What can Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton be thinking? A film almost entirely funded and made by African-Americans soars to the top of the box-office charts. Buoyed by impressive reviews, it stays there for two weeks, an almost unheard-of achievement for an ”urban-themed” movie.
And how do the United States’s most prominent black politicians respond? With threats of a boycott. With demands that film distributor MGM cut certain scenes for the video release. With a spasm of knee-jerk responses that put them both squarely in the company of fundamentalist right-wingers who want Harry Potter taken from libraries and burned.
The appeal of Barbershop, the film that’s got Al and Jesse’s collective undies in a bunch, is that it shows how black people talk among themselves when white folks aren’t listening. Apparently it also shows how black people talk among themselves when Jackson and Sharpton aren’t listening. Some of the characters go way off-message when it comes to some of the victimological bromides and ”yes-to-hope, no-to-dope” rhetorical boilerplates that, whatever their other virtues, Jackson and Sharpton too often traffic in.
This manufactured outrage over Barbershop centres on Eddie (stand-up comic Cedric the Entertainer), a wise and cantankerous older barber with a knack for galvanising conversations with a provocative remark. Eddie spares no one. Rodney King? ”He shoulda got beat for drivin’ drunk — in a Hyundai!” OJ Simpson? ”OJ did it!” Rosa Parks, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People activist who contested Montgomery’s segregated bus system by refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger? ”Rosa Parks ain’t no hero. She jess set her tired ass down!” And Martin Luther King, Jackson’s political mentor, is mentioned for his purported tom-catting on the road. But perhaps this is what Jackson really objects to: ”Jesse Jackson? Screw Jesse Jackson!” — a remark loudly endorsed by the barbershop clientele.
This is where the generations divide. Young viewers can’t see what the fuss is about, while some of Jackson’s generation can’t stand to hear their icons put down. ”To take two victims of the civil rights movement,” said Sharpton, ”and mock them is offensive and insulting.” Meanwhile Jackson, threatening a boycott, accused the filmmakers of ”turning tragedy into comedy”, blissfully unaware that he and Sharpton were turning a successful black comedy into a headline-hunting farce.
To its credit, MGM refused all the Jackson-Sharpton demands. No, it won’t cut scenes for the video release and, yes, it will be backing a sequel. This is the just response whenever the church denounces movies like The Last Temptation of Christ, so why should Jackson or Sharpton be treated differently? And why should a studio butcher its own work when those abusing it freely admit that, no, they haven’t even seen the movie?
While some commentators have sought to depict Eddie as a mischief-making ”trickster” figure, most of what Eddie’s character says could have come from any disaffected, middle-aged, working-class black man. He dismisses reparations for slavery as a joke. He goes after complacency and lazy thinking with a chainsaw.
The movie largely endorses Eddie’s worldview. The n-word, America’s most potent secular blasphemy, is used only by crooks — explicitly depicted here as the ruin of the hood. The movie’s one white character is finally, warily, welcomed as an equal, and Ice Cube’s character realises the Pakistani store owner across the street has exactly the same financial and personal woes as himself. This is what’s so depressing about Jackson’s urge to boycott Barbershop: it is a comedy that advocates equal treatment for everyone (except crooks), reaches out to its non-black characters, condemns the violence and gunplay associated with gangs and some kinds of hip-hop, and demands that viewers always question their own assumptions. And everyone in the US is seeing it. Except Jesse.
According to one Los Angeles barber who cuts Jackson’s hair when he’s in town, Jesse doesn’t even come by the barbershop; he brings the barber to the hotel suite. It sounds like Jackson badly needs to reconnect with that central masculine enclave of the African-American community, just as he clearly might benefit from a visit to his local multiplex. — Â