It’s Black History Month, so deep cuts this month feature a double dose of excellent Black satire that, until recently, had been pretty hard to watch and pretty hard to find anyone who was talking about it. The films are Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) and Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987).
I have to start by shouting out the Criterion Collection. They added Bamboozled to the collection in 2020 which was when I found it. Hollywood Shuffle joins the collection later this month. As noted by this New York Times article, as recently as August 2020, there were very few Black American films in the Criterion Collection. They’ve made a very legitimate and tangible effort to address this lack, so now I think there are around 20 Black American films in the collection with more added almost every month.
This isn’t about Criterion Collection, their lack of Black films, or their recent efforts to change this. This is about Bamboozled and Hollywood Shuffle BUT I found these films, especially Bamboozled because Criterion first helped to put them on my radar. Now that I’ve addressed this, I can talk about the movies themselves.
Spike Lee is one of the most interesting directors of the past 30+ years. He’s very probably the most famous Black American director, and yet he really only has a couple films—Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X—that seem to garner much mainstream film community attention. BlackKklansman (2018) helped to reinvigorate his place in American film a few years back (it also finally got him an Oscar), but I would still consider Lee both a very famous director AND an underrated one. I still need to see much of his filmography, but today I’m talking about the criminally underrated film Bamboozled.
Bamboozled was not a hit, making 2.5 million on a 10-million-dollar budget (Wikipedia). It came in the middle of a decade or so between Malcolm X (1992) and Inside Job (2006) when Lee made a whole bunch of movies that are probably good but that I still need to see.
In the midst of this run is Bamboozled, a movie that tackles turn-of-the-millennium racial politics and the racist structures of television in a way that is still relevant today.
It came in the middle of a decade or so between Malcolm X (1992) and Inside Job (2006) when Lee made a whole bunch of movies that are probably good but that I still need to see.
At its core, it’s a Black Network (Lumet, 1976). (If you haven’t seen Network, one of the greatest films of all time, do so immediately). Network is a dark satire of a TV network and its endless quest for ratings. It’s applicable to the mid-1970s and just as relevant, if not more so, in our infotainment world.
Roughly between Network and the present day is Bamboozled. This film concerns Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) a highly educated Black man working for a far less erudite and intelligent white TV producer. Frustrated by the stereotypical portrayals of Black people on the network, Delacroix pitches a terrible idea for a show so he will get fired and can get a different job. His idea is for the New Millennium Minstrel Show, a cartoonishly offensive minstrel show that is also quite accurate to how such shows were decades earlier.
To Delacroix’s amazement, the executive likes the idea, and the show is a hit. The executive defends the offensive show as “satire,” which is just rhetorical gymnastics to protect his own sense of whiteness. Bamboozled, which is actual satire, has quite a lot to say about how “satire” is co-opted in service of just being a bigot with impunity. There are many other plot complexities I won’t relay here to keep some of the surprises of the movie, and because they don’t make a lot of sense if you haven’t seen Network.
There is a lot going on in Bamboozled, including some fake ads thrown in, but it all centers on the idea of television and media representation. Lee is critiquing, among other things, the fact that the very structure of television is white. The film highlights how, even when Black people are granted opportunities on television, in something like The Cosby Show or The Jeffersons, the show is still made for white audiences to benefit the distinctly white structures of television. Bamboozled argues that any Black characters on television are going to be overshadowed by the white system that is television. And that the only Blackness (white) audiences want to see is Blackness presented through stereotypes, Lee’s point being that in this “new millennium” Black entertainment works the same as it did in the previous one. “Blackness” and network television are diametrically opposed forces.
I think he was right in 2000 and, even with some progress, I think he’s right now. While there are a few examples of Black television under the so-called era of “peak TV”—think of Dear White People, Atlanta, and Insecure for example—network TV hasn’t had similar success. There was Black-ish, but it was frequently critiqued for catering to white audiences too much (I can’t speak on it specifically as I never watched it). In the mid-2010s, there was The Carmichael Show, a complex and nuanced show that suffered in near total obscurity and managed 32 episodes. (I’ll definitely write about it sometime. It’s brilliant). Most recently there’s Abbott Elementary which to seems to have maybe, finally, cracked the code for Blackness on network TV. Still, the fact that this happened over 20 years after Lee’s film, and the fact that this is still the only example I can think of, is a testament to the enduring power of Bamboozled as a satiric work about exploitation, stereotypes and the inherent conflict between the white structures of network television and Blackness. It also stands as an incredible “adaptation” of Network to a new context, but that’s another discussion.
In a very different vein is Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle. It follows Bobby (Townsend) as he auditions for outlandishly stereotypical movie roles. This part of the movie is sort of a Black version of the satire at work in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992). But unlike Bamboozled, this movie is quite fun. There’s a sequence where Bobby imagines his life like a film noir and another where he and his friend take up the role of movie critics commenting on the lack of Blackness and lack of realistic Black characters in several parody movies.
These bits are rather hilarious, but they also make a broader point about the white structural architecture of Hollywood as a place of cliché representation (when representation happens at all). There isn’t much plot to the film, as it’s mostly just these sequences loosely tied together. Another sequence is for a sort of acting school where you can be taught how to be a Black actor ready to play all the most cliché roles. It’s a film that highlights how, especially in the late 80s/early 90s Hollywood system, there’s no place for authentic Blackness. It’s the same point Bamboozled makes about television, but it goes down a lot easier in Hollywood Shuffle.
But these films need each other. Hollywood Shuffle needs the razor edge of reality provided by Bamboozled and Bamboozled needs the enjoyment that comes from Hollywood Shuffle.
They both highlight the way the film and TV industry has little space for complex Black characters, and how the only real response to this is satire.
As noted by Danielle Fuentes Morgan in her excellent book Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, satire is often the best vehicle for revealing what she calls “kaleidoscopic Blackness,” that is, the many shades of Black experience that defy stereotypes. These films highlight how rich that Blackness can be while also reminding viewers that the systems of white entertainment—network television and Hollywood film—will only make space for this kaleidoscopic Blackness when they are forced to do so.
