Spike Lee's latest film, BAMBOOZLED, is a biting satire that dares to take on the state of race in the American media in the year 2000. In an era of no-holds-barred, no-limits, gross-out comedy, Spike Lee has created a film that is equally on-the- edge, controversial and shockingly funny, but one that also makes you think. With Bamboozled, Lee takes a look at one of film and television's rarest breeds -- the African-American television executive. His funny send-up is based in some sobering facts about the world a black writer enters, a world in which 75 percent of television writers are white. In a 1999 survey by the NAACP, it was found that ABC, for example, employed just nine black writers, five of whom were all working on the same show. At the time, NAACP's Beverly Hills/Hollywood branch president Billie Green stated: "The lack of diversity in writers' rooms throughout television is even more startling than the lack of diversity on the air."
So what is a young African-American writer to do? In Bamboozled, Pierre Delacroix tries to go with the flow and give the people, or at least the network's conception of the people, what they want -- but in so doing, he manufactures his own spectacular downfall. Delacroix delves back into the history of African-Americans on film and television and unwittingly revives one of the most popular forms of early entertainment -- Minstrel, the burnt-cork, black-face dance and comedy shows. It might seem far-fetched but it also might not be too far off the mark. As black historian Donald Bogle writes in his book Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: "Often enough the old stereotypes resurface, simply dressed in new garb to look modern, hip, provocative and politically 'relevant."'
Which is exactly what "Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show" is called by the press: a hip, funny way of tackling old stereotypes. But is it really? Spike Lee leaves it up to his audience to decide.
"Bamboozled came about because I was thinking about the end of this century and moving into the next. I have always been disappointed by the limited ways that people of color have been portrayed, depicted and often rewritten out of history -- and this seemed an appropriate time to think about the next hundred years of media," explains Spike Lee. "And it's not just in television or cinema, but all media as well."
With Bamboozled he comes at his subject from a cutting, satirical view point as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. Looking around at the current content of movies and television shows, he says, "I saw the minstrel show still very much with us. Pierre Delacroix's show doesn't seem that out there when you realize the only thing he's really doing different from some of the actual television shows on the network now is putting black-face on the actors."
But Lee did decide to take Delacroix's television production to the next degree of ironic absurdity -- absurdity that cuts to the core. "This is very clearly satire," he explains. "But this is also one of those topics where once you learn the real history, it raises some uneasy feelings. You see the images and you always have this internal conflict: just how funny is this and should I laugh or have some other response? Even Delacroix and Sloan aren't sure how to respond, just as is the audience."
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