Blackface is so blatant, so wounding, so highly charged, that it obscures any point being made by the person wearing it.” While Anthony Lane stated in The New Yorker, “Enough has changed for audiences to know blackface is ugly and unfunny.” Amy Taubin argued in the Village Voice that Lee had made “a justified but overly reductive attack on the television industry for its degrading representations of African Americans and on the audience that swallows the racist brew and begs for more”. Who wants to see Judy Garland, Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney in blackface? We wanted to use a clip of Bugs Bunny in blackface, but Warner Brothers wouldn’t give us clearance to use it.”Īmerican critic Roger Ebert condemned Bamboozled by writing, “I think his fundamental miscalculation was to use blackface itself. Lee calls it “one of the best scenes I have ever done”, even though he also feels that it was part of the reason why the film was dismissed at the time of its release. The film ends with a montage sequence showing the use of blackface and racist tropes throughout the history of American audio-visual entertainment. Lee takes no prisoners when firing bullets at American cinematic history.
The Mau Maus, a group of black militant activists, decide to take retaliatory action against the racism of CNS by kidnapping the show’s star and executing him live on the Internet. The show may please the masses, but many of the African Americans that it is lampooning are furious.
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The film shows the impossibility of achieving this in a world of TV and cinema that is institutionally racist. Delacroix entered TV with the foolhardy ambition and hope that he could change the stereotyping and racial tropes that litter everything he watches. Speaking with an affected accent, designed to make him sound like a WASP, Delacroix delivers a definition of satire, setting the tone for this film made in the tradition of Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) and Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957). Harvard-educated Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is the only black executive working at TV network CNS. “It’s the exploration of how dehumanised human beings.” He wanted to look at the history from another perspective: “I felt it would be a good time to look at how treated the depiction of black people.” Not good, is the short answer. Lee saw Bamboozled as a way to mark the 100th anniversary of cinema and 50 years of TV. The most comforting films for tough times Warning: This article contains strong language that might cause offence. Made on a $10 million budget, Bamboozled earned back less than $2.5 million worldwide. “To me, the definition of a cult classic is a film that nobody went to see when it came out,” Lee bellows down the phone from his home in New York with a hearty laugh. Spike Lee’s 14th feature film, Bamboozled, was released on 6 October, 2000, in the United States.
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