There are several distinctions between the blaxploitation films of the ’70s and the gangsta films of the ’80s and ’90s that go well beyond budgetary differences or period markers. Gangsta films of the ’80s and ’90s were, with varying degrees of success, attempts to “keep things real.” If they were not docudramas they purported to have the ambitions of docudramas, to portray what life is really like for the black urban underclass. “Menace II Society,” which opens with a nonsensical slaying at a Korean-owned store, dares its audience to dig deep into its liberal consciousness to find sympathy for its sociopathic heroes. “Boyz N’ the Hood” portrays the terrible state of education provided for inner-city children and the precarious line that exists between a life of crime and death and success at a college. These films are the equivalent of “consciousness” hip-hop.
The blaxploitation films of the ’70s, were in contrast, not only racial fantasies but often comedic racial fantasies. In Black Caesar, Fred Williamson played a gangster who takes back control of Harlem from white mafiosos. Even given the general campiness of the blaxploitation milieu, he’s a funny character. He organizes a drive-by shooting from a horse-drawn Central Park carriage. In the penultimate scene of the film he forces a corrupt racist white cop to wear black face and sing “Mammy.” There’s a hilarity to that moment, just as there’s a comedy in Shaft’s hyper-sexuality and his singular ability to provide white women with their most repressed sexual needs. That comedy comes from the satisfaction of an urge in the collective unconscious of an oppressed people.
As a side note, I would say that Quentin Tarantino understands those urges and is willing to consciously deconstruct them. In “Inglourious Basterds” he satisfies an unsaid need for victims of the Holocaust to no longer be nice Jewish boys, but the badasses who get to carve swastikas in the foreheads of Germans. The problem is that Tarantino’s Nazis are often unnervingly human. His genius in Jackie Brown may not have been merely to have resurrected an ancient blaxploitation fantasy but to consciously dissect it. He allows us to fetishize our image of Pam Grier, the badass heroine of ’70s films, but at the same time to contemplate the instability of that image. Grier’s Jackie Brown is forced to contemplate the indignities of aging and as she does so, we are forced to consciously deconstruct our fetishization of the fantasy that is Pam Grier. At some point the fantasy and the comedy does end.
Where do I start in response to this amazing post? The comedy factor is an issue worth exploring. Outside of the ridiculous parody one might consider the comedy a subversive tactic as well, as we have discussed in class. But I'd say the subversive element is lesser than the calculated comedy aesthetic meant to entertain. Yet, I like how you go further to draw out as the reading does how these films addressed socio-cultural contexts and unconscious desires. The comparison to the contemporary films works quite well here, too. I have not seen Inglourious Bastards, but the issue you bring up concerning the cultural work of characterizations and how some other characters undermine (or may undermine) that work seems quite valid. There has been so much written about the Jackie Brown film, and Tarantino himself as not conscious of what he is doing, but as you astutely observe and as we will see in the documentary, he is consciously playing with ideas in the popular imagination and a historical moment of reference whether it be Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown. Again, intellectually stimulating post and fine work.
ReplyDeleteCheers,