What a bizarre, sulphuric, directionless satire from Spike Lee Bamboozled is. The title is from a speech by Malcolm X (“You’ve been led astray, led amok. You’ve been bamboozled”) and Lee quotes it by unblushingly showing a clip of his own movie with Denzel Washington addressing a crowd.
In Bamboozled, Damon Wayans plays Pierre Delacroix, an upwardly mobile black TV executive with the strangulated pseudo-white voice Eddie Murphy famously sent up in his stand-up act. Pierre’s trying to get aspirational black middle-class
sitcoms on the air. But his neurotic white boss Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) continually demands edgy, street, gangsta-style stuff from the ghetto.
Goaded beyond endurance, Pierre cooks up a mad, defiant flourish – part radical-situationist stunt, part career suicide – designed to get himself fired with a pay-off. His new programme is a grotesque minstrel show set on an Alabamy plantation with black people actually blacking up with burnt cork – and of course it’s a huge ratings smash hit.
Like many movies, Bamboozled implies that TV is the big villain, and repeatedly alludes to Peter Finch being “mad as hell” in Network. But the obvious precursor, Mel Brooks’s The Producers, is not mentioned – I suspect because the director does not care to make common cause with Jewish victimhood, however comically invoked.
The satire gets sprayed everywhere: on the radical black group that finally abducts the minstrel show’s star, on the corporate executives promoting ghetto chic (the programme is sponsored by “Tommy Hillnigger”), and of course on the horrific minstrel show itself. This last target would appear to be a bafflingly obvious Aunt Sally.
Evidently Lee is saying that the attitude of white corporate America to black identity simply makes for a 21st century minstrel show. But this is a strangely indirect and heavy-handed way of making the point, as well as arguably regressive and defeatist. Finally Lee gives us a long montage of clips from “minstrel” movies, implying a perverse connoisseurship of this lost culture and a desire to reclaim and contextualise it in some way.
It’s a muddled, exasperating movie, but with undeniably powerful moments and its own bull-in-a-china-shop energy. Lee’s sheer tactlessness is refreshing.