Blackface, Bamboozled, and Zoe Saldana

Ashley Clark's new book Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee's “Bamboozled” arrived at a timely moment. Shortly after I finished it, controversy about Zoe Saldana's skin tone in the biopic Nina soared, and suddenly Bamboozled became as up-to-the-minute as a 2000 movie can be.

For those who have not followed the Nina debate, its mostly white creators enlisted Saldana to play jazz legend Nina Simone, a proudly Afrocentric artist who “fought the erasure of dark-skinned women by embracing Negritude,” as Brent Staples put it in a New York Times column.¹ The filmmakers’ big mistake (alleged or actual, depending on your point of view) was faking the Negritude by altering Saldana's looks, darkening her complexion and broadening her nose. The nose might be written off as traditional Hollywood flimflam—think Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) or Nicole Kidman in Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002)—but the skin smacks instantly of blackface, a queasy reminder of the time when bigotry against African-Americans was even more pervasive and destructive than it is today.

This is therefore an apt moment for revisiting Lee's movie, in which blackface figures prominently. The first thing to note is that the audience for Bamboozled has been miniscule. Revenues from its initial release totaled less than a quarter of its $10 million budget, and reviews have tilted toward the negative, apart from balanced appraisals from perceptive observers like New York Times critic Stephen Holden, who called it “an almost oxymoronic entity, an important Hollywood movie,” and New Yorker critic Richard Brody, who described it more recently as a “sharp, riotous satire” with “a wide range of incisive, sardonic, hyperbolic humor and drama.”² Given its low visibility, I will briefly summarize the film.

Damon Wayans plays Pierre Delacroix, an African-American writer determined to turn his creative flair and Ivy League degree into a big-time media career. Taking a job at a small-time cable network, he decides to implement the loopiest idea he can dream up, figuring that he will either (a) boost the network's dismal ratings and ride high on his success, or (b) ruin the company and enjoy the satisfaction of humiliating his white boss, Thomas Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), who thinks his black wife and African art collection give him “soul brother” bona fides. Pierre proceeds to create a show so God-awful that the network will surely self-destruct, freeing him for bigger ventures in time to come. Well aware that the entertainment industry has reaped high profits from low-down depictions of African-American life, he reaches into the same scurrilous bag of tricks, hiring a pair of black performers (Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson), making them blacker with burnt cork, naming their act “The New Millennium Minstrel Show,” and filling it with racial slurs, stereotypes, and clichés.

The show becomes a smash against the odds, and Pierre basks in applause, acclaim, and awards; but at the same time he runs afoul of his assistant and her militant brother, leader of the Mau Maus, a radical rap group with a murderous bent. Several plot twists later, Pierre dies a lonely death while watching a video montage of the racist imagery manufactured, circulated, and savored by white Americans for generations. This sequence does not just illustrate but categorically proves the culpability of mainstream culture in a spiritual and psychological genocide inflicted on minorities by media riddled with avarice, callousness, and complacency.

Blackface plays a major role in Bamboozled, serving as an inflammatory symbol of the media industry's unabashed coziness with racially charged caricatures and distortions. Pierre's downward spiral picks up speed when one of his stars rebels against the show, refusing to wear blackface when he sees that studio audiences have started wearing it for fun, and late in his decline Pierre wears blackface while brooding over the racist artifacts, toys, and playthings he has hoarded in his office. Bamboozled rubs the audience's collective nose in many kinds of racist kitsch, but the corked-up skin is what sticks most intractably in the viewer's craw, as Clark recognizes in Facing Blackness, where he links the blackface in Lee's film with the deplorable history of African-American entertainers forced to hide their faces behind makeup, masks, and frozen grins in order to subsist in white-dominated show business.

Bamboozled obviously borrows from Mel Brooks’s obstreperous 1968 farce The Producers, about two Jewish con artists who mount a historically unhinged show called “Springtime for Hitler” portraying a Führer with a song in his heart, and Lee has acknowledged Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Sidney Lumet's Network (1976) as influences on his film. On a related track, Clark positions Bamboozled among numerous films deploying blackface for good or ill, including such half-forgotten satires as Brian De Palma's scattershot Hi, Mom! (1970) and Robert Townsend's comic Hollywood Shuffle (1987). Clark also underscores the impact of blackface on the actors who wear it in Bamboozled, quoting Davidson's remark in a making-of documentary about Lee's film:

It brought out feelings, for me as a black person, how low we had to stoop [historically] to survive. Putting on the blackface and all that stuff was just a way of… getting your family fed. Put it this way: we already in blackface, we ain't gonna get any blacker. It was just putting us down more.³

I have reviewed Clark's book elsewhere, and here I want to reiterate what a real service he has performed, however unwittingly, by publishing it at the very moment of the great Soldana debate, to which I briefly return.⁴ Saldana is a hard-working actress who grew up in New York City and the Dominican Republic, studied dance and theater as a teenager, and has appeared in a long list of movies and television shows, earning dozens of honors from the BET Awards, the Black Movie Awards, the Black Reel Awards, the American Latino Media Arts Awards, the NAACP Image Awards, the Latino Imagen Awards, and other worthy outfits.

Nina was written and directed by the white filmmaker Cynthia Mort, who has disowned the final cut for reasons not directly related to the Saldana scuffle. Saldana herself identifies as Latina and black—her ancestry is mainly Dominican and Puerto Rican, with Haitian and Lebanese also in the mix—and the awards community obviously concurs, notwithstanding her roles in James Cameron's Avatar (2009) and James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), in which her characters have blue skin and green skin, respectively. Her minority credentials are solid, but they have not been enough to guarantee acceptance of her portrayal of Simone, an artist and activist who was Afrocentric to her bones. Simone also sported so much musical charisma and political courage that her lack of conventional movie-star beauty was beside the point, whereas Saldana has movie-star looks to spare, another sore point with some of Simone's countless loyalists.

What does Spike think about all this? Although the ever-scrappy auteur is rarely quiet when race-based issues surface in the media, no remarks from him about Nina have made news as of this writing. The controversy somewhat recalls his own experience when some objected to Denzel Washington playing the lighter-skinned hero of Malcolm X in 1992. But whatever Lee's view of the Saldana dispute, much of his filmography amounts to a blistering indictment of racism and intolerance, American style. As flawed as Bamboozled unquestionably is, no film has ever treated these festering ills with more fury, ferocity, and wit.

Notes

1. Staples, “Hollywood's Fake Version of Nina Simone,” para. 3.

2. Holden, “Trying on Blackface in a Flirtation With Fire,” para. 17: Brody, “Bamboozled,” para. 1.

3. Clark, Facing Blackness, p. 57. See also The Making of Bamboozled, Dir. Spike Lee and Sam Pollard.

4. Sterritt, “Facing Blackness,” pp. 73–74.