Discussion II

5 Bamboozled In the Mirror of Abjection

Ed Guerrero

The struggle over “race and representation” in all of its mass-mediated expressions on multiple screens, necessarily, goes on. In this political season the great American sport of “race- (and diff erence-) baiting” for electoral advantage has reached perfected heights, this being evident for “America’s fi rst black president” in the racial innuendo and storms that continue to dog him. Consider a few “race/diff erence” moments the president has had to negotiate, explain and/or endure: a White House cop–professor “sit- down” over the questionable arrest of a leading African American scholar; an “NAACP vs. Tea Party” smack down, stirred, in part, by minstrel caricatures of Obama at Tea Party rallies; state legislation (recalling seg- regationist “states’ rights” strategies of old) targeting “illegal aliens” in Arizona, Alabama and Georgia; threats of Koran burning and “Islamopho- bia” resounding throughout the land; and all of this to the drumbeat of the “birthers” claiming that Obama is foreign born and not a “real American.” So, perhaps not surprisingly, America’s racial, religious atmosphere has turned decidedly contentious, toxic and ironic, whereas all of the postelec- tion media speculation about a “post-racial society” has contracted into a fading, utopian blip on the social horizon.1

As it is expressed in the political imaginary, so it is mediated in the imagination of our movies. And indicative of the slippery, multivalent nature of race-baiting and racial (mis)representation as practiced by the dominant fi lm industry, when it comes to the images and narratives about African Americans, the issues and debates have hardly changed over the past cinema century. Although the slippery chimeras of “type/ stereotype” keep popping up in fl uid, contemporary and altered guises, these are largely the refl exive creations and (mis)representations of com- mercial Hollywood. Yet, not so surprisingly, as Spike Lee argues, the same vexed issues and devalued images of African Americans can arise as the creations of ambitious blacks themselves, squirming for a break, and perhaps success, in the same mainstream movie business. As always, though, when viewed through the lens of the group psyche, the white– black struggle over “representation” has remained remarkably consis- tent. White Americans tend to work out the narratives and scenes of

110 Ed Guerrero

their cinematic lives through a general process of affi rmation, whereas black Americans struggle with the mysteries and tangles of their big- screen issues and images through a generalized process of negation. The advent of Precious (2009) and the debates that swirl around the fi lm bear this broad rudimentary dynamic out.2 Notably, for the argument of this chapter, it seems that Precious has thrown Spike Lee’s “black” comedy Bamboozled (2000), with its disturbing, prescient vision, back into criti- cal, high focus. At this point in black American cinema’s cultural—con- sumerist—academic discourse, critical explorations of neo-minstrelsy, insightful and varied, tend to reveal the representational threads that connect Precious to Lee’s arguments in Bamboozled, in which he warns against the popularity and the persistent return of the stereotypic min- strel in all of its forms.

What once was literalized in the comedic, vulgar racism of the nineteenth-century “white-blackface” minstrel show, is now suggested and/or literalized, in many themes and genres from neorealist ghetto- gangster drama, to low “black-blackface” comedy or an endless string of bourgeois wedding melodramas, with much of this work produced and performed by blacks themselves. Whatever one’s attitude toward the contemporary debates sparked by Precious, and the fi lm’s burden on or credit to the black audience, the fi lm seems at the very least, to visu- alize the conservative assessment of African Americans handed down decades ago, from the writings of Daniel Moynihan to the politics of Ronald Reagan, and now articulated in the cinematic moment. Like a cheap horror movie bubbling in the swamp of ghetto pathology, Precious articulates all of the standard clichés fueling neoconservative expecta- tions of underclass, urban blacks, including an absent, rapist boyfriend/ father who dies of AIDS; a sadistic, hustling, “welfare queen” mom; and her grossly obese, pregnant, unwed, semiliterate daughter. In light of such right-wing fantasies, Spike Lee has never shied away from the sharp debates about black (mis)representation, or the contentious poli- tics of the African American media image. In this particular scuffl e, Lee has publicly asserted that some contemporary black fi lmmakers, studio execs and celebrities have taken to producing or promoting a stealthy, toxic brew of neo-minstrelsy that his feature, Bamboozled, forewarns will eventually fully resurrect Hollywood’s archive of racist caricatures of the past. Only this time around the spectacle will be a postmodernist, post-post-racial, electronic, multiscreen coon show.3

A century ago, one of America’s fi rst black stars in black-blackface, the brilliant performer and premier funnyman of the Broadway stage, Ziegfeld Follies and early cinema shorts, Bert Williams, experienced a familiar insight about the minstrel process, for him an epiphany, a self- realization both as entertainer and as an African American about the tangled confl icts on the discursive battle fi eld of “race and representa- tion.” For Williams, these vexed issues and ill conditions ranged from

Bamboozled 111

the split self, to psychic and social doubleness in all of its forms, to repressed anger, self-contempt, inner confusion and abjection. Osten- sibly, these affl ictions resulted from having to constantly negotiate the travails and hostilities of an openly racist, hostile society that, with complete schizophrenia, was very much entertained by him, thus richly rewarding his talent as the highest paid performer in Vaudeville while simultaneously despising his color and envying and fearing his fame and success. Williams’s insight into his condition is poignant and simply put as he notes, “I shuffl e onto the stage, not as myself, but as a lazy, slow going negro. . . . The real Bert Williams is crouched deep down inside the coon who sings and tells stories.”4 Whereas there are many issues regarding the devaluation of African Americans in the media that Bert Williams and Spike Lee would share perspectives on, they would cer- tainly agree about the vulgar expectations of the crowd that glorifi es the stereotypic coon persona at the expense of the imprisoned, inner black self. Lee and Williams would agree as well about looking into the mirror of abjection and confronting the self-contempt, inner rage and self-destruction that are often the thinly concealed downside, contradic- tions to stardom’s material and ego gratifi cations, it’s celebrated “fame and bling.”

Consequently, insights about the representational racism vexing Bert Williams at the dawn of the twentieth century and Spike Lee at the

Figure 5.1 Glover and the minstrel mask in Bamboozled (2000). (Photo: David Lee/New Line.)

112 Ed Guerrero

beginning of the twenty-fi rst run parallel, in that one can view them in the context of a society that, in spite of electing its fi rst black president, is still deeply undecided and ambivalent about the role of African Americans as a broad demographic in the nation’s economic, political, social life, as well as its cultural imaginary. Echoing the concerns of Williams’s histori- cal moment, Spike Lee argues in Bamboozled that this is still a nation in which, given the right popular, cultural and commercial conditions, blackface and minstrelsy could be revived in some grotesque retrograde or thinly disguised “neo” form and explode into a national fad. Accord- ingly, if Bert Williams were here today and part of the entertainment, cinema industry, he would fi nd the multifaceted struggle over race and representation, in many ways, not too far removed from the vexed issues of his day. Williams would certainly understand the doubleness registered in this chapter’s title, which one can take fi rst as being about the noun, an interrogation of the fi lm Bamboozled in relation to the mirror of abjec- tion, but second as being about the use of the verb, that is, being bam- boozled in the same said mirror. This chapter starts with the latter, the verb, the bag of tricks and turns in the mirror, that is, bamboozlement, and then moves on to what Spike Lee has to say about the danger, psychic and social, of resurrecting the coon show, minstrelsy and blackface in all of its varied postmodern forms.

From the beginning of print media in colonial America up to the pres- ent-day sophistication and global circulation of the electronic media, every “out” or oppressed social formation has been race- (or diff erence-) baited, suff ering their disfi gured, (mis)represented selves, images that defi ne and overdetermine so much of their lives, played back at them as entertainment or “news.” Disastrously for all of these out groups concerned, the production and dissemination of the images, narratives, caricatures and ideologies that have so much to do with mapping social destinies and negotiating political power have been kept beyond these out groups’ control, and mostly deployed against their self-interest. On a grand scale then, all out group social formations have been to some degree bamboozled in the mirror of abjection. In the particular case of African Americans, their wide negation in the electronic stream of the national imaginary could not exist without the structuring dynamic of the black–white binary that still defi nes the boundaries of color and “race,” and that (regardless of the rise of corporate versions and aca- demic applications of “multiculturalism”5) still underscores much of the nation’s group power relations. It comes as no surprise then, that the mirror of abjection reserved for African Americans stands in dia- lectical, contrast to its coeffi cient, the mirror of affi rmation, the mass- mediated refl ection into which Euro-Americans gaze in confi rmation of their national identities, skin color entitlements and implicit sense of superiority. A recent semiotic example of the black–white binary (negation versus affi rmation) in action blew in on the ill winds trailing

Bamboozled 113

the superhurricane Katrina. It took rap artist and poet Kanye West to break with the doublespeak of the dominant media script and angrily point out during a television interview that poor, urban blacks in New Orleans were persistently criminalized by the news networks as “loot- ers,” whereas middle-class whites just down the road in the burbs and countryside on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast brutalized by the same catas- trophe and engaging in the same activities, that is, scavenging to sur- vive, were deferentially described as the storm’s victims “searching for food.”

Considering this one anecdotal scrap in light of a long trajectory of scholarly research and historical deliberation, it is commonly recognized that the ongoing process of media (mis)representation and devaluation is infl icted most harshly, and now perhaps paradoxically, on African Ameri- cans.6 The paradox resides in the fact that black people produce so much of the nation’s popular language, culture and youth fashion, along with many of its sports stars, music and media celebrities. African American media presence is everywhere, and infl uentially pervasive.7 Yet, this black presence amounts to a sort of enchanting, iconic tokenism. For at the same time, despite the tentative expansion of a black middle class, for the vast majority of blacks, the indexes of African American material progress and standards for education, health and psychic well-being have remained stag- nant, and in many cases regressed to the abysmal levels before the civil rights movement.8

Regardless of the rise of black celebrity presence and star power, the containment and devaluation of blacks in media and cinema and politics obviously persists. And in some instances, as Bamboozled forewarns, this general (mis)representation has reverted to the more vulgar predictable car- icatures, narratives and tropes of America’s assertively white supremacist past. The most casual glance at the evidence is compelling, from Eddie Murphy’s mid-1980s popular revival of the pickaninny “Buckwheat” on Saturday Night Live; to the coon sidekick Jar Jar Binks of Star Wars fame; to the cinematic compensation for the success of the once premier, and now struggling, golfer Tiger Woods in the mystical but lowly black caddy and throwback to segregated times in The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000); even to international complications with the 2005 release of a Mexican federal stamp celebrating its own comic jigaboo, Memin Pinguin. Notably in contemporary politics, the sudden and expedient judicial rise of neocon- servative Clarence Thomas as the dialectically fl ipped image of civil rights hero and judicial giant Thurgood Marshall or the continued questioning of President Obama’s origins, citizenship and faith by the “birthers” and their religiously incited ilk bear more than a casual relation to the retrograde and debased imaging black people. Accordingly, the politics of abjection, black- face caricature and the electronic coon show, in all of their guises, from vulgar to subtle, seem to be an irrepressible, recurring theme in American entertainment, media and political culture.

114 Ed Guerrero

So the comic darky has risen from his plantation grave where the social protests of the civil rights movement and the following insurgency of Black Power nationalism last dumped him, to once again joke, dance and shuffl e across the American screen, stage, tube, Internet. Only this time the blackface minstrel performs with the agonizing self-critical irony in Spike Lee’s feature fi lm Bamboozled. Lee, who in all of his work is social issues oriented and politically inspired, derives much of his press, cin- ematic cache and audience from meeting the contentious issues of race and representation head-on. Importantly, in this fi lm, Lee does relevant, future-forward work. Other than the mainstream fi lm industry’s maver- ick, exploration of “passing in reverse,” Black Like Me (1964); or Robert Townsend’s guerilla masterpiece on the burdens of black-blackface, Hol- lywood Shuffl e (1987); or Harry Belafonte and John Travolta’s brilliant collaboration in the reverse-racial allegory White Man’s Burden (1995); or Warren Beatty’s insightful interrogation of white political power, race, identity and white-blackface in Bulworth (1998); or explorations of the new conditions of black cultural production and identity formation in Fear of a Black Hat (1993) and Drop Squad (1994), both directed by Spike Lee protégées, few fi lms have ventured so forthrightly into the dan- gerous and unresolved territory of blackface–whiteface and their tragic psychic consequences. In the view of this particular scholar/critic, Bam- boozled stands as Lee’s most accomplished, disturbing, satirically sharp and politically relevant feature since Do the Right Thing (1989).

Be forewarned though, no matter what your color, social status or out group orientation, what one calls “neo-minstrelsy” is explosive, tricky material in all of its forms, guises and varied expressions. In fact, Bam- boozled’s advertising icon, an inky-black, big-headed pickaninny eating a slice of watermelon in a cotton fi eld is so unsettling and treacherous that the New York Times, erring on the side of racial and political pru- dence, refused to run the provocative ad. Playing with America’s racial id can easily lead to psychic meltdowns, doing serious damage to one’s self-esteem and overall mental health. Or, as we have seen of late, it can lead to social tensions and blowups, rupturing the body politic along the rutted fault lines of various identities, oppressions, inequalities, religious persuasions and ideologies, from left to right. Only Lee, one of the few masters of image and color as political/aesthetic statement (and perhaps the late Marlon Riggs in his documentaries Ethnic Notions or Color Adjustment), could handle toying with the abject, or chanting “nig- ger” as a mantra, or depicting the grotesque irony of black-blackface (or white-blackface); all punctuated with “darky” memorabilia featuring jet-black faces, bubble eyes and humongous fi re-engine-red lips. Lee’s headlong dive into Americana’s ghetto of images, words and objects, into the nation’s racial-political unconscious, without being com- pletely destroyed by the material stands as one of Bamboozled’s main artistic accomplishments.

Bamboozled 115

By turning around and slapping the Tar-Baby of Old South folklore, that is, by confronting the recurring historical nightmare of the coon show and vomiting up its murky depths, Spike Lee with Bamboozled takes a long, painful (and in spots painfully, acidly funny) look into the most ambigu- ous and disagreeable of social and psychic mirrors. In the process, Lee provokes a series challenging questions about the persistent resurrection of blackface minstrelsy in popular media and culture. If Sambo and his ilk have returned, what are their contextual issues and guises today? What kind of popular reception in the present post–Affi rmative Action, neocon- servative political cycle would they receive? Even more importantly, why do we as a nation/culture repeatedly evoke minstrelsy in all of its “neo” variations, and misconstrue these images, words and devaluations as popu- lar entertainment? And what does Sambo do to (or for) the sense of the black self? Conversely, what does neo-minstrelsy do for (or to) the “norma- tive” white sense of self? And perhaps most importantly and highlighted by Bamboozled’s self-refl exive, satirical style, are contemporary blacks them- selves complicit in the creation and promotion of these images? These are a few of the tangled questions that Lee stirs up with his modern journey into the heart of Dixie darkness (Shadowland, as the fi lm’s musical theme goes), with his revival of the minstrel show and its whole poisoned menagerie of caricatures from Buckwheat to Sambo, Mantan, Topsy, Honeycutt and a plantation funk band most egregiously and provocatively called “The Ala- bama Porch Monkeys.”

Bamboozled is a straightforward tale, but one, perhaps predictably, with melodramatic destructive outcomes for all of its black characters. The fi lm tells of an alienated, irresolute, self-described “Negro” televi- sion writer, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), who dreams up a contem- porary minstrel show to create a ratings hit at a foundering UPN-style TV network and to regain the favor of his white boss, Thomas Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport). Yet symptomatic of the psychic entanglements of an ambivalent, foggy DuBoisian “double consciousness,” Delacroix’s motives are convoluted, not entirely clear, especially to himself. In reac- tion to the network’s cancellation of his most recent attempt at creating “positive image” black characters (a show depicting Negroes as digni- fi ed and uplifting, satirically called Brownnose Jones), Delacroix now explores to the fl ip side of the coin by creating a show so starkly, horrifi - cally abject and racist that he intends to shock the viewing public into a heightened social awareness of the politics of race and (mis)representa- tion. “Dr. Martin Luther King did not enjoy seeing his people beaten on network television. But white people needed to see it,” or so he tells his attractive assistant, Sloan (Jada Pinkett Smith).9 And if all of this does not work out, Delacroix reasons that perhaps the show will get him fi red and thus released from his network contract. To accomplish his bewildered aims, Delacroix and Sloan hire two black street performers, Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson), rehabilitating

116 Ed Guerrero

and resurrecting them as “two real coons,”10 Mantan and Sleep’n Eat, to star in Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show. However, Dela- croix’s scheme goes awry when the show becomes a wildly popular hit, turning blackface into a national fad. “Torn asunder” by the inner con- fl icts of a double consciousness gone wild, the confused and confounded Delacroix gets paid for his “success” while simultaneously suff ering from deep, barely repressed feelings of anger, shame and self-contempt. Making things even worse, the New Millennium Minstrel Show’s white studio execs and writers, seeing ratings and profi ts skyrocket, eagerly push the show’s already vile concept and content to new lows of insult and bizarre imagery.

One can comprehend Bamboozled as a cautionary tale about the mass mediation of the black self by interrogating two quotes, one at the begin- ning and the other at the end of the fi lm. For these map the trajectory of the fi lm’s twisted satirical ambiguity. Lee draws inspiration for the fi lm’s title and fi rst quote from his feature Malcolm X (1992), from a scene where Malcolm (Denzel Washington) enlightens a Harlem street-corner audi- ence to their abject social and psychic condition in America. In the scene (reconstructed from historic newsreel footage) Malcolm tells the audience, “You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray. . . . You’ve been bamboozled.” The second quote serves as the fi lm’s coda and was penned by the eminent writer and diagnostician

Figure 5.2 Refl ected abjection: two real coons in Bamboozled (2000). (Photo: David Lee/New Line.)

Bamboozled 117

of America’s racial condition, James Baldwin, who, invoking the personal and the karmic, writes that “people pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very sim- ply, by the lives they lead.”11 With the placement of these quotes, Lee argues that when it comes to race and representation blacks have been bamboo- zled as a people, a social formation, and consequently this bamboozlement has had calamitous psychic and emotional consequences for the personal sense of a black self. These quotes, then, suggest a social-to-psychic down- ward spiral that frames and elucidates much of the action and tragedy that occurs between them in the course of the fi lm. These framing quotes sug- gest everything from the overdetermining, institutional nature of media racism and why, as an image consuming society, we would actually need a minstrel show, to the very personal consequences of enduring an injured, fractured psyche, which plays out as an ambivalent, double consciousness shattered and further complicated by black complicity in resurrecting and promoting, but especially putting on, performing the minstrel mask.

Importantly, Bamboozled recognizes that at the turn of the millennium, DuBoisian “double consciousness” (African American consciousness torn between wanting to live the American ideal of racial equality while fi ghting the reality of being oppressed and despised on the basis of the color of one’s skin) has become such a wildly more complicated aff air. With many out and oppressed social formations adopting the political, legal and psycho- logical strategies honed in the civil rights movement as a template for social action and change, Dubois’s prophetic twentieth-century “color line” has now morphed into the broader complexities of the twenty-fi rst-century “diff erence line.” This, in part, explains why so many diff erent out groups and dissatisfi ed in groups would want to “blacken up” as a fad in the story world’s TV audience.

Exploring this insight, Spike Lee plays a wicked variation on the theme. Delacroix, a self-described “Negro” and a Harvard man with a bogus upscale accent, plays counterpoint to the white, senior VP Dunwitty’s wan- nabe black charade replete with “hood homeboy” dialogue, vocabulary and aff ectations. Dunwitty’s crude parody turns “double consciousness” on its head, revealing a white soul confl icted and “torn asunder” by want- ing to maintain the esteem and privileges of whiteness while simultaneously enjoying the romance of a stereotypical, transgressive blackness. Early on the white Dunwitty makes this upending clear. With the arrogance of an anthropologist gone mad, he tells Delacroix that he is blacker than him. He then smugly proclaims: “I know your people better than you do, bro.” On the cultural authority of his being a devoted consumer of black music, celeb- rities, sports stars and style, and his having a black wife and two biracial children, Dunwitty further stakes a claim to the insider use of the word nig- ger as freely and as frequently as he wishes. This vignette culminates with Dunwitty, now in schoolboy mode, baiting Delacroix by chanting “nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger . . .” ad infi nitum. Interestingly enough, at

118 Ed Guerrero

this media moment, life has come to imitate cinema in the case of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, demonstrated by her on-air “nigger” rant.12 Back in the story world, in crosscut reaction, Lee reveals Delacroix’s masked frustration as he screams his inner rage and pimp slaps Dunwitty across the face several times. This is fantasy, however, the repressed anger Delacroix would like to, but can’t, openly express. In the next cut and the story world’s reality, Delacroix politely informs his boss that he would “prefer he not use that word in his presence.”

Yet this vignette is also dialogic, in that Spike Lee answers (in black sig- nifying mode) a vignette in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), which makes the same claim to uninhibited use of “nigger” deploying the same logic. As the scene goes, two hit men (Samuel Jackson and John Travolta) lay low at a crime associate’s pad in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley in order to dispose of a dead black guy that they’ve accidentally shot in their car. Play- ing the associate, Tarantino rants and raves about his garage not being for “dead nigger storage.” Symptomatic of what Sigmund Freud would diag- nose as a thinly veiled death wish, the Tarantino character rambles on, gratuitously repeating the expression “dead nigger” several times. He then asks the two hit men what would happen if his wife were to come home to fi nd some “dead nigger” stashed in his garage. As he rants on we cut to the imagined scene of his wife coming home from work, revealing her to be a nurse and unmistakably a black woman. According to this reasoning then, for Tarantino’s character in Pulp Fiction (and Lee’s “call-and-response” echo in Bamboozled’s Dunwitty), being a white man married to a black woman is license enough to free use of the word nigger. In fact, in inter- views Tarantino has said that he wants to “liberate” the word and shout it from rooftops.13 To say the least, that would be acting on a naïve impulse. As opposed to the confrontational “racist hate” of the apartheid Old South, which inspired the national civil rights movement, the Tarantino character and Dunwitty suff er from post–Affi rmative Action, post-racial, neocon- servative “racist love,”14 whereby one’s consumer-driven love of black cul- ture and its mass-mediated trappings deems one an instant expert on black people, privileged to defi ne, appropriate and act out a confabulated black- ness accordingly. By this equation, everyone wants to participate in the mass-mediated, romantic adventure of playing the “nigga” (in hood-homey parlance), whereas no one wants to live the oppressive costs of actually being a “nigger” in the social, material and psychic senses. Bamboozled cleverly answers this fantasy with sardonic clarity when Delacorix’s father, the small-time club comedian Junebug (Paul Mooney), puts it succinctly, remarking in his stand-up routine that he wants them to start lynching black people again: “Then we would see who really wants to be a nigger.”

If neo-minstrelsy is driven by the consumer logic of a race-focused mode of cultural appropriation, exploitation and consumption, then Bam- boozled’s critique demonstrates a reasonable and penetrating objectivity when interrogating the issue. Put simply, Lee spares no particular social

Bamboozled 119

formation or identity from his argument, white or black. One of Bam- boozled’s guiding insights posits that many blacks eagerly participate (consciously, unconsciously or double-consciously) as producers and/or consumers of an ongoing, mass-mediated (in this case televised), electronic coon show with all of its disturbing expressions and trappings. Among the principal targets of Lee’s critical eye are rap and hip-hop artists, from so-called thugs to players, who often with a superfi cial cultural-nationalist spin have fallen under the spell of their own commodifi ed abjection. This critique is expressed in at least two ways in Bamboozled. The fi rst takes on the mainstream culture industry, spoofi ng the commercial exploitation of black youth culture and the hip-hop style in advertising. The second cri- tiques a stagnant Afrocentrism, as well as “gansta” nihilism by following the confused and nefarious doings of the Mau Maus, a stridently cultural nationalist, militant rap group headed by Sloan’s brother Julius, aka Big Blak Afrika (Mos Def). In this case the Mau Maus take it upon themselves to play “image police,” thus joining the ranks of those (from right to left) zealously working to conform black cultural production to their own aes- thetic, commercial and political expectations and agendas. Convincingly, it is the Mau Maus who precipitate the fi nal string of violent disasters in the fi lm’s conclusion.

As for commodifi cation, cut to a couple of commercials in network pro- gramming that reveal the New Millennium Minstrel Show’s advertising as wickedly self-critical and satirical. One is for “Da Bomb,” an alcohol- fortifi ed malt liquor marketed to low-income, urban blacks. The other is for the “Timmy Hillnigger” clothing line, targeted at a black youth market striving to keep up with barely aff ordable designer fashion trends that, ironically, the hip-hop style originated. Bouncing to a rhythmic beat, the new millennium coon show’s master of ceremonies, Honeycutt (Thomas Jeff erson Byrd), now decked out in hood-homeboy gear, extols the virtues of “Da Bomb,” which is not only poisoned with a liver-killing, superal- cohol kick, but, according to homeboy Honeycutt, has been developed by “our scientists” to help you “get your freak on.” To the hip-hop beat, the screen fi lls with a voluptuous, bikini-clad black woman straddling a huge, bomb-shaped bottle with fi ns, erotically riding it between her legs. Here, satire barely needs exaggeration in pointing to marketing expecta- tions and the viewing audiences’ received perceptions when it comes to inner-city blacks. It is also a given in the commercial ad industry that sex sells alcohol, and that this would apply even more so to a “captive” audi- ence. In this instance, none could be more captive than postindustrial, post-post-racial, ghettoized black youth, cut off from education, jobs and opportunity, sucking down alcohol-fortifi ed forty-ounce bottles of malt brew mockingly labeled “Da Bomb.”

In the next commercial Lee’s satirical instincts drift more toward the lit- eral and editorial. A young, rich and white Timmy Hillnigger smiles into the camera and smugly tells his inner-city, black youth audience/market how

120 Ed Guerrero

appreciative he is that they have spent what little income they have striving to keep up with his high-end, hip-hop, designer clothing line. Hillnigger thanks his most devoted consumers in the “gheeeto,” as he pronounces it, for making him even richer than when he started out, and recommends his new wardrobe line, outfi tted with the aesthetic touch of bullet holes. Again cut to a hip-hop beat, accompanying homeboys bustin’ their new dance moves on a dilapidated inner-city block as an alluring, scantily clad black model rubs her booty on the fender of Hillnigger’s pristine white Bent- ley while squealing his praises. Treading the fi ne line between the mocked and the mocker in their literal and disturbing expressions, Lee’s message in both ads pushes satire into new dimensions of social and self-critique. Throughout the fi lm, Bamboozled makes it clear that many black people, in their market-driven desire for the consumer goods and styles that enslave and devalue them, contribute to their own exploitation and sense of abjec- tion. This is especially ironic because it is the insurgent genius of black youth cultural production and politics that fashioned the design of, and desire for, these commodities in the fi rst place. Exposure of the commercial exploitation of type and stereotype by the ad industry persistently recurs as a theme in Spike Lee productions. Bamboozled’s ads remind us of the stinging, hilarious “Gospel Pack” fried chicken and “Mumblin’ Jack” malt liquor ad campaigns of the Lee-produced Drop Squad (1994).

Bamboozled also suggests that in the broader project of neo-minstrelsy, type and stereotype are fl uid, often interchangeable representations that can assume many masks, poses and layered expressions in consumer culture. The rap group the Mau Maus represent yet another turn in Lee’s argument that blacks are complicit in their mass-mediated captivity and exploitation. Rap- pin’ in a barely comprehensible amalgam of raw language, fractured “Ebon- ics” mixed with fl ashes of poetic insight, the Mau Maus sport big hats, lumpy do-rags and uniformly black baggy clothing while drawing inspiration from forty-ounce bottles of Da Bomb and cheap brandy. Here again Lee’s satire turns critical, self-refl exive and points the camera into the mirror of abjec- tion. Brewed in anger and malt liquor and sprinkled with moments of igno- rance and clarity, the Mau Maus’s parody a new millennium militancy. With insightful fl ashes, and yet enslaved by the very corporate forces and commod- ities that they refl exively rebel against, the Mau Maus cast an ambivalent and ultimately destructive shadow across Bamboozled’s story world. In moments and breaks, their poetic descriptions of the rage and beauty of blackness are profoundly diagnostic and perceptive: “Black fathers, black mothers, black brothers handcuff ed together and headed upstate in black vans, guarded by black dogs. . . . Black lips sucking crack into blackened lungs.” They then conclude the rap “Black Is Blak” (striving for the thematic force of “Fight the Power” in Lee’s Do the Right Thing) in the affi rmative, with deep philo- sophic insight: “And what is Black? . . . shade of the Universe.” The anger and truth are there. However, the Mau Maus’s shaky grasp of revolutionary theory and literature is also satirically clear. Regarding the work of Frantz

Bamboozled 121

Fanon, they angrily warn “Better be glad I ain’t read Wretched . . . yet.” As a topper, their grand intellectual contribution to the expressive representa- tion of blackness results in a reduction: it is to drop the c from black, thus spelling it blak.

If the Mau Maus represent a vulgar and insurgent, however one-dimen- sional, grasp of the political philosophy and expression of blackness, then, as Bamboozled tells it, they are not alone nor are they in a situation far from the “two real coons,” Mantan and Sleep’n Eat, or the buppies Delacroix and Sloan. It is only after they fail to make the cut in an audition for the pend- ing show that the Mau Maus increasingly sour on the neo-minstrel project. Moreover, when it comes to self-destruction, all of the black characters, rep- resenting a range of mass-mediated styles and cultural expressions of black- ness, share the same fate, fi nding themselves caught up in and ultimately destroyed by the same grand, cosmic conspiracy, the electronic coon show. For they all experience the psychological calamities of (as Paul Lawrence Dunbar so famously expressed it) “wearing the mask.” Although in rap or hip-hop style, the Mau Maus play dialectical counterpoint to Dunbar. Con- trarily, they wear the mask of rage and anger as opposed to the traditional minstrel “mask of happiness”15 so poetically described by Dunbar.

Consequently, as the New Millennium Minstrel Show becomes increas- ingly celebrated, and wearing blackface takes its place in popularity next to the hula hoop and the pet rock, almost all of Bamboozled’s African Ameri- can characters come to suff er the many psychic ups and downs of feeding an increasingly abject and confl icted double consciousness. To underscore the pain of their psychic condition while demonstrating a brilliant grasp of intertextuality as visual history, throughout Bamboozled Lee intercuts fi lm clips from Hollywood’s deeply disquieting racial and racist archive. Culled from old movie clips, everyone gets into playing the minstrel coon, from forgotten minor actors to the most popular white stars, including Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland and even Bugs Bunny, all performing their own slightly twisted and nuanced inter- pretation of white-blackface.

As Delacroix combs cinema’s and television’s representational uncon- scious for inspiration for his coon show, Bamboozled is spiced with black- blackface clips from Amos ’n’ Andy, Good Times, The Jeff ersons, The Jack Benny Show and cameo performances by “real coons” such as Ste- pin Fetchit, Willie Best, Mantan Moreland, Pigmeat Markham and oth- ers. Showing the infl uence of the work of the late Marlon Riggs in Ethnic Notions, Lee also points out that the stereotypic niggerism had a large historical presence and circulation in America as commercial kitsch. With the New Millennium Minstrel Show garnering acclaim, Delacroix starts to draw upon the socially constructed shadows lurking in the mirror of abjec- tion, which by now have taken up permanent residence in his head and lit- erally talk back to him in schizophrenic, mirror sequences as he dialogues with his minstrel, shadow self. Lee also critically alludes to the “negative

122 Ed Guerrero

versus positive” image debate that has drawn so much discursive energy in the past. In counterpoint to Dunwitty who, riffi ng on Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” decorates his offi ce with “positive” black star sports fi gures, entertainers and celebrities, Delacroix starts to decorate the shelves of his offi ce and home with “negative” minstrel Americana consist- ing of dancing puppet darkies, toys, mammy dolls, salt and pepper shak- ers, memorabilia and, his favorite, “Jolly Nigger Bank,” featuring a large slotted mouth with huge exaggerated lips to take in coins. With this last artifact, the analogy becomes exact: the Jolly Nigger in the form of a toy bank actually gets paid for being a mass-produced, commodity “jigaboo.” Nor is this psychic insinuation lost on Delacroix as he increasingly realizes that this is exactly his professional predicament.

With the newly revived fashion and antics of neo-minstrelsy spreading infectiously across the land and the fi lm’s African Americans falling into various states of psychological disrepair and ruin, all of Bamboozled’s con- tradictions and pathologies bubble up into one ugly, horrifi c (and in spots, bitingly funny) staging of the New Millennium Minstrel Show. Predictably, this turns out to be the coon show from Hell.

It’s no coincidence that for the real-time movie audience watching Bam- boozled, the show is very diffi cult to sit through, as it stirs up too much of past, uncomfortable historical truths: dancing jigaboos, whips, chains, howling, bloodthirsty lynch mobs, African Americans hanging from trees, all of the confl icts of white supremacy that still echo in the historic archive and electronic telepresence. At best, this vignette amounts to a sort of rep- resentational catharsis, a confronting and then purging of all those provo- cations, gestures and ghostly coon caricatures infl icted on black people during minstrelsy’s checkered one-hundred-year reign of imagistic terror. Now at the top of its ratings, the show has made blackface a national obses- sion and the cry “I’m a nigger” a pop culture mantra. The multiracial audi- ence, all in blackface, follow the “call-and-response” lead of the master of ceremonies, Honeycutt (Thomas Jeff erson Byrd), who opens the show with his signature slogan “niggers is a beautiful thing.” Then in televangelist mode, people of various racial and ethnic origins pop up from the audi- ence and enthusiastically give testimonials about the troubled confl uence of race, identity and powerlessness, in the end all proclaiming, “I’m a nigger.” Of course, one can see at this big-screen instant Spike Lee’s considerable talent as a creative imitator, as a synthesizer of classic cinematic moments. Lee has the knack for scavenging images, scenes, themes and plot details from other classic fi lms and fashioning them to his own fresh ends. When it comes to depicting network duplicity and the cynical manipulation of the viewing public, one can see the infl uences of A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Network (1976) in Bamboozled. Lee in spots and moments openly borrows from, or alludes to, both fi lms. Bamboozled is dedicated to novelist and screenwriter Bud Schulberg, writer of A Face in the Crowd, one of the fi rst fi lms out of Hollywood to depict the bamboozlement of television’s early

Bamboozled 123

audience. And in a webcast, public execution and other creatively imitative details, including Sleep’n Eat’s call for the audience to shout out that they “won’t take it anymore,” one can clearly see the infl uence of Network.

At the high point of the taping, with the audience shouting out their love of being a nigger, star of the show, now in his dressing room, Man- tan (Savion Glover), takes a hard, cold stare into the mirror of abjection and encounters the bottomless depths of his self-contempt and negation. Once again going through the (historically accurate) dreary ritual of burn- ing cork and applying it to his face, Mantan looks at his masked persona and realizes, as Bert Williams did a century before him, that “blackening up” and playing the coon to be a star, although materially rewarding, is tough on psyche and soul. As noted by Williams, the coon persona is per- petually at war with the African American inner self and its historic, com- munal ideals: the freedom struggle, the quest for self-determination and self-presentation, dignity and the collective vision of a liberated future. The late poet-rapper Tupac Shakur concurs with Bert Williams, Spike Lee and Mantan. Having similar feelings about the split self and doubleness, voic- ing consonant thoughts in hip-hop shorthand, he writes: “I’m at war with my own heart sometimes. There’s two niggas inside me. One who wants to live in peace, and the other won’t die unless he’s free.”16 Feeling the same deepening confl icts within his own split self, Mantan decides on the ultimate act of rebellion against minstrelsy, the mask, the audience and the network. He decides to appear on stage out of costume, as himself, without the burden (or benefi t) of the blackface persona.

Bert Williams, himself having once been singled out as a black celebrity scapegoat and hunted during one of New York’s infamous race riots, under- stood well that unmasking to stand revealed in the glow of the true self and its talents is a risky move. This is especially true when your audience has such high expectations of your playing the coon, and thus providing sym- bolic assurance that a darker people are contained in their assigned social “place” as “subpersons.” Predictably, Mantan is fi red on the spot by an outraged Dunwitty and thrown off the set. This starts a cascade of ruinous, violent events that brings Bamboozled to its melodramatic crash ending. In the studio parking lot, with his career as a coon over, Mantan is kidnapped by the Mau Maus, who focus their rage on his minstrel antics. He is sub- jected to a mock trial on the Internet, found guilty of racial (mis)represen- tation and condemned to be executed on a live broadcast in cyberspace. Mantan pleading that his minstrel routines were “only entertainment” and then being slowly shot to death while dancing in a hail of ricocheting bul- lets (as if in a cheap Western) is, again, one of those scenes that’s hard to watch for the same reason the assassination scene in Lee’s Malcolm X is hard to watch. Both scenes exude a graphic, hyperreal violence, amplifi ed by fi ring multiple gunshots into the victims, that panders to the technical at the expense of narrative meaning, thus betraying a deeper understanding of the victims’ artistry, politics and humanity.

124 Ed Guerrero

For its black characters, Bamboozled’s downward spiral and dénoue- ment follows swiftly. After Mantan’s grim cybercast execution (a ratings success), the Mau Maus are cornered and themselves summarily exe- cuted by the police. This racist shoot-down clearly echoes the political refrain of Do the Right Thing, on acts of extrajudicial police murder.17 The Mau Maus are given no chance to surrender and the lightest of the crew, dubbed “1/16 Blak” (M. C. Search), over his protests is taken alive, thus linking survival (predictably) to skin color entitlement. Meanwhile, taking yet another deadly turn, all of this pathological “coonitis” comes full circle. Echoing literary clichè or ‘60s t.v., (perhaps Hitchcock or Twilight Zone), inner self completely absorbs corporate persona, with face conforming to mask and Delacroix winding up in blackface, mum- bling and hallucinating that his Jolly Nigger Bank, now nervously ani- mated, is moving on its own. Sloan enters, completely shattered by the death of her brother and head of the Mau Maus (Mos Def). After a tense melodramatic exchange of blaming and venting, Sloan shoots Delac- roix; as he lies dying, we hear his voice-over quoting James Baldwin about people paying for what they do by what they allow themselves to become.

So then, Spike Lee, with Bamboozled, has made a fi lm that takes a tan- gled problem, the (mis)representation of black people through the general- ized performance of neo-minstrelsy, and reworks this performance into a resistant, painfully satirical text that provokes useful debate and critique. For all of Bamboozled’s shock eff ect and consciousness raising, I doubt that Mantan, Sleep’n Eat and variations on the theme will ever completely retire from America’s media and multiple electronic screens, from cell phone to Jumbotron. I don’t know if that is entirely possible. Black entertainers and their general audiences will forever have to negotiate the vast and treacher- ous, discursive terrain of “race and representation,” from musty “negative versus positive image” debates; to Afrocentric yearnings for a lost ontol- ogy; to “racial uplift” critiques; to search-and-destroy missions against the stereotype; to voyeuristic Precious tours of ghetto ruin; to the most current semiotic, sociological, political interrogations of African American cinema/ cultural production. Even the most cursory look at contemporary black screen, stage and stardom reveals the not-so-distant echoes of the black- face phenomenon (and its whiteface counterpoint). To name a few who labor in the ambiguous fi elds of what Spike Lee would call “Shadowland” while struggling with the representational tensions of “type versus stereo- type”: Mr. T, Martin Lawrence, Flavor Flav, Chris Rock, Monique, Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels, Clarence Thomas, all subtly or gregariously, justly or unjustly, bear this “burden of representation,” as James Baldwin would call it. And when it comes to grand, dialectical reversals and twists on a theme (the black performance in whiteface), nobody (except for maybe Sammy Sosa) comes even close to the chromatic, self-fashioning journey of the late and great Michael Jackson. In many ways and moments, then, perhaps

Bamboozled 125

blackface and minstrelsy will always embody the persistent return of the repressed powers of the racial id, either sustaining or pejorative, and always ironic, as the “blak,” shade of the Universe, seeks full representation in the American Dream.

NOTES

1. Charles Blow, “Obama’s Race War,” New York Times, July 30, 2010; Bob Herbert, “Shirley Sherrod, Thrown to the Wolves,” New York Times, July 23, 2010; Tobin Harshaw, “Our Post-Post-Racial Summer,” New York Times, July 23, 2010.

2. Ishmael Reed, “Fade to White,” New York Times, February 5, 2010; Armond White, “Pride and Precious,” New York Press, November 4, 2009; Jill Nel- son, “Precious Not So Precious for Everybody: Black Writers Not Feelin’ It,” http://bossip.com/216628/for-discussion-precious-not-so-precious-for- everbody-black-writers-not-feelin-it/#more-216628.

3. Spike Lee, “Spike Lee Rips Tyler Perry,” Global Grind, May 29, 2009, http:// globalgrind.com/channel/gossip/content/679631/spike-lee-rips-tyler-perry/; The symposium (March 26–29, 2010) “Black Cinema Now,” co-organizers Manthia Diawara and Ed Guerrero, at New York University was a coher- ent, up-to-date take on the fi lms, issues and debates in black American cin- ema. The conference notes are archived at the Institute of African American Aff airs, New York University. Also see NYU Cinema Studies blogsite http:// blogs.nyu.edu/tisch/cinemastudies/2010/04/recap_black_cinema_now_sym- posi.html; Ed Guerrero, “A Circus of Dreams and Lies: The Black Film Wave at Middle Age,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Reader, ed. Toby Miller (New York: Routledge, 2009).

4. David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 10.

5. Angela Dillard, “Multicultural Conservativism: What It Is, Why It Matters,” Chronicle of Higher Education 2 (March 2001): 7–10.

6. Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in Early American Film (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971); Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise & Demise of an American Jester (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

7. Herman S. Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); see espe- cially chap. 1, “The New Conditions of Black Cultural Production.”

8. Andrew Hacker, Money: Who Has How Much and Why (New York: Scrib- ner, 1997), 24. Here, commenting on the twenty-year period from 1977 to 1997 alone, sociologist Hacker asks: “Has there been racial progress? Two decades ago the typical black family received $605 for every $1000 made by its white counterpart. Yet today, the ratio is measurably lower, having dropped to $577 to $1000.” Thomas M. Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Alphonso Pinkney, The Myth of Black Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); George Lipsitz, The Pos- sessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profi t from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

126 Ed Guerrero

9. In fact, this representational strategy was at the core of civil rights movement thinking. As noted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “the brutality with which offi cials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught . . . in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare reveal- ing the naked truth to the whole world” (Why We Can’t Wait [New York: New American Library, 1964], 30).

10. Krasner, Resistance, 25–29. 11. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Vintage International,

2007), 55. 12. Nelson Davis, “Relationships and the N Word,” Huffi ngton Post, August 24,

2010, http://www.huffi ngtonpost.com/nelson-davis/relationships-and-the-n- w_b_693238.html.

13. Geary Groth, “A Dream of Perfect Reception: The Movies of Quentin Taran- tino,” in Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffl er, ed. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 186.

14. Frank Chin, Aiiieeeee (New York: Doubleday, 1975). The introduction theo- rizes the concept of a patronizing, appropriating “racist love,” as the com- plement of a discriminatory, murderous “racist hate.” Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

15. Krasner, Resistance, 96. For a detailed overall discussion of the travails of the mask and masking as a survival strategy for black men, also see Richard Majors and Janet Billison, The Cool Pose: Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Touchstone, 1992).

16. Rob Kenner and George Pitts, VX: Ten Years of Vibe Photography (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 54.

17. For a relevant discussion of Lee’s take on the politics and representation of police brutality, see Ed Guerrero, Do the Right Thing (London: British Film Institute Modern Classics Series, 2001).

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