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THE POLITICAL CRITIQUE of SPIKE Lee's Bamboozled

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THE POLITICAL CRITIQUE of SPIKE Lee's Bamboozled 35 GLOBAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES VOL 8, NO. 1&2, 2009: 35-44 COPYRIGHT© BACHUDO SCIENCE CO. LTD PRINTED IN NIGERIA. ISSN 1596-6232 www.globaljournalseries.com ; [email protected] LEGACIES OF BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN MEDIA: THE POLITICAL CRITIQUE OF SPIKE Lee’s Bamboozled PATRICK NKANG, JOE KING AND PAUL UGO (Received 24, August 2010; Revision Accepted 3, September 2010) ABSTRACT This paper examines the extraordinary ways in which the America mainstream visual media have propagated and circulated racist myths which subvert the cultural identity of the black race. Using Spike Lee’s Bamboozled , the paper exposes the negative social stereotypes espoused by American entertainment media about blacks, and argues that Spike Lee’s film not only unravels that subversive Euro-American rhetoric, but also doubles as an intense social critique of that warped cultural dynamic. KEYWORDS: Blackface Minstrelsy, Racist Stereotypes and American Media. INTRODUCTION Because slavery is the illuminating insight on this aspect of cinema in the founding historical relationship between black United States when he declares that “the fact that and white in America many will argue, lingers film has been the most potent vehicle of in subterranean form to this day (Guerrero 1993: American imagination suggests all the more 03). strongly that movies have something to tell us about the mysteries of American life” (xii). Film and the African-American Image American films then have a deep historical link with its social environment, providing us the As a form of social expression, the film medium profoundest social transcripts about American embodies significantly staggering amounts of society than historians, economists and other social truths . This very character of the film art professionals of any period could ever offer. derives from its peculiar ability to draw upon As Siegfried Kracauer has eloquently social realities for its narratology. From its outset argued, “what films reflect are not so much in the later parts of the nineteenth-century, explicit credos as psychological dispositions— cinema art began by recording the daily life of those deep layers of collective mentality which common people hence it became a keen extend more or less below the dimensions of recorder of prevailing times in Europe and North consciousness” (Qtd in Schlesinger xiii). In other America. It is this power of cinema to capture the words, the recurrent themes, motifs, metaphors, tensions and pleasures of everyday life that and images that any art form embodies are Arthur Schlesinger (1979) refers to when he talks important, for they show the prevailing worries about the medium’s ability to offer us important and tensions of the people of such an age. For insights into “ the tastes, apprehensions, myths, example, the most insightful revelation of post- and inner vibrations of an age” (xii). revolutionary struggle in Russia, the desolation And once cinema technology took shape as and solitude of post-war Germany, or even the an established narrative art, it blossomed in the detailed workings of imperialism in non-European hands of the Americans. Not only did the colonies such as Africa, Asia and South America Americans perfect the technology of cinema, the are best glimpsed through the films of such medium became for them a poignant instrument periods. Similarly, so do movies disclose to us for writing their national history in the global the inner and outer workings of American life and public domain. Schlesinger (1979) offers an hence racism will become an important narrative Patrick Nkang, Department of Theatre Arts and Med ia Studies university of Calabar, Calabar, Nigeria. Joe king, Department of Theatre Arts and Media Studies University of Calabar Calabar, Nigeria. Paul Ugo, Department of Theatre Arts and Media Studies University of Calabar Calabar, Nigeria. 36 PATRICK NKANG, JOE KING AND PAUL UGO trope in that creative revelation. The inauguration war days to the insolent, criminal and free ‘brut of the race trope as early as the last quarter of Negro’ of reconstruction” (15). The entire black the 19 th century in American film was in keeping population including the small body of interests with the broader social and political context of the groups such as the NAACP and the press time and the peculiar tastes of the audiences for condemned Griffith’s work. African-Americans which film was meant hence Jack Shadonian and other minority peoples became aware of how thesis that “all films are ultimately about negative and preJudicial the art of film something that interests and/or bothers the narrativized them. Instinctively, a new awakening culture they grew out of” (15). As soon as film amongst the African-American population yielded its narrative potentials with the trial of emerged to reconfigure the black image in the Edwin Porter’s fifteen minutes feature (The Great American media. This awareness emerged Train Robbery), it was to the contending issue of mostly due to the fact that most colored difference between whites and freed black slaves characters in American movies were depicted as that it turned its attention to. “black buffoon[s] who appeared not to have the The first ever comprehensive feature to slightest intelligence. When the Negro was not be made in the United States for example was made an obJect of ridicule, he was portrayed as The Birth of a Nation , directed by D. W. Griffith in the devoted slave who knew his place” (Mapp 1915. This three-hour epic with superb montage 16). technique was an amazing chronicle of the So independent black moviemakers began history of the United States beginning from to emerge to counteract and reconstruct such old reconstruction. The first feature to be shown in southern stereotypes. According to Thomas the white house, President Wilson Woodrow Cripps (1977), “by the end of the great described it as “history written in lightening.” It depression, popular taste had become more opened on February 8 th , 1915 in Los Angeles and sophisticated and no longer was willing to accept on March 3 rd , at the Liberty theatre in New York so readily the old southern stereotypes that City. And although Birth was produced and Hollywood was offering. Black protests against directed by Griffith, it was actually a synthesis of these stereotypes were having their effects too” the work of three southerners at the time living in (05). The old Hollywood films, produced to suit the north. Griffith adapted the film script from prevailing white American values and tastes were Thomas Nixon’s anti-black novels, The Leopard’s becoming unpopular. This was crucial for the Spots and the Clansman . It also employed the industry because a substantial segment of the ideas of Woodrow Wilson in his book Histories of industry’s patrons were African-Americans. So by the American People . And according to Ed the late 1920s independent studios with the sole Guerrero, “Wilson took the view that emancipated aim of producing all black films emerged. Chief blacks were ‘Idlers’ who could become ‘insolent amongst these movement were the Lincoln and dangerous [and thus] wrote of reconstruction Company, Oscar Micheaux, the colored players, as a policy that ‘puts the white south under the Reol, Ralph Cooper, and many others. Finances heel of the black south” (11). It was precisely this and technical know-how hampered these philosophy that The Birth espoused. The film companies, but a vigorous match toward implied that the African-American, especially in reconstructing the battered image of the black the heydays of reconstruction, when American (usually played by whites in blackface) emancipated, was villainous, lustful for white had begun. women and political power, and above all, In spite of these efforts, a lingering racial ignorant. These were stereotypical southern tension still remains in the United States. Among conceptions of the average African-American. To many other areas, the American entertainment be sure, The Birth did not invent these industry (Radio, TV, film) still reverberates with stereotypes, but it popularized them and these racial stereotypes of blacks only that the media motifs were to be deployed by other Euro- have now “substituted new subtle stereotypes for American directors and producers of American old blatant ones” (Mapp 08). American films and television programs for many years. mainstream media, especially TV networks, still In describing the intent of the producers of circulate ridiculous images of the African race. The Birth, Ed Guerrero remarks that “As frank Most common is the black man as exhibitor of racial propaganda, The Birth of a Nation is an grotesque comic stunts. It is this perpetuation of elaborate construction of black stereotypes, the old comic motifs where blackness becomes a ranging from the loyal slave, the mammy, and the source of popular spectacle in the entertainment dancing bucks in the slave quarters of pre-civil industry that Spike Lee takes on in his 2000 LEGACIES OF BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN MEDIA 37 release of Bamboozled. and reinforced by schools, organizations, family, our sexual lives, churches, institutions—all of The Politics and Aesthetics of an African- which produce racially structured society” (101). American Film Producer/Director: Spike Lee She then goes on to say that Spike Lee and his Shelton Jackson Lee, popularly known “...work represent a problematic through which as Spike Lee, was born on the 20th of March the political difficulties that inhere in African- 1957 in Atlanta and later raised in Forte Green American cultural production in this moment can section of Brooklyn. Lee had an early grounding be usefully discussed” (98). This statement in the performing arts, as his father, Bill Lee, was highlights the great contribution that Spike and a Jazz musician (perhaps this accounts for why his works provoke within the American cultural Delacriox’s own dad in Bamboozled is also a sector.
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