My Year Of Flops, #116 Case Files And A Mule Edition: Bamboozled

Spike, bubbeleh (can I call you
bubbeleh? I can? Thanks!), you're one of the greatest filmmakers of your generation.
Do you really want to share literary conceits with the stupid Baldwin? I didn't
think so. The point is to illustrate devastating satire by example, not to
define it upfront for the mouth-breathers in the audience.

Wayans recites the definition of
"satire" in the sort of pinched, nasal, gratingly unnatural voice that
third-rate black comedians employ to illustrate that white people be acting all
uptight and shit. Sadly, he maintains this annoying mannered speech pattern
throughout the film. Wayans peppers his speech with SAT vocabulary words and
anachronistic references to "Negroes," and illustrates his foppishly chosen
verbiage with florid, theatrical hand gestures. He over-e-nun-c-i-ates every
word. He sports a pencil-thin mustache and a weakness for the kind of
flamboyant purple suits favored by pimps, preachers, and Steve Harvey.

It's a bold, grating set of
acting choices that slathers a thick gloss of artifice over every word and
gesture. I still find Wayans the weakest aspect of Bamboozled, but I warmed up slightly to his performance this time
around. It's a burlesque of whiteness every bit as phony and unconvincing as
the ridiculous African-American affectations of his racist boss Michael
Rapaport.

As the film opens, Rapaport's
network is in trouble. The ratings are down, Wayans' pitches for new shows are
rejected as hopelessly dignified, and desperation has set in. After an
emergency staff meeting, Rapaport reads Wayans the riot act in his office,
which is decorated with giant pictures of black sports stars and arty African
masks. Rapaport casually drops racial epithets and heaps abuse on his
underling. When Wayans objects, Rapaport brags about his black wife and
biracial children and sneers, "I don't give a goddamned what that prick Spike
Lee said. Tarantino was right. Nigger is just a word."

In many ways, Rapaport, with his
fetishization of black culture, represents something more insidious than
blatant racism. Rapaport doesn't realize he's racist. On the contrary, he
considers himself culturally black, littering his talk with hackneyed slang
("I'm 'bout it, 'bout it") and hailing Kenan & Kel as "the stupidest shit on TV, yo."

With his job on the line, Wayans
tells strong-willed assistant Jada Pinkett Smith of his plan to pitch Rapaport
a pilot idea that "will be so negative, so offensive and racist. Hence, I will
prove my point. The point being that… the network does not want to see Negroes
on television unless they are buffoons." (Negroes being buffoons on television
these days constitutes the scheduling strategy of both VH1 and BET.)

Wayans' genius idea is to get
fired by pitching an impossibly insulting old-fashioned minstrel show starring
a pair of street performers (dancer Savion Glover and Wayans' fellow In
Living Color alum Tommy Davidson) in
blackface as Mantan and Sleep'n Eat, ignorant, dull-witted, unlucky ignoramuses
who've left the big city behind for the comfort and security of the watermelon
patch.

Instead of firing Wayans, Rapaport
loves the idea and green-lights a pilot, giving Wayans an all-white writing
staff and a Scandinavian director. Glover and Davidson are skeptical and
ambivalent but hungry for work, so they sign on. In the film's most haunting
scene, Glover and Davidson painstakingly burn cork in the manner of their
minstrel-show predecessors, coat their faces in cocoa butter to protect their
skin, then smear the burnt cork on their faces and paint their lips trolley-car
red. Driven by Terence Blanchard's haunting, omnipresent jazz score, it's a
lyrical scene that taps into the juju of blackface, the way it subverts and
masks identity while pretending to evoke a universal, one-size-fits-all
blackness. At the height of the minstrel show's popularity, black performers as
well as white performers slathered on burnt cork to darken their skin. The
legendary Bert Williams was famous for conveying humanity and vulnerability
behind a mask of total darkness; he and his partner were billed, like Glover
and Davidson here, as "Two Real Coons" to differentiate them from their white
competition.

At the first taping of The New
Millennium Minstrel Show, a baffled audience is unsure how to respond. But the
show soon becomes a cultural phenomenon. Bamboozled exploits the visceral, unnerving power of blackface
in minstrel-show sequences that are simultaneously entertaining and harrowing.
It's easy to see why the film failed to recoup even its tiny, $10 million
budget. Moviegoers understandably weren't eager to pay $8 apiece to have Spike
Lee pour salt in our country's racial wounds for 135 loose, rambling minutes.
Lee's reputation as a blowhard and provocateur belie his formidable gifts as a
sensualist. Even at his worse, (She Hate Me, cough, cough) his films look and sound fantastic, but Bamboozled eschews lush cinematography
in favor of rinky-dink digital video shot on home-video-quality cameras.

Paul Mooney has a magnificent
supporting role as Wayans' comedian father, Junebug. He's essentially playing
himself, a bemused, regal stand-up comedian with the beatific smirk of someone
forever enjoying a private joke at the world's expense. Wayans only lets his
aristocratic façade drop in Mooney's presence; Mooney calls him on his
bullshit, asking him where he picked up that ridiculous accent. Wayans
considers Mooney a broken man, a loser reduced to playing rinky-dink dives, but
he's perhaps the only free man in the entire film.

Mos Def co-stars as Pinkett Smith's
brother and the leader of the Mau Maus, a group of cockeyed rap revolutionaries
spouting empty slogans while guzzling malt liquor. In their own way, they're
just as phony and ridiculous as Rapaport and Wayans. In Bamboozled, nobody's innocent. Racial politics taint everyone.

Though it owes an enormous debt
to The Producers and Network,
Bamboozled is powered by a singular,
strangely hypnotic combination of broad comedy, sledgehammer satire, melancholy
and rage. In its last 40 minutes, however, Lee loses control of the film's
oft-wavering tone, giving it over entirely to incoherent rage and leaden
solemnity.

As his show conquers the world
and spirals out of control, Wayans becomes everything he professes to despise,
surrounding himself with ghoulish trinkets of our collective racist past and
slathering himself in blackface. The film's characters never emerge as anything
other than show-business constructs, so when Lee introduces a love triangle
between Wayans, Glover, and Pinkett Smith late in the film, it falls flat. The
prissy, narcissistic Wayans seems asexual, and there's no sexual tension between
Glover and Pinkett Smith.

As it lurches to a close, the
film grows increasingly dark, and the comedy disappears. The Mau Maus kidnap
Glover and murder him in front of a massive television audience. In a creepy
bit of irony, The Mau Maus are massacred to Public Enemy's "Burn, Hollywood,
Burn," a devastating, poignant reminder of a time when when Flavor Flav was
something other than the poster boy for post-millennial minstrelsy.

A distraught Jada Pinkett Smith
kills Wayans, who leaves audiences with parting words from James Baldwin, a
black man infinitely wiser and more comfortable in his own skin: "People pay
for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to
become. And they pay for it very simply by the lives they lead."

The film ends with a marathon
reel of shame cutting together powerful images of blackface and minstrelsy from
the first half of the 20th century, set against Blanchard's melancholy horns.
The images are ostensibly comic and lighthearted, but the music is despairing.
If Lee were to release a director's cut that included in its closing montage
every sad, ugly, de-humanizing image of African-Americans on television or in
film since 2000, it would last another couple of hours. This devastating final
section is Bamboozled in a nutshell; the
tragic rendered comic and the comic rendered tragic.

Failure, Fiasco or Secret
Success: Secret Success