Bamboozled
The days of blackface minstrel troupes may seem like ancient history to most Americans, but Spike Lee wants to refresh our memory. Spike Lee is onto something when he looks to the days of blackface minstrel troupes to help us understand race in today's America. With Bamboozled, Hollywood's most reliable provocateur is saying we haven't come as far as we think. In Bamboozled, Damon Wayans plays well-mannered Harvard alumni Pierre Delacroix, a black TV writer whose ratings-hungry boss (Michael Rapaport) delivers an ultimatum: give me a hit show or clean out your desk. His response is the show "Mantan," a revival one of the most popular and most degrading forms of entertainment in nineteenth-century America: blackface minstrelsy. Delacroix developed the program as a rage-driven stunt but it turns into an unexpected hit, apparently able to indulge a racist format largely because the actors using burnt cork to blacken their faces happen to be African Americans. In the movie, Pierre Delacroix is late for a meeting he wasn't told about. He reprimands his assistant Sloan Hopkins, who hadn't received any info about the meeting to begin with. This scene makes clear that if one wants to succeed in that company, one can't
Delacroix is tired of the pressure and the repeated rejection of both his numerous ideas for new shows centering on ethnic minorities and his request to hire at least one more writer of color. He won't simply quit; he wants to get fired instead. In order to achieve this, he pitches his idea for "The New Millennium Minstrel Show" to the station. Delacroix attempts to put together the most outrageous variety show that he can. He wants to make it so blatantly racist that it will stir up just enough trouble before getting thrown off the air. It's setting is a watermelon patch, the black performers wear blackface and fire engine red lipstick, and there's merriment and tap dancing. Pierre hires the homeless tap dancers Manray and Womack, renames them Mantan and Sleep 'N Eat, and makes their act the center of the show. I thought it was very interesting to see Michael Rappaport in this role after seeing him play a skinhead in "Higher Learning". There he had no authority, he was just a college punk taking his frustrations out on minorities. Now he is the boss, an entire company is at his disposal. However, he still exhibits the same ignorant racism as in the first film. I think that Spike Lee did this purposely to show that racism rears its ugly
Some common words found in the essay are:
Mantan Sleep, Spike Lee, Sloan Hopkins, Michael Rapaport, Millennium Minstrel, Michael Rappaport, Black Americans, Pierre Delacroix, , Afrcan- Americans, spike lee, minstrel troupes, pierre delacroix, black community, blackface minstrel, days blackface, days blackface minstrel, blackface minstrel troupes, black people,
Approximate Word count = 848
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
