Though Furious convinces him to relinquish the gun, Furious’s victory is only temporary. The meaning of Tre’s manhood is at stake; it is the most severe test he has faced, and he chooses to sneak out of the house to join Doughboy. All Furious can do is tensely exercise his hands with two silver balls, which in this context are an unavoidable metaphor for how black men view their fate through their testicles, which are constantly up for grabs, attack, or destruction. Then sometime during the night, Tre’s impassioned choice finally rings false, a product of the logic of vengeance he has desperately avoided all these years; he insists that he be let out of Doughboy’s car before they find Ricky’s killers.
Following the code of male honor, Doughboy kills his brother’s killers. But the next morning, in a conversation with Tre, he is not so sure of violence’s mastering logic anymore, and says that he understands Tre’s choice to forsake Doughboy’s vigilante mission, even as he silently understands that he is in too deep to be able to learn any other language of survival.
Across this chasm of violence and anguish, the two surviving friends are able to extend a final gesture of understanding. As Doughboy laments the loss of his brother, Tre offers him the bittersweet consolation that “you got one more brother left.” Their final embrace in the film’s closing moment is a sign of a deep love that binds brothers; a love, however, that too often will not save brothers.
The film’s epilogue tells us that Doughboy is murdered two weeks later, presumably to avenge the deaths of Ricky’s killers. The epilogue also tells us that Tre and Brandi manage to escape South Central as Tre pursues an education at Morehouse College, with Brandi at neighboring Spelman College. It is testimony to the power of Singleton’s vision that Tre’s escape is no callow Hollywood paean to the triumph of the human spirit (nor is it, as some reviewers have somewhat perversely described the film, “life-affirming”). The viewer is not permitted to forget for a moment the absurd and vicious predictability of the loss of life in South Central Los Angeles, a hurt so colossal that even Doughboy must ask, “If there was a God, why he let mothefuckers get smoked every night?” Theodicy in gangface.
The film’s epilogue tells us that Doughboy is murdered two weeks later, presumably to avenge the deaths of Ricky’s killers. The epilogue also tells us that Tre and Brandi manage to escape South Central as Tre pursues an education at Morehouse College, with Brandi at neighboring Spelman College. It is testimony to the power of Singleton’s vision that Tre’s escape is no callow Hollywood paean to the triumph of the human spirit (nor is it, as some reviewers have somewhat perversely described the film, “life-affirming”). The viewer is not permitted to forget for a moment the absurd and vicious predictability of the loss of life in South Central Los Angeles, a hurt so colossal that even Doughboy must ask, “If there was a God, why he let mothefuckers get smoked every night?” Theodicy in gangface.
Singleton is not about to provide a slick or easy answer. But he does powerfully juxtapose such questions alongside the sources of hope, sustained in the heroic sacrifice of everyday people who want their children’s lives to be better. The work of John Singleton embodies such hope by reminding us that South Central Los Angeles, by the sheer power of discipline and love, sends children to college, even as its self-destructive rage sends them to the grave.
Twenty-Five
GHETTOCENTRICITY AND THE NEW BLACK CINEMA
This reflection on the rise of a ghetto aesthetic in black cinema was first published in the British magazine Sight and Sound. Later I revised it for publication in other venues, most notably in Carol Becker’s wonderful collection of essays on art and social responsibility entitled Subversive Imagination. I examine a gaggle of films that were released in the late ’80s to the mid ’90s. Most take their cues from hip-hop culture and its preoccupation with masculinity as much as from earlier film culture. Addressing the work of Lee, Singleton, Matty Rich, Ernest Dickerson, and Mario Van Peebles, I argue that the themes, strategies, images, and symbols they employ represent a coming of age for a generation of directors who seek to portray the particularities of black life. At the end of this essay, I call for black male film directors to probe female identities and the relation of black men to women with the same insight and skill the best of them bring to masculinity, hip-hop, and the class line. I surmised that only with the emergence of female directors would the complexity of female identities get a full airing on film. The rise of Julie Dash, Leslie Harris, and Euzhan Palcy pointed the way to Kasi Lemmons and Gina Prince-Bythewood and hopefully, in the near future, to a body of criticism worthy of their talents.
THE EXPLOSION OF CONTEMPORARY BLACK CINEMA, along with the emergence of hip-hop culture, expresses the pervasive influence of African American styles, sensibilities, and ideas in American popular culture. The narrative strategies that black filmmakers employ, and the images, symbols, and themes black filmmakers present, are important because they embody the coming of age of a new generation of artists dedicated to portraying the complexities and peculiarities of black life. Given the wretched history of often distorted, even racist, representations of black life viewed through the prism of white cultural producers, the rise of a new black cinema promises the articulation of artistic visions of black life beyond the troubled zone of white representational authority and mainstream interpretative dominance.
A sharp analytical understanding of the narrative strategies, themes, symbols, and images of contemporary black filmmakers is crucial in developing a sophisticated critical vocabulary that may be employed to interrogate the cultural and artistic practices of the new black cinema. The development of such a critical vocabulary encourages and enables the examination of the artistic perceptions and representations of black filmmakers; a wide-ranging exploration of the material conditions and social situations of their cultural production; an astute analysis of the goals, aims and objectives of black film; and a rigorous engagement with the cultural contradictions and political determinants of black film production.
A select group of new black films, in particular, investigates the politics of black masculinity and its relationship to the ghetto culture in which ideals of masculinity are nurtured and shaped. Concepts of masculinity are central to contemporary cultural debates within African American society, especially given the crisis of black manhood and the widespread attention it has received in the last few years, especially within rap music and black film. Malcolm X is the unifying cultural signifier for the powerful premise of an overhauled black masculinity within a broad variety of contemporary black cultural expressions, the vibrant hero of a black juvenile cultural imagination seeking to contest the revived racism and increasing social despair of American life.
The relationship between concepts of masculinity and social responsibility is strongly implied in the life, thought, and career of Malcolm X, whose influence on contemporary black filmmakers cannot be underestimated. In one reading, black filmmakers can be seen as cultural interpreters of the socially responsible dimensions of black masculinity as they are taken up in the organs of American popular culture, particularly within African American life. In another reading, the work of black filmmakers can be read symptomatically, as examples of the failure or success of artistic explorations of masculinity to probe the healthy and productive—or unhealthy and disenabling—consequences of black manhood within African American life, particularly as it takes shape in the black ghetto and often in relation to black female identity.
In this essay, I will probe the treatment of the ghetto and black manhood in several black films, examining the artistic visions of directors in relation to their responsibility in forming images of these twin subjects. In the process, I hope to illumine the ethics of representation and characterize the manner in which these films both enable and resist helpful understandings of black masculinity, especially in connection with their views of black female subjectivity.
Matty Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn is a relentlessly desolate rejection of the logic of liberal
democracy: that individuals can act to realize themselves and enhance their freedom through the organs of the community or the state. For the inhabitants of Brooklyn’s Red Hook Housing Project, the possibilities of selfrealization and freedom are infinitely reduced by the menacing ubiquity of the ghetto. The suppressed premise of Rich’s film—the steely argument for its existence at all—is a deferred rebuke to all pretensions that the ghetto is not a totalizing force, that it is possible to maintain the boundaries between geography and psychic health implied by the expression: Live in the ghetto, but don’t let the ghetto live in you. It is precisely in showing that the ghetto survives parasitically—that its limits are as small or as large as the bodies it inhabits and destroys—that Brooklyn achieves for its auteur a distinct voice among black filmmakers while establishing the film’s thematic continuity with black popular culture’s avid exploration of black, urban (male) identities.
After disappearing for a while from the intellectual gaze of the American academy and being obscured from mainstream cultural view by the virulent narcissism of nouveau riche yuppies and the fragile gains of an increased black middle class, the ghetto has made a comeback at the scene of its defeat. The reinvention of American popular culture by young African American cultural artists is fueled by paradox: Now that they have escaped the fiercely imposed artistic ghetto that once suffocated the greatest achievements of their predecessors, black artists have reinvented the urban ghetto through a nationalist aesthetic strategy whose interpretative seam joins racial naturalism and romantic imagination. That the most recent phase of black nationalism is cultural rather than political suggests the extent to which the absorption of radical dissent into mainstream politics has been successful and expresses the hunger of black juvenile culture for the intellectual sources of its hypnotic and feral remix of pride and anger.
Mostly anger, and a little pride, stirs in the fragmented lives of teenager Dennis Brown (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), his younger sister Carolyn (Barbara Sanon), and their parents Frankie (Ann D. Sanders) and Ray (George T. Odom). Each in his and her own way is the prisoner of an existential and ecological misery so great that its pervasive presence would suggest the impossibility of charting its affects and differentiating its impact across the spectra of gender and class within the community. In Rich’s dark ghetto, it appears that all such difference is smothered by the lethal hopelessness spread thickly over the lives of its inhabitants in equally devastating portions.
But the exception to this apparently equally shaded misery is the extraordinarily acute misery of black men, seen first in the cinematic chiaroscuro of Ray’s descent into a Dantean hell of racial agony so absurd and grotesque that its bleakness is a sadistic comfort, a last stop before absurdity turns to insanity. Ray’s gradual decline is suffered stoically by Frankie, a doleful throwback to an earlier and dispiriting racial era when the black-woman-as-suffering-servant role was forced on black women by black men forced to pay obeisance to white society who, when they came home, expected to claim the rewards and privileges of masculinity denied them in the white world. The only other model lifted to black women consisted of an equally punishing (and mythic) black matriarchy that both damned and praised black women for an alleged strength of character absent in their feckless male counterparts. Thus, the logic of black communities ran: As the black man’s fate goes, so goes the fate of the family.
Brooklyn’s implicit narrative line ties generously into the fabric of this ideological argument, drawing its dramatic punch and denouement from the furious catastrophes that sweep down on its black male characters, the defining center of the film’s raw meditation on the angst of emasculation. Ray’s frequent beatings of Frankie are rituals of self-immolation, her brutally bloodied countenance a tangential sign of his will to redefine the shape of his agony by redefining the shape of her face. Moreover, Ray’s suffering-as-emasculation is further sealed by his denial of desire for white women during a Lear-like verbal jousting with an imaginary white man, a deus ex machina produced by his search for an explanation of his suffering and a dramatic ploy by Rich that ascribes black suffering to the omnipotent white bogeyman. And Dennis’s out loud soliloquies in the presence of his girlfriend Shirley (Reana E. Drummond) about his quest for capital to reverse his family’s collapse belies a deeper need to redeem black masculinity by displaying his virility, his goal to be the man that successfully provides for his family allied disastrously with his gratuitous desires to “get paid.”
A different tack was pursued in John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood. Singleton’s neorealist representation of the black working-class ghetto neighborhood provided a fluid background to his literate script, which condensed and recast the debates on black manhood that have filled the black American independent press for the last decade. Abjuring the heavy-handed approach of negative racial didacticism, Singleton retraced instead the lineaments of the morality play in recognizable black cultural form, richly alluding to black particularity while keeping his film focused on The Message: Black men must raise black boys if they are to become healthy black men. Thus Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), Ricky (Morris Chestnut), and Doughboy (Ice Cube), the three black males whose lives form the fabric of Singleton’s narrative quilt, are the film’s interpretative center, while Reva (Angela Bassett), Brenda Baker (Tyra Ferrell), and Brandi (Nia Long), the mothers of Tre, Ricky, and Doughboy, respectively, and Tre’s girlfriend occupy its distant periphery. Singleton’s film—as is the case with most cultural responses to black male crisis—is an attempt to answer Marvin Gaye’s plea to save the babies, while focusing his lens specifically on the male baby that he and many others believe has been thrown out with the bath water to float up the river, like Doughboy and one out of four black men, into the waiting hands of the prison warden.
But Singleton’s moral premise, like so many claims of black male suffering, rests dangerously on the shoulders of a ruinous racial triage: black male salvation at the expense of black female suffering, black male autonomy at the cost of black female subordination, black male dignity at the cost of black female infirmity. Once and for all, Singleton’s film jarred into visibility the inadvertent yet unseemly alliance between black cultural nationalists and the cultured despisers of black women. His implicit swipe at black women ceded too much ideological territory and argued too little with white and black conservative social scientists who lament the demise of American culture because it is in the lethal embrace of welfare queens and promiscuous black women. The brilliant presence of Furious (the father of Tre, played by Larry Fishburne) as a redemptive and unswerving North Star, and Brenda’s uncertain orbit as a dim satellite, offer the telling contrast in Singleton’s cinematic world.
This premise would seem achingly anachronistic, the warmed up leftovers from black macho posturing painfully evident in ’60s black nationalist discourse, were it not for its countless updates in the narrative strains of black juvenile culture, reified to patriarchal perfection in rap lyrics that denounce the racist dominance of white men while glorifying without irony black male material dominance and sexual mastery of black female life. Of course, the quest for black manhood is everywhere apparent in black culture; note its evocation as well in the upper climes of bourgeois respectability as the implicit backdrop to Clarence Thomas’s claim of perfidy by Anita Hill, the innuendo of his charge only faintly arrested in the racial code of his undertone: another sister pulling a brother down. But it is with the reemergence of the ghetto in popular culture and its prominence in a revived black nationalist cultural politics, where, for better and worse, the images of black masculinity find a discursive home.
This is especially true of black film and rap music. The politics of cultural nationalism has reemerged precisely as the escalation of racist hostility has been redirected to poor black people. Given the crisis of black bourgeois political leadership, and a greater crisis of black liberal social imagination about the roots of black suffering, black nationalist politics reemerge as the logical means of remedy and resista
nce. Viewed against this backdrop, black film and rap music are the heightened imaginary of black popular culture, the self-announced apotheosis of a black populist aesthetic that occludes the seepage of authentic blackness into diluted cultural expression.
Rap music grew from its origins in New York’s inner city over a decade ago as a musical outlet to creative cultural energies, and to contest the invisibility of the ghetto in mainstream American society. Rap remythologized New York’s status as the spiritual center of black America, boldly asserting appropriation and splicing (not originality) as the artistic strategies by which the styles and sensibilities of black ghetto youth would gain popular influence. Rap developed as a relatively independent expression of black male artistic rebellion against the black bourgeois Weltanschauung, tapping instead into the cultural virtues and vices of the socalled underclass, romanticizing the ghetto as the fecund root of cultural identity and authenticity, the Rorschach of legitimate masculinity and racial unity.
The sensibilities afforded by the hip-hop aesthetic have found expression in many recent black films. New Jack City, for instance, is rife with the feral fusion of attitude and style as the replacement of substantive politics that prevails among young black males, especially those profiting from the underground political economy of crack. Similar to Boyz N the Hood, with Ice Cube (Doughboy) and Juice, with Tupac Shakur (Bishop), New Jack City appeals directly to the iconic surplus of hip-hop culture by drawing upon rapper Ice-T to convey the film’s thinly supplied and poorly argued moral message: Crime doesn’t pay.
Thus, Ice-T’s “new jack cop” is an inside joke, a hip-hop reconfiguration of the tales of terror Ice-T explodes on wax as a lethal pimp, dope dealer, and bitch hater. The adoption of the interchangeable persona as the prerogative of mood and message in the culture of hip-hop is taken to its extreme with Ice-T’s character: Even though he appears as a cop in New Jack City, his appearance on the sound track as a rapper detailing his exploits as a criminal blurs the moral distinctions between cops and robbers, criminalizes the redemptive intent of his film character (even more so retroactively in light of the recent controversy over his hit “Cop Killer” recorded with his speed metal band).
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 56