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Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) Summary: In Bamboozled, Spike Lee reconstructs a blackface minstrelsy, in which he addresses social and political comments about race, identity negotiation and politics. This is done through the representation of pivotal characters such as Pierre Delacroix, Tavis and Manray. Delacroix, a Harvard educated African American is a television producer for CNS, who has had his creative ideas for a show constantly rejected. These shows are ones that portray African Americans in a respectible light. Delacroix is put under pressure from his boss Dunwitty (who claims to be blacker than him) to produce an entertaining "black show" or he will be fired. Faced with an ultimatum of either coming up with a hit black-centric show for the network or being fired, Delacroix opts for the latter on the basis that being fired will free him from his contract to the network and allow him to go to work for another network without having to go through the hassle of quitting and being sued for breach of contract. Delacroix decides to pitch a minstrel show for the Millennium, "Mantan's New Millennium Minstrel Show complete with black actors in blackface, Mantan (Manray) and Sleep n Eat (Womack). He does this on the belief that the network would reject it for being outright racist and fire him on the spot. However, Dunwitty surprisingly loves the idea and later Delacroix with its national success embraces his work and defends it as purely satirical work instead of an offensive one. Bamboozled's narrative, through the network decision to air this minstrel show, suggests the dangers implicit in re-presenting the damaging humor and stereotypes that inform minstrelsy's discourse and the extent to which satire can be used as a suspicious excuse for promoting racist ideology. The film, in turn, can be seen as a critique of modern attempts to apologize for and justify the repetition of traditional racist stereotyping in the modern mass entertainment industry. "Spike Lee's answer to ''Network'' is a scaldingly funny satire of the television industry in which a failing network hits the ratings jackpot with an old-time black minstrel show that resurrects offensive stereotypes. Accepted as hip, ironic and liberating by mainstream audiences but reviled by black militants, it starts a national craze for wearing blackface. If this messy cinematic collage goes every which way, its anger at a television industry that largely excludes blacks and whose black programming (in the director's view) perpetuates minstrelsy is right on target." (Holden NY Times Review) Herman Gray's Article, Black Masculinity and Visual Culture This article explores the social circumstances and cultural conditions in which contemporary representations of black masculinity are produced and circulated to reveal the formal and largely constructed ways of seeing and understanding visual representations of black masculinity. Gray quotes Gerald Early in his article, stating "self-representation of black masculinity in the United States are historically structured by and against dominant (and dominating) discourses of masculinity, and race, specifically (whiteness)." (1)
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