Bamboozled
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Bamboozled is a 2000 satirical film written and directed by Spike Lee about a modern televised minstrel show featuring black actors donning blackface makeup and the violent fall-out from the show's debut. The title means "purposefully confused, tricked or led astray".
Overview
The content is indeed heavily satirical, with its show within a show featuring its characters all in blackface and in a rural setting in a cotton field with plentiful watermelons. The Roots have a role as the show's house band, The Alabama Porch Monkeys. The audiences within the movie, initially baffled, come to love the show, and after a few episodes even elderly white women show up in blackface and proclaim themselves "niggers."One of Lee's tricks on the audience for his movie is that the performances of the show within a show are rendered with excellent musicianship, sharp timing, exciting dancing, all within the most stereotypical settings of cotton fields and watermelon feasts. This puts the audience (both on-screen and in the theatre) in the position of enjoying the performances, but being unsure whether it's correct to enjoy them.
The script, expressing rage and grief at media representations of black people, largely does so through the eyes of its moral center, the character Sloan Hopkins (played by Jada Pinkett Smith). It also satirizes many icons of black culture, including Ving Rhames, Will Smith, Johnnie Cochran, and Al Sharpton (Cochran and Sharpton appear as themselves in the film, protesting the television series).
The movie also stars Savion Glover as Manray (stage name Mantan, after Mantan Moreland), Tommy Davidson as Womack (stage name Sleep n' Eat, after Willie Best), Thomas Jefferson Byrd as Honeycutt, and Mos Def, Canibus, and DJ Scratch as three of the activist/hip hop group The Mau Maus. Mos Def's character, who calls himself "Big Blak Afrika" (refusing to spell the word with the "c" because "they don't even pronounce that shit!") is also Sloan's older brother.
Bamboozled was dedicated to Budd Schulberg.
Synopsis
Pierre (Peerless) Delacroix, played by Damon Wayans, is a Harvard-educated black man working for a television network that routinely rejects all of his attempts to get respectable, intelligent shows involving black people on the airwaves. He is further tormented by his boss Thomas Dunwitty (played by Michael Rapaport), a white man who proudly proclaims that he is more black than Delacroix and that he can use the word "nigger" since he is married to a black woman.Faced with an ultimatium of either coming up with a hit black-centric show for the network or being fired, Delacroix opts for the latter on the basis that being fired will free him from his contract to the network and allow him to go to work for another network without having to go through the hassle of quitting and being sued for breach of contract. With help from his personal assistant Sloan Hopkins (played by Jada Pinkett Smith), Delacroix decides to pitch a minstrel show, complete with black actors in blackface on the belief that the network would reject it for being out-and-out racist and fire him on the spot.
With help from Sloan, Delacroix recruits two homeless street performers Manray and Womack to star in the stage show. While Womack is horrified when Delacroix tells him about the show, his best friend Manray willfully agrees to star in the show as his big chance to become rich and famous.
To Delacroix's horror, Dunwitty falls in love with the minstrel show concept and not only does the show get greenlighted but it also becomes hugely successful. Manray and Womack become big stars while Delacroix becomes a lightning rod of controversy over the show, which he defends as being satirical. Delacroix embraces the fame of the show while his assistant Sloane becomes horrified at the racist nightmare she's helped unleash. Meanwhile, Womack finally has enough of the show and its racist nature and quits much to the shock of Manray. This causes Manray and Sloan to grow closer, which angers Delacroix. Delacroix tries to break up Manray's relationship with Sloan by accusing Sloan of sleeping with Manray to further her career and then reveals that Sloan only got her position as Delacroix's assistant by sleeping with him.
The move backfires though and only further drives Manray and Sloan together. The two create a tape of offending racist footage culled from assorted movies, cartoons, and newsreels to try and shame Delacroix into stopping production of the show and when Delacroix refuses to view the tape, Manray defiantly announces that he will no longer wear blackface and goes in front of the studio audience during a TV taping and does his dance number in his regular clothing. The crowd immediately turns against Manray and Dunwitty personally fires Manray from the show.
Kicked out of the studio, Manray is then captured by Sloan's brother Big Blak Afrika (played by Mos Def) and is executed by him and his fellow rappers the Mau Maus on a live internet webcast. The Mau Maus are quickly caught by the police and shot down in a hail of bullets, with the only survivor being 1/16th Blak, who because he is only 1/16 African-American does not look African-American and is spared by the police, tearfully proclaiming he is "still black." Furious, Sloan confronts Delacroix with a gun her brother had given her years prior and demands that Delacroix watch the tape she and Manray prepared for him. Delacroix refuses and tries to get the gun away from Sloan only to be shot in the stomach. Sloan looks on with horror and flees while proclaiming that it was Delacroix's own fault he got shot as Delacroix watches the tape at long last while he lies on the floor and dies.
The film concludes with a montage of racially insensitive and demeaning clips of Black characters from Hollywood films of the first half of the 20th century. Among the films used in the sequence are Gone with the Wind, Holiday Inn, Ub Iwerks' cartoon Little Black Sambo, Walter Lantz's cartoon Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat, the Looney Tunes short All This and Rabbit Stew, and, from the Hal Roach comedy School's Out, Our Gang (Little Rascals) kids Allen "Farina" Hoskins and Matthew "Stymie" Beard.
Film production
Most of the movie was shot on Mini DV digital video using the Sony VX 1000 camera. This kept the budget to $10 million USD, as Lee had trouble justifying financing for the project. The minstrel show sequences were shot on 16 mm film, and processed to video for editing.Analysis
The notion of degradation or “shuckin’ and jivin’” is at the center of the film. Pierre, like the black minstrel performers of the 19th century, is forced to subdue his own pride in the name of his career. Any pride that one could have in their intelligence or their talent is negated by the humiliation and self hatred that comes by being forced into playing an active role in one’s own degradation and humiliation.
Other movies such as Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, and the HBO film Dancing in September have dealt with the atmosphere both black actors and black sitcoms face, either appealing to stereotypes or attempting to recreate the success of The Cosby Show, the first and longest running sitcom featuring a black professional middle class family. While these sitcoms rate highly among black households, they are consistently beaten by white oriented sitcoms. Often the current state of sitcoms geared towards black audiences are relegated to a network such as UPN. While these shows feature black professionals and middle class characters, they are often criticized for portraying their black characters in a stereotypical way. The problem lies in the inherently smaller black population in the US and the inability of many black sitcoms to appeal to a white audience.The notion of “buffoonery” is often the focus of the problem with the black sitcom.
In Bamboozled, Mantan's New Millennium Minstrel Show (along with its racist content) becomes a huge success, and as a consequence its satirical value is diminished. The undeniable humor and talent presented in the show by the performers creates a conflicted viewing experience for both the audience in the film and the audience watching the film. Spike Lee acknowledges this conflict and presents it as having dangerous and ultimately socially destructive consequences. If such a negative representation is not clearly understood as being satirical, or is not appreciated as such, the humor found in it becomes degrading and the imagery disturbing.
The notions of the hyper ironic and the PC backlash are represented in the very straight-forward portrayal of the minstrel show and the audiences superficial appreciation of the subject matter. While the creative parties might have had the intention of mocking stereotypes, the presentation fails to highlight the satirical nature, as Spike Lee so deliberately does at the onset of the film. The theme of masks is central both literally and metaphorically in the film. The performers are black actors pretending to be white actors, pretending to be black. Their mask is one of the masks that black performers are forced wear, the mask of what a “typical” black person is like where Pierre’s is one of what the “typical” black man is not. The Mau Maus’ masks represent the anger and resentment worn by rappers under the guise of social consciousness. They are all controlled by the same mechanism that requires them to conform to a societal expectation in order to be successful in the eyes of that society. If they don’t conform they end up like Junebug, anonymous and unsuccessful, not to himself but through the eyes of the society that he rejects. The title Bamboozled refers to the position of black people in America. Its is not that they don’t have the choice to reject these expectations but that they feel as though they do not. They feel constrained and socially immobile and they end up playing an active role in there own denigration.
External links
| Films directed by Spike Lee |
| ' • She's Gotta Have It • School Daze • Do the Right Thing • Mo' Better Blues • Jungle Fever • Malcolm X • Crooklyn • Clockers • Girl 6 • Get on the Bus • 4 Little Girls • He Got Game • Freak • Summer of Sam • The Original Kings of Comedy • Bamboozled • A Huey P. Newton Story • ' • Sucker Free City • 25th Hour • She Hate Me • Inside Man • When the Levees Broke |
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