The first time I saw Spike Lee’s poignant satire on contemporary American mass-media driven society, Bamboozled, I wasn’t quite certain about the content and the framework of Lee’s piece. Having been exposed to the origins and ideological practices behind America’s infamous mid-nineteenth century dramatic tradition known as blackface minstrelsy, I couldn’t understand why Lee would employ this politically incorrect genre to make his point, so to speak. Why would he choose to tread on such a ‘dangerous ground’? This year, as part of the requirements for this course, I was able to see Lee’s controversial film for the second time; I do not claim to be closer to resolving my initial dilemma, but I also know that Lee’s blatant satire of the entertainment industry and its tactics in portraying African-Americans is worth looking into as we further examine the ideological significance of blackface minstrelsy as one of the ground-breaking mass entertainment features of the ‘American dramatic experience’.
In Bamboozled, we follow the career of Pierre Delacroix (portrayed by Damon Wayans), a Harvard graduate working for a large television network, CNS, as he copes with the pressures of creating and producing a hit show. He decides to put on a show whose audacity and outrageous controversy would get him fired from his fruitless job. Thus, he initiates “Mantan-The New Millennium Minstrel Show”, a modern-day minstrel show set on an Alabama plantation in the early years of slavery, with black actors wearing an even blacker makeup. Incredibly, Delacroix’s spoof turns into a ratings bonanza, a cultural phenomenon that engages both sides of the color/pay-roll/media line.
The practice of blackface minstrelsy was a cultural phenomenon of the antebellum years in nineteenth century American society. As Alexander Saxton points out in his 1975 essay, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology”, performing in blackface “provided a kind of underground theater where the blackface “convention” rendered permissible topics which would have been taboo on the legitimate stage or in the press.” In other words, white performers such as Thomas Rice, Dan Emmett and E.P. Christy used the minstrel show’s format to convey messages of class identity, racial hostility, hidden sexual desire(s), all the while asserting the supremacy of white egalitarianism, since “the meaning did not reside solely in negative or ridiculous portrayals of nonwhites; it resided in the “convention” itself.”
If we examine Lee’s work in light of Saxton’s arguments, we can see why some contemporary critics may consider Bamboozled’s content and framework rather appalling. However, if we think more closely about the puppet/puppet-master dichotomy at work within the blackface modus operandi, we can attest to a perhaps (un)intentional parallelism existing between Lee’s direction of his topic and the mass media’s execution of mass-produced cultural forms and/or traditions nowadays. Blackface performers are puppets operated by a white puppet-master; as far as their physical appearance is concerned, they are almost non-human, and yet as Saxton concludes in his piece on the ideological significance of this popular entertainment form, “they could be manipulated not only to mock themselves, but also to act like human beings.”
Lee’s fictionalized blackface performers, Manray, Womack and Delacroix himself, are such puppets, now in the hands of the all-revolving wheels of media production and consumption. The nineteenth century’s appropriation of white supremacy in blackface minstrelsy’s dominance of popular entertainment precedes the late twentieth century’s frenzy for delivering mass- produced cultural products that will reaffirm the already established principles of a cultural hegemony.In lieu of this juxtaposition, I find Eric Lott’s article on the postmodern re-conceptualization of blackface minstrelsy’s cultural complexity rather challenging. Lott sets out to identify and subsequently grasp the way(s) nineteenth-century White America “lived their own whiteness”, as he examines the formations behind blackface minstrelsy, namely the structural formation of the “racial unconscious”.
He traces the cultural formation of black minstrel shows by examining the relationship between property and sexuality in the antebellum years, i.e., he investigates the “spectacle” format of the minstrel show, where black commodified subjects acted out as “screens on which audience fantasy could rest, securing white spectators’ position as superior, controlling, not to say owning figures.” Consequently, his theoretical assumptions lead him to postulate two distinct paradigmatic applications of blackface’s origins. However, what I found most insightful about Lott’s argumentation was his analysis of nineteenth-century written response to blackface minstrelsy. In his attempt to “construct a public”, Lott discusses the validity of white audiences’ written commentary on the practice of black minstrelsy, that is, the revelatory silences, repetitions and omissions of white performers and audiences as they “conceived of what they were doing in minstrelsy, and the extent to which ventriloquized cultural forms confronted them with a rather more troubling prospect than has been recognized.” These narratives, in turn, point to the author’s initial statement regarding blackface minstrelsy’s “racial unconscious” as it flaunts as well as hides the socio-historical facts of expropriation, enslavement and intermixture. In this respect, the audience’s reaction to Lee’s Bamboozled, could provide a basis for an ethnographic study of contemporary audiences’ response to an art work which subverts the complacency of mass-produced cultural goods by engaging highly controversial images of racially colored practices.
I often wonder if Lee could/should have used a different content background for his satirical representation of contemporary mass media’s practices; perhaps he could have. Would then his message be as resonant as it is today? Perhaps it would. In a world of some 900 channels, diversity seems to be the unattained ideal. Detrimental depictions of African-Americans, as well as other minority representatives, in contemporary sitcoms, could be viewed as signs of the minstrel show’s continuous influence on the way a cultural hegemony maintains its power balance. In that respect, what better way to demask the commodifying practices of the contemporary economy-driven entertainment industry than by reverting to a once popular culture form whose manifestation depended on the same principles of dominance and supremacy.
Found in Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline, edited by Lucy Maddox, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999, p. 115.
Ibid, p. 138.
Ibid, p. 138.
Lott, Eric, “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy”, Representations, Volume 0, Issue 39, Summer 1992, pp. 23-24.
Ibid, p. 28.
Ibid, p. 38
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