“Expect the Truth”: Exploiting History with Mandingo

Introduction

The promotional poster for the exploitation film Mandingo prominently features a muscular black man firmly holding a partially disrobed white woman close to his shirtless body. Set against a fiery red sky, this couple is juxtaposed with another pair, a white man carrying a fainting black woman in his arms. The black woman’s dress strap dangles halfway down her shoulder, ironically evoking the image of Rhett Butler embracing Scarlett O’Hara from the classic movie poster for Gone with the Wind.¹ While these arresting depictions of passion dominate the space, the lower portion of the poster is populated with smaller scenes of intense violence: a black man hangs by his feet as a white man disciplines him with a wooden paddle; a band of whites on horseback chases a runaway slave; two half-naked black men wrestle each other for the entertainment of a crowd of cheering white men. Immediately above the two couples, stark black letters promise a revelatory experience: “Expect the savage. The sensual. The shocking. The sad. The powerful. The shameful. Expect all that the motion picture screen never dared to show before. Expect the truth. Now you are ready for Mandingo.”

Released in 1975, the film Mandingo was a critical disaster as reviewers both black and white scourged it with all manner of puritanical condemnations. Yet, in an age where the press could often decide a film’s financial fate, Mandingo was wildly popular with audiences, becoming the eighteenth highest grossing film of the year.² In our own time the film occupies a peculiar place in the pantheon of popular culture as its title has become a polysemous sign in the ever-morphing lexicon of American slang. A cursory internet search of the word reveals that “Mandingo” could refer to a historic West African linguistic group that spans several modern geopolitical nations, a contemporary African American male porn star, or the name of a small, white-owned business out of Owosso, Michigan that sells locally grown and bottled dill pickles.³ The word conjures up associations of illicit interracial sex and/or the myth of the well-endowed “black stud,” perhaps supporting the claims of the film’s detractors that it was a tawdry exercise in “sexploitation sociology.”⁴ Yet, in the 38 years since the film’s release, it has attracted a cadre of apologists from academia, most notably Robin Wood, who in a 1998 essay titled “Mandingo: The Vindication of an Abused Masterpiece” cited the film as being “the greatest Hollywood film about race.”⁵ Linda Williams has made similar claims for the film’s enduring relevance, arguing that Mandingo continues to speak volumes to contemporary racialized sexual dynamics, particularly in light of the explosion of interracial pornography via the World Wide Web.⁶ Robert Keser has offered the most recent academic reappraisal of the film, interpreting it as a “serious statement about the socio-economic order in the form of a melodrama” and placing it alongside other antiestablishment films of 1975, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon.⁷

Scholarly examinations of Mandingo vary in their approaches and conclusions, but all share a general interest in the film’s provocative textual features (depictions of race, gender dynamics, pornographic appeal, etc.). While it is certainly an arresting film text, little has been written on how the film was received during its 1975 theatrical run. Virtually all of the academic literature on Mandingo claims that audiences flocked to the film while critics condemned it, yet this tension is rarely explored with nuance or complexity. In such constructions, critics are often conceived as one homogenous community, and their universal hatred of the film is usually supported with a few quotes from film reviewers. The audience is also constructed as monolithic, and its acceptance of the film is represented only in terms of box office receipts. These broad, impressionistic characterizations barely capture the reception event that Mandingo truly was, and I propose that more research is required in order to truly understand the film’s cultural significance. Specifically, I am interested in the following questions...