The Darktown Revue

The first great black filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux, the independent producer of race films for black audiences, made a satire on minstrel shows and blackface with one of his first synchronized-sound films in 1931, a stagy short titled "The Darktown Revue." It's so brilliantly subtle of a film that some of the few viewers who've seen it, such as those on Letterboxd, dismiss it as promoting racial stereotypes despite that being the very thing it's satirizing and from a filmmaker whose earliest surviving productions were direct refutations of D.W. Griffith's racist epic "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). Rather than an easily-dismissed relic of a racist past, however, "Darktown Revue" features two minstrel skits that go beyond racialized humor, including one based in a pun and another based in a nonsense sermon ridiculing Micheaux's favorite target of charismatic preachers, and contains them within a Greek-like chorus criticizing the performances.

Depicting blackface and minstrelsy at the dawn of the 21st century is daring, I'll give Spike Lee that. Moreover, "Bamboozled" is intended to work similarly to "Darktown Revue," but offers little in the way of positive racial representation like Donald Heywood's jazz choir in Micheaux's film, nor is its minstrel show entertaining, with the exception of the skillful tap dancing led by Savion Glover and music of The Roots band, and despite, as its making-of-documentary evidences, it was supposed to be amusing. That's what would've made it a challenging movie to watch, of confronting one's being entertained by something that's fundamentally offensive. Yet, the minstrel show is almost purely dated--the names of the two stars are even taken from actors from the '30s-'40s (Mantan Moreland and William Best's "Sleep n' Eat")--and debasing racial stereotypes just like its final montage of old film clips--more debasing and dated than those in Micheaux's film from 1931. As Michael Rogin said in his review, "'Bamboozled' could not do its job if it did not draw us in." Simply put, as opposed to "Darktown Revue," I don't think "Bamboozled" did its job.

That's despite, too, the "The New Millennium Minstrel Show," shot on lush 16mm, being the best-looking part of the movie, the rest of which was shot on ugly home-market digital video. Instead of a Greek chorus, there's a lovely score overlapping some intermittently trite dialogue and ugly pixels. Even more ugly, it's a didactic slog to get through. Spike Lee's joint is as blunt and seemingly oblivious to one's own use of stereotypes as is arguably calling one's movies "joints." This is the same filmmaker who holds himself up as a paragon on the issue of the use of a racial slur within the very movie that uses that word exceedingly, as well as the exemplar of racial screen representation with a clip from his "Malcolm X" (1992). Where irony begins and the pomposity ends may be the most ambiguous aspect of the ultimately dull contemporary satire and the obvious history lesson (which may explain its elevation in some academic and critical circles subsequent to its initial poor box office).

The fundamental fault here seems to be a filmmaker who doesn't trust his audience and so must lecture them. We must be told from the start and repeatedly thereafter that this is satire. We're even given the definition of "satire." We're represented, seemingly all the more so by the documentary-esque reaction shots to the 16mm minstrel performances, by a gleeful blackfaced idiot-box audience applauding and howling on cue to dated stereotypes and who must be read aloud the moral of the story--muddled as it may be from an extroverted mainstream filmmaker who includes everyone else as targets for satire except, as Greg Tate says in his review, the "corporate white supremacy" that financed the movie. A movie about misrepresentation becomes itself a misrepresentation, to a lesser extent, of minstrel shows and, worse, of the audience.

The mocking commercials with malt liquor and Tommy Hilfiger and the auditions work better than the minstrel show, as at least there's a pointed contemporary joke there. The equivalent of Micheaux's Greek chorus here, too, is treated as modern minstrelsy with the "embarrassing" gangsta rap "pseudo" revolutionaries. Meanwhile, Damon Wayans's buppie show creator switches between a black white supremacist reversal of the only black man at the table of "Putney Swope" (1969) and a variation on "The Producers" in creating an awful show with the aim of being fired, except instead of the oppressors being ridiculed here it's the oppressed. Jada Pinkett Smith's assistant gets a final-act sleeping-to-the-top plotline and, as Victoria Piehowski has well argued (in her essay "'Business as Usual'": Sex, Race, and Work in Spike Lee's 'Bamboozled'") is a character lacking agency except to serve the picture's patriarchy of woman as sex objects and race as the domain of men. The two of them, consequently and inconsistently, alternatively enthusiastically enjoy racial stereotypes one scene and are demonstrably disgusted by them the next. There's also an emcee who references "A Face in the Crowd" (1957), and Mantan recites two variations on the "mad as hell" speech from "Network" (1976). It's such a mess that they eventually have to shoot their way out of it. At least, it goes with the "to be or not to be" "Hamlet" theme, I suppose. Ironically, the only character to come out unscathed is Paul Mooney's stand-up comic, who working the Chitlin' Circuit performs for black audiences--more Micheaux than Lee.