Black Film in the 1990s: A New Movie Boom PDF

Black Film In ike I99OS The New Black Movie Boom and Its Portents The biting comment of a black Los Angeles gang mem ber in the grimy mise-en-scene of Dennis Hopper’s cop-buddy, action fantasy Colors (1988) perhaps best summarized the frustrating pre dicament facing blacks seeking entry to the Hollywood system at the turn of the 1990s. Asked why he did not leave the gang life and try something more productive, homeboy (Grand Bush) replies, “Yeah, I could quit the gangs.... Maybe I’ll go to Hollywood and be Eddie Murphy.” Then he poses a question that sardonically conveys the point understood by all people of color: “You think America is ready to love two niggers at the same time?” This bit of subversive dialogue re calls James Baldwin’s notion of the black actor’s “smuggled in reality”; homeboy recognizes that dominant cinema cannot entirely hide the fundamental sense of inequality and marginalization that is persis tently all too real for African Americans. At the same time, however, a countervailing sense of expectation grew in that cultural moment, as Hollywood began to show signs of opening up to black creativity and energy again. Gradually, all aspects of black filmmaking and filmic representation began to gain momentum after almost fifteen years of stagnation and subordination that for the most part had confined black cinematic talent and expression to a few major “stars.” These were largely featured in one-dimensional roles or biracial “buddy” ve hicles fashioned to accommodate the broadest crossover market (e.g., Clara’s Heart , Driving Miss Daisy , Lethal Weapon II ). Starting in the last years of the 1980s and swelling in the 1990s, the new black film wave was heralded by the release of over seven black-directed features in 1990, including such pivotal produc tions as 7b Sleep with Anger by Charles Burnett, Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, and Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash. In 1991, the black movie boom continued to expand with the release of twelve films directed by African Americans, along with over twenty other productions that starred or had significant roles for black actors. In many ways, 1991 was a prolific turning-point year that brought to the commercial screen a range of significant and diverse black feature films, such as A Rage in Harlem, directed by Bill Duke, John Singleton’s hit Boyz N the Hood, The Five Heartbeats, directed by Robert Townsend, and the rereleased Chameleon Street, directed by Wen dell B. Harris. Also that same year, Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar for her “buddy” role as a spirit medium in the mainstream hit Ghost (1990), making her only the second black woman ever so honored by the Hollywood system. Serving as a contrasting index of the severity of the drought between the two black movie booms, production in 1990 and 1991 alone easily surpassed the total production of all blackfocused films released since the retreat of the Blaxploitation wave in the mid-1970s. The boom of the 1990s has emerged out of conditions that are com parable to those that fostered the Blaxploitation period, but they also stand in ironic counterpoint to them. The social contexts of the two black film waves differ significantly, as one would expect, because of the increasingly soured and polarized negotiation of blapk-white “race relations” in the intervening years. We have noted that, along with other empowering conditions, the Blaxploitation boom emerged from a period of militant political activism fueled by the rising identity con sciousness and social expectations of African Americans at the end of the civil rights movement. These forces inspired black intellectu als, artists, writers, and politicians to demand an end to Hollywood’s 158 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S pervasive and fundamental subordination of blacks on the screen. Hollywood’s strategic response to this combination of black social and intellectual pressure was to produce a wave of cheaply made black action-adventures set in the “ghetto” that wefe, with a few notable exceptions, cranked out by white directors and garnered tremendous profits for the mainstream commercial system but also subordinated black talent and creativity to the needs of that system at all levels. In contrast, the black movie boom of the 1990s has materialized out of a climate of long-muted black frustration and anger over the worsen ing political and economic conditions that African Americans continue to endure in the nation’s decaying urban centers. Ironically, the social character of this anger is the dialectical opposite of the passion that helped overdetermine the inception of the Blaxploitation boom at a historical moment when hundreds of American cities burst into fiames as urban blacks, frustrated when “civil rights” gains did not trans late into real economic progress for the majority of blacks trapped in northern ghettos in the mid-1960s, and they increasingly took to the streets in a. series of urban rebellions. Conversely, from the mid-1980s onward, we have witnessed the rise of an insidious, socially fragment ing violence driven by the availability ofcheap guns and crack cocaine in the nation’s partitioned inner cities. For the most part, black rage has lost its political focus in this violent apartheid environment; it has become an internalized form of self-destruction expressed as gang and drug warfare. If such a situation can be said to have positive effects, we can see this rage as an energizing element in much of the new black cultural production, finding expression in a rearticulated criticism of white racism and a resurgent interest in black nationalism among the urban youth inspired by the rap lyrics of Public Enemy, N.W.A., Sis ter Souljah, and Ice-T, or resonant in the films of Bill Duke, Spike Lee, Matty Rich, and John Singleton. Black anger has not been confined to the urban poor. Black middle class children who. came of age in time to reap the benefits of the civil rights movement are finding out that, like the dissatisfied, up wardly mobile “Buppies” that populate Jungle Fever (1991), Livin’ Large (1991), and Strictly Business (1991), professional positions and success have not delivered them from the insults and isolation of a persistent and growing racism that poisons all societal transactions.! THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | ({9 Adding complexity to the social frame, the 1990s are also a moment of expanding black heterogeneity and “difference,” with such emergent groups within the community finding voice as gays and women, as manifest in the work of Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien, the continued popularity of black women’s novels, and the increasing call for more films by black women directors to translate these potent narratives? Yet the black community is not without its divisions and tensions, as is evident in the increasing isolation and distance of the black middle class from the problems of the black inner city. Certainly these expansive, diversifying shifts in black social con sciousness have resulted, in part, from the progressive efforts focused on rasing the black standard of living and improving race relations un leashed at the end of the 1960s. And these shifts must be recognized as evidence of the positive growth of the black social formation. But distrust is also pervasive. A 1990 opinion poll of black New Yorkers conducted by the New York TimesIfound that 64 percent of black respondents felt that drugs and urban violence were part of a white conspiracy to eliminate blacks; in the same poll, 32 percent of those queried suspected that AIDS was invented by scientists with the same purposes in mind. These beliefs filter into cinema; the implicit prem ise of Bill Duke’s De&p Cover (1991) is that the slow destruction of blacks is accomplished through the organized importation of cocaine. Director John Singleton’s character Furious Styles (Larry Fishburne) voices similar suspicions in Boyz N the Hood when he gives a street corner speech about how “they” funnel liquor, drugs, and guns into the black community in hopes that “we will kill each other off.” Underscor ing this position in real-time media, Singleton followed up on this train of thought on a popular television talk show, reasserting that AIDS was an invented disease and part of a genocidal plot against blacks.® For African Americans, then, the last decade of the century reveals a renewed sense of racial oppression and foreclosure, pessimism, and sinking social expectations. And when compared to the sense of social unity and purpose forged out of the sharp struggles of the 1960s, Afri can Americans are now going through an intense period of nihilism, fragmentation, and self-doubt, as they wonder where the next wave of collective struggle for social change will come from."* No matter how bleak these perceptions may be, one cannot naively 160 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S dismiss African American understandings of the times as collective paranoia. Black public opinion and political consciousness have been alarmed by a sharpening climate of deteriorating race relations, polar ization, and outright racial conflict made depressingly tangible in a steady stream of newscasts and nightmare media images over the turn of the decade. The deaths of Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins at the hands of racist lynch mobs in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst (New York) and the barbaric spectacle, broadcast on global television, of Rodney King being beaten by white police officers in Los Angeles have left no doubt in the black social psyche that America is still a racist society and that white America is persistently attempting to turn back the clock on whatever racial progress was made during the programs of “The Great Society” and the turbulent 1960s. Accordingly, Spike Lee’s invocation in Do the Right Thing of the names of the martyred Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpers as victims of police murder, and his dedication of Jungle Fever (1991) to Yusef Hawkins, and his use of the Rodney King tape in the opening of Malcolm X (1992)—all have struck deep harmonic feelings across the entire range of the African American community. Further compounding black feelings of alarm and despair, such sensationalized media events as the Anita HillClarence Thomas Senate hearings. Magic Johnson’s retirement, the Mike Tyson rape trial, and the social pathology of a white Boston “Yup pie” murdering his pregnant wife and blaming the crime on the mythi cal black scapegoat and thus provoking a reflex wave of police terror in the black community only confirm African American feelings that they have been made the major source of lurid spectacle for an image information driven society unwilling to recognize their humanity. Equally important, one must note that the present atmosphere of racial scapegoating and intolerance, as well as an overall acceptance of the “new” racism, has not erupted out of the murky depths of the most ignorant strata of the white social hierarchy. In great part, the national mood has been engineered and encouraged by the intensifying racist tone of mainstream political rhetoric and discourse rooted in the backlash politics of the Reagan years. This most recent wave of “nativism” started with the evocation of Cadillac-driving, parasitic welfare queens during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 bid for the presidency; continued through the successful exploitation of white fear focused on two black THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 161 men, Willie Horton and Jessie Jackson, during George Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign; and the 1990 Senate race of Jesse Helms, who made a crude appeal for white votes to defeat his African American opponent by blatantly advertising that “you needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but it had to go to a minority because of a racial quota.” In the same year, a former Klansman-Nazi, David Duke, called himself a Republican and won 44 percent of the vote in his 1990 bid for a Senate seat in Louisiana. On the national stage, Pat Buchanan picked up Duke’s themes and code words, winning a substantial white “protest vote” against George Bush in the early 1992 presidential primaries and the applause of delegates at the Republican National Convention.® Given this kind of establishment legitimation of playing the “race card,” one can hardly wonder that in Los Angeles the pent-up frus trations of disenfranchised people, sparked by a long series of bru talities and injustices culminating in the racist verdict in the Rodney King police brutality trial, exploded in spring 1992 into the worst civil rebellion the nation has experienced in this century. Very much in the same way that the 1950s lynching of Emmett Till or the 1960s assas sination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., marked defining moments in African America’s ongoing struggle for racial justice, the stark video tape, the acquittal of the four white police officers, and the uprising that followed it marked a consciousness-shaping moment for a whole new generation of Americans.® Gauging the temperament of the market, creating trends, or stay ing in sync with the popular mood of its various audience segments and fusing them into a dominant consumer consciousness is work that occupies a large slice of the film industry’s business talent, research, and capital. Hollywood traces an intricate path over the course of this restless, racially tense cultural period. While the mainstream produc tion system is willing to admit a few black directors and black-focused films to its exclusive club for obvious reasons of profit, the industry has also been quick to co-opt these new shifts in racial politics and attitude among whites and African Americans. Following trends set in the 1980s, the commercial cinema system has continued to stock its productions with themes and formulas dealing with black issues and characters that are reassuring to the sensibilities and expectations of an uneasy white audience. These filmic images tend to mediate the |«2 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S dysfunctions and delusions of a socity unable to deal honestly with its inequalities and racial conflicts, a society that operates in a profound state of racial denial on a daily basis. Thus images are polarized into celebrations of “Buppie” success and consumer-driven individualism that are consonant with a sense of black political quietism, tokenism, and accommodation, or condemnations of violent ghetto criminals, gangsters, and drug lords. These figurations can hardly be perceived as accidental at this cultural moment. Indeed, one of the most reveal ing and subtle instances symbolizing Hollywood’s sharpened, carefully maintained racial hegemony occurs in the most profitable comedy ever made. Home Alone (1990). In the film, an abandoned eight-year-old (Macaulay Culkin) seeks to fool two burglars into thinking his house is occupied by rigging a life-sized photo cutout of Michael Jordan to run around on a toy train track. Given the film’s astounding commercial success and broad audience infiuence, this scene is unsettling not only becaus^ts reification of Jordan represents the extent of black partici pation in the movie, and by implication in the exclusive, upper-class, suburban white domain of the narrative, but also because it implies one of the primary ways African Americans are constructed in the popular imagination: as one-dimensional, cardboard celebrity cutouts. Moreover, the co-optation and exploitation of black images and cul ture pervades the media industry in general. This trend is especially marked by the commercial success and consumption of urban rap and hip-hop culture among a vast, crossover, white youth population that has come to identify openly its milder suburban discontents with black anger and rebellion.'' But perhaps the revelation of the multivalent complexity of black images and the media uses of these are best con trasted by the juxtaposition of the opulent, soothing image of a black professional class rendered on “The Cosby Show” in contrast to the stark, real-time, genocidal slaughter of urban blacks on the nightly eleven o’clock news. It is little wonder that by the beginning of the 1990s, blacks felt that they existed in the dominant social imagina tion as media-constructed “stars” and fantasy figures or as criminals, while according to almost every social-material index, the quality of black life in this country steadily declined.® Or cinematically, as Spike Lee insightfully transcodes these perceptions in a dialogue about race between the bigoted Pino (John Turturro) and Mookie (Lee) of Do the THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 163 Right Thing, in Pino’s words, Prince, Magic Johnson, Eddie Murphy, et al. are “different,” the media-worshipped exceptions, and the rest are just “niggers.”® Considering these vast political and social changes centered on race relations in the past two decades, one irony is that the Blaxploitation boom was a series of movies made for black audiences mostly by white directors, while the 1990s wave has been made by black directors for black audiences with the broader range of crossover consumption in mind. The similarities between the facilitating economic backgrounds of both movie booms demand discussion in response to a set of central concerns or questions most often arising among the new black crit ics and directors: Is the new black movie boom a cyclic or periodic phenomenon trapped within the context of Hollywood economics? And will this new boom signal a real and permanent opening for blacks at all levels in the industry? Both black film waves arose during periods of economic crisis and downturn in film industry earnings. In the present instance, Holly wood, after a peak box office year in 1989, followed by the second-best summer ever in 1990, was encouraged to expand production, with the result that six or seven major studios pumped out almost two hundred films.’® But the turning point for studio profits started with the 1990 Christmas season and the chilling effects of the Persian Gulf War on the entertainment business in general, when box office receipts started to soften. In the opening months of 1991, Hollywood found itself overinvested in a series of lackluster, expensive blockbusters, which com bined disastrously with a glut of films already chasing shrinking box office profits. Once more, the commercial film industry was to find itself on the downside of the profit curve and sliding into one o'fits peri odic economic crises. In the words Qi Variety reporter A. D. Murphy, the domestic box office “hit a speed bump” in April 1991, as profits con tinued to fall through May to a deflated box office intake of $82 mil lion for the first week of June, compared to $111 million a year before, a 26 percent drop in revenues.” Added to the bite of a cruel spring and further complicated by a deepening national recession, the sum mer of 1991, the period that accounts for 40 percent of studio earnings, proved to be equally disappointing, with the box office down by 7 to 10 percent and industry profits in general estimated to be off by as much >«4 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S as 15 percent. As a further indication of the pervasive seriousness of the situation, the slump at the box office and the anemic condition of the film industry were paralleled by a crash in video rentals, which by October 1991 had fallen off by 25 percent. Overall, the recessionary slide continued with big independents going under, majors like MGM foundering, and all studios backlogged with expensive flops and try ing to cut expenses. By the start of the anxious 1992 summer season, ticket sales were at a fifteen-year low?^ Within this bleak economic context, Hollywood, and the media in dustry in general, once again turned its attention to the size and con sumer power of the mythical, ever-shifting black movie audience, vari ously estimated at 25 to 30 percent (overrepresenting its 13 percent portion of the population).’® The fact that Hollywood has known about the disproportionately large black moviegoing audience since the early 1950s gives further credence to the argument that the movie industry routinely ignores black filmic aspirations and marginalizes black box office power until it can be called on, as a sort of reserve audience, to make up sinking profit margins at any given moment of economic crisis. Accordingly, then, two of these moments of crisis were the studio profit slumps that coincided with the rise of black film produc tion waves in the late 1960s to early 1970s and again in the late 1980s into the 1990s. This argument is further supported when we look back on the abrupt manner in which Hollywood curtailed the earlier Blaxploitation wave, despite the fact that black-focused and black-cast films continued to make money as late as 1976, as evidenced by the hit directed by Michael Schultz and starring Richard Pryor, Car Wash. At that moment, the industry reasoned that blacks would attend crossover and blockbuster movies with th^^ formulaic ingredients of sex, violence, and action in the same numbers as they would more black-focused films. Therefore, once Hollywood found its way out of the economic doldrums and re turned to making blockbusters, epitomized by the tremendously suc cessful The Godfather (1972) and The Exorcist (1973), which drew 35 percent black audiences, the industry saw no need to continue a spe cifically black-focused product line. Moreover, for the past two decades Hollywood has increasingly employed the short-term profit strategy of making “small” films in short “cycles” organized around various THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | 1 | | I6S themes and genres aimed at specific audiences.Thus much of the evi dence tends to support the argument that expanded waves of black movie production occur in short cycles (four years or so) in an inverse relationship to the overall prosperity of the dominant film industry. One cannot say whether or not this particular black movie boom of the early 1990s will end as arbitrarily and suddenly as its predecessor, but this wave’s expansion and survival beyond its short-term economic utility to the commercial film industry will largely depend on how quickly Hollywood realizes that the ongoing racial diversification of its future audience is permanent and irreversible, arising out of the oftenstated fact that the sovereign collectivity of “whiteness” will be just another large minority beyond the year 2000. Or, stressing the con nection between shifting racial demographics and box office profits, as marketeer Warrington Hudlin puts it: “If, within the next 30 years, America is going to be predominantly a nation of people of color, then white studio executives had better begin to understand who their con sumer is going to be.”^® Moreover, Hudlin has been quick to apply this insight to his own film output with the success of the formula comedy House Party (1990), which cost $2.5 million to make and earned more than $25 million. Besides the tendency of black films to come in “waves,” one must consider the abiding film industry principle that, perhaps more than any other, enforces the economic limits of black narrative features. Studio executives figure that black-focused films are a lucrative ven ture as long as they are cheaply made. The current production cost for bringing in a “small film” is anywhere from $1.5 to $10 million, and the top end of this range is about a third of what the average com mercial film costs. Thus Hollywood makes these modestly budgeted black features with the expectation of recovering the capital invested and turning a profit from the black audience alone. An added appeal of such low-budget features is the industry gamble that it will occa sionally hit the jackpot with a big success, as it did with New Jack City (1991), which cost $8.5 million and earned over $47 million, or the top-grossing black film Boyz N the Hood (1991), which was made for a modest $6 million and, so far, has earned over $60 million.’® Obviously both films are exceptional, for they not only did well with black audi ences, but they have successfully crossed over into broader consumer 106 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S markets. Among other things, because of its rap soundtrack and the presence of Ice-T, New Jack City was not only a hit with its targeted black youth population but attracted a large, young white audience. And doing even better with Ice Cube, Boyz was a hit with the domestic black and white audience and is garnering a huge business overseas. Crossover power or, more properly, the lack of it, is exactly the factor that marks out the budgetary limits of the black feature film. For as these usually cheaply produced vehicles approach the studioimposed $30 million “glass ceiling” on production costs, these films must rely on drawing the white or foreign audience, or both, to meet the high profit ratios Hollywood demands of them. From the industry perspective, when the production costs of a black film approach this budgetary limit, one of two things must happen. Either the film does not get financed (and therefore is not made) or during the long tangled course of production its black point of view, politics, or narrative gets co-opted or in some other way altered to accommodate broader (white) audience sensibilities to guarantee the profit margins demanded by studio executives. Certainly these are the kinds of concerns and pres sures that dogged the production of Malcolm X, with Spike Lee’s pro tracted struggles with Warner Bros, and the Completion Bond Co. over financing. In Boomerang we see these same pressures overdeter mining yet another result. Here, even a benign black-cast, dominant cinema romantic comedy with the star power of Eddie Murphy came VP a commercial flop because, among other things, it was not success ful enovg:h at crossing over to offset its $40 million-plus costs. The dominant film industry’s de facto budget ceiling and its adora tion for the much-publicized success of a few recent black films and black directors notwithstanding, the scope and direction of the 1990s black movie boom cannot entirely be reduced to the crass business of merely turning a profit as its sole motivating force. In an often over lapping, complex manner, the diverse sources of inspiration, finan cial strategies, and production circumstances of the new black cinema wave tend to bifurcate, with black films and filmmakers moving into subtly different perspectives. We can distinguish these different out looks, calling them black “independent” cinema and the “mainstream” employment of black creativity in the dominant cinema system, but these lables overstate the case somewhat. The line of feature films THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM { | | | 167 1 I ' « « ' j j li JI ill II I , J " spanning the work of Micheaux in the 1930s; Van Peebles, Parks, and Poitier in the 1970s; Woodberry and Burnett in the early ’80s; and Lee, Singleton, Duke, Dash, and Paley, among many others, in the 1990s is more tangled than such terms imply. And while these two outlooks have always had their debates, the surge of new black feature films coming into circulation combined with the ongoing demand for more black-focused vehicles seems to have lessened some of the more pro nounced distinctions between them. Another reason for black filmmaking^s sense of overall cohesion de rives from the fact that out of social and economic necessity, black in dependent and mainstream impulses are both forced to struggle with a fundamental paradox, a corollary to Hollywood’s budget ceiling, that subtly influences all black cinema production in this country. Whatever its orientation, black cinematic expression, as much of black culture, has nearly always been proscribed, marginalized, exploited, and often ignored. Thus black filmmakers of both persuasions are constantly called on to create out of an uncompromised, forthright perspective that recovers the long-suppressed sensibilities, aspirations, and nar ratives of the black world and struggles to bring them to the cinema screen. At the same time, because moviemaking is such a capitalintensive business and is so largely dependent on mass markets, con sumer trends, and fashions, these same filmmakers must appeal to a broad enough commercial audience to earn sufficient revenues at the box office to ensure that their candid visions of the black world will be successful. And, what is equally important, that their work will be sustained in a succession of feature films. In other words, the black filmmaker must struggle to depict the truth about black life in America while being inextricably tied to the commercialized sensibilities of a mass audience that is for the most part struggling to deny or avoid the full meaning of that truth. It is interesting, then, to look at the new wave of black films and directors, noting that the “independent” directors are usually ahead of, in search of, or aim at building a new audience for black cinema. Or these directors aim at transforming social relations, reflecting a particular set of problems or crises vexing the black collectivity, say, like Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990), which in its intricate narrative seems to articulate all these issues. Or their Aims speak 168 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S for the consciousness of newly formed subjectivites, barely emergent from the vast social continuity of blackness, say, for groups or subcultures like black women or gays, or for the unassimilated Third World within the United States, or even for those politicized or intellectual blacks who demand more narrative depth, character development, and political clarity than is usually provided by formula entertainment and mainstream commodities. Productions such as Daughters of the Dust (1990), Lookingfor Langston (1989), Sidewalk Stories (1989), and Cha meleon Street (1989) all exemplify films that struggle to render forth right, nuanced interpretations of black life against the co-opting, ho mogenizing pressures of the commercial cinema system. Another important distinguishing facet of the independent impulse has to do with the way these films articulate fresh cinematic styles and visions. Such directors as Julie Dash, Wendell Harris, and Charles Burnett are struggling, a la Antonioni, Bunuel, Godard, Altman, or, more recently, Wayne Wang and Jim Jarmusch, to create insur gent, new cinematic languages, images, and narratives. These would be capable of decentering or opposing the staid filmic conventions of the sovereign Hollywood “norm” with its technological verisimilitude of violence, glossy, color-saturated surfaces, continuity editing, “in visible style,” and avoidance of political or social engagement that suggests the possibility of social change. Thus, through their experi mental languages, black independent films often defy the standardiza tion of the dominant cinema product, as well as the dulled expecta tions of its consumer audience, in order to tell the stories of emergent subjectivities in radically new ways. Certainly the acidic, voiceover monologue of the masquerading protagonist in Chameleon Street, the “magic real” manipulations of space-time in Daughters of the Dust, and the black and white pantomimic construction of Sidewalk Stories all aim not only at speaking in stylistically new ways but also through new formulations of identity and subjecthood. One director who has come to epitomize the black independent im pulse and its aspirations is Charles Burnett, who was schooled at UCLA and reared in the 1970s black film environment known as the “L.A. rebellion,” which also produced Billy Woodberry, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and Larry Clark. Always true to the sense of politi cal and aesthetic autonomy bred of those insurgent times, Burnett has THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 169 persistently refined his vision over the past several years with such films as his masterpiece feature Killer of Sheep (1977), as well as My Brother’s Wedding (1984) and the screenplay for Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984). As part of the new wave, Burnett’s feature To Sleep with Anger (1990) was greeted with buoyant, critical expectations and the hope that this black movie boom would be more broadly representative of black filmic styles, life, and culture than its Blaxploitation predecessor. Yet, in many ways. To Sleep with Anger, which was produced by popular black star Danny Glover for under $1.5 million, provided by S.V.C., a subsidiary of SONY, and distributed by Samuel Goldwyn, has come to represent the frustrating intersection of independent and mainstream issues debated among black filmmakers. Added to this are the overdetermining, paradoxical problems of win ning broad distribution and popular box office support for a film that in its vision and style runs far beyond the colonized appetites of the sex-violence-action trained consumer audience, be it black or white. 2b Sleep with Anger, which features Danny Glover as the interlop ing trickster, Harry, is an understated, enigmatic exploration of the cracks and tensions of black family life in the middle-class environs of contemporary Los Angeles. The film’s power and appeal reside in the way the filmmaker turns his gaze inward on the stable black commu nity, as microcosmically rendered in the intricate conflicts and tangles of three generations of an extended black family. The arrival of the superstitious throwback Harry, with his “down home” manners and divisive machinations, stirs tensions between the latent values of the rural South and those of contemporary black urban culture; between the generation of the parents, Gideon (Paul Butler) and Suzie (Mary Alice), and their two sons. Junior (Carl Lumbly) and the “Buppie” Babe Brother (Richard Brooks), afld their families. Harry, the complexly drawn, simultaneously comic and devilish trickster, comes to symbolize much that is wrong with this middle class black community. Burnett drew his inspiration for the character from stories his grandmother told him about life in rural Mississippi, and he says of Harry, “He’s a character that comes to steal your soul, and you have to out-trick him’’^^ Exploiting the codes of southern hos pitality and manners to set up operations in Gideon and Suzie’s house hold, Harry plays on weakness as he divides all against all. His charm 170 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S and trickery work a subtle, malignant spell that contributes to Gideon’s having a stroke, exploits the sibling rivalry between the two sons, causes Babe Bro and his wife to split up, subordinates the women of the family to the backward patriarchy of the sharecropping South, and finally establishes a junta of southern cronies in the house determined to party away the family’s resources. To Sleep climaxes when, on a full-moon Friday night, the two brothers almost kill each other and are prevented from doing so only by the women of the family, led by the mother,. Suzie, who stops a potentially fatal knife thrust with her hand. Later, at the emergency room, Burnett’s camera pulls back to articulate the social dimension of the problem as the audience realizes that this family is just one of a vast urban terrain of similarly troubled families there to patch up their quarrels and physical wounds. Order and hope are restored to the narrative when, in an act of poetic justice, the oldest and youngest collide. Harry slips and falls on marbles, spilled by Gideon’s grandson, and dies of a heart attack on the kitchen floor, thus fulfllling the symbolic promise of a scene that opens the fllm. For when Harry first arrives, the grandson touches his shoes with a broom, which Harry reads, according to southern folklore, as a magical threat and a foreshadowing. It is only fitting, then, that the innocent actions of the young child should eliminate the calculated evil and corruption of the devilish Harry. Burnett ends his film on a clever dramatic irony that involves a form of symbolic pollution, when the family cannot get the city to remove Harry’s corpse in a timely man ner. Thus the irony of the overbearing house guest who overstays his welcome is comically literalized when, even in death, Harry cannot be gotten rid of. But Harry’s corpse also obstructs and pollutes the space where the family meets, where its food is prepared and eaten. Beyond the perfection of Burnett’s dense, mysterious, tragicomic narrative, perhaps the subtle expression of style that most distin guishes 7b Sleep with Anger is the way that Burnett deploys his disci plined sense of cultural introspection throughout the film. Burnett has turned his gaze away from the surrounding white world inward to con struct a black subjectivity that replaces the flat stereotypical dominant cinema with a sense of multidimensional, black typicality. As with all of Burnett’s films, 7b Sleep draws its power from the shared sense of values and cultural vision of the African American insider who cre THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 171 ates his story world unselfconsciously, with few concessions to market or crossover sensibilities. This ability to specify cultural vision is per haps best demonstrated in the subtle way that black music, especially the blues motif, weaves its way throughout the narrative. The film opens with a stirring Gospel solo; at various moments, one can hear the boy next door haltingly practicing the trumpet; Harry typifies the nomadic blues lifestyle and survivalist rural culture as depicted when bluesman Jimmy Witherspoon (playing himself) shows up to sing at a party given in Harry’s honor. Moreover, the blues as an index of the soul’s progress is brilliantly revealed in the scene when Suzie finally asks Harry to leave. Harry accepts his fate without rancor or protest. Then, in a moment of illumination, as if to explain himself, Harry likens his soul to the crude, unfinished sound of the boy’s trumpet next door, heard as a dim background refrain throughout the film. Harry completes the analogy by saying that one must put up with the soul’s practice and noise to appreciate how its music finally timns out. And consistent with Burnett’s enigmatic but socially redemptive style, 2b Sleep understands and symbolically forgives its trickster. For as the end credits roll up, we hear the boy’s music improve. Despite the film’s narrative depth and subtle dramatic force, as well as some of the season’s most favorable reviews, it is disappointing but somewhat predictable to note that 2b Sleep with Anger has fallen into the trap of the paradox proscribing much of black film, the conflict be tween rendering an honest black perspective on the big screen while being forced to measure a film’s survival and importance solely on its profitability at the box office. In spite of the film’s recognition by black community institutions as a significant work, with the Beverly Hills/ Hollywood branch of the NAACP going so far as to campaign to bring out the black audience, 2b Sleep was largely perceived and handled by its distributor, Samuel Goldwyn, as an “art house” vehicle. Moreover, Burnett, among others, claims that scant attention was paid to how the film was marketed in the black community. The film’s box-office problems were further compounded by the persistent fact that much of the black audience is a youth market and as such is action-adventure oriented. Consequently, the film did poorly overall at the box office, accumulating a merger $348,285 after its first five weeks of release.^® 172 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE 19905 In an added irony that illustrates the film’s complex fusion of qualities as both black film and art film, To Sleep performed five times as well with white audiences as black, thus inspiring one critic to tag it “an all black film (except for the audience).”“ But the last word on the black filmmaker’s dilemma should go to Burnett himself, who perceptively observed well before the film’s release that “the situation is such that one is always asked to compromise one’s integrity, and if the socially oriented film is finally made, its showing will generally be limited and the very ones that it is made for and about will probably never see it.” This persistent problem of a black dramatic film rendered in ex perimental, non-Hollywood language coming into conflict with the de mands of the commodity system has vexed the popular circulation of at least two other important black independent features. Chameleon Street (1989), and Daughters of the Dust (1990). In Wendell B. Har ris’s Chameleon Street, which won the $5,000 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance United States Film Festival in 1990, we find another prom ising black feature that, because of its unique narrative and visual construction, has found itself a poor fit in popular consumer markets and relegated to the purgatory of the obscure art house, university, and museum circuit. The epitome of black independent vision, Harris’s film, which he wrote, directed, and stars in, was financed and made for around $1 million, largely through his efforts at persuading friends, professionals, and community members to invest in the project. Beyond the determined ingenuity of the production’s “guerrilla fi nancing,” Chameleon Street’s cinematic authority dwells in the unique, disturbing view that the film affords the spectator into an African American psyche and that psyche’s calculated interactions with a sur rounding, dominant white society. On its formal surface. Chameleon Street tells the true story of William Douglas Street, a brilliant but unstable Michigan black man who, through a series of impersonations, successfully infiltrated the white professional world. Street as chame leon and con man moves from scam to scam, from becoming a physi cian with a Harvard degree who performs a series of deft hysterecto mies to a Yale graduate student.to a corporate lawyer and so on. At each juncture. Street is found out, prosecuted, and occasionally im prisoned, only to move on by assuming another guise. Thus, part of THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 173 the film’s unsettling effect comes from our realization of how thin and transparent these much-admired professional castes are to an ambi tious, cunning intelligence. Yet, black or white, by mid-film the spectator’s discomfort grows with the dawning realization that the protagonist of Chameleon Street’s most frightening role is permanent and ubiquitous. For William Doug las Street, as revealed by the way the director Wendell Harris marks the Street character with his own persona, is a black everyman sen tenced to a life of dissembling in a society completely obsessed with designations of “race” and maintaining racial hierarchies. Street’s fan tasy life, as signaled by his attending a masquerade party as the Beast from Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), his frustrated am bition and intelligence, his dissembling in the face of a white profes sional class so eager to disavow its refiex feelings of racial superi ority that it uncritically accepts him, all culminate in a dialectically shocking metaphor for the double consciousness, masked anger, and constant pretending that all blacks, to some degree, must deploy to live in a persistently racist society. And, of course, here resides the dark, troubled core of the film. Embellished by Harris’s arty, avantgarde style and sardonic voiceover monologue, this is the unspoken and unspeakable truth that will forever keep Chameleon Street out of dominant cinema’s mass entertainment markets. As the critic Armond White has rightfully observed, the film’s social and aesthetic declaration joins a continuum testimony voiced by African American subterraneans so disturbingly inscribed in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, and Ish mael Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing, all characters who refuse to be do mesticated to America’s racist agenda.^^ If the situation for black male independent filmmakers has proven difficult, then it has been almost impossible for black women. Com pared to black men, there are few black women filmmakers and, in most cases, they must negotiate the “triple oppression” of their work predicated on independent vision, race, and gender. This layering of barriers is starkly borne out by the simplest industry statistics. At the moment of this writing, the mainstream industry has produced and distributed one film by a black woman director, A Dry White Season (1989), by the foreign-bom Euzhan Paley. And demonstrating a struc 74 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S ture increasingly prohibitive with the imposition of each new category of difference, of the more than 450 commercial films released in 1991, white women directed 5 percent, or approximately 23 of them. Black men produced more black films in 1991 than in the entire 1980s, while black women produced no films whatsoever.^® Against these daunting odds and obstacles, we must contextualize and critique the only Afri can American women’s film to come even close to posing an alternative to Hollywood’s near-absolute race and gender hegemony. Daughters of the Dust (1991), written, produced, and directed by Julie Dash. This feature, centered on a black woman, is the result of a tenyear vision, produced for around $1 million, made up of $650,000 in grant money from the public broadcast “American Playhouse” series, $150,000 from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with the re maining capital coming from independent, “guerrilla” financing. Much like the novels of black women that started to emerge in the 1970s, Daughters of the Dust pointedly sets out to reconstruct, to recover a sense of black women’s history, and to affirm their cultural and politi cal space in the expanding arena of black cinema production. The nar rative encompasses a long summer day in 1902, set at Ebo Landing in the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast, a relatively isolated historical location that allowed the survival of African cultural beliefs and practices that are so important to Dash’s text. Daughters depicts a seashore picnic held by the extended Peazant family, which has con vened, with a photographer, to bid farewell to the family’s ancestral island home and confront the psychic stresses and religious and politi cal debates centered on moving to the North toward jobs, assimilation, and upward mobility into a nascent black middle class. Uniquely, and against the grain of commercial cinema expectations, black women, speaking in “Geechee” dialect and ornately costumed in a variety of white tropical Victorian dresses, for one of the few times in commercial cinema history occupy the visual, spiritual, and moral center of the screen. The narrative, which is rendered in a nonlinear style structured with dislocations in time and space, fiashbacks, and forwards, depicts a complex ideological debate carried on by three generations of the family’s women who are roughly split among at least three interpretations of “progress”, that is, the move North and all that it portends. The family matriarch,. Grandma Nana THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | ITS (Cora Lee Day), wants to ensure the survival of African mystical tradi tions, ancestor worship, ritual magic, and a deep generational sense of extended-family unity that has enabled them to survive the long ordeal of slavery. Opposed to Nana are her daughters and in-laws, repre sented by Viola (Chefly Lynn Bruce) and Haagar (Kaycee Moore), who have no use for the past, who dismiss all African retention as superstition or, as Haagar derisively puts it, as “hoodoo.” To varied de grees, the family embraces a black interpretation of Christianity and the move North toward what they argue to be the social and material advancement of a developing black middle class. Daughters’ mixture and contestation of black worldviews is further complicated by the re turn from the North of the outcast prostitute daughter. Yellow Mary (Barbara-0), accompanied by her lesbian lover, both of whom symbol ize an emergent independent womanhood not inhibited by penetrating the male realm of “business” or advocating liberalized forms of sexual choice and expression. But, as her name implies. Yellow Mary also ar ticulates the family’s subtle sense of color consciousness. As with much of the best of the independent impulse. Daughters of the Dust represents an uncommon, one-of-a-kind challenge to the cinematic containment of expressions of race and gender. The film aspires to counter the erasure of black women and their stories, not only because of the ambitious focus of its director but also through the resourceful, avant-garde manner in which Daughters constructs its story. As director Dash relates it; “The media have helped create the whole aura of invisibility around black women film makers.... In my film. I’m asking the audience to sit down for two hours and lis ten to what black women are talking about.” What these women are talking about, however, the continuation of the African past into the syncretic African American present and future, is revealed through a narrative structure that can, in a sense, be approximated by the Latin American literary term “magic realism.” By relying on a cultural heirloom, the African oral tradition shaded with the narrative sensibilities of the griot, or storyteller, as Dash says, she wants to disrupt the spectators’ blunted, consumer imagina tions and plunge them into the “world of the new,” thus constructing the tale in “the way an bld relative would retell it, not linear but always coming back around.” 2® Or as Nana so poetically explains her percep 176 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S tion of continuity, “The womb and the tomb are the same place.” More over, this sense of “magic real” circularity, as well as the subversion of dominant cinema’s regime of time and space, guides the slow reve lation of the tale, as, for example, in the way it is told as a prenatal flashback of Nana’s unborn granddaughter, who runs in accelerated motion through various scenes and tableau, a returning ancestor yet to arrive and eager to be reborn. We also catch fleeting gestures and expressions of Islam, African animist magic, and Christianity, all of which suggest the syncretic mix of rituals, ideas, beliefs that will be come the African American future. Yet, in spite of Daughters' imaginative force, its resistant self imaging, its insistence in speaking for, and to, new emergent constitu encies, or simply because of these things, the film had trouble finding a distributor. Even with an impressive premiere at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, Daughters languished for a year without a distribution deal until Dash signed with Keno International. Exemplifying the way that the film industry and its organs perceive projects, issues, or cul tural perspectives that are not easily packaged, commodified, or subor dinated to the demands of colonized, ready-made markets. Daughters was dismissed in a Variety review as “an investigation into a very little known African-American culture” that played “like a two-hour Laura Ashley commercial.” Conversely, Dash has not been naive about the challenges of producing an antihegemonic text, for she voices the wry counterpoint to her previous observation, saying that “most white men don’t want to be a black woman for two hours,” though there is no doubt that, ultimately, over time, her film will get the popular recep tion it demands. This will come about simply because Daughters of the Dust is engaged in the long, slow process of opening up new, liberated zones in the social imagination. For as the film connects with, or builds, the consciousness of its audience, its circulation and earning power will grow. Also, Daughters' public television showings and distribution in secondary video markets will inevitably contribute to this process. Among other black-oriented projects that achieve a subtle mix of in dependent and mainstream qualities, in that they were either indepen dently or alternatively financed or offer fresh cinematic approaches to the representation of black life and race relations while gaining broad popular distribution in both theater and videotape markets, are Matty THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 177 Rich’s Straight Out ofBrooklyn (1991), Joseph Vasquez’s Hanging with the Homeboys (1991), and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991). Per haps most recently, no other director of the 1990s wave epitomizes the values and determination of the independent stance more than Matty Rich, from the Red Hook area of Brooklyn, who at age eighteen has become the youngest person ever to make a film for U.S. commercial release. Rich credits much of his drive to a mix of the anger he felt about the subhuman conditions he experienced in the'housing projects of his childhood, and what he feels is the urgent necessity of depicting that oppressed community’s daily reality through the medium of nar rative cinema. Set in the grim apartheid of Red Hook’s public housing environment. Straight Out ofBrooklyn depicts an obvious, ingenuous, but somewhat technically uneven tale of one family’s slow destruction under the pressures of ghetto life. Perhaps the most telling moment in the film occurs when, in a fiash of insight, one of the young home boys, Dennis (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.), weighs the systematic institu tional forces that keep him trapped, ghettoized, as he declares to his girl friend that “there is no ‘right’ way to get out of Brooklyn!” More successfully than any of his basically doomed characters, young black filmmaker Matty Rich has been able to implement this advice by plotting his own escape trajectory. Applying the classic guerrilla financing strategy, mapped out by Van Peebles, Townsend, and Lee before him. Rich drew $16,000 on his mother’s and sister’s credit cards, which was enough to shoot an eight-minute fund-raiser. Rich then went on Brooklyn’s black radio station, WLIB, and made a direct appeal for community support of the project, from which he got $77,000, invested by black folks ranging from garbage collectors to lawyers. To this enterprising start was added supplementary funds from the PBS “American Playhouse” series, as well as a timely boost of recognition from a special jury prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. Samuel Goldwyn then picked up the film’s distribution, and Rich was on his way to what, by Hollywood standards, was a sizable hit, grossing $2.7 million on an initial production cost of $300,000.2® Besides its material success, and in spite-of its uneven, beginner’s quality. Straight Out of Brooklyn’s, socially urgent tone and uncompromising revelation of the conditions of ghetto lifeunark the film as an eminent example of all that the independent impulse aspires to accomplish. 178 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S Joseph Vasguez’s Hanging with the Homeboys, and Mira Nair’s Mis sissippi Masala, with their intimate looks at the workings of the non white world, fit comfortably into the perimeters of the new black wave, if for no other reason than the new and brilliant ways that both these filmmakers of color explore intimate social relations between African Americans and the nation’s other unassimilated Third World people. As with much about race relations that cannot be instantly explained or packaged, the filmic self-representation of America’s large nonwhite population is a pressing social reality that Hollywood has basically ignored, just as the media, serving its own ideological ends, usually narrowly frames the nation’s complex racial situation as a black-white confrontation solamente. So it comes as a distinct innovation when Vasguez focuses his dramatic comedy, which was made by New Line Cinema for a modest $2 million, on this cinematic void or repressed zone. Much like Chameleon Street or John Sayles’s City ofHope (1991), the powerful undercurrents of Vasguez’s film turn on the subtle condi tioning and proscribing powers of race, as four homeboys, two black and two Puerto Rican, go out on the town on a comic Manhattan ad venture in what turns out to be their last time together at the end of what has been, for all of them, a prolonged adolescence. Exploring thematic concerns significantly absent from commercial cinema, Mira Nair’s second feature film, Mississippi Masala (1991), takes on the tangled issue of interracial romance between lovers who meet in the terrain of social overlap between two nonwhite cultures. Thus the film challenges the boundaries of the staid Hollywood con vention that almost always renders miscegenation as undesirable and depicts it from the hegemonic perspective of the white male coupled with a nonwhite (usually Asian) female.®” Nair’s film tells the story of a masala (meaning a “spicy dish”) romance between an African Ameri can man (Denzel Washington) and an Indian woman (Sarita Choudhury). In the process, Mississippi Masala, produced for a mere $5 million, manages to explore the tangled “in house” issues of color dif ference and hierarchy, the problems of living in exile, the stereotypes held among nonwhite groups, as well as the optimistic possibilities of Asians and African Americans interacting romantically. Overall, the subtle appeal of the film resides in the way it depicts interracialism and social intimacy between nonwhite groups, while making the point THE NEW bIaCK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 179 that romantic mixing is the natural, if sometimes problematic, result of cultures sharing the same social space. In contrast to the way that dominant cinema, say, in Mississippi Burning (1988), Dances with Wolves (1991), and City of Joy (1992), manages to set its dramas in nonwhite locales or themes while stead fastly keeping whites at the center of the narrative, Nair succeeds in maintaining the black independent focus on exploring nonwhite reali ties and worlds while moving the people who inhabit these worlds from the margins to the center of the screen. For this reason. Nah- says that “whites are powerfully absent in the film.”® As-important, though, Mississippi Masala provides popular black actor Denzel Washington with a rare opportunity (as 7b Sleep with Anger did for Danny Glover) to break out of the rigid commodifying mold of the studio system’s one-dimensional “star” roles and formulas, most of which narrowly confine black talent to the genres of comedy, the biracial buddy film, or the male-oriented ghetto action-adventure. Mississippi Masala subverts the white “norm” by constructing Washington as a sexually attractive black male romantic lead, matched with Sarita Choudhury as a nonwhite immigrant woman who is not stereotypically infatu ated with the assimilationist fantasy of falling in love with the proto typical white American male. Moreover, by depicting an irrepressible dynamic heterogeneity as an alternative to stale notions of a homoge neous separatism, Mississippi Masala plays an engaging counterpoint to the proscriptive musings of Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991). In fact, with Mississippi Masala and Hanging with the Homeboys depicting racial overlap and hybridism as normal social interactions, as well as depicting nonwhites coping with similar environments and limitations, both films play with a broadened definition of “blackness” concurrent with that deployed in Britain. According to the British usage, the cate gory black is much more expansive and political, encompassing all nonwhite immigrants in the society facing similar discriminations and oppressions.®^ If black independent filmmakers tend directly to resist or oppose cultural and political domination through their avant-garde languages, forms, socially urgent narratives, and insider depictions of the black world, then those black directors who work within the “mainstream” tend to be more concerned with learning and perfecting the conven ®® Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S tions of dominant cinema language and addressing their projects to the colonized desires of the vast consumer audience encompassing blacks, other nonwhite minorities, and extended la crossover marketing to whites. Most of the black directors who have had commercial successes argue that they work within the studio system in order to expand the definitions and possibilities of being black and to subvert the dominant norm by marketing a “black sensibility” to as broad an audience as possible. Or, as director John Singleton personalizes it: “The more of a hand I can deal in the media, the more power I have against a system that’s trying to dehumanize my family.”®® Notably, strategies for deal ing with the cultural and economic domination confronting all black filmmakers, independents and mainstreamers alike, tend to fall into the spectrum of black culturally resistant practices conceptualized by the writer and critic Houston Baker. Extrapolating Baker’s analysis to film, then, independent black filmmakers tend to practice the “de formation of mastery” by which they deform the master’s formal con ventions, language, conceptions of time and space, and so on, in order to create oppositional or culturally resistant productions. At the other end of this strategic continuum resides what Baker calls “the mastery of form.” In this instance, black directors working within the studio system strive to learn the master’s forms, dominant cinema’s lan guage, formulas, images, and so on, in hopes of filling those forms with a new, insurgent content. They want to change or subvert the domi nant cultural norm from within the formal confines of the system.®'* While appreciating the merits and arguments of both approaches, it is important to think of black cinema as a continuum of connected stratagems, practices, and perspectives. Over the course of their careers, black filmmakers tend to employ a mixed bag of tricks. Many of them follow a developmental trajectory from guerrilla financing and bold independent visions to broad audiences and popular acclaim, commercial hits, on to hassling with the miseries of domination and co-optation, much like any director trapped within the demands of the Hollywood system. Thus, at this developmental point in black cinema, we have to be cautious as to which strategy or mix of options will ultimately prevail and prove most useful to furthering the emancipa tory aspirations of black people on the big screen. Obviously, though, both approaches have limitations that lead us with persistent circu THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 181 larity back to the original black cinema paradox. For narrative cinema is a capital-intensive, mass-audience-driven social practice. Conse quently, one can create the most liberating filmic vision ever articu lated in the diaspora, but if it does not find an audience, it will have little social impact. Yet we must also note that Hollywood also employs a mixed bag of tricks and strategies to contain any challenge to its cinematic regime, according to its needs at a given historical moment. Thus the studio system is quite adept at containing insurgent impulses of difference, usually by excluding or ignoring them, but also in times of economic insecurity or shifting cultural relations by the more per vasive strategy of co-opting resistant images and narratives into the vast metamorphosing body of its cinematic hegemony. Thus a black director may make the most popular film ever or successfully work a very lucrative genre only to find that the studio system has co-opted the form of blackness while emptying it of its emancipatory content and cultural impact. The pitfalls and manipulations confronting all black filmmakers not withstanding, the industry category (besides comedy) that has come to dominate the new wave of black studio productions and register some of the biggest moneymaking hits is the male-focused, “ghettocentric,” action-crime-adventure vehicle. In terms of black sensibility of mes sage articulated through mastering “the master’s form,” this loosely defined genre has produced a number of varied features, including the neo-Blaxploitative crime adventure New Jack City (1991), the tense urban drama Juice (1992), the formulaic Ricochet (1991), and the powerful tale about coming of age in South Central Los Angeles, Boyz N the Hood (1991), which is considered by many to be the commercial feature that best represents the success and potential of the new black movie boom. Because of its compelling, original script, social context, and adept marketing strategies, as well as its timely arrival at a turn ing point in the nation’s volatile racial predicament, Boyz N the Hood has proven to be an extraordinary African American vision, taking up the racial discourse where Do the Right Thing left off. As noted earlier, foremost and from the perspective of mainstream commercial cinema, Singleton’s film has fulfilled Hollywood’s lowbudget, high-profit black production formula beyond the industry’s wildest expectations, becoming the most commercially successful black 182 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S film ever. Yet, at Boyz’ premiere, anything but the movie’s impressive commercial success was foreshadowed. Theater violence among the genre’s predominantly youthful urban audiences had already appeared with the preceding March 'release of New Jack City. Now, on a Fri day night in July, at this premiere, violence spread across the nation’s theaters in an explosion of gang-related fights and shootings that left two people dead and more than thirty wounded. While Columbia sup ported Singleton’s film from its inception, even going as far as offering to pay for security to those venues that requested it, more than a few theaters pulled the print, and there was widespread talk among the ater owners, reported in the media, in favor of withdrawing the film from circulation. Some critics were quick to assert that Boyz raised the expectation of violence among its volatile youth audience, point ing out that the advertising trailer managed to include every instance of gunplay in the film, rather than emphasize its antiviolence message or the father-son relationship at the film’s moral center. Director John Singleton was quick to defend his vision and in a series of press conferences and interviews put the controversy into perspective. Responding in a Rolling Stone interview to criticism of the film’s marketing, and especially the trailer, which he helped edit, Singleton remarks on the double standard applied to his work, saying of the trailer that “it got motherfuckers into the theater” and “that’s the bottom line. If the trailer for Terminator 2 showed the part where he agreed not to kill anyone, nobody would have gone to see it.” At a swiftly arranged press conference, Singleton noted that he “didn’t create the conditions under which people shoot each other.” And keep ing Boyz’ theme in mind, Singleton further pointed out that this kind of violence “happens because there’s a whole generation of people who are disenfranchised” and that to suppress the film would be an act of “artistic racism.” In the light of the clear ways that the film argues against gang violence, for instance opening with the grim statistic that “one in every twenty-two black males will be murdered” and ending with the inscription “Increase the Peace,” Singleton’s remarks under score the fact that the violence surrounding the film is symptomatic of the deep injustices and inequalities festering in the society. Singleton thus finds himself in the proverbial trap of the messenger bearing the bad news of society’s oppressions. To suppress or proscribe Boyz be THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 183 cause it deals forthrightly with the results of the economic and social conditions inflicted on black people would, at minimum, come off as an act of outright censorship and hypocrisy. In terms of its narrative, stunted, wasted lives are what Boyz is all about.®® The film depicts three adolescents—Tre (Cuba Gooding), Doughboy (Ice Cube), and Ricky (Morris Chestnut)—as they struggle to survive to adulthood and escape the menace of the tight social space to which they have been relegated. The feeling of confinement and limitation of opportunity that shapes all black life in Los Angeles’ sprawling ghetto opens the film with a full-frame shot of a STOP sign as a fleet, silver airliner flies overhead and beyond the ’hood to distant lands and vastly broader social horizons. Boyz’ opening image marks the influence of contemporary black urban music on Singleton’s work in that it pays homage to the rapper Too Short, who employed the same metaphor in his potent music video “The Ghetto.” Moreover, the tran scendent airplane flying high above the problems of the black world is a thematic refrain in black cultural production. The metaphor goes back to a revealing opening moment in Richard Wright’s classic novel Native Son (1940), when Bigger Thomas looks up from the conflnes of Chicago’s South Side ghetto at a sky-writing airplane overhead to the bitter realization that anything to do with flight—mechanical, imaginative, or otherwise—is for “white boys” and far beyond his reach. Improvising on the time-honored theme of the fatal juggernaut that the political system and power structure has prepared for black ado lescents like Wright’s Bigger Thomas, director Singleton explores at least three ideological paths for young black men, as represented in the dispositions and fates of his three principal Boyz. Doughboy opts for a life of gang banging and dope dealing in rejection of the unattain able status and toys of the white middle-class world. His docile half brother Ricky chooses athletics as a route of escape, hoping to get a football scholarship to the nearby University of Southern California. In a strategy that embodies historical black notions of self-help and the Du Boisian idea of the “talented tenth,” Tre and hi^ girl friend, Brandi (Nina Long), choose academic achievement, commitment to a future marriage, and the possibility of going away to college together as their path out of the ghetto. Singleton’s tale makes it clear, however, that in occupied territory >84 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S all paths are closely intertwined, for black people are not seen for what they aspire to; rather, what they are suspected of. And the odds against any particular vision of survival or escape succeeding are daunting. This abiding truth of ghetto life is made chillingly real in perhaps the film’s most compelling scene when a rabid, self-hating black cop arbi trarily terrorizes the ’hood’s best and brightest, Tre, by holding a gun to his throat. Moreover, the film’s subtle weave of aspirations, frus trations, and violent outbursts adds complexity and occasional contra diction to the director’s antiviolence message, simply because Boyz draws its dramatic visual force from the film’s insider depiction of gang culture. This holds true right down to the details of Doughboy’s blue color coding as a “Crip” or his subtle macho gestures with a handgun when facing down a red-coded “Blood” on Crenshaw Boulevard. Con sequently, Ice Cube’s performance occupies the visual, dramatic cen ter of the film, defining the attitude and actions so essential to draw ing commercial cinema’s targeted youth audience, in contrast to Cuba Gooding, who dutifully shoulders the burden of Boyz’ moral message. Yet, overall, the film’s diverse points of view as rendered by its char acters, the social compression of so many different outlooks and aspi rations under the stresses of ghetto life, move Boyz beyond the inept essentializing of films exploiting the same locale and culture, for ex ample, Dennis Hopper’s cop’s-eye view of the ’hood. Colors. For Singleton, all these young men’s futures turn on the absence or presence of fathers. Beside the senseless communal violence that eventually claims both Ricky and Doughboy and that, according to Tre’s father, only facilitates dominant society’s laissez-faire genocide of blacks, the guiding theme of Boyz has to do with black fathers taking responsibility for raising their sons into politicized, enterprising black men. Tre’s father. Furious Styles (Larry Fishburne), explicitly exem plifies the urgency of this corrective to the very real, overwhelming problems facing black boys. Often didactic. Furious gives advice on everything from the necessity of blacks controlling their capital and real estate to how a sexually adventurous young man keeps his “dick from falling off.” And while this latter bit of fatherly wisdom is ingenu ous when contrasted with the self-serving “dick thing” rationalizations of Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Boyz tends to deliver its message in binary terms by offsetting the image of the “good” single-parent father with THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 185 a number of images of “bad” single-parent mothers. This, in part, has led the critic Jacquie Jones to note that the women in Boyz occupy only two flattened-out categories, “bitches and ho’s.”'^' Furthermore, in spite of its socially complex roles and its intimate depiction of a world inhabited exclusively by blacks, or more because of its position in mainstream cinema discourse, Boyz reveals more than a trace of dominant narrative convention in its melodramatic devotion to the cult of the enterprising individual (a la Horatio Alger), as-home boys are rewarded or punished by the end of the film for choices and paths consonant with, or in conflict with, dominant values. For we are informed in the epilogue. Doughboy is murdered while Tre and Brandi move up and out of the ’hood to attend Spelman and Morehouse Col leges respectively. Beyond the social urgency of Boyz' insider cultural verisimilitude, perhaps the closest thing to a high political moment comes when Doughboy, after burying Ricky and taking vengeance on his assassins, makes a final speech, recapping Furious’s street-corner oration, on calculated white indifference to the plight of the ’hood. While Doughboy’s closing remarks are for the most part contained by the dominant melodramatic form, thus becoming the raw material of consumer voyeurism, Boyz N the Hood's, politics cannot be sepa rated from its place in the volatile, ever-shifting historical moment. For the stakes in the nation’s ongoing racial confrontation were raised dramatically with the Los Angeles rebellion at the end of April 1992. Responding to escalating tensions, California Governor Pete Wilson came to appreciate the film’s social import and felt compelled to rec ommend that all citizens see Boyz N the Hood. Another notable demonstration of box office drawing power arising out of Hollywood’s eager embrace of the new black directors and the in dustry’s astute application of the ghettocentric, crime-action formula appeared with the release of director Mario Van Peebles’s commercial success New Jack City (1991). Made by Warner Bros, for a mere $8.7 million. New Jack City once again proved the efficacy of Hollywood’s low-budget strategy for black films by returning five and a half times its production costs, over $47 million in gross profits. Yet, other than the theater violence that accompanied the film’s premiere, the use of a rap artist in a starring role, and its “ghettocentricity,” New Jack City differs from Boyz in many important respects. Whereas we can argue 186 J Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S that to a large extent Boyz N the Hood resists or overrides industry convention with its strong nationalistic message and streetwise veri similitude, N&w Jack City comes off as pure dominant cinema, action entertainment formula. Alongside Bill Dukes’s A Rage in Harlem (1991), New Jack City has surfaced as one of the first black gangster movies since the wane of Blaxploitation in the mid-1970s. Neverthe less, from its biracial buddy cops to its gratuitous spectacle of violence to its alliu’ing depiction of the luxurious lifestyles of ghetto drug lords. New Jack City comes off as a crude assemblage of entertainment cli ches engineered to attract the broadest spectrum of the youth market, from the black inner city to the white suburbs. In an ironic inversion of perspective, perhaps signaling entrepre neurial lessons grasped in the twenty-year interval between the two black booms or waves, Mario Van Peebles, the son of the renowned independent Melvin Van Peebles, has reversed his father’s stance on guerrilla financing to work entirely within the conventions and ex pectations of the studio system. As well, the younger Van Peebles’s New Jack ideological outlook on ghetto heroism and black community politics has turned the dialectical corner on his father’s perspective. Whereas the legendary Sweet Sweetback is a sexualized rebel and out law fighting the injustices of police occupation of the black community, the biracial buddy cops (Ice-T and Judd Nelson) of New Jack City are depicted as the violent, institutionally sanctioned, extralegal solution to the black community’s drug and crime ills.®® In a further ideological convolution, the rapper Ice-T, cast as an undercover cop, plays entirely against the grain of his “original gangsta” persona, especially when we consider that all his output, including the controversial song “Cop Killer,” pointedly articulates his disapproval of the oppressive role that the police play in marginalized communities.®® Aside from New Jack City’s commercial success, perhaps the film’s most innovative contribu tion to the growing wave of black-cast and black-focused productions has to do with the way the film effectively integrates rap music into its mise-en-sc^ne. In much the same manner that the socially focused music of Ice-T adds political and cultural dimension to an otherwise shallow, exploitative buddy-cop-gang flick such as Colors, an ongoing rap mix provided by Ice-T and other artists inflects New Jack City with a slightly dissident or subversive edge that works against the THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 187 cop-buddy cliches of this neo-filaxploitative production. Noting New Jack’s many, sometimes obvious, allusions to the immigrant gangster movie, the critic Jacquie Jones best sums up New Jack City by writing that “ultimately, it looms as little more than a Blackface Scarface.”^^ In contrast. Earnest Dickerson’s Juice (1992) better negotiates the tricky space of political and aesthetic challenges and compromises situated between the ideologies of independent and mainstream pro duction, between the possibilities of insurgent liberating vision and generic moneymaking formula. Shot in shadow and darkness, alleys and bleak inner-city settings, punctuated with contrasting lighting and flashes of primal colors, and a deft hip-hop sound mix, in style and values Juice alludes to the corrupt, violent world of the film noir of the early 1950s. The narrative follows the slow destruction of four ado lescent friends living under the honoriflc code of the streets and the tyrannical rule of the gun while concurrently trapped by the stunted options of ghetto life. After a robbery has gone bad and has turned to murder, the most violent of the crew. Bishop (Tupac Shakur), degen erates into a paranoid psychotic who moves to eliminate his homeboys one by one. In an escalating chase-and-struggle narrative that takes the spectator on a violent sojourn through the hip-hop underground and black urban youth culture, only the strongest of the boys, Q (Omar Epps), survives unscathed. Evincing Dickerson’s cinematic skills honed as director of photog raphy on five of Spike Lee’s productions. Juice’s visual style and pac ing sustain the film’s drama and render a compelling panorama of the devastation wrought on black youth culture and aspirations by the ma lign neglect of almost a decade of Reaganomics.^* And if the film’s lack of “positive images,” as critiqued in the Amsterdam News, communi cates an overall sense of foreclosure or doom, it must be argued that the film’s politics are not to be found exclusively in any one action or “positive” statement. Instead they subtly imbue its overall mise-ensc^ne, which carries Juice beyond the binary discourse of “negative” versus “positive” messages or images or mere neo-Blaxploitation box office formula. As painful as it might be to some. Juice’s overriding insight does not concern redemption. Instead, like the best of Lee’s work, with social diagnosis in this instance, the film confronts the audience with the alarming situation facing a large segment of black 88 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S urban youth today. Yet, in some ways the film also makes concessions to dominant narrative convention, particularly by attributing Bishop’s violent rage to individual pathology, rather than connecting it to the collective determinants of discrimination and social injustice infiicted on an oppressed community. Underscoring Bishop’s mental instability, director Dickerson makes a point of Bishop’s father’s mental prob lems and Bishop’s admiration for the psychotic criminal Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in the gangster classic White Heat (1949). Consonant with Hollywood formula, then. Juice tends to reduce pressing collec tive issues to the drama of individual weaknesses and victimization. Yet, all these black, ghetto-centered action flicks must necessarily differ in subtle ways from the standard studio product. While they all adhere to the images, editing, and sounds of action formula, they also implicitly undermine Hollywood’s inherent tendency to repress or co opt resistant or oppositional social perspectives in its films. All three of these features are inextricably caught up in the aspirations and com munal problems of the social worlds they depict. In James Baldwin’s words, they all unavoidably must bear the black artist’s “burden of rep resentation,” the burden of always being viewed as, and reduced to, the voice and sign of the black community resident in the popular imagi nation. Thus, even if the issues that broadly define blackness were to be exclusively “positively” depicted in these films, most black-focused narratives would articulate tensions and perspectives that cannot be completely subsumed by the dominant ideology of “entertainment only.” Whether neo-Blaxploitation action flick or ghettocentric gang epic, in some manner these films must inevitably historicize the cul tural, political, and economic issues of the resistant communities they represent. Underscoring this linkage in the most blunt and depressing manner, on their premiere nights, no matter what ideological attitude these features took toward the politics of domination or independence. New Jack City, Boyz N the Hood, and Juice vf&YQ all greeted in the aters across the nation by gang confrontations, shootings, and random violence. Thus the inadvertently intense social character of the blackfocused urban-action-adventure flick manifests itself by assembling communal tensions and frustrations in its audience in the compressed and volatile space of the movie theater, while depicting these same tensions on the screen. Rather than think of these Aims as the cause THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 189 of theater violence, and more to the point, we should view them as vehicles through which society’s racial contradictions, injustices, and failed policies are mediated. They are the artist’s examination of, and dire warnings about, a society in which African Americans are, in terms of statistics, worse off today than before the civil rights move ment. And though the news is bad, the blame resides with the social order in its totality, not the cinematic vehicle that delivers the news.^^ Not all mainstream black creative energy or studio attention, how ever, has gone into projects rendering tales of violence and adventure in the ghetto, for the major part of black talent and white capital has been invested in the production of low- to mid-budget black com edy features. Being the most prolific genre in terms of black themes, casts, and images, and the only genre that has continuously engaged black talent since the collapse of the initial Blaxploitation boom, blackfocused comedies as well as black-white buddy comedies have estab lished themselves as Hollywood’s other lucrative, if not its most lucra tive, black-centered enterprise. Moreover, the 1990s wave of black comedies has tended to express a broad number of related traits or thematic similarities, the most obvious of which has to do with the multivalent ways that black comedy provides a deflected, mostly non threatening space within which America can tentatively engage its ubiquitous race problem. From the perspective of middle-class whites, black comedies allow for complex, pent-up racial fears and energies to be transcoded into simplistic entertaining formulas and solutions that often implicitly maintain white perceptions and expectations of blacks, as well as the racial status quo.^^ The buddy vehicle White Men Can’t Jump (1992), starring Wesley Snipes and Woodie Har relson, which earned $70 million-plus; the black-focused Mo’ Money (1992), starring Damon Wayans, which earned an impressive $17 mil lion in its opening week; and the megabit (earning $100 million-plus) Sister Act (1992), starring Whoopi Goldberg, all in their slightly dif ferent ways comfortably define black people within the norms and ex pectations of mainstream consumer entertainment. Conversely, from the black side, at their best, many of these productions allow Afri can Americans, through the subversion of parody and satire, to mask and express insurgent, social truths and discontents that, if depicted otherwise, would make the suburban moviegoer uneasy. Even a be 1’0 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S nign teen-entertainment flick like House Party well expresses this tendency. In its resolution, the metaphor for a superb party, “blow the roof off the sucker,” becomes literal as the roof of the house falls out of the sky on to two bumbling, authoritarian cops, thus comically subli mating the same rebellious impulse that caused Ice-T to be so vilified in the national media for the release of his song “Cop Killer.” But perhaps one of the most troubling ironies of the new black come dies of the 1990s involves the sheer cinematic proliferation of African American images of success and upwardly mobile characters engaged in the range of American business enterprises, while in off-screen, sta tistical reality, the vast majority of black people are increasingly being pushed to the margins of American society.'*® In varying ways this painful contradiction between image and reality implicitly resonates in the humor of Livin’ Large! (1991), and the 1992 releases Strictly Business, Mo’ Money, and Boomerang, all of which employ variations of classic screwball or romantic comedy formulas. They depict an up wardly mobile or successful protagonist who either finds that he is dis satisfied with success or must renounce his cultural or class identity in order to succeed. Directed by veteran black filmmaker Michael Schultz, creator of such black-cast hits as Cooley High (1975), Car Wash (1976), and The Last Dragon (1985), Livin’ Large! explores the price and pain a striv ing black journalism student, Dexter Jackson (T. C. Carson), must pay in order to succeed in the competitive, white-ruled world of tele vision newscasting. In a scenario that cleverly alludes to Pygmalion, Dr. Faustus, and The Portrait ofDorian Grey, Dexter gradually turns on his cultural origins and community loyalties, as well as abandons his hip-hop dialect, under the tutelage of an ambitious domineering white woman news director (Blanche Baker). He then discovers that he has trapped himself in a Faustian bargain that he finds increasingly suffo cating. Symbolic of his barely repressed guilt and eroded identity, to his escalating horror Dexter is trapped in a hallucinatory dialogue with his deracinated whiteface alter image, who has the unnerving habit of confronting him from random television screens. After doing a series of “negative image” exposes of ghetto life and having an affair with the station’s white coquette. Missy (Julia Campbell), which leads to a career-advancing arranged wedding promoted by the station as “Gone THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 191 with the Wind meets Superfly,” Dexter loses community, friends, and his black fiancee (Lisa Arrindell). The situation blows up, a la screw ball comedy, when Dexter’s conscience gets the better of him, and he cannot go through with the loveless wedding ceremony. Implicit in Livings farcical treatment of the television news busi ness, the primary institution controlling the hegemonic representation of political and social reality, is the African American argument that the news media represent the black community as a series of neverending, intractable “problems,” that is, crime, drugs, welfare, absent fathers, racial violence, and the rest. Thus the mainstream audience is led to believe that the black community is totally dependent, degen erate, and in need of the paternal charity and discipline of the white power structure. Equally important. Livin’ satirically plays with the broadly held black contention that the only way to be accepted and succeed in the white-dominated realm of corporate business is to ape white upper-class culture and values. This theme recurs in a number of black-cast comedies, including the diegesis of yet another satire of African American success in the corporate world. Strictly Business (1992). Starring Tommy Davidson and Joseph C. Phillips, Business tells the story of a hyperconformist, deracinated “Buppie,” Daymon Tinsdale III (Phillips), who is forced to find his cultural expressivity and roots when he falls for a beautiful black nightclub singer, played by Halle Berry. Both features articulate their comfortable position in the main stream of commercial cinema discourse by resolving themselves on notes of comedic high optimism, utopian compromise, and the subtle reaffirmation of corporate values. In Livin’, Dexter’s revolt at his forced, miscegenous wedding wins him back the respect of his com munity, friends, and fiancee. And Dexter’s commandeering the micro phone to report the chaos of his wedding so impresses the senior, white male management that he is offered the position of co-anchor on the station’s evening news. The final scene of the film offers a syncretic, biracial male-buddy resolution as it cuts to the “Channel 4 Evening News” logo accompanied by the Herbie Hancock-composed funk-hiphop soundtrack. The now commercially hybrid Dexter, dressed in a sport coat over an Afro vest made of kente cloth, and his white male co-anchor, Clifford Worthy (Bernee McInerney), exchange jesting hip 191 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S hop handshakes and greetings, with Worthy quipping, “We do be down.” Then, in linguistic affirmation of his allegiance to the dominant corporate culture, Dexter starts his reporting in perfectly articulated, race-neutral news talk as the film ends and fades to credits. Strictly Business also ends in an optimistic fantasy that celebrates the triumph of capital, romance, and racial cooperation, as Daymen Tinsdale III is able to negotiate his “double consciousness” deftly by maintaining his newly found hipness while moving up in the corporate hierarchy. His promised partnership in the firm is rescued with a $75 million invest ment by a group of Harlem fat cats, and Daymen negotiates the owner ship of a nightclub to bond the affections of his new girl friend as well. Though, as noted, in the new black-cast comedies, as in other black mainstream features, the opinions and perspectives of “blackness” are not entirely containable within Hollywood tropes and conventions; thus these comedies inadvertently conjure up resistant expressions and points of view of their own. For a prime example, most of the new black comedies articulate a sustained, if at times subliminal, negative critique of white corporate culture by pointedly fingering the agent of malfeasance and evil in their narratives as an overambitious white businessperson. In Livin’, the manipulative, careerist news director Kate Penndragin personifies an aggressive, career-obsessed white feminist as she manipulates Dexter to secure her own place in the cor porate hierarchy. In Strictly Business, evil takes the form of a white male junior executive willing to do anything, including sabotage Tins dale, for a partnership in the firm. And positioned as Damon Wayans’s corrupt nemesis in Mo’ Money, the white male director of security (John Diehl) oversees a scheme to defraud the credit card company that employs them out of millions of dollars. Clearly, the binary trope of black goodness versus white wickedness emerged as a staple during the Blaxplditation period, evolved in Richard Pryor’s biracial buddy comedies of the 1970s, and followed through in the black comedies of the 1980s, as evinced by two of Eddie Murphy’s features. The Golden Child (1986), where the white villain is a synecdoche for Satan, and Harlem Nights (1989), where the bad guys are white racist gangsters. Significantly, in the majority of the 1990s black comedies, the in verse, Manichaean image of white corporate villainy is further re inforced with the corollary figure of the soulless, deracinated “Buppie.” THE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 191 If African American comedy views corporate culture as alienating with many evil attributes, then the lost, decultured “Buppie,” in his Brooks Bros, suit, speaking with perfect diction and listening to “clas sical” music, has come to represent the ultimate African American cinematic nightmare of assimilation. In Livin’ Large!, Dexter climbs the corporate ladder while the features of his ghostly, video double be come progressively whiter as it offers Dexter career-advancing power moves from the television monitor. When he rebels at his wedding, his persona in the monitor is the first thing Dexter smashes. In Strictly Business, Daymen Tinsdale III receives the revelation of hipness and dumps his corporate girl friend, who is played as an arrogant, black bourgeois snob (Anne-Mane Johnson). Mo’ Money relies on the same scenario, when black con man Jonny Stewart (Damon Wayans) steals Stacey Dash (Amber Evans) from an uptight, domineering black cor porate boy friend so full of self-contempt that he tells antiblack jokes and considers African Americans outside his job description as “street trash.” Showing up in a number of films, this consistent ridicule of the hy perconformist “Buppie” relates, in a Freudian sense, to a more gen eralized black thematic concern with unstable, shifting identities, the dissemblings and masks so essential to those on the run and trying to survive in a racially unequal society. Certainly, the arts of dissembling and unmasking make up the acid cores of both To Sleep with Anger and Chameleon Street, as well as the cliched “mistaken identity” for mula of the teen pic Class Act (1992). And this black sense of doubling and masking is stretched to its complex dramatic limits in the brilliant urban-crime drama directed by Bill Duke, Deep Cover (1992). In Deep Covei/^s, shallow, comic counterpoint, comedian Lenny Henry changes his race from black to white, going underground to expose the Mafia in director Charles Lane’s True Identity (1991). And in the mainstream comedy hit Sister Act (1992), Whoopi Goldberg stars as a second-rate Vegas nightclub singer on the run, masquerading as a nun and hiding in a convent. In her endless narrative role as the expression of “black ness in a white milieu, Goldberg plays a missionary in reverse, bring ing the gospel of black soul and spontaneity to the white natives of a sterile, cloistered nunnery. In terms of capital invested, however, star casting, and narrative ’4 Illi BLACK FILM IN THE I990S exploration of an elite black world, the 1992 black mainstream com edy that presses the limitations of Hollywood’s budget ceiling has got to be Boomerang, directed by Reginald Hudlin and costing $42 mil lion, with $12 million of that going for Eddie Murphy’s salary alone?® Set in the exclusive, high-fashion, upper echelons of a successful black cosmetics firm. Boomerang tells the story of marketing executive, Marcus Graham (Eddie Murphy), a notorious womanizer who gets his sexploitative game turned on him when he falls for his new, careerdriven boss Jacqueline (Robin Givens). In a classic comedy of reversed intentions and roles, Graham comes to realize the emptiness of hedo nism and “success,” eventually winding up with a woman representing the true romantic ideal, played by Halle Berry. To the film’s credit, in much the same way that the black-cast major studio productions Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky (both 1943) employed a consider able range of the black entertainers of their day. Boomerang utilizes the talents of Eartha Kitt, Geoffrey Holder, Grace Jones, David Alan Grier, Chris Rock, and Martin Lawrence. Moreover, Reginald Hudlin artfully directs all these actors within the expectations and range of their career personas, including Grace Jones as a supermodel, doing a wicked parody of her media image. Yet, in the ostentation of its high-rise, corporate mise-en-sc^ne, its panoramic celebration of positive images of “black success,” and its un questioning acceptance of the reigning commercial paradigm. Boomer ang raises some interesting questions about the intent and direction of black cinema practice. Ultimately the film is a classic cinema romantic comedy, with its only distinction being that it is cast entirely in black terms. Perhaps Boomerang’s debt to genre and formula is nowhere more clearly revealed than in the comment of director Hudlin when he says of Eddie Murphy and his superstar persona in the film, “My goal was to make him Cary Grant.” This comment subtly recalls the early, imitative black cinema practice of conceptualizing the persona of the black actor in terms of contemporaneous white stars, dating from the early black auteurs who billed their actors with such titles as “the black Valentino” or “the sepia Mae West” or the “the colored Cagney.”^® So the set of critical questions that constantly vexes black cinema over the course of its evolution must again challenge us at this juncture. Is the fundamental purpose of the new wave of black cinema to regisTHE NEW BLACK MOVIE BOOM | | | | 191 ter “success” primarily in terms of box o

Black Film in the 1990s: A New Movie Boom PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript

Upgrade to continue