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"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." So warns Kurt Vonnegut in Mother Night, his novel about an American playwright posing as a Nazi radio propagandist. His pose as propagandist ensures Vonnegut's protagonist a more than comfortable life in wartime Berlin. And, while claiming absolute aversion to Nazi crimes and ideology, he embraces his assumed role with a certain enthusiasm-- leaving readers to contemplate the complex interplay of self-deception and lucid selfawareness that compose this single figure.
Such is also the case with several characters in Bamboozled. Spike Lee's most recent film asks us to ponder a similar interplay of self-deception and self-awareness, not only on the part of his characters, but also on the part of an entire American culture and its media establishment. In its creation of demeaning yet highly profitable stereotypes, under the guise of entertainment, the media have, historically, defined the 'place' of African Americans. And the public, regardless of individual politics or ethical beliefs, has voraciously consumed such representations.
Within the film, a television writer recreates the most inflammatory of black stereotypes in order to expose them, or so he tells himself. Yet his effort backfires when the American public (somewhat tentatively, at first) embraces and is entertained by these stereotypical buffoons. As the film audience watches the TV studio audience respond to the performance, a self-reflexive layering begs questions of complicity-our own as viewers of the television show-within-thefilm and, perhaps, complicity of the film, itself, in its creation of the television show.
On the level of character, Bamboozled is about the corrosive influence of material acquisition and cultural power in America, corrosive mainly because access remains firmly in the hands of the white corporate and media establishment. A Harvard-educated African-American television writer for the CNS Network, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) creates Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show in response to white CNS programming executive Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), who claims that shows about middle-class blacks like the Huxtables are "old stuff." Asserting his own proprietary...