Week #12--New Media, Representation, and the Neglect of History

One of the most interesting observations of the period when Do the Right Thing (1989) was released is that it was the success of filmmakers such as Lee, John Singleton, and the Hughes Brothers that directed attention towards an earlier generation of Black filmmakers whose training in film schools and independent projects long preceded the boom of Black filmmakers in the early ‘90s. Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, and Julie Dash would make their most prominent films during this period, in which they received a great deal of critical acclaim for their work, but an inconsistent following of Black moviegoers. The content of their films were a far departure from other mainstream Black-themed films. Dash and Gerima each released historical dramas about slavery and its haunting legacy regarding Black familial unions. Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, released throughout ’91 and ’92, focuses on a matriarch’s attempt to sustain the customs of her family based in the Gullah Sea Islands, as the younger generation relocates to mainland South Carolina. Shortly thereafter, Gerima released Sankofa, a film about a Black model who is transported by ancestral spirits to antebellum slavery in the United States. Unlike previous treatments, Gerima’s film provide the brutal details in which people of African descent were made into commodities, dehumanized through sexual assault (which would produce more “property”) and unspeakable expectations of labor. It was a daunting task for Dash to find a distributor, and it became more bittersweet in that an audience could not be cultivated despite the film’s critical acclaim. Gerima, however, established a do-it-yourself template for distributing his film, by renting out theater houses across the country to show his film because his film was continuously rejected by distributors. Burnett faced a fate similar to Dash with his film, To Sleep with Anger, which is about a Black family in Los Angeles whose generational conflicts are intensified when an old friend of the patriarch comes to visit. In spite of featuring a major movie star (Danny Glover) and receiving favorable reviews, Burnett’s film never was able to reach a consistent audience because of a failed strategy by the distributor. His follow-up film, The Glass Shield, had a more conventional narrative structure, and starred Ice Cube, by now a bankable movie star. A film about a young Black cop who is expected to conform to the crooked practices of the sheriff’s department when a young Black man is being framed for murder, it would nevertheless suffer the same fate as Burnett’s previous effort, in that its lack of availability to an audience caused the film to disappear into the ether.

Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is dependent on the idea that the mainstream viewing public has internalized a short-term memory of history, even amongst Black audience members themselves. Although the film demands a bit too much compliance to the premise so that his point can get across, Lee nevertheless reveals how even something as culturally deplorable as blackface and minstrelsy can be internalized into something that people become comfortable through mere commodification. The normalization of an art form deliberately use to dehumanize people of African descent becomes the industry standard to which Black performers must conform not even so much for stardom, but to earn a modest living. It begins to persists to the central culprits of the show: Pierre Delacroix, hyperperforming his own life as an upper-class Black professional, sees his idea initially as a backfire and then utilizes it as a “retroactive” compensation; Sloan is caught in a tension between her romance with the star of the show and her compliance to an idea she condemns; Womack and Man Ray finally having an opportunity to live the lavish life they dreamed of while living on the streets, yet their talents are confined to what will only appease both mass audiences and corporate profits.

The symposium organized by Cineaste magazine reflects the lasting legacy of Lee’s film, if not the director himself: an ambivalent response towards how the film exhausts itself with its subject matter, but provides a scrutinizing critique of how ideas are articulated, how culture is perceived, and how it is ultimately circulated as a commodity. Zeinabu Davis’ piece reflects that in spite of the pain she undergoes watching the film, both in the historical information it references and the overload of material it presents, she is still able to identify both the filmic strategies of Lee (i.e. the use of color) and the importance that a filmmaker as ubiquitous as he is was able to pursue a culturally loaded project. Greg Tate (a writer who I strongly recommend you follow—he’s often featured in the Village Voice) provides a critique that recognizes the film’s presentation of minstrelsy as currency for economic upward mobility, but questions whether it analyzes the dimensions of humanity beneath the façade of Blackface. Tate provides a profound argument, but I think it suggests that he overlooks the epiphanies that Womack and Man Ray come to when they realize how exhausting it is to maintain the level of success the show has accumulated, especially given how dehumanizing they feel in their temporary transformations. If anyone, a more effective question to raise about this depiction would be whether Lee could provide a more in-depth chronicle of each character’s transformation, expanding them beyond just stock characters to make a larger point about Black talent as a commodity in a corporate landscape.