This essay continues, obviously, part one. Once again, all images are from the film, you should see the film (otherwise this post might make no sense), and even if Spike Lee can get away with blackface, you almost definitely can't.
“Blackface Minstrelsy and Spike Lee's Bamboozled: A
Hegelianism Without Reserve" (Part 2)
Tommy Davidson as Womack, as Sleep n' Eat of Mantan: The New Millennial Minstrel Show
This theoretical gambit on the part of the film has several
repercussions. To begin with, the liberation of the negativity of blackface
from any certain content means that its function as satire cannot be
controlled; like the proverbial tar, it tarnishes all who touch it. Not only
does the film critique Lee himself by producing an analogy between him and
Delacroix, but Mos Def (playing Big Blak Afrika) comes to resemble a caricature
of himself as black radical rapper [6], while the spectacle of Al Sharpton and
Johnnie Cochran protesting the show makes the audience brutally aware that
these public figures are first and foremost playing themselves. The inadequacy
of their protest chant (“Painted face, disgrace to the race”) in the face of
the complex politics at work behind the Mantan show and the film itself
renders them anachronistic. To oppose blackface for its racism is to still to
oppose blackface, and this negativity is not something exterior to the logic of
blackface, but inheres in its very structure. By the very universality of its
negativity, no-one can oppose it without this opposition losing all meaning; in
short, the opposition to stereotype becomes, itself, a stereotype.
Rev. Al Sharpton as Rev. Al Sharpton
This analysis of blackface as negation coincides in many ways with the analysis of Tavia Nyong'o in “Racial Kitsch and Black
Performance,” which traces the genealogy of the figure of the black child as
scapegoat in relation to Bamboozled. Through tracing the figure of the
performing black child, Nyong'o argues that racist kitsch figurines function
analogously as scapegoats or effigies for both those who produced the racist
figures initially as well as for those who collect them today in the spirit of
curating and memorializing this racist past (with the implicit assumption that
such figures are outdated today). Thus, both the racist accumulation and the
oppositional curating of these abject figures relies on a subject's negation of
the racist object: I am not that. The racist figurine invites abuse from
all sides, much as the figure of the black child has historically invited
abuse, from Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, through Buckwheat in Little
Rascals to Lil' N----- Jim (Cartier Williams) in Bamboozled. The
abused black child and the racist figurine are both scapegoats, abject
effigies, and Nyong'o's critical intervention here is to invite us to identify
with these figures, rather than with a position of exteriority. In the dynamics
of the film, this is to identify with Lil' N----- Jim, rather than to abuse him
(as Manray does) or to pity him (as the audience is invited to do): “To
identify, contrapuntally, with the abashed and wounded child, rather than with
our protective feelings for him, is to locate the abjection on screen and
within ourselves that Bamboozled elicits but cannot tolerate” (386).
Thus Nyong'o concludes: “The point may be to locate, within the transformations
of our shame, a way out of scapegoating” (389).
Furthermore, the radical negativity of blackface (or, in
Nyng'o's reading, the racist kitsch figurine) means that it can only be
consciously understood as being excess. Nyong'o makes explicit the connection
between the performing black child and excess in his discussion of Topsy:
Eva
[the white child] is not just well behaved, she is perfectly innocent . . . She
is literally too good for this world. Topsy, who is subjected to continuous
physical abuse by Aunt Ophelia and the house slaves, is so hardy she is almost
insensate. She is fun to kick; even she finds it fun. Eva is one of a precious
few. Topsy is part of a disturbing and disgusting surplus. The violence done
upon her is the performance of waste. (377)
Here, Nyong'o's footnote points us to Georges Bataille's The
Accursed Share, a work in which Bataille attempts to account for a “general
economy,” based on a principle of excess and loss, in contrast to the
traditional “restricted economy,” based on utilitarian principles of
accumulation, (re)production, and reserve. Rather than understanding energy to
be finite, which implies a particular point of view, Bataille attempts to think
through energy on a global scale, which is always excessive: “On the surface of
the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess; the
question is always posed in terms of extravagance. The choice is limited to how
the wealth is to be squandered” (23). While a particular being may lack energy
or resources for some end, when energy is viewed from the general perspective, there
is always too much and so some must be squandered. In essence, Bataille's
thought in The Accursed Share can be seen as an attempt to grapple with
the ethical implications of the second law of thermodynamics, of the
inevitability of entropy and loss. This is to say that some energy must always
be expended to no end and that there is, on the global scale, excess energy
above and beyond any utilitarian project. Paradoxically, this excess is also a
radical and irrecuperable loss from the viewpoint of the particular, since it
is energy expended to no useful or recuperative end, “if the system can no
longer grow, or is the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it
must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not,
gloriously or catastrophically” (21). Thus, if Topsy part of an excess then she
is also lost, expended without return, and irrecuperable.
The abused black child.
I think.
I don't even know.
No seriously what is wrong with you people what is this.
If, in the Hegelian system, the determinate negation of
appearance is recuperated in the teleological project towards self-consciousness,
then the abstract negation of blackface introduced by Bamboozled—its
function as pure negativity—cannot be recuperated in any teleological project
whose aim would be to raise consciousness. Much as Topsy is pure loss—abject
waste—from the perspective of the economy of white children, the negativity of
blackface is pure loss from the perspective of the forward-looking
consciousness. This is to say that an engagement with or reflection upon
blackface cannot lead to a self-conscious humanism, and hence Bamboozled is
not a story about developing consciousness. As can be inferred from their
expressions during the pitch of the show, Manray and Womack are quite
self-aware about its racist stereotyping, from its very inception. While it
could be said that these characters eventually exhibit a self-conscious
acknowledgment of their own positions within the racist television industry,
there is no moment of epiphany, no moment of insight, of a knowledge that has
not been there all along. Even if these characters were unfamiliar with the
history of blackface minstrelsy, there was no moment at which they were not
aware of its racism. Still, Womack and Manray fare better than most of the
characters. Neither Sloan nor Delacroix is any more self-aware at the end of
the film than they are at the beginning and, in fact, Delacroix's character
seems to lose his self-conscious and critical perspective as the narrative
progresses. Dunwitty, of course, remains blindly ignorant throughout. The
audience enters the film knowing that blackface is terrible and dehumanizing,
and leaves knowing the same. To sum: if the intent of the film is to raise
awareness of the negative effects of stereotypical images, then it seems as
though Bamboozled is a waste of time [7].
If there is no possibility of progressing beyond blackface
through negating it, in whatever fashion, then the only possibility of escaping
its dialectical logic inheres not in negation or rejection, but rather in
embracing it, as Nyong'o has suggested. If there is one character in the film
who embodies the possibility of escaping in this way the dialectics of
blackface and the violent circuit of the stereotype, it is Womack. Zeinavu
irene Davis ends her meditation on the aesthetics of the film, “'Beautiful-Ugly'
Blackface: An Esthetic Appreciation of Bamboozled,” by looking to the
scene in which Womack declares his disgust at the entire Mantan enterprise
and informs Manray of his decision to quit. Of this scene, which is Lee's
favorite according to the audio commentary, Davis writes:
A
more subtle repetition of the theme music occurs in one of the most powerful
and transformative scenes in the film. . . . Here, the theme music enters the
scene subtly—almost stealthily—in single notes, somehow as if the music carries
the character out of the nostalgia of the past and into the reality and wisdom
of the present. Womack may not know what lies in front of him, but he now
clearly knows what he can leave behind—money for the sake of misrepresentation.
He makes the choice to choose his own identity. (17)
Davis rightfully centers on this moment as being “one of the
most powerful and transformative,” but what Davis does not describe is Womack's
final act: passing his hand over his face, he takes on the dumb expression of
minstrelsy one last time. His final lines in the film is played as blackface
without the burnt cork, infusing the dehumanized with pathos in a virtuoso
performance by Davidson. Womack does not escape the film's cycle of stereotype
by opposing or negating blackface, but rather puts forth the possibility of
escaping the blackface dialectic through blackface. It is important to
note that this miming of the stereotype comes after, not before, his coherent
outraged critique, “It's just the same shit, done over.” Only Womack seems to
understand that one cannot have a final word against blackface without falling
under its power—that is, nothing rational can come after it.
Just go back and rewatch this scene forever.
At the same time, this move towards escape is not certain to succeed, as
Davis underscores. While Womack may embody the possibility of escape, this is
only a possibility and not a certainty, as after this scene he disappears from
the diagetic world (except for a very brief shot watching the televised murder
of Manray). The film cannot show what comes after blackface, for by its own
logic nothing comes after blackface. In Bamboozled, the escape from the
dialectics of blackface is literally unrepresentable. One can only chance escape
[8], by putting it on, by gesturing at its possibility without determining its
outcome. If, instead, one were to posit determinately what comes after
blackface, then one would recuperate its abstract negativity with a determinate
one—it would be to say for certain what blackface is not. This would be to
inscribe its capacity as absolute loss, as unreserved excess, within an economy
capable of recuperating this loss for a future deployment.
Here, I respectfully disagree with Nyong'o who ultimately
finds fault with the film in that its “critique of black-on-black violence does
not extend to violence itself” (386), and subsequently the film invites the
audience to heap hate upon the character of Delacroix. This is because “while
authenticity is subject to a great deal of skepticism . . . the shamefulness of
inauthenticity is never questioned,” and thus “the film cannot find a
way to exit the circuit of 'an eye for an eye'” (387). I am not exactly sure why Nyong'o criticizes
the film for its unwillingness to question the shame of inauthenticity. At this
moment in his intervention, Nyong'o draws a connection between inauthenticity
and the character positioned as the film's internal scapegoat, Delacroix. It
follows in Nyong’o’s argument that the existence of the inauthentic and hated
character of Delacroix within Bamboozled itself
means that the film cannot exit the cycle of scapegoating it ostensively
critiques. However, I disagree with Nyong’o’s claim that the film never
questions inauthenticity; the entire point of the film is that inauthenticity
is shameful, no matter what that inauthenticity is, and this logic even extends
to the inauthenticity of filmed representation itself. Furthermore, I would
argue that without the shamefulness of inauthenticity set up in Bamboozled, one could never read the
film and reach Nyong'o's revision of the Cartesian cognito: “I feel (shame),
therefore I am (human)” (389). Indeed, Nyong'o's whole project hinges on the
imperative to embrace the abject excess that floods us with shame, since in
doing so we could recuperate this loss in the name of a higher form of humanism.
If the alternative is put forth that inauthenticity is not shameful, then the
very possibility of traversing racism—truly escaping it and not just repeating
the violence towards the abject—through locating ourselves in the shame of the
scapegoat is rendered impossible. Finally, we should acknowledge that this
identification with the shamefulness of inauthenticity—the doubling back of the
stereotype—does not guarantee success, for to guarantee an exit of the circuit
of violence would be to posit an authenticity of escape which could only fall
back into the dialectical movement of appearance and essence. As described
earlier, this dialectic movement assumes inauthenticity as the grounds for a
determinate positive content of knowledge. Yet it can only do so by setting out
in advance blackface as the determinate negation of something certain—whiteness
or, more recently, the human and humanism. Attempting to recuperate Bamboozled within this system counters
the fundamental core of its critical insight: we cannot control racism, and escape
is never guaranteed.
Nyong'o errs in assuming that the conclusion of the film
comes at its violent end. Rather, the film logically concludes in Womack's
willingness to take the chance of escaping the racist system through rejecting
its lure of fame and fortune. This is, finally, similar to Lee's own gambit in
the film: in embracing the inauthenticity of filmed representation, he opens
himself up for critique and risks having his film being misunderstood as an
attempt to raise consciousness, rather than an attempt to double back and thus
elude the dialectics of blackface and inauthenticity. The analogy of
Lee-as-Delacroix, which many critics have acknowledged, must also be supplanted
with the analogy of Lee-as-Womack. Rather than concluding the film with
Delacroix, a human in an inhuman face, Lee concludes it with a brilliant
montage of animated racist figurines, foregrounding instead the human face of
the inhuman, similar to Womack's final scene. If Bamboozled is a failure
in humanism, as in Keeling's and White's estimations, then it is a failure in
the best possible way: rather than falling short of his intentions, Lee exceeds
them, wildly and beyond his control.
Finally, as a minor postscript, we can ask of this film (that leaves
no position untainted): what of the critic of Bamboozled, what of the academic theorist of race and racism? Working on
this piece, collecting images and still-shots, makes me very aware of my
entanglement within this system. I am not African-American, and writing this piece (and putting it forth into the electronic public sphere), I find that I, too, cannot rise above the pool of shit. How can I frame these images, how can I invoke these stereotypes without implicating myself in the structures of antiblackness that is the precondition that makes these images legible and intelligible? Frankly, I don't have an answer, and I'm not convinced that this analysis manages to somehow stand above, beyond or outside these structures. I'll let the film have the last word:
[6] I can't not mention the hip-hop in this movie. Besides having Mos Def play Sloan's rapper brother, this film has the Roots play the Mantan: The New Millennial Minstrel Show show band (named The Alabama Porch Monkeys), and the rest of the actors who play members of the fictional Mau Maus group have serious hip-hop credentials. Most obviously, Spike Lee gave MC Serch a line from a song Serch did in the early 90s as part of 3rd Bass:
Originally here:
(I would just like to note tangentially that "The Gas Face" is the first recording of the rapper Zev Love X of KMD, who is better known as underground hip-hop demi-god MF Doom.)
Finally, the fictive Mau Maus themselves made a music video that didn't really go anywhere, most likely because its mixture of racist caricature imagery from Bamboozeled and sincere radicalism is hard to conceptually situate decontextualized from the film. In fact, it's hard to situate even knowing the film: they are playing characters, obviously, and stand at a distance from their characters, but it's impossible to judge this distance.
[7] This waste in relation to progressive consciousness also
accounts for the critical reception that sees Lee's film as dealing with a
historical anachronism, the “now passed issue of blackface,” in the words of Armond White (13). For the progressive liberal humanist, blackface is a moment in
history which we have by now overcome in our collective unfolding
self-consciousness. From the perspective of Bamboozled such progress is
impossible after blackface.
[8] For an analysis of the function of chance in relation to
unreserved expenditure in the Hegelian dialectic, see Jacques Derrida's “From
Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve,” especially pp.
260-261. Derrida's reading of Bataille's reading of Hegel focuses on a
different moment in the unfolding of the Hegelian phenomenology, specifically
at the moment at which the master consciousness stakes his life and thus wins
over the slave consciousness. Bataille's critique of Hegel lies essentially in
the fact that, while the master stakes his life, Hegel assumes from the get-go
that the master will not die, and thus the Phenomenology does allow for
the chance of death—which would be an absolute negativity and thus absolute
meaninglessness—at all. My reading of Bamboozled is very much influenced
by this reading of Bataille.
Davis, Zeinabu irene. “'Beautiful-Ugly' Blackface: An
Esthetic Appreciation of Bamboozled.” Cineaste 26 (2001): 16-17.
Derrida, Jacques. “From a Restricted to General Economy: A
Hegelianism Without Reserve.” (1967). In Writing and Difference. Trans.
Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P: 251-277.
Grubar, Susan. “Racial Camp in The Producers and Bamboozled.”
Film Quarterly 60.2 (2006): 26-37.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. (1807).
Trans A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1977.
Keeling, Kara. “Passing for Human: Bamboozled and
Digital Humanism.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15.1
(2005): 237-250.
Lee, Spike and Gary Crowdus and Dan Georgakas. “Thinking
About the Power of Images: An Interview with Spike Lee.” Cineaste 26
(2001): 4-9.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Living Color: Race, Stereotype, and
Animation in Spike Lee's Bamboozled.” In What Do Pictures Want?: The
Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005: 294-308.
Nyong'o, Tavia. “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance.” The
Yale Journal of Criticism 15.2 (2002): 371-391.
Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants
in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.
Tate, Greg. “Bamboozled: White Supremacy and a Black
Way of Being Human.” Cineaste 26 (2001): 15-16.
Thompson, “The Blackfaced Bard: Returning to Shakespeare of
Leaving Him?” Shakespeare Bulletin 27.3 (2009): 437-456.
White, Armond. “Post-Art Minstrelsy.” Cineaste 26
(2001): 12-14.
Yancy, George. “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body.”
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005): 215-241.
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