You ve been hoodwinked. You ve been had. You ve been took. You ve been led astray, run amuck. You ve been bamboozled.
So said Malcolm X, as quoted by Spike Lee in the production notes to Bamboozled, his perplexing new film. To Malcolm, the bamboozlers were white people in general, but in Lee s films they re the television executives, black and white, who bamboozle themselves in the mindless quest for ratings. The film is a satirical attack on the way TV uses and misuses African-American images, but many viewers will leave the theater thinking Lee has misused them himself.
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That s the danger with satire: To ridicule something, you have to show it, and if what you re attacking is a potent enough image, the image retains its negative power no matter what you want to say about it. Bamboozled shows black actors in boldly exaggerated blackface for a cable production named Mantan The New Millennium Minstrel Show. Can we see beyond the blackface to its purpose? I had