Racial Masks and Stereotypes in Imitation of Life and Bamboozled
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Nicole Wong Racial Masks and Stereotypes in Imitation of Life and Bamboozled By Nicole Wong Visible signs of diference mark the racialized body only in com- bination with nonvisible social preconceptions and expectations. A racial stereotype is the link, the image, which ties the visible with the nonvisible imagined meanings and values specifc to the culture in which they are produced and shared. Te process of racial stereotyping therefore requires three components: the marked body, the collective society of meaning and image-makers, and the racial mask through which the latter views and defnes the former. My concern in this article is how American1 popular culture and mass media entertainment has become the foremost platform for racial meaning production, perpetuating false racial stereotypes, yet at the same time attempting to expose its own role as image-maker. As forms of popular mass media entertainment, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) depict such an exposition of the racial stereotyping process, but with signifcant diferences that come with forty years’ distance. Tese two flms function as tragic allegories of the racial stereotype production process as popular entertainment, wherein central characters mask their marked bodies, their self-identity and essential personhood. Racial stereotypes literally are enacted on stage to entertain an audience, a downsized representation of 61 Caméra Stylo both American media makers and receivers. Trough the optic of Sander Gilman’s conceptions of the Other and the Self, I will explore the motives behind, and subsequent futility of, attempts to mask racial self-identities with media-defined projected identities that ultimately turn performers into the slaves of spectators. I will also position the ideologies of both films as refections of the racial performer/audience relationship of their respective time periods. Imitation of Life, a flm adaptation of the Fannie Hurst novel of the same name, follows the story of Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a struggling single black mother who moves in with Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a white widow struggling to become an actress. Te two become close friends as Lora becomes increasingly successful and Annie agreeably acts as her domestic servant. Meanwhile, Annie’s light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), begins passing as white, eventually leaving home to perform as a hypersexual white nightclub dancer. Afer fnding Sarah Jane dancing in a sleazy club and agreeing to let her continue living as a white woman, Annie dies of grief, prompting Sarah Jane to re-embrace her black identity. Forty years later, Bamboozled moves away from everyday and ordinary experiences of the maternal melodrama as popular attraction towards the broadcast television show format. Te flm tells the story of Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), an uptight, educated, black television producer. In an attempt to get fred, Delacroix proposes a minstrel show where black actors perform in blackface to his patronizing white boss Dunwitty (Michael Rappaport). To his surprise Dunwitty loves the idea and the show becomes a huge hit. Manray (Savion Glover), a former street performer, changes his name and becomes the star of the show Mantan: A Twentieth Century Minstrel Show. Afer refusing 62 Nicole Wong to continue performing in blackface, he is fred, and eventually kidnapped and killed by the Mau Maus, a caricatured Black Nationalist group. Racial masks and stereotypes function in these two flms in terms of the performer/audience relationship, analogous to Gilman’s Other/Self dichotomy.2 Gilman describes stereotypes as the categories of perceived diferences that separate the Self from the uncontrollable non-Self, the Other, of the outside world. Te contact between this Self, the idealized pillar of control and solid permanence, and the outside Other, the threateningly unfamiliar and obscure, results in a paradigm destabilization within the Self. The subsequent anxiety and desire for re- stabilization results in an objectifcation of this Other. Trough a series of analogies and associations with previous experiences or imagined fantasies, and a projection of specifc characteristics onto the Other, it will satisfy the pre-emptively formed template to which certain markers of diference, such as race, have assigned it. Tese templates are mutually exclusive stereotypes, dividing the racial Self from the visible or imaginary diferent racial Other, creating a binary logic. It is the Self ’s disposition towards categorizing the exterior unknown, as well as media-produced racial Other fantasies, that enable the process of stereotype and mask construction and false identity projection, a process that is the basis of both Imitation of Life and Bamboozled. Sarah Jane, Manray, and Delacroix are the racial Others, the performers, who wear a mask to appease the Selves represented by the white males for whom Sarah Jane pretends to be white, or the studio audience that determines the popularity of Delacroix’s minstrel show. Sirk and Lee structure their films around the perspective of the Other, the central characters who propel the narrative. 63 Caméra Stylo Yet the viewer is also made aware of the Self ’s perspective, that of the white males and studio audience, allowing us as viewers to witness and analyze the relationship between the two, exposing the stereotyping process. Tis is accomplished defly by the use of mirrors, not as refective, but as refractive surfaces, symbolically showing us not what the Other character looks like or who he or she really is, but rather the image of that character that the Other wishes to present, and the Selves in the flm are to see. In other words, the mirror refects the mask, not the person. To illustrate, in Imitation of Life Sarah Jane, who has been passing for white, meets with her white boyfriend Frankie on a deserted street corner. As she suggests running away together and he seems to agree, the camera pans to the lef, so the viewer only sees Sarah Jane as an image refected in the glass window behind Frankie. In this initial frame, the viewer is led to believe that Frankie is convinced by Sarah Jane’s mask; he sees her as we see her now— happy, honest, white. Te mirror is bending the image of Sarah Jane, an intervening shroud distorting who she really is. In this case, Frankie is the white, male, normative Self who feels secure in thinking Sarah Jane is also white. Discovering that her mother is black, Frankie is destabilized and projects a false image/stereo- type of “blackness” onto Sarah Jane. As Frankie angrily asks, “Is your mother a nigger?” the camera quickly pans back to the right and we, the viewer, see Sarah Jane directly, as her white mask falls away. However, the scene continues, Sarah Jane refuses to stop the masquerade. As she repeatedly denies being black, the camera again pans to the lef, and we again see Sarah Jane’s image in the glass window, getting smaller and smaller as her mask disintegrates into a brutal beating. In Bamboozled, the most illuminating use of mirrors occurs when Manray and Womack3 apply blackface makeup for the 64 Nicole Wong frst time. As the two performers sponge on the burnt cork paste, shots alternate between close-ups of their faces in the process of being covered in a literal black mask. We see them as the indivi- duals that they are: shots of their blackened faces in full minstrel costume refected are in the mirror, the artifcial image about to be presented to the diegetic studio audience. Te symbolic nature of the mirror is further reinforced when Manray refuses to put the makeup on, and he is subsequently fred. In this melancholy scene, as Manray enters his dressing room and fumbles with the makeup and the show’s script, we see him directly, without make- up, as he sees himself. The camera moves, avoiding the mirror, and when we finally see Manray’s reflection in the mirror, it is accompanied by the sound of a woman in the studio audience screaming, “Be a nigger!” Hence, we comprehend the connection between what is seen in that mirror and what the audience expects to see from Manray—a bufoonish minstrel performer. In addition to mirrors, we see in Bamboozled the use of rep- resentational mediums such as television and the internet to fguratively and literally depict the culmination of the stereotype process: the death of the authentic individual to let the stereotype live.4 Afer Manray is fred from the Mantan show for refusing to continue to degrade himself, for defending his self-identity,5 he is kidnapped by the Mau Maus who plan to flm his murder, which is broadcast live online and on television as a sadistic form of entertainment. Tis fnal ‘dance of death’ is repeatedly framed through video cameras, monitors, televisions, and computer screens, as the diegetic viewing audience believes they are watching not the murder of Manray, a complex human individual, but of Mantan, a simplified stereotype of a ‘minstrel coon’. Paradoxically, the Mau Maus succeed in killing the individual who fought against the racial mask, thus strengthening the degrading racial stereotypes they claim to despise. 65 Caméra Stylo Te Mau Maus are a walking contradiction in that they claim to be in favour of black rights, when actually they are more like living stereotypes created and controlled by the image-making media. As a caricature of the Black Nationalist, the Mau Maus act as agents of society’s collective Self, the society that watches and enjoys the Mantan minstrel show, sent out to eliminate Manray, the threat to their stabilized racial ecosystem. Similar to Sarah Jane’s boyfriend, this collective Self is what Gilman calls patho- logical, lacking the “ability to distinguish the ‘individual’ from the stereotyped class into which the object might automatically be placed”(Gilman 18), unable to see Sarah Jane or Manray beyond the racial mask.