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romination's review
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
Have had this one sitting around for a little bit so I thought it would be good to finally get around to it. Little shorty we picked up after a screening of Bamboozled on the auspicious occasion of its 23rd anniversary - coincidentally, exactly one year before I'm sitting here writing this. Scary!!!
Bamboozled is definitely a movie that I've got... complicated feelings about. On my first watch, I was completely floored by it, a movie that felt full of righteous venom that shocked me to my very core. In 2019 I'd done SOME work to try and understand the historical horrors done to Black people by the United States, but this movie shows you so much so directly, putting it in your face so you can't look away, reminding you that all this hate is built into the country's DNA and showing you just how pervasive it is in our representations of Blackness in media. On my second watch, though, the movie felt more... scattered. Where before it had seemed like truth coming out of its well to shame mankind, this time it felt a little more (to paraphrase this book) like Lee was just walking down the street, whirling his fists around, hitting everyone and everything on all sides. With that initial shock of that first viewing gone, it was easier to notice how confused the treatment of, say, the Mau Maus was, a militant rap group portrayed as a bunch of buffoons. Or the treatment of Sloane, much of her scenes apparently making it onto the cutting room floor and leaving her feeling like a pawn in two men's games of sex and jealousy. Same too the ending, which now seemed too tame in its implications of media holding up these kinds of minstrel stereotypes and performances.
I'd hoped the book (that's right! There's a book we're talking about here! I'm not just reviewing movies on a book website!) would help me square some of this up, or at least give me a greater context for where some of this might have been coming from on Lee's part. Ashley Clark gave a talk at the screening we were at and it's clear that he's been thinking about this movie in great depth since he first saw it at age 15 back in 2000. Indeed one might say he's one of the, if not THE, foremost scholar on the work, and one of its greatest advocates, pushing for a critical reappraisal of a movie that polarized audiences on release and led to a rather disheartening box office pull. And it's no surprise that Clark's name is all over the Criterion release of this film, including conversations with Lee and a new essay on the movie as well. I think it was him who'd pushed for its inclusion.
Clark's read on Bamboozled is that it's only become more relevant over time, especially as conversations about media portrayal of Blackness have only grown more foregrounded in the American consciousness. While previous films like Do The Right Thing may have explored the psyche of the neighborhood's residents and directly question their racism, Bamboozled seems to return to the source, saying "so why do these characters feel this way? What causes them to have this terrible view of Black Americans?" before pointing right to the TV screen. Well, not just the TV of course, but the history of how it all got here. The movie may be too unfocused to have the depth of something like Marlon Riggs' excellent Ethnic Notions or even Roger Ross Williams' more recent Stamped from the Beginning for talking about where THAT came from, but this book helped me focus back to the fact that Bamboozled isn't trying to be that - it's trying to be a cry of anger, Howard Beale screaming "I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE," which even gets quoted semi-directly in the movie.
The book also reminded me that at the point the movie came out, Spike Lee had been in Hollywood for over a decade, and had been making provocative works since his undergrad class, when he made a student film about a man who attempts to remake Birth of a Nation that caused a bit of controversy. Looking at it with that in mind, I suppose it was only a matter of time before he returned to the concept, only now armed with the anger and frustration that comes from years and years of trying to be a Black creative in Hollywood - for a lot of people, he might as well have been the only Black director, resulting in him receiving a lot more scrutiny than if the industry had been more integrated. At the time he'd already had projects pitched that wouldn't get picked up by studio executives, movies that in order to complete, he'd had to finish the funding from his own pocket or give up his pay. A project as acerbic as Bamboozled feels like it can only come out of someone who's had the experience, which he definitely did.
As for that feeling of being spread a little too wide in its satirical targets, specifically with how to read the Mau Maus, Clark also comes up with mostly questions than answers, a "perhaps we should see them as people who are so bamboozled they don't know what's right anymore," or perhaps we can take it Lee's perhaps too-late shot at the gangsta rap groups who'd made such success in the preceding decade. Lee had been in the press before calling them "neo-minstrels" already, so perhaps this broadly-sketched group just represent the cartoonishness he thought they exhibited in real life.
The book also places it in the conversation with other works, oft satirical or fantastical, about race by Black creatives, from films like Hollywood Shuffle or the previous Lee-produced Drop Squad, to books like Black No More or, of course, Ralph Ellison's seminal Invisible Man. There's also a greater contextualization of Lee's own work and how it fits into that, as well as his criticism of contemporary portrayals of Blackness in works like The Green Mile or Legend of Bagger Vance.
With all of this in mind, the book helped me come away with a greater understanding of where the movie rose from, both culturally and from Lee himself. Bamboozled is still often a tough watch - in its attempts to mock these stereotypes, it still puts them up on the screen quite faithfully, in all its ugly ol' glory. There's a reminder through it that perhaps we would have truly been able to leave these things in the past, but there's always an audience for it, and there's always BEEN an audience for it. Is it not us, after all, who go to these movies, buy these books, listen to this music, empower the people who allow these creative decisions? If Bamboozled is doing anything, it's putting our nose in it and making us smell it so we know how bad it is. But I think Clark's estimation of it might be right on: a tremendous if messy film, something that needed to happen even if it's difficult to stomach as it flickers on the screen before you. And I'm glad to have had this book to help pick it apart.
Side note I would be curious to hear the author's thoughts on American Fiction (based on the novel Erasure) which is lapping up awards this year. It feels like an edges-sanded-down version of this same concept, a version far less acerbic and far more interested in mocking white liberals - something this book did well to point out were not the whole of the audience being mocked, an audience that includes other Black people and, to my chagrin, Puerto Ricans, for example. Personally I think the fact that it's receiving so much awards-season heat is kind of a mark that it's not as sharp or critical as it so smugly thinks it is and is exactly the kind of softball "see, we can laugh at ourselves and take criticism!" thing that doesn't really have much challenge to it. The movie version, at least, I have not read the book. But that's outside the scope of this review. Toodles!
Bamboozled is definitely a movie that I've got... complicated feelings about. On my first watch, I was completely floored by it, a movie that felt full of righteous venom that shocked me to my very core. In 2019 I'd done SOME work to try and understand the historical horrors done to Black people by the United States, but this movie shows you so much so directly, putting it in your face so you can't look away, reminding you that all this hate is built into the country's DNA and showing you just how pervasive it is in our representations of Blackness in media. On my second watch, though, the movie felt more... scattered. Where before it had seemed like truth coming out of its well to shame mankind, this time it felt a little more (to paraphrase this book) like Lee was just walking down the street, whirling his fists around, hitting everyone and everything on all sides. With that initial shock of that first viewing gone, it was easier to notice how confused the treatment of, say, the Mau Maus was, a militant rap group portrayed as a bunch of buffoons. Or the treatment of Sloane, much of her scenes apparently making it onto the cutting room floor and leaving her feeling like a pawn in two men's games of sex and jealousy. Same too the ending, which now seemed too tame in its implications of media holding up these kinds of minstrel stereotypes and performances.
I'd hoped the book (that's right! There's a book we're talking about here! I'm not just reviewing movies on a book website!) would help me square some of this up, or at least give me a greater context for where some of this might have been coming from on Lee's part. Ashley Clark gave a talk at the screening we were at and it's clear that he's been thinking about this movie in great depth since he first saw it at age 15 back in 2000. Indeed one might say he's one of the, if not THE, foremost scholar on the work, and one of its greatest advocates, pushing for a critical reappraisal of a movie that polarized audiences on release and led to a rather disheartening box office pull. And it's no surprise that Clark's name is all over the Criterion release of this film, including conversations with Lee and a new essay on the movie as well. I think it was him who'd pushed for its inclusion.
Clark's read on Bamboozled is that it's only become more relevant over time, especially as conversations about media portrayal of Blackness have only grown more foregrounded in the American consciousness. While previous films like Do The Right Thing may have explored the psyche of the neighborhood's residents and directly question their racism, Bamboozled seems to return to the source, saying "so why do these characters feel this way? What causes them to have this terrible view of Black Americans?" before pointing right to the TV screen. Well, not just the TV of course, but the history of how it all got here. The movie may be too unfocused to have the depth of something like Marlon Riggs' excellent Ethnic Notions or even Roger Ross Williams' more recent Stamped from the Beginning for talking about where THAT came from, but this book helped me focus back to the fact that Bamboozled isn't trying to be that - it's trying to be a cry of anger, Howard Beale screaming "I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE," which even gets quoted semi-directly in the movie.
The book also reminded me that at the point the movie came out, Spike Lee had been in Hollywood for over a decade, and had been making provocative works since his undergrad class, when he made a student film about a man who attempts to remake Birth of a Nation that caused a bit of controversy. Looking at it with that in mind, I suppose it was only a matter of time before he returned to the concept, only now armed with the anger and frustration that comes from years and years of trying to be a Black creative in Hollywood - for a lot of people, he might as well have been the only Black director, resulting in him receiving a lot more scrutiny than if the industry had been more integrated. At the time he'd already had projects pitched that wouldn't get picked up by studio executives, movies that in order to complete, he'd had to finish the funding from his own pocket or give up his pay. A project as acerbic as Bamboozled feels like it can only come out of someone who's had the experience, which he definitely did.
As for that feeling of being spread a little too wide in its satirical targets, specifically with how to read the Mau Maus, Clark also comes up with mostly questions than answers, a "perhaps we should see them as people who are so bamboozled they don't know what's right anymore," or perhaps we can take it Lee's perhaps too-late shot at the gangsta rap groups who'd made such success in the preceding decade. Lee had been in the press before calling them "neo-minstrels" already, so perhaps this broadly-sketched group just represent the cartoonishness he thought they exhibited in real life.
The book also places it in the conversation with other works, oft satirical or fantastical, about race by Black creatives, from films like Hollywood Shuffle or the previous Lee-produced Drop Squad, to books like Black No More or, of course, Ralph Ellison's seminal Invisible Man. There's also a greater contextualization of Lee's own work and how it fits into that, as well as his criticism of contemporary portrayals of Blackness in works like The Green Mile or Legend of Bagger Vance.
With all of this in mind, the book helped me come away with a greater understanding of where the movie rose from, both culturally and from Lee himself. Bamboozled is still often a tough watch - in its attempts to mock these stereotypes, it still puts them up on the screen quite faithfully, in all its ugly ol' glory. There's a reminder through it that perhaps we would have truly been able to leave these things in the past, but there's always an audience for it, and there's always BEEN an audience for it. Is it not us, after all, who go to these movies, buy these books, listen to this music, empower the people who allow these creative decisions? If Bamboozled is doing anything, it's putting our nose in it and making us smell it so we know how bad it is. But I think Clark's estimation of it might be right on: a tremendous if messy film, something that needed to happen even if it's difficult to stomach as it flickers on the screen before you. And I'm glad to have had this book to help pick it apart.
Side note I would be curious to hear the author's thoughts on American Fiction (based on the novel Erasure) which is lapping up awards this year. It feels like an edges-sanded-down version of this same concept, a version far less acerbic and far more interested in mocking white liberals - something this book did well to point out were not the whole of the audience being mocked, an audience that includes other Black people and, to my chagrin, Puerto Ricans, for example. Personally I think the fact that it's receiving so much awards-season heat is kind of a mark that it's not as sharp or critical as it so smugly thinks it is and is exactly the kind of softball "see, we can laugh at ourselves and take criticism!" thing that doesn't really have much challenge to it. The movie version, at least, I have not read the book. But that's outside the scope of this review. Toodles!
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