Anyone seen the movie “Bamboozled” directed Spike Lee?
http://www.bamboozledmovie.com/ I’m not sure if you guys seen it or not. If you guys did, it would be helpful in providing some insights for my question. Oh, and if something like this doesn’t belong in Cafe Society, feel free to move it.
I have recently saw this film and for my Cultural Conversation class, which centers around African-American and historical arts, I am ask to write an extensive essay about this. The question I’m asked is “how does the movie interacts in the cultural conversation of shaping black identity?”
I’m interpreting the above statements as how as African-American identity been shaped throughout centries based on the arts. After the abolishment of slavery, Blacks and their culture still faced discrimation against the White oppressors. The minstrel show was a misleading form of entertainment for Whites to make fun of Black people and their culture. Unfortunately, in this modern socitey of corporate competiton, a subtle form of “minstrel” still exist. With gangsta rap, movies in which Blacks are the bad guys, White men in movies pretending they are Black, etc, they White corporates think they know Black people but are really only defining them by popular culture. What does it really mean to be an African-American in America? This is what the satrical movie “Bamboozeled” was about.
Ok, so how should I develop ideas in understanding how all of these shaped Blacks indentity and the argument of the movie? I’m sure it will involve understanding historical writers such as Malcom X, WEB DuBois, and others. Do you know how I can develop ideas in relating these people understand the movie and the identity of African-American in America?
Well, this may sound confusing but perhaps you can steer me in the right direction. I am also currently reading a biography of Malcom X but not really sure what I should I be looking for. Any help on where I should begin my research?
I think you’ve got it, essentially. To get to the heart of the movie, I think you have to look at the minstrel show on two fronts: first, the reason for its creation; and two, the reason why it was popular. The protagonist of the movie (Delacroix? is that his name?) realizes that society doesn’t want to see African Americans on T.V. unless they play buffoons, so he tries to overdo it. People love it, to his dismay. In other words, he plays right into their hands and underestimates the depths to which the racism and stereotyping plague American society. As far as the argument of the movie, Spike Lee basically comes right out and says that blacks in popular culture are treated as jokes, and blacks who allow the stereotyping to continue become, like the (Delacroix?) guy, a perpetuation of the very profiling he sought to attack.
Also, the Malcolm X book is a good idea, as I believe the title of the film is a tribute to Malcolm X’s “You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray, led amok. You’ve been bamboozled.”
Last note: you might also want to check out The Producers as well, since the formula used in this film is largely borrowed from it.
It ddn’t strike me as plausible that the Minstrel show could be a huge hit with a modern TV audience and I object to a bunch of pseudo-terrorists like the Mau-Maus being described as “brilliant”, when their scheme consists solely of:
kidnapping an actor, forcing him to perform, then gunning him down on live TV. Yeah, that’s really insightful. By making violence seem like an attractive solution, Spike Lee ends up embracing the same stereotypes I thought this movie was trying to satire
The movie’s final montage of stereotypical minstrel-ish characters in 20th-century film (which, disturbingly, included Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland) has the movie’s only real laugh. A white actor is putting on blackface makeup and talking to his black servant:
“This stuff is hard to put on, and take off. [looks at servant] Y’know, you’re lucky!”
That one bit from an old movie had more insight into white cluelessness than anything Lee had done in Bamboozled.
The most successful black TV show in history (and one of the most successful overall) was The Cosby Show, which I don’t think is even referenced in Bamboozled, probably because it disproves Lee’s premise that successful black TV characters can only be buffoons.
I would also explicitly explore how African-American’s themselves were complicit in this. Represented by Delacroix, he looks on in horror at his Frakenstien, yet he doesn’t end it. His performers don’t end it either. And apparently the Black audience isn’t too worked up about it. They have all been “Bamboozled”.
I thought the film was an interesting failure as a satire. An important message presented unevenly.
The montage of clips and images at the end of the film packed more sickening emotional punch for me than the entire rest of the film. Spike Lee is not a subtle filmmaker, which worked against him in telling the story. To me the most effective kind of satire lures you in by sounding rational or starting out as likeable and intriguing or giving the appearance of normality and only later showing the cruel or ugly face underneath. This film felt unreal from the start, Damon Wayan’s portrayl of Delacroix was too intentionally stilted. He wasn’t acting “white”, he was acting how standup comedians portray whites. His attempt to get fired by creating the show was too obvious. If he had manipulated his boss, a white man who thought he understood more about blacks (and was somehow “blacker”) than Delacroix, into going ahead with the show, it would have seemed more realistic.
I didn’t see the Mau-Maus as “brilliant” either; I saw them as deluded opportunists. When they try to live the image they want to portray as rappers, they give the audience a show of black on black violence, and are destroyed for it. I remember thinking that no one would remember afterward what they believed they were trying to say, just the violence of what they did. Maybe this was Spike’s comment on gangster rap, maybe I’m reading too much into it? Wouldn’t a group of rappers be more likely to have an impact on popular culture if they were to start wearing blackface rather than a TV variety show, on a second tier network, that was a direct copy of minstrel shows? If Delacroix was a record executive instead of working in TV? But that would have been a different movie.
Maybe this was supposed to be Manray/Mantan’s payback for his own personal ambitions at the expense of his people. Womack walked away from the show over his guilt and shame and lived, but at the expense of his success.
How the movie interacts with the conversation about shaping black identity is by laying bare the examples of how overt in their contempt racist portrayals of blacks were compared to now where those portrayals often masquerade as blacks taking control of how they are portrayed (like many of those UPN and WB sitcoms) when it’s just the same old stereotypes in new packages. Can anyone say that shows like The Wayans Brothers or The Parkers are positive portraits of blacks in America? Or the film B.A.P.S.? The characters may get the best lines and the lead roles now, but they are still being portrayed as buffoons. Spike Lee doesn’t offer any real solutions or alternatives, but he rarely does in his films.