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3 What’s Sex and Women Got to Do with It? Sexual Politics and Revolution in Sweetback and The Spook “Girl, they ain’t lying about Sweetback. Now if I don’t remember nothing else about it, that movie had lines way down the block. And people went to see it two or three times, okay? I think about it now, I was just a child seeing that movie. Can you believe that?” As a lovely, ageless black California artist shared this with me, I listened like a kid voyeuristically experiencing Sweetback.I’dseenthemoviemanytimesbeforethisconversation,butthrough her remembrances, I was feeling the magnetic aura of the film in its time. It seems as if I’ve always known about Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the infamous film that inadvertently spawned the blaxploitation genre. Years before actually viewing it, I’d heard all about it and read all kinds of black film histories that addressed the film. I knew that part of its controversial though legendary status stemmed from its graphic sexual scenes, one in which the director’s own son played the boy in the encounter with an older prostitute. And still, the movie jumped off the screen and slapped me upside the head when I finally watched it for the very first time several years ago now. I sat stupefied as the warning “Watch Out A Baadasssss Nigger Is Coming Back To Collect Some Dues” faded from the screen. The hype embodied in the well-known declaration that the film “raged” and “screamed” was justified. Whenever I show the film in my classes, it shouts loudly at my diversely mixed students, provoking anger, confusion, and discomfort for many and passionate political enthusiasm and love in others, particularly my black male students. Once we grapple with its form, themes, and problems and continue our viewing and discussion about the black action movie culture of the time, it is always the one film that they are drawn to return to over and over again. 56 . “baad bitches” and sassy supermamas Perhaps because of its unabashed Black Nationalist action center, another boldly political revolt–themed film, ἀ e Spook Who Sat by the Door, provokes some of the same responses. I had long heard of this film as well, but it wasn’t until about 1999 that I finally viewed it for the first time. I watched it with a boyfriend who prided himself on his black radical intellectual consciousness. For him, the film was a sacred manifesto about true Black Power political action and change. Created and written by Sam Greenlee and produced with other black male collaborators, it offers an unusual, serious dramatization of Black Nationalism and revolution. Though there were also critically significant black dramas like Lady Sings the Blues, Sounder, and Black Girl in the early 1970s, ἀ e Spook was released during a period when the crime world–oriented blaxploitation formula was being exhausted in black-marketed, studio-supported action films like Super Fly. ἀ e Spook reflects a black male political perspective with its extraordinarily strong critique of white supremacist, capitalist oppression and due in part to the control that black men had over the film’s vision. Like Sweetback, ἀ e Spook does not employ the individual criminal/drug action plot or employ and marginalize the black militant image as merely a sensationalist element in the narrative. Rather, it attempts to evoke the black protest struggle emphases on the empowerment of the black community and resistance to the racial status quo. Despite its technical roughness, I was captivated by its intensity. When the last scene faded, my boyfriend immediately launched into a spirited discourse about the film’s revolutionary import and carried on with platitudes about the black male hero’s brilliance and the like. He finally calmed down and excitedly awaited my confirmation. Of course I delivered. I agreed on its explosiveness and commented on how interesting it would be to see a remake of it, but I ended with a few deadly serious questions as to whether women would be in the black revolution or not and how. There were women in it, my boyfriend reminded me; didn’t you hear the hero tell the brothers how important the sistas would be? I did at that, I answered, but the comment was sort of overwhelmed by the film’s representation of black women through two main characters—a traitorous, black bourgeois bitch and a noble black whore with African queen potential. To say the least, the parallels between...

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