Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic

5. “You Better Watch This Good Shit!”: Black Spectatorship, Black Masculinity, and Blaxploitation Film

5 “You Better Watch This Good Shit!” BlaCk sPeCTaTorshiP, BlaCk MasCuliniTy, and BlaxPloiTaTion filM “resistant” and “oppositional” Constituting an African American Audience and the Question of African American Spectatorship In 1965 much of the world watched on television as the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded in what was up until then the largest urban uprising of its kind in U.S. history. Images of African American bodies as active agents of violence in the rioting and as the inescapable victims of the batons and bullets of the Los Angeles Police Department and the National Guard were widely circulated. These images began to compete with the other image of African Americans created in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles through films such as Hallelujah, Charles Vidor’s celebration of plantation life (1929); Song of the South, Walt Disney’s celebration of slavery (1946); and more recent “noble Negro” vehicles, such as Sidney Poitier’s Lilies of the Field (1963). When the historic events in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and 1970s were coupled with the competing images and agendas of mainstream Hollywood, the Black film boom that has come to be known as “Blaxploitation” was born. Between 1966 and 1975 approximately seventy feature-length Black action films were created as part of this genre, either by Hollywood studios making extensive, first-time use of African American production and distribution staff or by newly formed independent African American production companies. The films that fall within the genre category of Blaxploitation are in some senses as varied and uneven as the 160 sPectAcUlAR BlAckness conditions of their production. They range from slick blockbuster-style studio films to low-budget films with low production values created in B studios such as American International Pictures, which initially came to prominence with the success of teen exploitation films such as Beach Party (1963) and Pajama Party (1964).1 Because the 1960s and 1970s were the first time that African Americans and their desires and concerns became the conscious focus of mainstream U.S. visual culture, Blaxploitation era film production points to the ways in which “a Black audience,” a notion that was very much the product of a historically specific moment, was deliberately socially constructed, not only to answer the calls for an aesthetic revolution befitting the social and political revolutions of the time, but also as a marketing niche to fill the specific needs of a Hollywood film industry that was floundering badly in the wake of the rise of television and the failure of the studio system. Consequently , the production of Black-themed films during the Blaxploitation era reveals the ways in which African American film strove to create a visual tradition that specifically negotiated and counteracted a history of African American oppression that had largely been formulated and enacted through visual culture and visual coding. It also reveals the limitations on and possibilities for resistance within the commodification and cooptation of African American popular culture as it was developing in the period immediately following segregation. To determine what is at stake in the production and consumption of Blaxploitation, this chapter examines the following issues: the relationship between black action films, the African American community’s rejection of nonviolent protest, and the consumption of popular culture, grounded in a discussion of how visual pleasure was constituted for the audience of Blaxploitation. The fact that the Black film boom of the 1960s and 1970s constructed an African American audience that actually mattered had broad implications for film production and consumption and also for notions of African American subjectivity. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks explores what she terms “the oppositional gaze” and the centrality of visual culture to the totality of African American historical experience by describing the ways in which African Americans have been compelled by historical necessity to recognize and participate in the power of the gaze: “The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied the right to gaze. I knew that the slaves had looked. That attempts to repress our/Black people’s right to gaze had produced in “YOU BETTER WATCH THIS GOOD SHIT!” 161 us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declare: ‘Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality’” (116). According to hooks, an “oppositional gaze” both informs African Americans of the...