Member-only story
Are We Being Bamboozled By The Film and TV Industry?
A review of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000)
Spike Lee’s obscure but star-studded Bamboozled is a meta-satire about the way the entertainment industry masks exploitation and minstrelsy as social commentary, in which Lee skewers everyone from television networks to Buppies to faux-conscious Black nationalist Idpols — sparing no one, including himself.
The film follows Harvard-educated, only-black-man-in-the-room, Pierre Delacroix, played by Damon Wayans using an atrocious accent.
Delacroix, whose real name is Peerless Dothan, is an executive at an underdog television network (CNS) whose boss — played by Michael Rapaport as basically himself — makes it clear early on that he hired Pierre to produce the kind of “edgy,” “urban” content that will give CNS leg up over the big boy networks. After several of Pierre’s shows about the ordeals faced by middle-class black protagonists are rejected, Pierre and his assistant, Sloane Hopkins, played by Jada Pinkett Smith, hatch a Producers style plan to get him fired, thereby getting out of his contract without incurring a penalty.
He pitches The New Millennium Minstrel Show, a live variety hour featuring two street performers (played by Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson) who perform in blackface, a band called “The Alabama Porch monkeys” (played by the Roots), and an MC dressed up as Abe Lincoln in blackface, an apparent reference to Bing Crosby in Holiday Inn.
Despite insisting that the show is satirical, Pierre hopes the show will be so offensive to modern-day audiences that the network will have no choice but to can him. Naturally, Producers style shenanigans ensue, and in a plot line that prefigures Dave Chapelle’s real exit from his own show just five years later, the show gains traction and things spiral out of control as Pierre, Sloane, and the stars of the show are forced to confront what they’ve created.
Soup Season is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
