copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

Postcolonial disgust — a critical reading of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled

by Kevin Rønaas

Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) radically deploys aesthetic disgust to interrogate the commodification of Black identity in neoliberal, postcolonial culture. Lee weaponizes discomfort, grotesque imagery, and formal abrasion—particularly the jarring contrast between digital video and 35mm film—to unsettle audiences and expose the violence underlying racialized entertainment. Drawing on Kantian aesthetics, Sianne Ngai’s concept of “ugly feelings,” and postcolonial theory from Frantz Fanon and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, I  examine how disgust operates not merely as affect but as a critical strategy. The film’s formal excess and confrontational tone are deliberate disruptions of the sanitized, consumable images demanded by late capitalism. Engaging with Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher, I situate Bamboozled within a broader critique of neoliberal pluralism and repressive tolerance. Ultimately, my goal is to highlight how disgust, mobilized aesthetically, can resist co-option and compel confrontation with enduring systems of racial and cultural oppression.

A defense of disgust

Disgust is a term, both in aesthetics and cultural studies, which has proven difficult to conceptualize or formulate in such a way that the feeling would seem desirable. Perhaps that’s due to the phenomenological intensity of its repugnance, the categorical rejection of its revolt, the total inability to synthesize or consume it as pleasurable. As Kant outlines in Critique of Judgement, only one kind of ugliness cannot be aestheticized without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction, and that is disgust. Because, he says, in that which excites disgust, “the object is represented as it were obtruding itself for our enjoyment while we strive against it” and “the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from the nature of the object itself.” Thus it is impossible that it can be regarded as beautiful .[1] [open notes in new window] But is Kant right? And going further, looking past beauty, could one find virtue in disgust — could this impossibility of beauty potentially present a form of radical sublimity — and if so, how?

As Sianne Ngai discusses in Ugly Feelings, due to its unique position as intolerable, disgust has potential as an aesthetic in that it not only challenges our tastes and forces us to consider what we deem of aesthetic value, but it actively demands our rejection and asserts itself outside the spectrum of what we find tolerable.[2] Whereas most aesthetic categories, despite potentially ugly connotations, can be formulated in such a way that they appear aesthetically desirable or pleasurable, disgust is defined by the revolt, repugnance, and rejection it elicits in its subject and therefore appears to negate pleasure altogether.

This intolerability offers a unique conduit to ask questions surrounding what a society thinks is or isn’t tolerable — and by extension, to examine the values inherent to that society. In a late-capitalist world where anything and everything is subject to commodification, the intolerable presents a ripe aesthetic for exposing the boundaries of what a culture finds acceptable and why. Therefore, by embracing the disgusting and inhabiting the characteristics of the seemingly revolting, art has the potential to bring to light prescient discourses surrounding tolerance, biases, history and ideology in a singular and confrontational fashion.

Bamboozled

Few films engage with this aesthetic as abrasively and as thoroughly as Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.[3] For those unaware, Bamboozled is U.S. satirical black comedy-drama film from 2000 written and directed by Spike Lee about a modern televised minstrel show featuring African-Americans donning blackface makeup and the fallout from the show's success. The script traces the rise-and-fall of Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show — a show created by a dejected African-American TV-network employee by the name of Pierre Delacroix (real name Peerless Dothan) as a ploy to get fired by his belligerent and racist boss, who mocks his genuine ideas of portraying black people in a positive and intelligent light as “Cosby clones.” In this way, the film delves into problems surrounding the entertainment industry’s exploitation of African-Americans as subjects, its perpetuating  the racist stereotypes surrounding them, as well as its willingness to repurpose anything as a commodity no matter how offensive or harmful it might be to certain demographics within its populace. The theme of tolerance in particular, and the implications of it, in many ways seem to central to the film’s interest — asking questions regarding what’s tolerable, to whom is it tolerable, should it be tolerable and just why is it tolerable? The film goes at this through an abrasive and often cartoonishly unpleasant tone, forcing the audience to navigate whom to empathize with and what to derive pleasure from.

Disgust v. aesthetic pluralism

The most apparent example of this aversive characterization is the portrayal of Mantanand its creator, Pierre Delacroix. To give some context, a minstrel show was a widely celebrated and prevalent entertainment tradition, within both Hollywood and the broader U.S. public, where white actors would don blackface and put on exaggeratedly mocking performances meant to highlight and ridicule African-Americans’ supposed inferiority. As Cheryl Thompson notes in Blackface in Hollywood: Past and Present,

“Blackface minstrelsy has left an indelible mark on Hollywood, shaping racial archetypes and narratives that persist in film to this day.”[4]

The evocation of this bigoted history in the film, thus brings with it a host of associated feelings — such as anger, resentment, even disgust — which become part of the aesthetic experience.

We see this in Mantan’s first performance. Up until that point, the film has been presented as a DV-shot procedural of Delacroix’s struggles and frustrations at the network. Delacroix, in his aggressively exaggerated presentation, cadence and mannerisms, as well as his bigoted corporate milieu, may come across as uncomfortable and grating to behold, but his depiction never really passes the threshold into full on abhorrence. But when Mantan comes on, the film breaks into a 35mm film stage-show with the most abrasive racial depictions seen in film since Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's .[5] As Mantan and his buddy Sleep'n’Eat call themselves “coons”, salivate over the “aroma of high cotton”, long for a time when “niggas knew they place”, imitate crack babies, bemoan welfare leachers and announce that they’re “sick and tired of niggers”, a viewer struggles not to experience a phenomenological sensation of shock, horror and revolt which drags you out of the diegesis of the narrative. But this disgust is neither unwarranted, nor unintentional. The film in many ways weaponizes it, evokes it actively, to jolt viewers into awareness of the historical exploitation and capitalization of African-Americans by the entertainment industry and its legacy within the current late-capitalist neoliberal market.

I find this narrative strategy particularly interesting when seen in light of what Ngai calls aesthetic pluralism. Aesthetic pluralism describes how, particularly in an age such as late-capitalism, aesthetic expressions are received as equally valuable and worthy of inclusion – foregoing any “critical discourses of exclusion”.[6] This “pluralism”, at first glance, might appear as a somewhat benign attitude, in that it allows for a multiplicity of expressions and approaches them with an open mind. But such open-minded plurality also risks actively negating critical discussions about what should and shouldn’t be deemed aesthetically worthy – imposing a hegemony of inclusion where expressions that might be actively harmful or exploitative to certain demographics are accepted as legitimate regardless of the consequences they have on society as a whole.

Mantan, and the relation its creator has to it, embodies this predicament. At first, Delacroix pitches the show as a hidden ploy to get fired from his contract, fed up that his racist and profit-driven boss rejects his genuine ideas about trying to create a show that speaks to the African-American middle-class experience in the United States. But after the show becomes a huge success, Delacroix adopts the attitude that the show is a poignant satire, and that his vision of creating a show so unabashedly racist and bigoted that he’d get fired was never true to begin with. This narrative arc exemplifies the potential pitfalls of aesthetic pluralism. If everything is aesthetically worthy, what are the limits of what we find tolerable? Is Triumph of The Will [7] a subversive portrait of Nazi Germany’s self-aggrandizement? Is The Birth of a Nation [8]  an ironic depiction of the United States’ fragile foundations? Most would probably answer No, but operating from a pluralist perspective, such discussions are legitimate. Furthermore, does it matter? If everything can be approached as equally aesthetically worthy of expression – in so far as the expression is pleasurable or entertaining – what is to stop whatever horrifying, racist or vilifying expressions that have been or have yet to come? To be approached, recontextualized, consumed, even lauded on the same level as all other aesthetic expressions?

Even more troublesome, and perhaps most important here, discussions arguing against such a position risk becoming totally negated. This is something Herbert Marcuse termed “repressive tolerance”,[9] where he argues that pluralism – in his theory mainly political, but Ngai and this article use the term to discuss culture as well – oxymoronically risks becoming oppressive in its acceptance of any-and-all perspectives and negation of discussions of exclusion.[10] If all perspectives are to be tolerated and allowed into the public sphere, as part of cultural consciousness, what is there to stop these perspectives from becoming viewed as equally worthy or commensurable? One could of course critique it, but in doing so one easily risks becoming or appearing intolerable. As Ellen Rooney points out, this problematic has plagued Marxism since the mid 20th century, where critique of pluralism is viewed as authoritarian or anti-democratic, thus making it irrelevant or incompatible with modern paradigms of tolerance. [11]As such, critique becomes negated while bad faith or insidious expressions are given room to breathe.

In Bamboozled, this dynamic is exemplified in a scene where Delacroix and his assistant have a meeting with his boss and a PR Consultant to discuss how they should manage potential negative reactions to the show. Here, the PR Consultant lays out what she names the “Mantan Manifesto”, indicating some tenets on how the show will guard itself against hostile response.

• First, the “manifesto” suggests that the show should employ black staff as a veneer to protect itself against accusations of racism, attempting to render accusations of bigotry as ethnically irrelevant and oxymoronically racist in-and-of themself.
• Second, it states, “Let the audience decide!”  – ultimately foregoing any responsibility for what is entered into the public sphere, rather letting the audience, or the market, decide what is or isn’t tolerable.
• Third, it attacks its detractors directly – “Who put these critics in charge anyway? (...) These so-called cultural police?” – framing any and all critique as a form of censorship attempting to limit or control the cultural diaspora.
• Fourth, it again implies that its critics are bigoted and intolerable – “Who determines what is black?” – arguing that the characters of the minstrel show are worthy of representation along the same lines as anyone else, thus arguing for commensurability.
• Five – “Mantan is a satire.” – which, as discussed earlier, functions as a get-out-of-jail-free-card for exaggerated portrayals of ugly stereotypes.
• Something which tenet Six – “If they can’t take a joke, you know what? Eff’em!” – confirms, but also makes actively oppressive – in that all critique is rendered as an intolerable lack of humor or understanding of pleasure which seeks to control what the audience can or cannot enjoy.

Thus, the show is free to be as vile or racist as it wants without ever having to answer for it.

Pluralism and ideology

The irony here is that none of these tenets merge from the actual creators themselves, but are rather corporately mandated from their white bosses. This may point to an ideological and historical dimension inherent to aesthetic pluralism. As Ngai, Rooney and Hal Foster argues, aesthetic pluralism is almost intrinsically connected to the values of the era of late capitalism, the ideology of neoliberalism and the culture of postmodernism.

“Pluralism, more than any political theory currently in circulation, dominates our way of understanding democracy to such an extent that ‘democracy’ and ‘political pluralism’ tend to be perceived as identical (...) commentators from disciplines across the humanities have increasingly used ‘pluralism’ and ‘postmodernity’ as synonyms for each other.”[12]

Postmodernity as an epoch is fruitless to discuss without an understanding of its leading mode of cultural expression – postmodernism – and its dominant ideology – neoliberal late-capitalism. As Jameson outlines, postmodernism can be understood as the cultural expression or logic of late-capitalism that emerged after the end of World War 2, and which permeates itself throughout the present-day. It crystallized through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, where a series of crises such as “the oil crisis”, “the end of the international gold standard”, “the end of the great wave of 'wars of national liberation' and the beginning of the end of traditional communism” – was countered with the rise of transnational conglomerates in tandem with the widespread dominance of mass-media (through print, internet, television, film) – which  led to a global post-industrial economy where everything, not just material resources and products, but also immaterial dimensions such as culture itself, became transformed into commodified aesthetics and consumable products.[12]

And this cultural logic, where all and anything is subject to commodification, has, as David Harvey explains, direct ties to the ideology of neoliberalism where the goal is to establish and maintain a political-economic system that seeks to maximize the role of markets while minimizing state intervention.[13][14][15] From such a perspective, where the primacy of the market and consumption is the ultimate ideal, pluralism becomes the leading virtue or ethos of the age, ensuring that any-and-all commodities are received with the maximal potential for success. And as such, from a structural or industrial perspective, the true value of an aesthetic expression is measured in how it performs in the market. Which ironically, as the novel Erasure [16] and its film adaptation American Fiction [17] highlight, mostly leads to a sort of anti-pluralist hegemony where only profitable or successful representations of identities are celebrated and produced, no matter how limiting or reductive they might be.

In Bamboozled, this reductionism is perhaps made most clear in the conversation Delacroix has with his father, and the voiceover that follows, after watching his father perform a rather successful, but commercially modest stand-up routine. In the green room, they discuss his father’s career with Delacroix critiquing his father’s lack of financial success and arguing that it must be a sign of his inadequacy as a performer:

Delacroix: “How did you end up here?”
Father: “I got too much pride. Too much…uh…dignity…integrity. I can’t do that Hollywood stuff, man. I can’t say that stuff they want me to say.”
Delacroix: “There’s gotta be something more than that. I mean – reality. I mean, maybe you weren’t funny enough.”
Father: You must be crazy man. Didn’t you hear that audience tonight? They were with me.”

Although his father seems to be satisfied with his craft, Delacroix critiques him afterwards, calling him a “broken man” and “a strong man with conviction, integrity, principles – and look where it had gotten him.” Delacroix announces that he has chosen a superior artistic path:

“I had to ask myself, did I want to end up where he was? Hell, emphatically, no!”

Artistic endeavor is thus reduced to market activity — success or failure determined by its life in the market.

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] 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.

 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 (Fig 9). 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.

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.

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 (Fig 13). 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.

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.

Dialectics without synthesis

The film doesn’t only go about this problematic with an abhorred sledgehammer, but it does seem to have some understanding of the dialectical relation that repugnance has with fascination. As Ngai explains, that which disgusts us seems to foster a morbid fascination, due to our inability to rationalize it or incorporate it within a system of pleasure or desire. [32] For lack of a better example, a child might be fascinated with its own feces, wishing to taste it, know its properties, process it through its bowels, although its faculties wholeheartedly reject and protest such a notion. Why? Because that object does not allow itself to be known or conquered, it exists outside our means of knowledge and dominion. As Adorno and Horkheimer discuss, much of the enlightenment rationalist project which has driven the progress of history until the dawn of postmodernity has been based on idealization of knowledge and the rational human.[33] However, this idealization also led to a colonialist ethos, where all aspects of reality had to be analyzed and studied so they could be owned and dominated.

“The reduction of the world to what can be calculated is a form of domination.”[34]

Disgust rejects this domination. It is not a knowable property that can be analyzed and quantified in a spreadsheet, it is a phenomenological affect. As such, subjects born into a world shaped by this value system naturally find the confrontation with the edges of their dominion frustrating – especially when it is the history of their ancestors and their race. But if one can abstract the revolting, if one can aestheticize it, find a means of consuming it in another form without regurgitating it, the disgust may be conquered and thus one can take ownership of it, master it.
 
This may explain the film’s many depictions of African-Americans loving and appreciating Mantan. At first glance, this depiction may seem incomprehensible, and thematically counterintuitive. But, if one examines this with an eye to the dialectic, this depiction takes on an added layer, perhaps portraying a latent desire within the African-American community to conquer this history and overcome it within the current world order.

“The colonized intellectual wants to use history to prove that his people had a culture (...) But this passion is still dominated by colonial time, colonial categories.”[35]

In this sense, Delacroix’s arc of creating the show as a means to get fired, only to later embrace it and defend it as a satire, takes on a more tragic character. Instead of merely being an opportunistic ploy to seize on the success of Mantan, it could be read as an attempt to take ownership of his own monstrosity without succumbing to the revolt he has for it and the history it evokes.
 
The scene where he defends Mantan on a radio show highlights his predicament. When confronted with adverse reactions to the show, he counters them with an attack on the African-American community’s self-victimization – ”slave mentality”, “this is the new millennium”, “slavery has been over” – framing their revolt and disgust as a lack or inability to overcome this history. But his project ends up becoming a negation of the very real structural, cultural and material consequences of history, and instead functions as what postcolonial theory terms as internalized oppression, where the values of the oppressor are subsumed by the oppressed and lead to participation in continued oppression.

Delacroix is a victim of this kind of internalized oppression, as mentioned, with his adoption of a white cadence, the gentrification of his name, and his very mannerisms echoing Fanon’s thoughts in Black Skin, White Masks.[36] And his way of staunchly defending his adoption of the White mask, and attacking those who remember the history of violence and hierarchical inequalities, also speak to Fanon’s description of the colonized intellectual in The Wretched of the Earth and that figure’s maintenance of the colonial structure.[37] Furthermore, Delacroix’s way of making his own product palatable to himself directly emulates the values, talking points and language of critics of African-American culture – “they pull each other down”, “stop thinking that way”, “adapt to the times” – thus also embodying the linguistic imperialism and mental colonization. Such a process is described by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind[38] where she outlines how the language and culture of the oppressor is internalized and eventually leads to self-negation.

The use of 35 mm by Pierre Delacroix in the film, but also from a metatextual perspective by Spike Lee and his crew themselves, could be read as an extension of this – showing how film is the aesthetic language of the oppressive cultural system. Using it to tell such stories risks maintaining the very cultural relations one tries to defeat. The stylistic flourishes and positive reception of Mantan prove this dilemma. At first, it might seem a clever artistic means of ironizing bigotry, but in doing so it risks appealing to an aesthetic sensibility based on inequality and become unironically appropriated as pleasurable – thus upholding the cultural paradigm it claims to satirize. But, as mentioned, Digital Photography would not have offered a better alternative to this dynamic, as it too proves to be a language or aesthetic subject to the same systemic power relations.

In this sense, the dialectical relations which the film explores, blackness/whiteness, film/digital, modernity/postmodernity, all seem to reach a form of neo-colonial synthesis, rather than any equal progress. As such, many of Fanon's critiques of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic when it comes to race or colonization bear fruit.

“The Negro did not become a master. When there are no more slaves, there are no masters. The Negro is a slave who was allowed to assume a master’s attitude.”[39]

One cannot free oneself or liberate oneself within the ideology or ontology or epistemology of the oppressor, because this culture is precipitated on a fundamental belief that the oppressed are sub-human and therefore not capable of offering sufficient recognition to the oppressor. In a postcolonial world order, this mode of thinking makes it fair for the oppressed to maintain a system littered with asymmetrical distribution of means, opportunities and power. It needs what Sylvia Wynter calls an ontological revolution, where the very idea of being and having value is redefined,[40] so that any dialectical notion of progress would have to be based on a renewed and equal conception of the human.

Virtues of disgust

In this way disgust maintains its power and may prove a radical way of challenging ideological and historical aesthetic paradigms without fully succumbing to them. Because the one dialectic which isn’t able to resolve itself as some neocolonial synthesis within or outside the film is that of disgust/fascination.  In the end, Delacroix's attempt to conquer, aestheticize and commodify his disgust proves unsuccessful, because the disgusting, despite its many abstractions, remains intolerable. Much like a child consuming its own feces, no matter how much artificial flavoring you put on it, the body rejects it and becomes sick from within. As Mantan continues its success, Delacroix’s psyche starts to spiral with hallucinations of animate piggy-banks and a megalomaniacal need to dominate any-and-all of his African-American staff. It becomes clear that he is not the breaker of slave-mentality that brings African-American culture into the new millennium as he purports, but rather he becomes what he revolts against: the exploiter, the colonizer, the abhorrent. And he pays the price for it, with his life but most importantly with his being. Thus, the disgusting does not allow itself to be consumed, processed and made pleasurable, but rather it tears the faculties apart from the inside, rejecting the colonial dialectic.

But why? How? As Ngai writes, “there is a sense in which the disgusting is ‘the true Kantian sublime’—more sublime than the sublime itself”,[41]  because it is as Derrida explains “the absolute ‘other’ of the system of taste”. [42]It can’t be consumed by all our senses. It goes beyond our imagination’s capacity to represent it as a whole simply because it is too intolerable to ponder. It demands exclusion, and it demands it instantly. In an epoch where the cultural logic, is built on pluralism and the unrestricted freedom of the market, disgust’s demand for instant exclusion becomes a negation of this ontology.

It presents the one aesthetic that won’t allow itself to be subsumed, appropriated, colonized, commodified, as pleasurable, desirable or profitable. In this sense, it might present the one artistic means left for ontological and epistemological disruption. If the Capitalist Realist ontology Mark Fisher[43] details is true – where it is near-impossible to conceive of a world outside of the very historically contingent power structures of neoliberal late-capitalism – disgust, by demanding exclusion, rejection, still has the power to jolt one into awareness of their role in a subject/object, self/other, consumer/product relation and the historical nature of this relation. As one tries to rationalize the feelings of displeasure of witnessing the disgusting, one can’t help but become aware of the historic and cultural totality which breeds this revolt – ultimately eliciting a kind of postcolonial sublime.

“The feeling of the sublime is thus a pleasure that arises only indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces of the body and a consequent stronger outflow thereof, and it is thus a movement of the mind which, in the judgment of the reason, displays its superiority over nature by virtue of a certain ability to think a totality or absolute magnitude.”[44]

However, unlike Kant’s sublime, the disgusting never manages to become fully pleasurable, because – as Kant himself says – the object can’t be ”distinguished from the nature of the object itself in our sensation.”[45] Thus, our rationalization of the repugnant does not allow itself to reach a stage where it becomes pleasurable or desirable and further appropriated or commodified. It remains repugnant because what it represents is too repugnant for aesthetic representation.

In this way, disgust makes impossible the lack of historicity and erasure of history that Jameson and Fisher critique late-capitalist postmodernism for –

“The past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts”[46].

 It also deals with what postcolonial thinkers, such as Fanon, critique its predecessor in modernity and imperialism for in regard to the colonized subject –

“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”[47]

By forcing us to rationalize the totality of our disgust, we are forced to reckon with the ideological, material, cultural and historical context which renders the disgusting, well, disgusting. In a sense, history, ideology, culture, become the very objects of aestheticization – and as such, through their portrayal as repugnant, they become un-negatable. Disgust thus emerges as perhaps the most politically direct and potent of aesthetics, always challenging notions of taste and revealing their relation to history, culture and ideology.

“In its intense and unambivalent negativity, disgust thus seems to represent an outer limit or threshold of what I have called ugly feelings, preparing us for more instrumental or politically efficacious emotions.”[48]

And Bamboozled wields disgust to reveal neoliberal late-capitalist project and its culture of postmodernism as a continuation of colonial modernity’s exploitative power relations and inequalities – with cinema and the entertainment industry as its bloodied tool, perpetuating these dehumanizing hierarchies.

Notes