[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a House feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

Ed Howard: Towards the end of Spike Lee's viciously funny media parody Bamboozled, there's a shootout between the police and a militant rap group in which all the black members of the group are quickly killed, leaving behind the one white guy (played by MC Serch of real-life hip-hop outfit 3rd Bass). As the cops put him in cuffs, this one survivor repeatedly cries out to them, "Why didn't you shoot me?" It's such a poignant moment because he seems to be pleading with them, begging them to treat him the way they'd treated the black members of the group, demanding that he not be spared because of the color of his skin. He's so upset, not only because his friends are all dead, but because he's realized an essential truth that Lee is getting at in this movie: no matter how well he'd fit in with his black peers, no matter how fully he'd been accepted by them and participated in their work, he was still separated from them, cut off from their experience of the world at a very basic level over which he could have no control.

Throughout the film, Lee has multiple characters try to take on the attributes of a race other than the one indicated by the color of their skin: black people trying to sound white, white people trying to sound black, and of course many people of various races donning blackface as a TV-inspired fad. For the most part, Lee has nothing but contempt for these characters; MC Serch's character is the one arguable exception, and in the end he can no more escape the color of his skin and what it means than anyone else in the film. I'm starting at the end, to some degree, because this sequence is so suggestive of the film's themes, and also because we should probably admit up front that we're two white guys about to discuss a film that has a very provocative and challenging view of race and racism. It's a film that's at least in part about how it's all but impossible for one race to understand the experience of another—especially whites thinking they understand what it means to be black.

Bamboozled follows the black TV executive Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) as he develops a blackface minstrel show that he thinks will expose the racist attitudes of the media but only winds up feeding into and inflaming that racism. I didn't entirely know what to make of this movie when it came out in 2000, but I've come to believe that it's one of Lee's best, right up there with Do the Right Thing. A bold satire that doesn't pull any punches, Bamboozled is a deeply discomfiting film that's purposefully exaggerated and outlandish and yet is packed with real-world references that ground its satire—even that shootout with the white survivor is based on real events. Lee is exploring the history of racist entertainment in the US, and as the closing montage makes clear, he's suggesting that the same forces that made Birth of a Nation and the vaudeville caricatures of comics like Mantan Moreland so popular are still very much present, in a more covert way, in the modern American entertainment industry. As a result, Bamboozled does what great satire always does: it takes a scenario that should seem ridiculous—it's hard to imagine an actual blackface variety show being aired on American TV today—and uses it to explore the submerged but very real racial attitudes that underpin all sorts of entertainment that only seems less racist than Delacroix's Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show. Continue Reading »