Bamboozled (2000) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Damon Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Tommy Davidson
written and directed by Spike Lee

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I can see from the negative press surrounding Bamboozled that Spike Lee has supposedly overshot the mark. Nobody, they say, really likes the racist imagery of the minstrel show anymore, and they say that Lee’s insistence that people might pretty much disqualifies his film from serious attention. But I wonder. I remember being in a college-dorm common room watching a horribly racist production number in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, to hear one viewer shrug it off simply because the participants “looked happy,” and I remember having a roommate who owned a publicity knick-knack of a black baby bursting out of an orange who had no idea how it could be construed as offensive.

The truth of the matter is that such imagery is not only relevant to the current discourse on race but important to expose, if for no better reason than to see its lineage stretched out into the present and to emphasize that we haven’t come quite as far as we might like to think. I can’t think of a better place to begin that project than Bamboozled, which shows the tangled motives and buried feelings that lead to repetition, in covert form, of the same images the film unflinchingly exhumes.

We have Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), a Harvard-educated television writer whose scripts keep getting rejected for being “too white.” His white superior Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), married to a black wife with two biracial kids, claims proudly that he’s blacker than Pierre; long story short, he wants something “real” from him pronto. Knowing that he’s cornered, Pierre decides to craft a series idea so horribly offensive that he can be released from his contract. Thus “Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show” is drafted, cast with two street entertainers (Tommy Davidson and Savion Glover) as ‘two real coons’ who live in a watermelon patch and have humorous misadventures. To his horror, Dunwitty loves the idea, and the show turns out to be a ratings smash that divides the country into fans and protestors. For the rest of the film, Pierre is torn: Should he embrace the success that “Mantan” has brought him while accepting its negative imagery, or reject that imagery and find himself out in the cold?

From here the film sets out to explore the looking-glass world its black characters inhabit, predicated as it is on anticipating its acceptability to the white normality that calls the shots. Pierre’s actions, it turns out, are a reaction to the marginalized position of his comedian father; while the elder Delacroix pulls down a good living, his refusal to make his act acceptable to a white elite cost him the fame that he deserves. Pierre wrestles with his desire to avoid his father’s fate, and his assistant Sloan Hopkins (Jada Pinkett-Smith) argues with her rapper brother Big Blak Afrika (Mos Def) over the validity of their lives.

Sloan has steeled herself to the various compromises of making it up the white corporate ladder, making herself a cog in the machine of oppression; the self-styled Afrika has devoted himself to the denigration of whiteness, and has, with his group the Mau Maus, become a parody of black indignation. But whatever their stance, it becomes obvious that whiteness determines the course of their lives: black identity, it turns out, is defined negatively as that which is not white. The horror of their argument, as well as the crisis of Pierre’s collusion with the enemy, is that its participants have no ‘normality’ of their own, and have to carve niches for themselves out of the few shabby roles that are on offer.

All of this comes to a head in the shocking, relentlessly upbeat performances of the minstrel show, which serve the film as both an indictment of the way TV blacks are portrayed as comical buffoons and a re-education program that exposes the connection between the blatant racism of the past and the covert racism of the present. It’s important to know that the show is written entirely by white people, who remember the cartoonish blacks of “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times” in an attempt to come to grips with what will determine the content of the show. The minstrel show is revealed as simply the starting point to a whole way of thinking about black people, one in which the pop of the present is more than happy to re-iterate so long as it conceals its shady origins. Bamboozled is bold enough to get this lineage out in the open. We are treated to the misadventures of Mantan and Sleep’n’Eat, and the quandary of the actors who portray them, as an attempt to highlight the history of racist imagery and its seductive grip on the popular mind.

If all this sounds a little much for one movie to handle, let it be known that it’s Spike Lee’s best work since Do the Right Thing. Repeating that film’s density of ideas, Lee lets the data wash over the audience in waves, overloading us with information and building a latticework of speaking positions that evoke the deep complexity of its characters’ decisions. He is not about to let anyone off the hook for creating the climate that results in the “Mantan” show, nor is he entirely unsympathetic to the blacks who wind up furthering that climate in an attempt to find some piece of the pie. While some of the story developments are a bit clumsy, and the ending is too neat, the plot here is merely an excuse to riff on the dynamics of racism and evoke the few options left open to those who want the privileges that ought to go along with simply being human. And as a polemicist, Lee has few peers in mainstream American film, working up a series of epithets and catcalls that, through their offhandedness, embody the racial unconscious of the people who hurl them.

Lee is also acute in evoking the ominous threat of whiteness that lurks on the film’s edges. If you are white and felt that your enlightened state when it comes to race entitled you to something, expect to have the smug grin wiped straight off of your face. The white characters, peripheral though they might be, set the context for what every black character in the film has to do, which is to define themselves negatively against white expectations. One particularly unpleasant scene features a publicist explaining how “Mantan” will be defended to the press; when she steps over the line with Pierre and Sloan, she soldiers on, declaring that she has a degree in African-American studies as if it allowed her free range over the feelings of her black colleagues. After a while, the image of solo black people speaking to a room full of whites becomes chilling, providing more than enough motivation for the panic and hysteria that grips the protagonists.

Bamboozled is testament to both the skill of Spike Lee as writer-director and the situation in which he finds himself. Resentful of all of the roadblocks involved in being black in the entertainment industry, Lee has crafted a stunning poison-pen note to those who would define the parameters of his life. At once a historical reclamation project and a gauntlet flung down to those who control the image bank, Bamboozled is one of the best, most cogent and most powerful films of the year.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers The studio may have dropped the ball when marketing the theatrical release of Bamboozled, but their Platinum Series DVD is dignified. The film was transcribed to disc anamorphically at 1.78:1 from the 35mm blow-up of a mini-digital video source, a routine process that tends to polarize tech-minded viewers. I prefer it this way for aesthetic reasons–the plastic look of original tape can be detrimental to dramatic scenes. (Portions of “Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show” were shot on Super16, though it is my theory that that footage is fourth-generation, fifth including DVD.) There are times when its stompin’ 5.1 Dolby Digital sound overwhelms Bamboozled‘s low-resolution photography, but I appreciated the great care that went into a rather trippy mix; and once again, rap music proves King of the Subwoofer.

Subdued menus downplay the specialness of this package. I had two favourite extras, tops being a two-minute-and-thirty-second animated art gallery of unused one-sheets, many of them sassy enough to belong in the MoMA. I also very much enjoyed (the 16×9-enhanced!) “The Making of Bamboozled” (53 mins.), which loosely tracks the production’s progress and can claim as its sidebar commentators such diverse luminaries as reviewer Stanley Crouch and A Face in the Crowd screenwriter Budd Schulberg, one of Lee’s mentors and idols. While the doc’s extended length gives way to a bit too much back-slapping in the homestretch, the whole thing leaves a sweeter aftertaste than Lee’s characteristically spotty, nonanalytical commentary track.

Nineteen deleted sequences (in their untreated mini-DV form) make an appearance; the final six are actually alternative spots for “Da Bomb” and “Hillnigger,” and I must say, I found Lee’s attack on the advertising world the least sharp aspect of Bamboozled‘s satire. These outtakes otherwise reveal an omitted subplot involving the controversial hiring of a white, foreign music video director for the “Mantan” pilot, as well as more Network-style build-up to the climactic “Dance of Death.” Cast and crew bios, ‘clips’ for the Mau Maus‘ “Blak iz Blak” (say, where’s Mos Def among these supplements? He’s a natural on camera) and Gerald Levert’s “Dream with No Love,” and a trailer (anamorphic, 5.1) finish things off, not counting the DVD-ROM access to Bamboozled‘s website and Lee’s shooting script, a very different animal from the final product. I don’t see how anyone could feel bamboozled by this disc, and the film itself deserves an audience.

136 minutes; R; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; New Line