Bamboozled

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For the teletext, see Bamboozle. For the music festival, see The Bamboozle.

Bamboozled
Directed by	Spike Lee
Produced by	Kisha Imani Cameron Jon Kilik & Spike Lee
Written by	Spike Lee
Starring	Damon Wayans Jada Pinkett Smith Savion Glover Michael Rapaport Tommy Davidson
Distributed by	New Line Cinema
Release date(s)	October 6, 2000
Running time	135 min
Language	English
Budget	$10,000,000
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Bamboozled is a 2000 satirical film written and directed by Spike Lee about a modern televised minstrel show featuring black actors donning blackface makeup and the violent fall-out from the show's success. The title means "purposefully confused, tricked or led astray".

[edit] Overview

The content is indeed heavily satirical, with its show within a show featuring its characters, all in blackface, performing in a cotton field with plentiful watermelons. The Roots have a role as the show's house band, The Alabama Porch Monkeys. The audiences within the movie, initially baffled, come to love the show, and after a few episodes even elderly white women show up in blackface and proclaim themselves "niggers".

One way Lee unsettles the moviegoer is by ensuring that his minstrel show's extreme racial stereotypes are combined with superb entertainment. The show features excellent musicianship, sharp timing and exciting dancing. This compels audience members (both onscreen and in the movie theater) to enjoy the performances even as they question whether their enjoyment is morally right.

The script expresses rage and grief at media representations of black people, largely through the eyes of its moral center, Sloan Hopkins (played by Jada Pinkett Smith). It also satirizes many icons of black culture including Ving Rhames, Will Smith, Johnnie Cochran, and Al Sharpton (Cochran and Sharpton appear as themselves in the film, protesting the television series).

The movie also stars Savion Glover as Manray (stage name Mantan, after Mantan Moreland), Tommy Davidson as Womack (stage name Sleep n' Eat, after Willie Best), Thomas Jefferson Byrd as Honeycutt, and Mos Def, Canibus, and DJ Scratch as three of the activist/hip hop group The Mau Maus. Mos Def's character, who calls himself "Big Blak Afrika" (refusing to spell the word with the "c" because "they don't even pronounce that shit!") is also Sloan's older brother.

Bamboozled was dedicated to Budd Schulberg.

[edit] Synopsis

Pierre (Peerless) Delacroix, played by Damon Wayans, is a Harvard-educated black man working for a television network that routinely rejects his proposals for intelligent shows involving black people. He is further tormented by his boss Thomas Dunwitty (played by Michael Rapaport), a white man who proudly proclaims that he is more black than Delacroix and that he can use the word "nigger" since he is married to a black woman.

Facing the necessity of either coming up with a hit black-centric show or being fired, Delacroix decides to aim for the latter. If the network fires him, he rationalizes, it will release him from his employment contract, allowing him to seek work at another network. With help from his personal assistant, Sloan Hopkins (played by Jada Pinkett Smith), Delacroix decides to pitch a minstrel show, complete with black actors in blackface, in the belief that the network will reject such over-the-top racism and fire him on the spot.

Delacroix and Hopkins recruit two homeless street performers, Manray and Womack, to star in the stage show. While Womack is horrified when Delacroix tells him about the show, his best friend Manray willfully agrees to star in the show as his big chance to become rich and famous.

To Delacroix's horror, not only does Dunwitty enthusiastically endorse the show, it also becomes hugely successful. Manray and Womack become big stars while Delacroix becomes a lightning rod of controversy over the show, which he defends as being satirical. Delacroix embraces the fame of the show while Hopkins becomes horrified at the racist nightmare she's helped unleash. Meanwhile, Womack finally has enough of the show and its racist nature and quits much to the shock of Manray. This causes Manray and Hopkins to grow closer, which angers Delacroix. Delacroix tries to break up Manray's relationship with Hopkins by accusing her of sleeping with Manray to further her career. Then he reveals that Hopkins only got her position as Delacroix's assistant by sleeping with him.

The move backfires though, and only further drives Manray and Hopkins together. The two create a tape of offending racist footage culled from assorted movies, cartoons, and newsreels to try and shame Delacroix into stopping production of the show. When Delacroix refuses to view the tape, Manray defiantly announces that he will no longer wear blackface. He appears in front of the studio audience during a TV taping and does his dance number in his regular clothing. The crowd immediately turns against Manray and Dunwitty personally fires Manray from the show.

Kicked out of the studio, Manray is then captured by Hopkins' brother Big Blak Afrika (played by Mos Def) and is executed by him and his fellow rappers the Mau Maus on a live internet webcast. The Mau Maus are quickly caught by the police and shot down in a hail of bullets, with the only survivor being 1/16th black, who because he is only 1/16 African-American does not look African-American and is spared by the police, tearfully proclaiming he is "still black". Furious, Hopkins confronts Delacroix at gunpoint and demands that he watch the tape she and Manray prepared for him. Delacroix refuses and tries to get the gun away, only to be shot in the stomach. Hopkins, horrified, flees while proclaiming that it was Delacroix's own fault he got shot. Delacroix watches the tape as he lies dying on the floor.

The film concludes with a montage of racially insensitive and demeaning clips of black characters from Hollywood films of the first half of the 20th century. Among the films used in the sequence are Gone With The Wind, Holiday Inn, Ub Iwerks' cartoon Little Black Sambo, Walter Lantz's cartoon Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat, the Looney Tunes short All This and Rabbit Stew, and, from the Hal Roach comedy School's Out, Our Gang (Little Rascals) kids Allen "Farina" Hoskins and Matthew "Stymie" Beard.

[edit] Film production

Most of the movie was shot on Mini DV digital video using the Sony VX 1000 camera. This kept the budget to $10 million USD, as Lee had trouble justifying financing for the project. The minstrel show sequences were shot on 16 mm film, and processed to video for editing.

[edit] Analysis

The notion of degradation or “shuckin’ and jivin’” is at the center of the film. Pierre, like the black minstrel performers of the 19th century, is forced to subdue his own pride in the name of his career. Any pride that one could have in their intelligence or their talent is negated by the humiliation and self hatred that comes by being forced into playing an active role in one’s own degradation and humiliation.

Other movies such as Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, and the HBO film Dancing in September have dealt with the atmosphere both black actors and black sitcoms face, either appealing to stereotypes or attempting to recreate the success of The Cosby Show, the first and longest running sitcom featuring a black professional middle class family. While these sitcoms rate highly among black households, they are consistently beaten by white oriented sitcoms. Often the current state of sitcoms geared towards black audiences are relegated to a network such as UPN. While these shows feature black professionals and middle class characters, they are often criticized for portraying their black characters in a stereotypical way. The problem lies in the inherently smaller black population in the US and the inability of many black sitcoms to appeal to a white audience.The notion of “buffoonery” is often the focus of the problem with the black sitcom.

In Bamboozled, "Mantan's New Millennium Minstrel Show" (along with its racist content) becomes a huge success, and as a consequence its satirical value is diminished. The undeniable humor and talent presented in the show by the performers creates a conflicted viewing experience for both the audience in the film and the audience watching the film. Spike Lee acknowledges this conflict and presents it as having dangerous and ultimately socially destructive consequences. If such a negative representation is not clearly understood as being satirical, or is not appreciated as such, the humor found in it becomes degrading and the imagery disturbing.

This is evident in the very straightforward portrayal of the minstrel show and the onscreen audience's superficial appreciation of the subject matter. While the creative parties might have had the intention of mocking stereotypes, the presentation fails to highlight the satirical nature, as Spike Lee so deliberately does at the onset of the film. The theme of masks is central both literally and metaphorically in the film. The performers are black actors pretending to be white actors, pretending to be black. Their mask is one of the masks that black performers are forced wear, the mask of what a “typical” black person is like where Pierre’s is one of what the “typical” black man is not. The Mau Maus’ masks represent the anger and resentment worn by rappers under the guise of social consciousness. They are all controlled by the same mechanism that requires them to conform to a societal expectation in order to be successful in the eyes of that society. If they don’t conform they end up like Junebug, anonymous and unsuccessful, not to himself but through the eyes of the society that he rejects. The title Bamboozled refers to the position of black people in America. Its is not that they don’t have the choice to reject these expectations but that they feel as though they do not. They feel constrained and socially immobile and they end up playing an active role in their own denigration.

[edit] External links

• Bamboozled at the Internet Movie Database