In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon states, “We believe that the
conscious and organized undertaking by a colonized people to re-establish the
sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural
manifestation that exists” (1445). Speaking generally of colonized nations and
more specifically of Africa (and even more specifically of Algeria), Fanon
calls for the “re-establishment of the nation,” which will give life to a
national culture, molded by struggles, eventually leading to “national
liberation” (1446). Necessary in any re-establishment, though, is an original
establishment—an original nation in this case, which is non-existent if one
considers the state of the oppressed African-American in the postbellum
age. An uprooted people made up of
diverse tribes and nationalities cannot be considered a native people;
therefore, such a group struggles to define itself in terms of national
character, given that it helped colonize its new nation, albeit in an oppressed
role. While descendants of white
European settlers can subscribe to notions of independence, ingenuity, and
determination, among other American
characteristics, descendants of slaves struggle to define themselves outside of
the constrictive bounds of the oppressor.
Spike Lee’s Bamboozled demonstrates this struggle narratively and
formally. Different perspectives of the
black struggle come from different characters: Pierre Delacroix strives to be
successful in a systemically racist institution; Sloan fights for power within
the same institution with the additional disadvantage of being a woman; her
brother Julius—a.k.a. Big Blak Afrika—takes a much more militaristic stance,
disavowing any culture, including his name, of his slaveholder ancestors;
Manray and Womack simply want food on the table, and if they can accomplish
that through their talents, all the better.
Motivations stated, a closer look at the formal presentation of
characters better reveals why their goals are frustrated.
The most glaring formal aspect of Bamboozled is its predominating
“home-video” camera. The majority of the
film has a quasi-documentary feel, alternating at times (most notably during
the Mantan segments) with a more
cinematic, traditional clarity. Camera style, along with narrative
structure and genre conventions, are mediations essential to Stam and Spence’s
methodology (884). “One mediation
specific to cinema is spectator positioning,” inclusive to camera style
(885). At first glance, the documentary
style camera belies a realness to the subjects not available in a traditional
fictional film; Delacroix narrates, mostly, as the real audience gets a
supposed unscripted, inside look of a TV studio. The first Mantan
show, in contrast, is obviously constructed the moment Manray and Womack enter
the stage in blackface. The camera
swings incongruously from audience to stage, the former blurry and of lower
quality, the latter crisp and well lit.
Granted, the Mantan show is
being filmed in front of this studio audience to be aired on television, but it
does seem ironic that the real spectator only sees the crispness of a
constructed performance through the eyes of the diegetic audience, who are all
watching it live, not through a screen as we watch Delacroix, Sloan, and the
rest of the brains of CNS.
Perhaps the obvious constructedness
of Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel
Show is what makes it so easy for the audience to embrace it. During the pilot episode, a look of shock
pervades an audience that eventually cheers by the show’s conclusion. It does not take long for an ethnically
diverse (but mostly white) audience to don blackface when they come to the
shows. Their appropriation of blackface
should not be taken as a validation of black culture, but rather an attempt to
“help the traditions of the indigenous society” by taking the role of
“defenders of the native style” (Fanon 1441).
The audience—including the producers, Dunwitty and even
Delacroix—believes it can wear blackface because it is only mocking something
that was ridiculous in the first place.
In Delacroix’s words, what they are doing is satire.
The studio audience would (wrongly)
claim its detachedness from the actual practice of minstrelsy to justify their
wearing blackface in order to mock it. However, the spectator positioning of the
studio audience does not make them equal with Manray and Womack. As seen through point of view camera, they
look down at them, laughing at them, not with them. The real audience has an equally hard time
relating to the doc-like, behind-the-scenes narrative. It does not take long to realize that it,
too, is just as constructed as the Mantan
show. Despite its gritty, real-to-life
look, certain elements emphasize a Brechtian detachedness, especially apparent
during a scene in which Delacroix hurls accusations at Sloan (and fires
her). Any realness created by the camera
lens is cancelled out by the melodramatic music, the hammy dialogue, and the
mise-en-scene when he sits down in the chair behind his desk. A gigantic circular window overlooks the
cityscape, making Delacroix an all powerful, comic book villain. What this entire scene really suggests is a
soap opera. Like documentaries, they
employ similar camera work, if not in style then in appearance.
That particular Delacroix scene—not
atypical of the rest of his scenes in Bamboozled—proves
“the granting of point-of-view shots to the oppressed does not guarantee a
non-colonialist perspective” (888).
Neither do scenes with Mau-Mau—though shown from their perspective, the audience struggles to
identify with this group in all of their intimidating close-ups. This film is arguably an anti-Battle of Algiers, a film in which
everything contributes to the impression and expression of a unified people
(886). Though the audience identifies
(through point of view camera) with the three Algerian women disguised as
French women who plan to plant bombs, they fail to identify with any of the
oppressed black characters in Bamboozled, which is kind of the point. How can African-Americans promote a culture
that is not somehow constructed by the oppressor? While not nearly as obvious as the minstrelsy
of the Mantan show, the black
experience, as presented by Bamboozled
is a construct—one in which someone can find success only by mimicking white
preferences (Delacroix) or by defining oneself against them (Big Blak
Afrika).
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