When the Spike Lee film Bamboozled first came out in October 2000, Professor Charlotte Pierce-Baker of the women’s studies department took her class to go see it at the theater. “It was a class on black language and culture in the United States,” Pierce-Baker recounted, “an English and linguistics class cross-listed under cultural anthropology and African and African American studies.”
She prepared her class for the movie’s controversial themes by first screening Marlon Riggs's Ethnic Notions, a groundbreaking 1986 documentary that explores visual representations of black people in relation to cultural attitudes. Such images, such as popular “Jemima” figures or “happy darkie” servants, have been linked to the disempowerment of black people and, by extension, the perpetuation of racism.
Bamboozled picks up this discussion through the fictional story of Pierre Delacroix, a television writer played by Damon Wayans. After repeatedly being encouraged to write shows that are “more black,” Delacroix decides to stick it to his boss by pitching a show that is so over-the-top with racial stereotypes that he believes the network will either come to its senses or fire him, making him better off regardless. The show Delacroix writes is a modern-day minstrel, featuring two street performers in blackface telling racially charged jokes as they sing and dance from their watermelon patch set. Delacroix's plan backfires, however, when the show is a huge commercial success, drawing the film into a convoluted exploration of race, identity, and blame.
After viewing the movie, Pierce-Baker's class sat down for a meal and discussed their critical interpretations of the film. “It's much easier to discuss this kind of thing over hamburgers and Coke,” she explained.
Without the benefit of this sort of careful preparation and digestion, Pierce-Baker asserted that Bamboozled can be overwhelming, producing discomfort, embarrassment and anger. “You wanted to look away,” Pierce-Baker said, “and audiences made that quite clear.” Indeed, the film stayed in theatres for just five weeks, earning less than $2 million.
Cultural anthropology professor John Jackson expressed his belief that the negative audience reaction had to do with “lazy viewing” of the film. As Jackson pointed out, moviegoers who go to the theater to “check out” into another world for two hours don't expect to be confronted with problems about their own society and culture. Instead of offering an escape from reality, Bamboozled demands reflection upon the norms and institutions that shape it. “You can't be passive and watch this film,” Jackson said. “It will run you over.”
The same qualities that made Bamboozled unpopular in the theater, however, have made it a classroom standard here at Duke, where professors from a wide range of departments including AAAS and cultural anthropology frequently show it in their classes. Jackson has used the film in everything from an introductory cultural anthropology class to a film class on the documentary experience.
Jackson finds the film's exploration of the corrosive abilities of media representations to be so powerful because it refuses to let anyone—even the filmmakers themselves—off the hook for their complicity in the creation of these images. “It does a good job trying to depict how unwieldy and Frankenstein-like our cultural images have been,” Jackson explained. “Spike Lee and Damon Wayans are depicting these cultural representations, but at the same time they're referencing their own previous works and their contribution to this monstrous creation.” Jackson referred specifically to Wayans’s role in the sketch comedy show In Living Color and earlier Spike Lee films.
Cultural anthropology graduate student Johnetta Pressley has led discussions on the film focusing on these issues. “It's a hard film to watch because everyone is implicated in it,” Pressley said in an e-mail. “No one is exempt from Lee's critique, so people's initial reaction is to reject it.” In the film, when a group of gangster rappers takes issue with Delacroix's minstrel show, Lee uses the opportunity to at once criticize the role of rap and hip hop culture in creating a crippling image of black people that allows racism to persist.
Sophomore Tiffany Locus has elected to show the film as a resident advisor program in Gilbert-Addoms dorm to focus on precisely this issue. “MTV and BET inspired me to show this film,” she said. “In my opinion, blatant acts of sexism, racism and other disrespectful acts have taken place under the approval of those channels…I wanted my residents to partake in a contemporary analysis of overt acts of racism.” Bamboozled is a useful catalyst for this discussion, she asserted, because it explicitly addresses “self-degradation and racism and how people passively allow discrimination to occur so long as it is labeled entertainment.”
As cultural anthropology professor Lee Baker explained, “Despite the move towards multiculturalism and a milieu of vigilant political correctness, Hollywood still traffics in the very profitable and entertaining images that were initially cast during the late 19th century and are enduring today.”
Having found a welcoming venue in the classroom, Bamboozled forces students to examine their own complicity in the creation and perpetuation of these images and the effect such so-called entertainment can have on minority communities. Pressley noted that even educators must be willing to question their own roles in cultural creation. Just as the filmmakers in Bamboozled could not claim to be passive mediators, so do those who teach Bamboozled become both interpretors and creators of a cultural document. “The film is addressed not only to those who've never thought about those issues,” she explained, “but also to those of us who like to believe we're savvy to them, because we still might be contributing to the problem.”
Even if the film offends you, she said, “it forces you to think about the issues it presents.” No one is off the hook.
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