"Men Ain't All"-- A Reworking of Masculinity in Tales from the Hood, or, Grandma Meets the Zombie

Abstract

In the 1995 horror film Tales from the Hood, director/screenwriter Rusty Cundieff and his company rework stereotypes of African American masculinity by borrowing elements from folklore. Influences on the movie from African American folklore-specifically ghost, trickster, and conjurer tales featuring the use of enchanted objects to exact vengeance-emphasize one's responsibility to the community, the weak overcoming the strong, and the wisdom of elders. Tales thereby questions and complicates previous binary depictions.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. sees the young African American filmmaker Rusty Cundieff as one of the harbingers of the "renaissance to end all renaissances" (Gates 1994: n.p.). He cites Cundieff's previous film, the hip-hop satire Fear of a Black Hat, as an example of African American art that displays consciousness of previous traditions and confidence in the "legitimacy of black experiences as artistic material" (Gates 1994: n.p.). Gates praises Cundieff's and the other artists' "zest for parodies" and the self-conscious echo, imitation, parody, and revision of their "riffing" and "signifying" on African American culture. I agree with Gates's assessment, and I take it one step further.

In Tales from the Hood, director/screenwriter Rusty Cundieff revises not only African American artistic tradition for the screen; he and his production company attempt an even larger revision, by reworking stereotypes of African American masculinity. The significance of Cundieff's 1995 horror movie lies in the progress it makes toward eradicating binary gender depictions from the genre of horror film. It makes a small contribution toward disassembling such binaries in the larger culture as well. This measure of progress comes from Cundieff's use of certain elements of folklore to question and complicate depictions of African American men in film. The importance of this film for folklore studies comes from the example it provides us, not only of folklore's continuing influence on popular culture but also of its potential for disrupting hegemonic images that popular culture promotes. Specifically, elements of African American folklore that emphasize one's responsibility to the community, the weak overcoming the strong, and the wisdom of elders appear to have influenced this particular example of movie making. Elements from conjurer or trickster stories and ghostlore, as well as enchanted objects, especially those tied to the theme of vengeance, all appear in Tales from the Hood.

For decades, Hollywood has presented white male stars "as supreme icons and incarnations of the rootless, decultured 'individual' in industrial consumer society" (Guerrero 1993:126), while it has presented African American male characters as either passive bystanders or aggressive villains, but rarely as distinctive individual heroes who win the struggle in any movie plot. In answering those stereotypes, some African American filmmakers have depicted similar "individualist," and possibly "reactionary," male heroes who win the day (Guerrero 1993:96-97). Some filmmakers have compensated for previously desexualized "sidekick" African American male characters with emphatically sexually active characters, and some have compensated for early Hollywood's weak, impoverished stereotypes with depictions of African American males as strong and economically powerful (ya Salaam 1995:6). (See Donald Bogle's work on the variety of stereotypes.¹)

Cundieff's production has created characters who defy Hollywood's dominant white culture-and these characters win their battles against white authority figures. At the same time, the film uses these and other characters to reflect, then contradict, some of the responses of African American filmmakers to the dominant culture. By using related themes from African American folklore, the movie interrogates the stereotype of masculinity as tied to power, whether physical, economic, or sexual. Masculinity, in whatever ethnicity, the movie seems to insist, does not have to be synonymous with power.

The overall approach of the film reflects a tricksterlike duality. Thematically, Cundieff and company's morbidly comic Tales signifies upon the horror genre and upon African American inter- and intraracial relationships. On the surface, the film gives us familiar movie monsters, who turn out to be heroes of their people. A vengeful conjurer, in her final shot, wears the clothes and demeanor...