Here’s a situation I’m sure we’ve all been in; you’re arguing with someone about something, convinced of your righteousness, rationally deconstructing their points. Then someone comes along, and here’s where you hit a snag; they agree with you. But not in a way you’d like. They have the same opinion, but they argue it in a way that simply makes you look idiotic by association. All of a sudden, the argument is lost and you’re left wishing death upon this person.

Even though they were on your side.

Spike Lee, I think, feels like this hypothetical person, at least sometimes. In Do the Right Thing, his character Mookie despises the racism displayed by Italian Pino, but doesn’t condone his friend Buggin Out causing a scene and trying to boycott the Italian restaurant for not having pictures of inspirational African Americans on the wall. And here, in Bamboozled, there is no explicit racism as such shown by a white man. A white man starts the conflict, and in an offensive way, but he does so with a supposed love of black culture and a sense of irony. For the rest of the film, the true racial fighting occurs between various African Americans.

On the one hand, you have Mos Def’s Julius Hopkins and The Mau Maus, a gang of fiercely protective wannabe rappers who inexplicably seem to have invited a white man into their group (who sees himself as a “brother”, and objects as if he’s personally hurt to anti-black racism). On the other, you have Pierre Delacroix, creative televisionary, and the two stars of his show; Manray, aka Mantan, and Womack, aka Sleep’n Eat. Together they run the ongoing hit minstrel show Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show. Is it ironic satire, or not? It’s difficult to say. Certainly the audience is made up of both white and black  people (and many other nationalities), so are they wrong to be enjoying this show? Are they laughing at themselves, or at the stereotypes?

Delacroix himself initially comes up with the idea simply because he wants to create the most racist thing possible, in an effort to dissuade his “nigger”-loving boss Dunwitty from forcing him to write a show that would feature his presumed black insight. But when the show becomes successful, and when Delacroix wins awards, he loses sight of his original hatred of his own monster and declares it to be a satire. In short, he’s a metaphor for a director who started out with a statement and then lost it amidst the powerful pull of the entertainment industry.

In effect, Delacroix becomes a metaphor for Spike Lee himself, since by the very nature of writing a film about this, Lee is showing these “satirical” shows. This has not endeared the film to some critics. For instance, Roger Ebert said that the message of Bamboozled reaches hypocrisy, if only because the image of blackface is so immediately offensive that it shrouds any issue-based discussion with its in-your-face and on-their-face assault. Is it, though? I’m not sure. Essentially this is similar to the argument that Michael Haneke hates violence in film but shoves it into your face, which arguably is hypocrisy, and yet… how else does one talk about it if you can’t actively show what you’re talking about? You’d be waltzing around political correctness all the time, and you’d barely be saying anything at all. The problem is that film is essentially a visual medium, so why not communicate its issues through the most obvious and yet painfully true example ever? The image of a blackface is intensely affecting, yet the word “nigger” seen on paper would mostly be less so – this is even in the film itself, as Delacroix quietly objects to his white boss using the word “nigger”, but it’s the blackface which causes an uproar.

Then you’ve got to ask the question, is the show within the film trying to reclaim blackface as the word “nigger” has effectively been? Or is the show itself being hypocritical? And if so, is the film that shows said show hypocritical as well by association, or commenting on the hypocrisy of the latter?

Round and round and round it goes. Is there a definite answer? Of course not. Certainly I don’t have the answer; I’m white. Like Do the Right Thing, Bamboozled isn’t a direct argument one way or the other, because it’s (deliberately) wrapped up in hypocrisies, inconsistencies, and offensive images to prove a point about offensive images. And if the montage at the end doesn’t affect you in some way, then you are a heartless human being.