient and profitable? Bamboozled leaves the answers to us.

When Lee occasionally loses grip of Bamboozled's narrative reins the result is a few hackneyed, drawn out scenes that feel over-the-top just for satire's sake but don't really serve the script. It is during those times when you're wondering if the film lacks potency or if the race question has finally been played out. Perhaps it's a bit of both.

Lee's film casts its net far and wide and snares the ignorant, both black and white. It raises old, unanswered questions of race and culture, nurture and nature, and (loudly) asserts that, unfortunately, no, we aren't past race yet. And while it won't win any awards for sheer entertainment value, Bamboozled is emphatically clear about our ongoing misconceptions about race. Lee, who's often cast as the "angriest man in Hollywood" by his critics, should be commended for taking on America's long-suffering, often ignored burden. In fact, we should be "mad as hell" more folks in the entertainment industry aren't equally inclined.

[NOTE: This article is not to be reproduced, forwarded, or distributed in any form without *explicit* permission from the author.]

Posted at December 31, 2000 11:00 AM

Comments

DAMN. You said it all. What a perfect article. Its too bad we aren't past race yet. And as a white man, I can see where you are coming from. There are a lot of "my people" who "try to act black" But I think it really is about something else...perhaps, it represents the way in which white people in America need to find themselves, need to cling to some form of culture because we have no idea what our culture is. We're good at taking over the world's cultures but bad at finding our own.

Posted by: thomas at April 23, 2006 05:13 PM