An Analysis of Bamboozled; Spike Lee's Final "African-American" Film

I love Spike Lee's Bamboozled; a film about a minstrel show that at the time, seemed to be a gross characterization of the direction that African-American culture was headed in but looking back on it was more prophetic than anything else. The film also represents a shift in Spike Lee's career as it is the last dramatic film he has been involved in that directly speaks to the Black community. His other films have been produced for mainstream audiences, and while he still produces documentaries that deal heavily with Black issues he hasn't put out films like those that characterized his signature look and feel in the eighties and nineties since then.

The film was shot entirely using cheap digital technology. The film came out in 2000, which represents a huge shift in the African-American hip-hop community. The eighties were the golden age of hip-hop and were all about partying, the nineties was about conscientiousness but everything was dumbed down during the last decade, which is the decade that the film speaks to. At the time we had to assume that Spike Lee's characterizations were about the nineties, but more of what Spike Lee addressed actually came forth in the last decade.

The fact that the film was shot digitally also represents a huge change in hip-hop from the audio sampling period, which was definitively "analog" in it's look and feel to the cheap synthesizer period which was somewhat low rent, and digital. The change in the sound of hip-hop also represented a change in the direction that hip-hop was moving in. Bamboozled is a disturbing film that shows bourgeois African-Americans acting ghetto, which at the time was interesting but has come to pass when you look at the careers of Kanye West and Beyonce. In the eighties and seventies, neither artist would have chosen the path of hip-hop, but instead would have branched out in other directions and would have been against hip-hop. Run DMC, a hip-hop group that was not from the other side of the tracks, made embracing street culture more acceptable for middle class Blacks.

There are a few key issues to look at when considering this film. The rejection of positive Black culture in place of the acceptance of ignorant Black culture. The character that wanted to be positive, but was actually from the 'hood, was told by the bourgeois Black man from Harvard that his ideas were too reflective of The Cosby Show. It was an eerily prediction of what BET would morph into. The use of disenfranchised African-Americans, who in this case performed outside of the network on the street, to carry out the bidding and make the show a reality. Militant Blacks that rally against the show, just like a lot of underground rap groups did during the last decade in their disgust of what hip-hop had turned into. The use of Black Face by Blacks, which we see now in the current decade. Everything that Bamboozled speaks about, came to pass in the decade directly following its release.

Now that the decade has come and gone, and everything addressed in the film has already occurred, which direction is the African-American culture headed in now? Spike Lee himself moved on to speaking about other things and issues that were more universal, though he still does so from the perspective of a Black man. It is an interesting film, one that you will watch once but might never watch again because of Spike Lee's preoccupation with disturbing images in that he uses repetition to drive home a point. It is not as entertaining or as slick as his other films. The film was shot for ten million dollars, but the gross revenue was only two million dollars. Spike Lee took a chance on cheap technologies and went against his own formula to create an artistic statement; as far as profitability the film was about as much of a failure as the underground hip-hop culture was during the last decade.