Beyond Superfly

Scott and company make it easy for Gleiberman to arrive at the conclusion he does — it is a little uneasy to watch how lovingly they portray the ingenious rise of Frank Lucas. But it's not hagiography; instead, the film sets up the contrast between this image and what he uses this image to accomplish. Scott expends a lot of energy showing us the devastation Lucas' Blue Magic heroin wrought on Harlem. He takes the time to show us the needles plunged deep into the rotting, blackened forearms, with all the close-up clarity of Requiem for a Dream. Why else linger on children crying next to dead, overdosed mothers in empty apartments? Why the depressing images of Vietnam soldiers shooting up in the disease and squalor of south Asians brothels? Why the demoralizing shots of housing project dwellers looking out from their windows, literally trapped in rusty cages like a dog pound or a third-world chicken coop? A hero-worshipping biopic wouldn't extend the movie roughly 30 minutes (a fifth of the running time of the rest of the film) to rub our nose in this filth.

Scott's intent is evident not just from the scenes upon scenes invested in the heroin squalor, but also in his technique. Scott smash cuts from these squalid images to portraits of Lucas calmly reading the paper in his thousand-dollar business suit over breakfast. We see needles plunge, and then, bam, there's Frank outcharming every guy in the ballroom, walking out with the classiest lady at the party. Arms rot, then we see Frank sipping expensive wine in front of his fireplace.

This dark duality of Frank Lucas is exactly what Jay-Z describes. In fact, Ridley Scott's method of contrasting these images is the cinematic shorthand for what the real Frank Lucas says about his role in the degradation of Harlem:

When asked about the relative morality of killing people, selling millions of dollars of dope, and playing a significant role in the destruction of the social fabric of his times, Frank Lucas bristles. What choice did he have? he demands. "Kind of sonofabitch I saw myself being, money I wanted to make, I'd have to be on Wall Street. On Wall Street, from the giddy-up. But I couldn't have even gotten a job being a fucking janitor on Wall Street."

In other words, Frank Lucas could only be a hero to, say, one of the stockbrokers from Boiler Room, swindling life savings from desperate husbands, or perhaps the Enron trader who laughed "Burn baby burn … that's a beautiful thing" during a California wildfire. Frank Lucas' peer group isn't Bill Gates and Warren Buffet; it's Ken Lay and Nicholas Brookes. The Enron guys who bragged about stealing $250 a megawatt hour from Grandma Millie might see the amoral capitalism of Frank Lucas in heroic terms, but does Gleiberman have such contempt for the audience that he thinks we will too?

This point is also lost on David Denby. He chews up three pages of The New Yorker pondering the message of American Gangster. Again, true to the consensus, much of his review lavishes praise on Scott's craftsmanlike ability to "pack as much as he can into the corner of shots" and "pack even the most casual scenes decisively," and several dozen words about on how Lucas wiping a table under a damp drink and replacing it with a coaster is the perfect prologue for this character. But Denby's damning criticism is "the movie's glorification of Frank Lucas," extending the idea to the portrayal of Lucas as a captain of business. Denby acknowledges Scott's effort to show the evil effect of Lucas' business on his home in Harlem, but "none of this devastation alters the approving portrayal of Frank." Denby goes further: The "shallowness of his characterization" asks viewers to consider why "it's better that Harlem w(as) destroyed by black gangsters rather than by Italians." Denby disparages Scott's presentation of Lucas' ascent as "not with irony, or as a mini-tragedy, or as cruel joke on his own community, but as a long-delayed victory of black capitalism."

Denby's simplistic argument is premised on the notion that Frank Lucas is to be taken simply as a heroic role model, which he arrives at by taking the portrait at face value. He doesn't recognize that the seemingly approving portrait is an essential part of the ironic tragedy of Frank Lucas — or, more importantly, that the "victory of black capitalism" is the cruel joke.

The seemingly heroic portrayal of Frank Lucas goes directly to a deeper point about the post-Civil Rights era that Denby brings up but doesn't see. In scene transitions, Scott uses background media (a TV on in the living room, cops reading newspapers, etc.) to associate Frank Lucas with figures like Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King. Denby reads this to mean that we're meant to believe that Frank Lucas' success "is a strike against racism."

This face-value criticism completely misses the deeper point: The Civil Rights Movement empowered blacks as they never had been before, giving them a newfound freedom that could be used for good or evil. In other words, blacks not only could use the same bathrooms as whites, but could extort the masses like them too. Blacks could march on Washington to demand the same rights as white people, or deliver agents of death to public housing projects for a handsome profit just like white people. That's the dark, cruel joke of American Gangster's Frank Lucas, the punchline of which apparently flew right over David Denby's head.

In fact, it's a running joke throughout the film that the cops simply can't believe that a black man could accomplish what Frank Lucas does. Scott sets up the joke in the very first extended sequence of the film. (The first scene is Lucas setting a man on fire, which itself could be a joke on the torture-happy cop from a previous Denzel movie directed by Scott's brother. Lucas starts out as the right-hand man of Bumpy Johnson, then the king of the Harlem drug trade. Near death, Bumpy and Frank amble into a department store. Bumpy laments the development: America got "too big," he says. Big stores "cut out the middle man" and "lack personal service," where business men like him "take care of people."

In other words, if Bumpy is Sam Walton, then Frank Lucas is his David Glass. Like Glass to Walton, Lucas took Bumpy's business structure and thought it through like a modern CEO: buy direct from the manufacturer, outsource to cheap foreign labor, bring efficiency to the supply chain, keep costs down and make your products indispensable to the consumer. Like Wal-Mart, Lucas priced his competitors out of the market, either putting them out of business or making them work for him. A mom-and-pop heroin outfit like that of Nicky Barnes (a fat, sloppy, and effective Cuba Gooding, Jr.) simply can't survive the ruthlessness of Frank's Blue Magic, Inc. Lucas' ladies cutting his heroin in the nude (so they won't pocket any of the product) is a pornographic equivalent to the women in blue vests blackmailed into staying beyond their clock-out time and rarely given merit-based promotions. Like CEO Glass, Lucas will take virtually any measure to keep costs down and profits up.

It must be said that the CEO-ification of Frank Lucas is more than a bit overstated: In real life, the man was much more of a Superfly than the movie leads you to believe. However, the inspiration for "Frank Lucas" comes directly from the man himself. One of the most poignant moments of the New York article is when Lucas reflects on how gentrification renders guys like him irrelevant, just as his modern methods did the Mob.

A couple of days later, eating at a T.G.I. Friday's, Lucas scowled through glareproof glass to the suburban strip beyond. "Look at this shit," he said. A giant Home Depot down the road especially bugged him. Bumpy Johnson himself couldn't have collected protection from a damn Home Depot, he said with disgust. "What would Bumpy do? Go in and ask to see the assistant manager? Place is so big, you get lost past the bathroom sinks. But that's the way it is now. You can't find the heart of anything to stick the knife into."

There's a certain dark poetry to Lucas use of the word heart: It's both life and death. Guys like Bumpy Johnson — in the romanticized mobster narrative — gave life to neighborhoods by offering protection and ensuring basic needs. He also took the life of the neighborhood by running drugs to its veins. Gentrification offers great security to the well-landed, but little to the downtrodden: The corporate big box store gives no handouts, people are lost inside the walls, there's no heart to knife and rob for liquor money. Guys like Bumpy Johnson could at least offer something to his people. But corporations are soulless, created on paper and are moved only by the bottom line on that paper. In this way, Frank Lucas was closer to Home Depot and Wal-Mart than to the mob. He wasn't the end of the mafia; he was the beginning of the big box store.