Bamboozled
dir. Spike Lee
New Line Cinema

In the time it took for Bamboozled — Spike Lee’s satire in which a black writer half-unwittingly convinces a major network to revive the blackface minstrel show — to get from New York and Los Angeles to Flyover Land, the full weight of its promotional campaign hit and the standard array of cinepundits dropped their two soundalike cents: Why is Lee picking at the nearly scarred-over wound of blackface? Does he really expect anyone to find its plot plausible — that the country would embrace minstrel shows in the Year 2000, or that the melodrama could resolve itself the way it does?

Failing to understand Lee’s films is practically a national pastime. That’s not to give Lee too much credit; he frequently has ill concepts and occasionally makes bad films. Bamboozled certainly offers plenty to dislike, but the wholesale dismissal of the premise reveals a certain, tiresome cultural myopia. If anyone really thinks that the majority (that is, white) culture won’t line up to be sold a bill of goods about black people that’s laden with the worst stereotypes with respect to behavior, appearance, etc., they must be fooling themselves into thinking it’s not suburban white kids driving the sales of the least savory subsections of hip-hop.

These aren’t exactly earth-shattering observations — Lee himself has acknowledged that the blackface in Bamboozled is, among other things, a stand-in for gangsta culture. But “other things” is the operative term, the reason that Lee wasn’t content to comment only on modern black entertainment. True, the blackface archetype that blacks are lazy and dishonest isn’t very far removed from the gangsta archetype that blacks are thugs and criminals — both invoke the need for white supervision — but Bamboozled is trafficking in more than that. The blackface set-up gives Lee more than a century of foul race relations to plumb, and it’s also the perfect satirical backdrop for his rat-race observations.

All that’s very interesting. What’s not interesting is that the movie takes so much from Network, the 1976 attack on the television industry courtesy of director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. For those who haven’t seen it recently, it’s remarkable how badly the movie has aged — the venom Chayefsky directed to those short-changing the American consciousness has curdled and soured his ceaseless diatribes. The movie’s own self-importance dwarfs the self-absorption it’s satirizing.

Bamboozled is the same way. Beyond just co-opting (or, perhaps more appropriately, sampling) Network’s contempt towards TV, its terrorist faction and its “mad as hell” catchphrase, it similarly trashes any pretense of letting its audience draw its own conclusions while not really offering any firm conclusions itself. The movie weaves its tapestry out of such thick, obvious ropes that by the time it descends into its apocalpytic, New Wave nightmare finale, you’ve long since realized Lee doesn’t have anything concrete to say — it’s harmony but no melody. Bamboozled is recommended because that harmony is sometimes haunting, incendiary and righteous, but it is also sometimes like listening to Wynton Marsalis honk out raspberries.

The director even adds another layer of difficulty by shooting exclusively in digital video and 16mm. For all those filmmakers who want to demonstrate that there’s a digital revolution going on: OK, understood, point taken. Now please stop it, because blowing up the lower-resolution digital image onto 35mm for theatrical projection makes everything truly ugly, and you’ll just drive audiences back to the small screens on which the picture actually looks good. Lee is savvy enough to play with the chunky visuals — the joke is sometimes how much detail you can make out, like when the Gianni Versace label on Jada Pinkett-Smith’s blouse is pellucid during a pitch meeting — and it's ironic that nothing on this hit TV show — particularly its blackfaced stars — ever looks good.

Troubled though it is, Bamboozled is no failure, and it’s practically a masterpiece in light of what some of his peers are up to. But Lee is famously argumentative, and you just wish he’d make and defend a point rather than mockingly observe all the facets of all the arguments — yes, it’s satire, but the best satires use their scorn to fertilize a kernel of a solution. It’s an open question whether Lee is conflicted or simply contentious, but the impact of black entertainment on America is arguably as important as any other “black issue” he could tackle, and Bamboozled shows he has more than one more movie in him on that topic. Here’s hoping they improve on this one.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)