If one examines this predicament a step further, such a perspective becomes even more problematic in light of how neoliberalism functions, the history of late capitalism and its material, societal and cultural consequences. No epoch exists in a vacuum, and in the case of late-capitalism, the material and cultural structure bears deep traces of the exploits of modernity. The idealization of the rational human — in essence, and with exclusion to all that did not fit this category, the white man — led, in unison with vast technological achievements and advancements, to industrial societies which became increasingly democratized, but which were often built on the colonial endeavors which exploited the labor and resources of those regarded as inferior to the rational man. Now, this is admittedly a broad definition of modernity that foregoes many of its complexities, differences and virtues, but it helps to set the ground for the argument I am making about the USA that Bamboozled emerges out of. In this case, the epoch of modernity led to vast inequalities — both culturally and materially — along ethnic, gendered and class lines that bled into the era of postmodernity which followed it. Now, this description of modernity doesn’t necessarily mean that postmodernity was doomed to repeat the same predicament, but, as Harvey argues, postmodernity and the ideology of neoliberalism which came to prominence within it, was not a transcendence or correction of history, rather an evolution of it.[18] [open endnotes in new window] Thus, the unequal power relations of modernity entrenched themselves with the added sinister veneer of freedom, equal opportunity, democracy, and pluralism – leading to a Capitalist Realist predicament such as described by Mark Fisher, where the modes of oppression and inequality are subsumed and internalized as unquestionable common-sense virtues.[19]

This tension is perhaps best aestheticized in the film’s opening. Stevie Wonder’s song Misrepresented People plays. It details the history of African-Americans in the United States from the arrival of the slaves in 1492, through slavery and genocide of the 17th, 18th and 19th Century, to the seeming emancipation of the Civil War and equality of the Civil Rights Act, and ends at the beginning of the 21st century where the crack epidemic and mass incarceration continue to handicap its community. That song is contrasted with a monologue which introduces the protagonist, delivered in a rather bourgeois apartment and with an exaggerated white cadence. He gives a definition of satire and how the industry (and by extension him) is suffering from a lack of viewership. The contrasting of Pierre Delacroix – a name he changed from Peerless Dothan to gentrify his appearance – bemoaning his or his industry’s lack of success while the centuries of exploitation inflicted upon his race echoes in the background asks a viewer to reckon with the question: Just how are things better now? At first, it might appear things are radically better.

For all his troubles, Delacroix appears to be well-off financially and materially secure. But, as we are further introduced to him, it becomes clear that his relative success has come at a steep price. First, in his speech, in his cadence, in his mannerisms, in his very name, Delacroix has subjected himself to a form of gentrification – adopting a white subjectivity to make himself more agreeable to the neoliberal labor market. This adheres to the predicament Frantz Fanon details in Black Skin, White Masks, where he describes how colonized people adopt a white identity in order to inundate themself with the culture of the oppressors and thus prosper within their ideology.[20]  Second, his seeming success is apparently quite fragile – “The problem is, not enough of you have been watching out there, Television Land.” His show is subject to an ever-expanding market – “With the onslaught of internet, video and interactive games, 900 channels to choose from, our valued audience has dramatically eroded.” Now he cannot create the types of art he wishes to produce, but has to conform and alter his expression to the demands of the market.

This predicament embodies the critiques Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes in Can the Subaltern Speak?,[21]where she explains how subalterns – a postcolonial term used to describe people who are outside the hegemonic power structures, something which Delacroix as an African-American seems to fit – are forced to alter their speech in accordance with the demands of culture, ideology and the market, thus making their speech not really their own but that of the hegemony.

As the taste or wants of the market stem from this history of racial exploitation, the content which he has to produce to remain financially secure will have to adhere to these exploitative sensibilities, in essence propagating them. That aspect of the market is something Sandra Ponzanesi describes as a ”new Orientalism” in her work The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies. [22] As such, it becomes clear that Delacroix is neither free nor secure at all, but rather a vessel for the market to continue the exploitation of African-Americans.

What constitutes the disgusting?

It is in this vein the film’s weaponization of disgust emerges as particularly fruitful, challenging notions of taste, aesthetics, tolerability and their connection to history and ideology. The film asks if taste a universal, eternal, standard, or is it dependent on historically contingent discourses? In other words, is the beautiful, the grotesque, the pleasurable, the revolting, subject to history, or universal? I point to a larger discussion within the history of aesthetics, with many disagreements, complexities and positions between Aesthetic Relativism and Aesthetic Universalism. Bamboozled appears to engage with this discourse, particularly in relation to the neoliberalist free market, its aesthetic pluralist ideals, the history of modernity and colonialism that precipitated it, and the history of film which has mirrored this evolution.

If one looks at the form of the film, one of the most glaring formal decisions is to utilize the dichotomy between 35-millimeter film and Digital Videotape. At the time Bamboozled was released, shooting on film was still the industry standard – as it had been since its conception and throughout the 20th century – but as the technological innovations of the latter half of the century developed, digital photography emerged as a new and often cheaper option to produce films. Digital Photography, particularly at the time, was often critiqued for possessing inferior aesthetic qualities as opposed to film: low-dynamic range, lower resolution, limited depth-of-field, harsh highlights, muddy shadows, uncanny movement. But, its far cheaper production costs made it a viable and increasingly popular option despite its aesthetic setbacks. In the years since, digital photography has largely replaced film as the industry standard for shooting movies — albeit with Digital Cameras long since abandoning the DV format and achieving far greater visual quality — due to digital media’s inherent cost-efficiency and ease of use, with film mainly being used as a novelty by particularly esteemed filmmakers. This evolution has however proved contentious, with many arguing that the industry’s abandonment of film sacrifices aesthetics at the altar of profit.[23] Now I say this not to argue the superiority of one format or mode of photography over the other, but to explain that at the time of Bamboozled’s making, the discourse surrounding digital photography was that of an inferior cinematic aesthetic developed to enhance the efficiency and cost of filmmaking rather than as an aesthetic alternative.[24] This makes the choice in the film of shooting the Minstrel show on 35 mm film and the “real world” on DV photography particularly interesting, as it associates the most abrasively obscene with a known history of aesthetic legitimacy, and aestheticizes the satirized but seemingly mundane world of corporate politics and everyday life with cost-efficient “ugliness”. In a sense, it appears that the film eschews portraying it all as perceived ugliness. Rather, format choices also challenge what our notions of aesthetic pleasure are, what can and can’t be pleasurable, what we find tolerable, and how it relates to the history of film and the history of the United States.

Abrasive depictions in Mantan include snapping a watermelon like an NFL football, getting chased around a chicken coop, dancing in prisonwear and proud proselytizing of black people’s claimed buffoonery.

In the film’s mise en scene, the staging and execution of the minstrel show, along with its capture on 35 mm, in many ways support such a reading. On paper, in a neoliberal postcolonial United States, the exploitative bigotry performed in the minstrel show should appear blatantly revolting. And from a certain perspective, it does. The Minstrels are made-up in cartoonish blackface, wear outrageous costumes, tap-dance in prison outfits, spike a watermelon while joking about getting raped, hide in a chicken coup and act like chickens while the white master hunts them with a shotgun. All this is depicted in a bombastically abrasive fashion which, as noted, fosters a phenomenological reaction of shock and revolt. But, as the film depicts audience reactions to that show, this is not the case for all — the seemingly revolting portrayals of African-Americans are for much of the audience rather pleasurable and entertaining. Why?

The show is admittedly well produced, well-choreographed and well-lit – in contrast to its DV sections, In those, most of the footage cuts between handheld shots and static close-ups/medium shots, uses simple lighting set-ups with either low-contrast lighting or one key-light while the rest of the frame remains muddily indiscernible, and visually is marked by overall low-dynamic range and low-resolution imagery. The film unleashes its most elaborate blocking, expressive camera movements (Dollys, Cranes, etc.) and luscious dynamic lighting in these racist performances. But can these formalist tools make something so abrasively racist palatable? The answer appears to be a resounding “Yes,” but not for everyone. As much as the show becomes a massive success by letting U.S. viewers revel in the joy of unashamedly indulging in racism of the past, a number of people reject it. Delacroix’s Mother, Father and Assistant, Angry Protesters, and a militant group called the Mau-Maus — all notably African-American — express their disgust at the show’s gentrifying a form of historical oppression suffered by their people.

As it explores this chasm between tolerability and revolt, pleasure and obscenity, the film uses the aesthetic of disgust to expose taste, aesthetics, and pleasure as historically and ideologically dependent dimensions. If taste and aesthetics are universal, how then could something both be revolting and pleasurable at the same time, when — as we’ve described — disgust is the one aesthetic category which negates pleasure? It is because our tastes have been conditioned through history, a history in which one class of people were the oppressors and the others were the oppressed. Although most would probably agree that the history of oppression is abhorrent, the way our faculties responds to the depictions of this oppression will vary based on class, race, nationality and other socio-cultural factors.

“Art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences.”[25]

To many people, thinking about the contrast between high art and popular pleasures, such an idea might seem somewhat obvious. But this idea also highlights how the aesthetic sensibility of the neoliberal free market is contingent on the history of colonialism and inequality which precipitated it. Thus, if art evokes disgust, it may reveal aesthetic pluralism as a dangerous ideal which allows harmful content into a market where it risks propagating already pre-existing systematic inequalities.

The scene where Mantan’s hype man Honeycutt – adorned in an Abraham Lincoln costume and blackface – riles up an audience full of people wearing merchandise from the show while embellished in full-on minstrel costumes and blackface, in many ways speaks to this quandary. As person after person in the audience announces their unabashed pride in performing the most antiquated stereotypes of African-Americans they can think of – they rap, they affect an exaggerated cadence, they slur their words, they brag about the size of their manhood – the rest of the audience cheers them on, signifying that Mantan has allowed the public a space to embrace their own racist sensibilities without having to acknowledge them as such. The scene ends with Honeycutt – an African-American representative of the show, the industry, the neoliberal structure – wearing the outfit of the President who freed the slaves, vindicating his audience for this unashamed racism by screaming “Niggas is a beautiful thing!” The audience of minstrel men and women applaud, suggesting that the market’s allowance of such a product into the public sphere is in-and-of-itself a racist act and erases any perceived progress of history through liberation.

Audience members wearing merchandise of the show and celebrating wearing blackface.

A vessel of bigotry

In this sense, the use of 35 mm takes on a more sinister dimension, suggesting that the very history of film and its aesthetics share some complicity in portraying African-Americans as buffoons. The history of film, as hinted at earlier, emerged as an artform in the latter stages of modernity and has continued its history into the age of neoliberal late capitalism. As such, its aesthetics too has been intrinsically linked to the history of oppression that I previously discussed. The history of cinema does not in any way refute these linkages, with a plethora of examples from Griffith’s aforementioned The Birth of a Nation to the The Jazz Singer,[26] Minstrel Man,[27] Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,[28] and Song of the South,[29] facilitating aesthetic pleasure in racist depictions. Throughout most of this history, film negatives were the leading cinematic mode of production. By using this format to shoot these scenes, at the dawn of the 21st century, with digital photography readily available and used for the rest of the picture, the film appears to make a choice that suggests that cinema has always been complicit in whitewashing or beautifying bigoted atrocities. And the ending seems to make such a reading clear, with a montage of films exhibiting bigoted portrayals of African-Americans throughout its history.

Images from the near-ending montage showing bigoted depictions of African-Americans throughout the history of Hollywood cinema.

But the film doesn’t just stop there. If one looks at the Minstrel show scenes, they also decide to break the boundary between 35 mm and DV footage at certain choice points of the show, to display audience reactions and behind-the-scenes angles in DV format. At first, this might seem to be a decision made to show that this corporate, cost-efficient, neoliberal late-capitalist “ugly” world produces unscrupulous bigotry. And although that is a legitimate reading, one could go further and interpret this as a blurring or, in the sense, a deconstruction of the boundaries between film and Digital Photography, positing them both not as aesthetic opposites, but rather as the product of the same exploitative history – essentially one and the same – despite their perceived aesthetic opposition.

Cuts between 35 mm and DV footage in the middle of Mantan.

This implies a pessimist position on the future of cinema and its emerging mode of production. For many, the dawn of digital photography, despite its possible aesthetic inferiorities, presented – due to its cost-efficient, easily applicable nature, as opposed to film –  a potential democratization of the form where anyone could make their own film. Bamboozled seems to suggest that such optimism is deluded, and in many ways emulates concerns raised by scholars such as Lev Manovich and David Bordwell. They argue that even if one could produce a film independently, how would the film be made visible to a wide, global audience, without the distribution networks, algorithms, and platforms of the entertainment industry? “While anyone can now make a film using a DV camera and editing software, there is no easy way to get others to see it.”[30] One could of course attempt to do it oneself, but as Bordwell notes: “

Digital production may be getting cheaper, but the costs of marketing and distribution are still enormous.”[31]

Since distribution remains unfeasible without financial and structural support, the entertainment industry remains the key arbiter between audience and creators. Modes of production are rendered if not irrelevant, equally subservient, to the still centralized power of the hegemony. As such, cinema’s past, present and future all seem indicted to the same fate. The very final shots contrast a dying Pierre Delacroix in self-imposed blackface with the continuation of Mantan and the line, “Always keep em laughing.” His assistant had shot him and put on a videotape of the entertainment industry’s history of exploitation and misrepresentation of African Americans — dooming the predicament of a continually misrepresented people with no course for correction since the original sin, so-to-speak, remains ignored and uncorrected.

Final shots of the film.