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Bamboozled

© James C. Hess

It was Jack Warner, of Warner Bros., I believe, who was credited with saying: If you want to send a message, use Western Union.

For years director Spike Lee has been sending messages to movie-going audiences and his telegrams are getting rather expensive.

And not just monetarily.

Spike Lee's latest film ('joint' is his term for such efforts) is entitled "Bamboozled". It is a satirical attack on the way television (and not just network television) uses, misuses, and abuses African-American images to gain numbers. And, therefore, advertisers.

Now here is the thing: Satire carries, implicitly, a message. A message that, if not presented ideally, will become a source to certain danger.

Not to mention failure.

Which is what results for Lee.

Failure. Absolute failure.

"Bamboozled" stars Damon Wayans as Pierre Delacroix, a Harvard grad, who is a program executive for a cable television network. He works for a guy who fancies himself without prejudice: Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport). In fact, Dunwitty goes so far as to tell Pierre that he is blacker than Pierre.

Of course Pierre does little to deflect this charge. He has an accent that, well, isn't black. But he is black enough to take proper offense to how Dunwitty and the heads of the network regularly treat him.

Now. To change things at the network, to demonstrate just how black he is Pierre decides a plan: On the street in front of his office he often passes by two homeless sorts, street performers: Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson). Pierre puts them up in a blackface variety show set in a watermelon patch on a Alabama plantation.

Blackface was once funny. Now it isn't. And within the context Spike Lee puts it in it comes across not as satire (the desired intention) but as nothing less than hate speech.

The show, as one might expect, shocks, offends, and alienates more than a few viewers of the network. But, as network tv goes, becomes a hit. A huge hit. As a result the plot of "Bamboozled" turns and twists and sickens and perverts in ways that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Which was? Given Lee's almost obsessive urge to force feed a message to moviegoers it is not known, and if it was known, it is forgotten.

Spike Lee is not a hatemonger. Nor a bigot or racist. Everything he says and does serves a valid and noble purpose: To enlighten people (moviegoers) to serious issues at hand. Example: Why is it the black-themed shows on network television are almost always comedic in construct? Why not dramas? Is it that non-blacks are afraid that blacks can do something more than just be buffoons?