Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled by Ashley Clark (review)

Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) centers on Pierre Delacroix, a television executive who is trying desperately to attract viewers to his shows. Delacroix’s network is rife with deep and institutional racism; it cannot produce shows that represent African American life honestly and complexly. To satirize this lack, Delacroix conjures an old-fashioned minstrel show that will clearly and explicitly show up the network’s limited understanding of blackness. Surprisingly, his plan backfires and the show is a huge success, thus undermining Delacroix’s critical impulse. Bamboozled, in short, is a thorny and difficult work. While Spike Lee’s career is not without its challenging moments, this film has certainly been misunderstood and under discussed in theory and journalism. Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is Ashley Clark’s riposte to that critical absence. A journalist and film programmer, Clark’s sensibilities are attuned both to the dimensions of movie production and reception, as well as aesthetic, historical, and cultural concerns. The book is the most sustained and significant analysis of the film and an excellent contribution to popular film studies. This text will be of use for scholars, students, and general readers alike.

Clark’s book begins with a personal aside, introducing us to his first encounter with Bamboozled when he was young and living in London; candidly admitting that he was “either unable or unwilling to engage critically with [the film’s] elliptical, choppy narrative, or its cacophonous late lurch into torrid romance and macabre melodrama” (x–xi). Within a few pages, Clark begins to grapple with the idiosyncratic and slippery nature of Lee’s film, which, through the rest of Facing Blackness, he explores rigorously. Through a few short chapters, Clark tackles the film’s major concerns of race and representation in the media, arguing that Lee’s “merciless lampooning of corporate media cluelessness is Bamboozled’s most consistently effective line of satirical attack” (43). This film’s political sights are set clearly at the media (and film/television in particular), and Clark unpacks these often successful (though sometimes misguided) assaults.

Facing Blackness, then, analyzes the role of minstrelsy in the film as well as US culture at large, asserting that Bamboozled “characterizes minstrelsy as something akin to an abstract virus; a malevolent mainstay in the continuum of black representational degradation” (54). Discussing further the complex nature of blackface in the film, Clark points to the ways in which the functions, signs, and processes of minstrelsy accumulate. Clark quotes Freud at one point to describe the uncanny feelings about race produced by the film, noting that “we know precisely where its horror comes from—it’s no secret, but it has been effectively suppressed in popular culture and histories” (64). This uncanny feeling leads us perhaps even to one of the central fetishes of contemporary US culture: the avowal and disavowal of deeply rooted and structural racism. Lee’s answer to this psychic block is a “staggering final montage of racially offensive imagery” from across history. Through the “bolting together images of black and blacked-up white performers” from different times and genres “Lee might be accused of lacking nuance,” but, Clark argues, “the risk is worth the taking” (65). Bill Brown has also discussed the uncanny in relation to Bamboozled, and notes that while blackface “animates” historical stereotypes, the racist objects and collectibles that we are shown at the film’s end (Aunt Jemima jars, Sambo art, and so on) actually “deanimate it, to arrest the stereotype . . . to fix a demeaning and/or romanticized racism with the fortitude of solid form.” In these objects we witness what Brown calls the “American uncanny,” or “the possibility that our reluctance to think seriously about things may result from a repressed apprehension—the apprehension that within things [like the jars] we will discover the human precisely because our history is one in which humans were reduced to things (however incomplete that reduction).” ¹

This American uncanny pulses...