In living colour

>> Spike Lee skewers TV in Bamboozled

by MATTHEW HAYS

With Bamboozled, Spike Lee, America's most prominent black filmmaker, again makes racial politics the central theme in a feature. For many fans, it's a welcome return--some felt he wasn't so adept at tracking notorious '70s serial killers (though, for the record, I loved Summer of Sam).

His passion for this storyline can certainly be felt throughout Bamboozled. It's an hilarious premise. Damon Wayans plays an upwardly-mobile young TV screenwriter who works for a smallish network stricken with bad ratings. Wayans's boss (Michael Rapaport) is an evil and cynical fellow who thinks he's honorary black because of his "black wife and kids" (or so he claims). Wayans's disdain for Rapaport becomes crystal clear to us when Rapaport begins hurling the word "nigger" around, unapologetically.

Disillusioned and disgusted with the TV medium and the nasty white-dominated scene he's forced to work within, intent on bailing on his contract, Wayans chooses to take the "Springtime for Hitler" approach. He concocts a pilot proposal so offensive, so bound to misfire with test audiences, it's sure to get him canned.

Putting on a new face

The show is Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, and, pulling every cynical race card he can, Wayans manages to sell the show to Rapaport and his higherups. The high concept involves two young black men donning blackface minstrel makeup (à la Al Jolson), reciting various bits and pieces of anachronistic shtick, parodying cruel racial stereotypes of yesteryear. In an age when everything is ironic and nothing earnest--a post-politically correct world--Wayans' bizarre concept unexpectedly becomes a national sensation, leaving him dumbfounded by the phenomenon.

It's a very funny idea, one that allows Lee plenty of opportunity to skewer TV types (undoubtedly worthy targets). And it isn't difficult to imagine what inspired Lee's anger. A few years ago, the TV and movie industry was praised for what appeared to be a new wave of racial integration, both behind and in front of the cameras. The new mix had its limits, it seems: a perusal of last season's TV lineup found that only a handful of black actors were finding their way into the new programming. Add to that Lee's attack on the animated show The PJs, which starred the voice of Eddie Murphy, a program which featured crude racial caricatures of blacks which were defended as daring and politically incorrect.

A flawed hero

Lee has injected Wayans' character with much of the director's own anger. Wayans is seen railing against the system, taunting his white TV exec colleagues at a board meeting and baiting his stupid and insensitive superior (Rapaport is fine in this role). But Lee also has disdain for his protagonist, who rapidly gets sucked into the success of the project, fantasizing about winning awards and donning blackface himself to fit in with the show's fawning studio audience.

It's a biting attack on the media machine itself, and, as expected with Lee, this movie has a full set of razor-sharp teeth. Lee rages against sell-out blacks, whites who profit from contrived controversies and makes a specific jab at a well-known designer who sells his goods primarily to black-dominated 'hoods (disguised so that no one will recognize him as "Tommy Hillnigger").

Political films have become so rare in this post-Jane-Fonda world, one can't help but watch a film like Bamboozled with a sense of relief. Even if you don't agree with his views entirely, Lee presents the TV biz well, laying bare its idiosyncracies, taking many of his cues from the '70s landmark Network. His clips of black stereotypes from the media archives are artfully employed. (The film's title, Bamboozled, comes from a Malcolm X speech which is shown--performed by Denzel Washington in Lee's biopic--in clip during a montage.) It's a welcome switch from the current critical favourite, The Contender, which neatly sets up a daring political scenario, but then manages to pull its conceptual punches in the final act, effectively robbing it of any controversy it might have provoked.

Having said that, Lee hampers the very good bits of his film, typically, with an unhealthy dose of didacticism. Just like Oliver Stone, Lee assumes an idiocy and lightning-short attention span on the part of his audience, repeating, reiterating and regurgitating the same themes over and over and over.

It's an odd contradiction, this. On the one hand, Lee suggests that audiences are being underestimated everywhere. On the other, throughout Bamboozled and especially in its final third, he clearly does so himself. :

Bamboozled opens Friday, Oct. 20