STEPHANE DUNN
‘Death is too easy for you, Bitch.’ (Foxy Brown, 1974)
‘I’m looking for a nigger called John Shaft.’ / ‘You found him, wop.’ (Shaft, 1971)
In the performance of racial identities on the big screen, dialogue operates as a preeminent signifier. Specific periods in American cinema in particular reveal the ways that a style of dialogue acts as a critical device both thematically and formally, revealing the politics of race, gender and other social categories. Dialogue, furthermore, indicates the politics off-screen. Specifically, racial identities or, rather, notions of racial identities and the visualisation of skin colour through bodies shape dialogue so that, for example, non-white characters register as ‘black’ or ‘ethnic’. Traditionally, this has meant that black characters appear in ways that not only conform to the dominant cultural inscriptions of those identities but in such a way that the representation of the racialised social and political status quo remains intact.
Representational power, particularly with regard to modern media forms and popular culture, comes out of the ability to direct, own and write the words through which group identities get constructed. Historically, black folk have not been able to direct – control, write and distribute – the black cultural voices on-screen or the performance of black identities through speech or cinematic language. As we can observe in the history of minstrelsy, America’s first form of popular entertainment, dialogue or rather the verbal performance of racialised identities has been central to popular cultural representation. After the silent film era when ‘talkies’ and the scripted spoken word redefined the representation of different social identities on-screen, the emerging racialised speech revealed how dialogue became critical to what Linda Williams refers to as the performance of racial melodramas, which ‘serves as way to conceptualize various types of cinema’ and dramatise racialised and gendered ‘pathos and action’ or more specifically ‘the sufferings of innocent victims and the exploits of brave heroes or monstrous criminals’ (2002: 19).
Indeed, dialogue has often revealed as well as hidden the ideologies of racial identities and tensions it has both intended to blatantly exploit and ignore. What’s interesting to explore are the radical and conservative ways dialogue ‘speaks’ or reveals or attempts to project racial identities throughout the evolution of African American representation in very distinct political and cultural eras. One such moment is the 1970s black action genre blaxploitation, which emerged on the tail of the Black Power-inspired new black hero action film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). Films like Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972), Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) have become immortalised as iconic blaxploitation fantasies.
Historically, black cultural voices in film have been invisible or sidelined, and black actors’ performances of black identity have been marginalised; in the classical Hollywood era, racialised speech was a mix of the culturally sanctioned racist codes of the day and often purposefully aimed less at offering more authentic representations of black identity and more at confronting the ‘race problem’ and probing white psychological angst (see Willis 1997: 1–4).
1However, in the 1970s black action film, racialised speech from black characters highlighted black urban culture and black vernacular voices. These films, therefore, provide a distinctly rich text for studying the ways that a genre and cinematic moment becomes defined by a distinct style of dialogue that speaks and performs contemporary and traditional racial politics and identities. Throughout blaxploitation, the black urban vernacular voice emerges through black characters that get to speak up and talk back to ‘the Man’ while being identifiably ‘black’ (situated in black cultural and geographical settings like Harlem, for example) and speaking black vernacular language. While the performance of black urban identities arguably took on some eerily modern-day blackface-like undertones as Hollywood quickly latched on to the financial benefits of the genre, it still marked the first time that dialogue in the mouths of black characters offered a bolder confrontation and condemnation of the racial hierarchy, and there emerged representations of black cultural identities that had not largely been seen in film, such as the ‘baad nigger’ and unapologetic portraits of both the black poor, working class and iconic ghetto identities from the pimp to the prostitute.
Though overtly sexed, raced and gendered language is a staple of so-labelled 1970s B-grade movies (cheap budgets, over-the-top action and gleeful exploitation of drugs, sex, race, and so on), dialogue in the black action film explosion of the early 1970s particularly suggested the radical political fervour permeating the cultural backdrop; hence it manifested the influence of the cool Black Power male persona embodied in the boldly unapologetic public rhetoric of such iconic figures as Malcolm X and black-bereted Black Panthers, and in entertainment and sports by the likes of Muhammad Ali and football great-turned-Hollywood actor Jim Brown. The image of Black Nationalist masculine identity, the fearless, heterosexually potent athlete, and such real and mythic black street or urban cultural social identities as the cool pimp or ‘the mack’, street savvy hustler and hot mama, all get distilled in the performances of black identities throughout blaxploitation cinema. Dialogue, like the body, functions as a signifier to authenticate (radically or conservatively) the black cultural thematic and aesthetics of the films and the crucial marketing of them as black cinema to black audiences.
The gleeful exhibition of black/white tensions in the black hero vs. white enemy plots relies quite heavily on dialogue, notably the profanity, slang, historically taboo words and signature racialised and gendered epitaphs and disses coming out of the historical social and political period – ‘whitey’, for instance. While the use of the word ‘nigger’ or its late-twentieth century variation ‘nigga’ or ‘niggaz’ has been the source of much public outcry and debate in recent times, ‘nigger’ was a familiar rhetorical strategy for political racial signification in black poetry, political speech, song and film in the 1970s. The word was alternately an internal rallying call or diss to those who were, in the words of the Last Poets, ‘too scared of revolution’ and part of popular black ghetto speak in much the same way as it in part functions for the current Post Civil-Rights era hip-hop generation. This is not to dismiss the problematic historic and contemporary racial implications of the word; nevertheless, loaded words such as ‘nigger’, ‘bitch’ and ‘cracker’ are dialogue staples in the bevy of narratives of black folk rising up and revolting against ‘the Man’ (see Dunn 2008: 115).
The genre grew to manifest white Hollywood’s exploitation of black audiences’ desire for representations of black people who rebelled, won, looked, talked and acted ‘black’ and lived in familiar black locales, all of which Hollywood had typically neglected; the black political import – underlining serious critique of white patriarchal supremacy – became overshadowed by the sex and drugs, underworld battles, plot sensationalism and the caricatured dialogue which was being largely written, directed and produced by white filmmakers and studios (see Dunn 2008: 22). In Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the film that influenced the development of the blaxploitation film explosion because Hollywood took note of its financial success, dialogue is used in ways prevalent in its blaxploitation predecessors (see Guerrero 1993: 94–5). Here dialogue operates both as critically significant symbolic signifier and narrative strategy to construct Sweetback’s (Melvin Van Peebles) sojourn as a metaphor for the black community’s and specifically the black man’s historical and contemporary disempowerment and oppression in the white supremacist social, economic and political structure of American society.
A BAAD NIGGER RISES: SILENCE AND COMMUNAL DIALOGUE IN SWEETBACK
Billed as the film ‘rated X by an all-white jury’
2 and dedicated to the black community and those tired of ‘the Man’,
Sweetback provoked Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton to deem it the ‘first revolutionary’ film (see Van Peebles 1972; Newton 1972). The film is about a sex show performer, Sweetback, who finds himself on the run for his life and freedom after a temporary moment of rage in which he stops some cops from beating up a young militant named MooMoo. Director Van Peebles famously described the motivation behind the movie’s underlining socio-political critique: ‘Since what I want is the Man’s foot out of our collective asses, why not make the film about a brother
getting the Man’s foot out of his ass’ (1972: 13). Notwithstanding the varied historic critiques and debates over the film’s sexual politics, the political import, formal quality and representational strategies,
Sweetback’s revolt-against-the-Man plot sold and caught an ailing Hollywood’s attention, thus leading to the cycle of films that became tagged the ‘blaxploitation’ genre. While the film established a plot template (‘baad nigger’ against ‘whitey’), the aesthetic qualities of the film are rather distinctive. The treatment of language and dialogue is especially so and results in a unique, if at turns problematic, representation of black cultural identity.
Interestingly, the dialogue is styled in such a way that contradicts the hitherto familiar staples or conventions of narrative dialogue in popular Hollywood action film, especially the prominence of dialogue along with the action sequences. In Sweetback, dialogue is alternately constructed in three different ways. First, there is minimal dialogue from the central character, Sweetback. Secondly, dialogue is structured through several monologue-like sequences performed by various individual characters that represent different black urban ghetto identities. Thirdly, dialogue is forged in the film’s voice-over call-and-response sequences featuring a chorus of voices, the black community, who speak to and about Sweetback, affirming Van Peebles’ declaration that the community – or rather, the voice of the black community – is itself a central character in the film. As Gladstone Yearwood describes, the film is both ‘all of us and none of us’ and offers ‘performers but no stars’ (2000: 190).
Sweetback’s lack of dialogue throughout the film thus seems to underscore Van Peebles’ use of the character as symbolic of the collective plight of black people and poor black men in particular. Thus, on one level, as an ‘everyman’ or more aptly ‘every black man’ prototype in this regard, Sweetback’s silence serves to establish Van Peebles’ focus on performing the dynamics of racial politics confronting black collective identity. On another level, Sweetback’s silence is critical to Van Peebles’ confrontation of another very specific trope of black male identity, the hypersexual primitive.
These two performances and subsequently the critique of the racial politics emerge in the representation of Sweetback’s seeming manipulability in the first part of the film. As a young, initially nameless boy in a whorehouse, he is introduced to both sex and his sexualised identity signified by the name he is given, Sweetback. An older woman directs the silent boy to move until she calls out, telling him he has a sweet ‘Sweetback’. A subtle brief smile plays on the boy’s face at the woman’s declaration, then he morphs into the grown Sweetback against the backdrop of a jarring secularised rendition of the black spiritual, ‘Wade in the Water’. In the next key sex scene, the adult Sweetback is a sex show performer at Beetle’s (Simon Chuckster) makeshift theatre. Here, the film directly confronts both performances. Sweetback’s sex show actually performs the mythology of hypersexual black masculinity; the camera closes in on his ‘sweetback’ (penis) as he has intercourse with a black woman who displays some verbal pleasure, saying that ‘Sweetback is the greatest’ amid a circle of onlookers and a ‘fairy-princess’-clad black male emcee who narrates the show. However, it is the dialogue off to the side, outside this allotted space where Sweetback seemingly has at least the appearance of one limited type of potency – the sexual – that most dramatically reveals the disempowerment that defines black male life.
Beetle is cornered by two white cops who watch the show from afar, both as voyeurs comfortable with the eroticisation of black sexuality on display and as police making sure that the woman from the audience who will get to ‘fuck’ Sweetback will not be white. The emcee, aware of the policing eye of white patriarchal authority, reminds the eager white woman that only a black female spectator can ‘try’ Sweetback. Though limited, the dialogue throughout is strategically pointed as the camera cuts from the sex show to the conversation between Beetle and the cops. That dialogue underscores the politics of black men’s status in the white supremacist patriarchal status quo:
COP: We just want to borrow one of your boys for a couple of hours to make us look good.
BEETLE: Why me, I’m short a man already.
COP: We know you’d be willing to lend us a hand.
BEETLE: Why you people all of a sudden so interested in black folks – dead or alive?
The hyper-visibility of black male sexuality and the invisibility of black identity are highlighted by the cops’ taken-for-granted demand and subsequent possession of ‘any’ black body to stand in as a representative for ‘every’ black man. Thus, Van Peebles suggests the racist stereotypes that define mainstream notions of black male identity from black criminality to hyper-sexuality. Without protest, a silent and expressionless Sweetback is carted off by the two cops.
As Sweetback physically rebels and morphs from passive follower to aggressor actor in his own struggle for freedom, the black communal voice rises increasingly and Sweetback’s verbal quietness continues operating as a motif that glaringly reminds us of the oppressive politics and subsequent systemic powerlessness that surrounds black life, which Sweetback comes to heroically defy. Sweetback’s defiance becomes in part a radical disruption of racist performances of black identity both in traditional Hollywood film and American culture generally.
Unfortunately, in the midst of this radicalism, there is also a disappointingly conservative treatment of black female identity and women generally. While there is a sharp underlining critique pointed to the relegation of black masculinity to the realms of primitive sexuality and criminality, there is also, at the same time, perpetuation of the mythology of black heterosexual allure or rather potency over black and white women. While one black woman merely says ‘First things first’ and unbuckles Sweetback’s pants after he appears handcuffed, silently expecting help after his escape from the police, Sweetback later earns his and MooMoo’s freedom from a white biker gang, when upon seeing the female identity of its leader, Prez, he decides upon his tool for the duel he must win by uttering his one word of dialogue throughout the scene: ‘Fucking.’ In each sex scene, from the earlier sequence in the whorehouse to the sex show to his sex encounters while on the run, the women verbalise the silent Sweetback’s sexual potency usually with a cry of pleasurable submission: ‘Sweetback!’ While Sweetback emerges from being a sex performer for hire to using sex as a means of survival and a tool for the struggle against the Man as his mechanical demeanour transitions to an active, politicised consciousness, the representation of feminine identities remains confined to the sexual, and defined by their subordinate usefulness to black male survival (see Dunn 2008: 124–37). Even in the monologues, including the two primary black female ones, these roles remain intact.
As a film that offers more than a series of performances that signify the black male struggle and the racist oppression of the black community, the visual glimpses into the black ghetto and the communal soul are achieved in part through the documentary-like filming of the monologues set within the black ghetto. These scenes allow for the rare spotlight on the diverse shades of black humanity within. There are a number of short interview sequences off-camera, presumably white interrogators asking for information on Sweetback’s whereabouts, and an array of black men and women, all who basically answer either ‘Sweetback, no I ain’t seen him’ or ‘I don’t know him’. The longer monologues, of which there are about three, begin right after Sweetback has beaten the two cops and the police launch a ‘most wanted’ search for him, which includes literally terrorising the black community. The camera cuts to Sweetback only infrequently, but stays primarily on Beetle who carries on a rather long rambling one-way conversation, the scene thus emphasising the theatrical quality of the performance. He delivers a basic message to Sweetback, essentially advice and a statement of cautionary support as he understands the community implications of the police’s hunt for Sweetback: ‘Keep the faith … You my Man, man … you just lay low’ and ‘don’t tell no one where you are’.
The most verbally dynamic of the monologues comes in two separate scenes, one featuring a black preacher at a funeral, then speaking to Sweetback, and the other featuring an around-the-way type of girl – a black woman who is a Sweetback supporter. In the first, the Afrocentric preacher has probably the most intensive speech as the voice of the supporting community: ‘I’m gonna say a black Ave Maria for you.… You saved a plant they were gonna pick in the bud. That’s why the Man’s down on you.’ In the second, the exaggerated performative effect in the overall film becomes more pronounced. The blonde-wigged woman stands in a doorway while a silent white cop leans on the outer door; the lighting, red and flashing, intensifies the seedy tone of the setting and the scene’s theatrical quality. The one-way boisterous dialogue plays to further emphasise the woman’s exaggerated appearance and reminds us of the continuing performances that serve to signify Van Peebles’ overall representational aim: the dehumanisation of black identity and the solution to it, rebellion ‘by any means necessary’. The woman’s speech provides a rare moment in the film with the most overt exhibition of black ghetto speak, of the profane black vernacular voice:
I haven’t seen Sweetback. I don’t see the cat.… You just keep leaning and leaning, get the fuck off my back, man. Look I’m clean.… When I get pissed off, man, I will throw a natural born nigga’ fit on you, understand? I ain’t on the street no more, understand; I ain’t in the trade. I just want to be left alone.… Leave.
After the silent cop slinks off, the audience understands that the woman has essentially put on a show, worn a mask or donned an identity so to speak for ‘the Man’ in support of Sweetback. She laughs and speaks directly to Sweetback: ‘Sweetback, man, shit.’ The camera cuts to the woman on a stage; she whips off the wig and sings ‘I love you’ into a microphone.
This rather long sequence cuts between shots of Sweetback running through the city towards the desert and the community ‘interviews’. One of the last, and most intriguing, speaking moments in the film occurs in a scene with an older black woman who sits shelling peas surrounded by children. Here, the styles of filmmaking – drama, action and documentary – veer even more into the latter as both the set of the dialogue and dark lighting emphasise the realistic edge of the scene. The woman, like the others, appears to be responding to inquiries about the sought after Sweetback. ‘I might have had a little Roy. I can’t rightly remember’, she says, and goes on to note that the county takes them away when they get older. These few but pivotal words underscore the symbolic implications of the character of Sweetback, once again emphasising his ‘every black man’ role and the slipperiness and problems of socially constructed notions of black identity.
Even though the physical or rather visual presence of the ghetto and the faces of community recede as Sweetback wanders further into his solo trek across the desert, the collective or rather communal voice becomes more prominent, coming after perhaps the most prominent sign of Sweetback’s awakening consciousness. After winning their escape from the gang, a motorcycle rider (John Amos) comes to move them but can only take one, which is supposed to be Sweetback; but Sweetback tells him to carry the young militant instead. Given his dominant silence throughout, Sweetback’s statement carries significant weight: ‘Here’s our future … take him.’
The call-and-response voice-over dialogue provides the soundtrack, articulating both the historic oppression of black folk and the rally for black liberation in the contemporary moment. At first, the chorus mocks Sweetback’s possibly futile run for freedom, suggesting the long-standing systemic oppression of black folk from slavery through Jim Crow and contemporary racial segregation and brutality against black liberation struggle. The off-screen lead voice (Sweetback and symbolically the voice of black liberation struggle) calls, ‘They won’t waste me’, but the offscreen mocking chorus responds: ‘You can’t make it on wings, wheels, on steel, Sweetback.’ The chanting chorus invokes the tragic historic reality of the black struggle in America: ‘They bled your brother. They bled your sister.’ The call and responses between lead and chorus goes back and forth between resistance to the idea of black revolution and finally acceptance:
CHORUS: You got to Thomas Sweetback. They bled your brother…
SWEETBACK: Yeah, but they won’t bleed me.
CHORUS: Don’t let them get you.… He ain’t gon’ let you stand tall, Sweetback. The Man know everything.
SWEETBACK: He oughta’ know I’m tired of him fucking with me.
CHORUS: Right on, brother.… Run, Sweetback. Run, Mothafucka.
As Yearwood notes, the narrative voices become more ‘explicitly political’, as the chorus brings in the word ‘revolution’ and finally they sing support of Sweetback’s revolt with a repeated line from a gospel classic: ‘Let it shine’ (2000: 211).
SPECTACLES OF BLACK/WHITE TALK: BLAXPLOITATION SPEAKS RACE
Rather than a blaxploitation film, Shaft might be better described as a classic black action film that suggests the emerging confiscation of the developing black action film genre. An MGM film, Shaft departed from the outside Hollywood positioning that helped shape and retain Van Peebles’ independent filmmaking style and aesthetic perspective in Sweetback; it did continue the preeminence of black cultural style and offered major black direction over the aesthetic quality and black character representation. Along familiar Hollywood narrative lines, with its departure from the symbolic signification through the sound and visual representation that marked Sweetback, Shaft provides a telling text to study the evolving dynamics of the formulaic racialised dialogue that would become a signature feature in the hundred-plus film cycle churned out between roughly 1971 and 1975.
While Sweetback uses dialogue sparingly, a motif underscored by the mostly silent Sweetback, Shaft follows Hollywood convention privileging dialogue. The dialogue acts as a narrative device in unfolding the plot and for the explicit exhibition of gendered racial identities upon which the film hinges. The soundtrack, most notably Isaac Hayes’ title song, establishes the gleeful sexualised black masculinity that personifies Shaft (Richard Roundtree) as a brother who plays all sides: the cops, the black and white underworlds and the black militants, following his own rules. His allure rests in his cool, kick-ass persona and his heterosexual potency:
HAYES: Whose the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?
GIRL CHORUS: Shaft.
HAYES: Damn right! … Whose the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about?
GIRL CHORUS: Shaft.
HAYES: Right on.
The dialogue that ensues throughout the film reinforces these features, articulating a version of the glamourised sexual representation of black masculinity, the white/black status quo and black triumph within and despite it. The film’s exhibition of racialised dialogue includes double entendre (for example, the references to the main character’s cool and sexual parts/prowess, including ‘dick’ and ‘Shaft’), playing the dozens, and one-line barbs. The explicit style of this racialised language is quite different from Sweetback’s call-and-response sequence towards the end of the film.
One of the most revealing moments that emphasises the crucial performance of white male/black male identities and the divide between them occurs early in the third scene of the film when Shaft is summoned to the police station to offer information on the brewing mob war in Harlem. Here, we see what will become a signature relationship in blaxploitation cinema, the halfway or grudging ‘ally’ or ‘friendly’ white cop who understands and seemingly has some atypical respect for the exceptionally cool, independent black hero. Captain Vic (Charles Cioffi) and Shaft engage one of their racially signifying sharp exchanges:
SHAFT: All the static and hassle in the world wouldn’t make me sing a song for the police, Vic. No way, baby.
VIC: What’s with all this black shit? You ain’t so black. [holds up a black pen]
SHAFT: And you ain’t so white.
VIC: You want to play your superheavy black thing?
Later on, as the war between Bumpy’s (Moses Gunn) Harlem syndicate and a white one escalates, Vic tells Shaft that the stakes are high: ‘on the outside it’s black against white’, and this perceived revolt or attack on white bodies (criminal or not) by blacks could lead to ‘troops and tanks’ on Broadway. Vic and Shaft’s overtly racialised polite or civilised signifying highlights the dialogue’s importance in creating a fantastical exhibition of the racial lines being crossed and defied and the racial status quo being upset by bold ‘niggers’ like Shaft.
At various points over the course of the narrative, the lyrics of Hayes’ gospel-and-soul-fused soundtrack share narrative force with the dialogue so that several sequences set to music unfold in between the traditional narrative movement through plot action and dialogue. As Shaft travels through Harlem looking for information on Bumpy’s kidnapped young daughter, music tells the story of black ghetto life: ‘Crime rate is rising too. If you were hungry what would you do?’ Shaft interacts with a series of black ghetto identities from the shoeshine man to informative street hustler to girlfriends to the black militant voice. Two character types, the one indicative of the cultural prominence of the pimp, ‘the mack’, or big outlaw Man in the hood (Bumpy) and the other a telling mark of the lingering Black Power ethos of the times.
Shaft like many of its predecessors introduces a staple black character type in the angry black militant armed with the prerequisite politicised Black Power rhetoric and ‘fuck the Man’ attitude. In
Shaft, the first is performed by Bumpy who, despite calling Shaft in to find his daughter, despises him for straddling the line between the two worlds – the white arm of authority (the cops) and the black ghetto community. He comments on Shaft, basically deeming him not truly black enough because of his positioning. As Bumpy describes him using the racially vernacular language of the time, Shaft is ‘a black spade detective’ who has his ‘foot in whitey’s craw’.
Shaft’s other antagonistic ally is black militant Buford (Christopher St. John) who views Shaft in much the same way as Bumpy, since Shaft is not directly involved in the work of black revolution. Shaft and Buford share some of the most tense scenes and verbal exchanges, including one after a shootout at Buford’s ghetto headquarters when Shaft remarks on their lack of preparation for a white attack and tells a wounded brother: ‘When you start that revolution you better hope Whitey’s standing still.’ Buford retorts, ‘We’re done running’, but Shaft reminds him that running is exactly what they are doing. Increasingly in blaxploitation films, and Shaft anticipates this, the representations of Black Power and black political liberation struggle become inarticulate and relegated to a surface representation without any of the empowered rhetorical precision or physical activity of revolution that marked Sweetback and 1973’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door. In Shaft, primacy is given to Shaft’s street cool as well as individualism (see Guerrero 1993: 93).
The dialogue in the movie dramatically enhances this and the overall racialised text; this is why Shaft must drop lines like he does, for example, to the prototypical, sexually available, nurturing black girlfriend: ‘I got a couple of them [problems]. I was born black and poor.’ Yet, rather than being radically and collectively politically conscious or motivated and aesthetically distinctive, Shaft’s dialogue is racially barbed, helping to create the genre’s signature sensationalist formula.
In blaxploitation classics like Superfly, Coffy, Cleopatra Jones (1973), Black Caesar (1973), The Black Godfather (1974) and many others, dialogue got more explicitly racially and sexually exploitative and graphic as the representational strategies for portraying black identities grew more problematic, steeped as they were in the gleeful performance of stereotypical black ghetto identities. The two iconic supermama flicks, Pam Grier’s Coffy and Foxy Brown, suggest the disturbing construction of not only black femininity and masculinity but of white femininity that became staples of blaxploitation cinema.
Foxy Brown, starring Grier and written and directed by white filmmaker Jack Hill for American International Pictures (AIP), provides a glaring example of how dialogue in blaxploitation cinema lends itself to the disturbingly cartoonish and caricatured performances of racial identities. Hill’s dialogue is sort of a catchall of Black Poweresque lingo, the contemporary ghetto vernacular and most overt language that characterises the historic racial patriarchal system. Short race speeches, token diatribes about the black man’s plight or ‘the Man’s’ oppressive foot, are interspersed within the exhibition of racial epithets and discourse. Thus, a number of racist tropes inscribing black identity, particularly black femininity, are performed over the course of the film. Hill explains that he threw everything into
Foxy Brown, including the most over-the-top language, name and action sequences signifying on AIP’s call for a
Coffy sequel then demanding a quick, cheap new black supermama vehicle (1998: 139). Several of
Foxy Brown’s scenes – including the rape scene – display the dominance of the explicit racist-sexist language that characterises the list of stock identities that emerge as blaxploitation staples, including the baad supermama that Foxy Brown personifies, the drug-dealing pimp who is most often subordinate to the white syndicate head, white and black prostitutes, racist white cops, white lesbian, ego-tripping black ghetto king, and so on. The words ‘bitch’ and ‘nigger’ become perhaps the most used in the genre, as
Foxy Brown demonstrates. The key plot development, for example, Foxy’s undercover stint as a prostitute, provides the exhibition for this language.
Performing as Misty Cotton, an exotic, supremely skilled prostitute, Foxy undertakes to take down a white female nemesis, ‘Miss Katherine’, and her lover, co-leader Steve. Foxy, an already overtly-sexualised character as the camera makes clear by focusing on her breasts and sexual attractiveness throughout the film, dons a more explicitly sexualised black female identity in order to infiltrate Katherine’s lair. Her appearance, tight brightly-coloured jumpsuits and dresses, the prerequisite flowing wig and Misty’s sexualised talk authenticate an identity and subordinate status that fits Katherine’s notions of ghetto-centric black femininity. In their first meeting, Foxy completely sells her Misty Cotton performance telling Katherine, ‘Let’s cut all the bull … I’ve come here for one reason only, this is where the money’s at.… You tell me who you want done and I’ll do the hell out of him if the price is right.’
This speech invokes the historic hot mama or Jezebel trope of black femininity, reinforcing the association of sexual wildness and promiscuity with black female identity (see hooks 1992: 70–1). Later, after Katherine and Steve discover her real identity, Foxy is sent to their version of a breaking plantation for difficult girls where Katherine declares she’ll ‘probably love’ what the boys will do with her. At the ranch, the discourse enacts a most disturbing parody of the white master/black female slave relationship as Foxy is roped by the neck, dragged, tied up, drugged and repeatedly raped and taunted by two stereotypical rednecks types as banjo music plays in the background:
REDNECK 1: I’m just getting my kicks out of letting this big-jugged jiggaboo think she can go for a walk.
REDNECK 2: It’s time for another smack.… You a lucky junkie.
REDNECK 1: Sure that’s one thing we got plenty of … dope … you a lucky nigger, you know that?
REDNECK 2: Yeah … you’re getting just a wee bit more this time.
FOXY: I don’t need anymore.
REDNECK 1: …And you don’t even say thanks.
FOXY: Thanks … you faggot mothafucka …
REDNECK 1: Did your old black mammy teach you to talk like that?
Foxy gets her ‘revenge’ when she escapes and sets the ‘skinheads’, as she calls them, on fire and blows up the whole drug supply. Her ultimate moment of revenge comes when she delivers Steve’s penis to Katherine. Having castrated them both literally and figuratively, she delivers the final baad assss black woman line of the film with: ‘Death is too easy for you, Bitch.’
Such dialogue represents the dominant mode of talk in the film, undercutting any serious political undertones. The departures from this explicit racial language which primarily conveys a host of racial stereotypes are few but important in that they remind us of the quickly fading import of the black political backdrop in the evolving genre. One of these rare departures occurs near the beginning of the film when Foxy rescues her brother Linc, played by quintessential blaxploitation actor Antonio Fargas. One of the three key serious dialogue speeches occurs as Linc breaks down the dehumanising social castration of black men:
Foxy, look I’m a black man and I don’t know how to sing and I don’t know how to dance and I don’t know how to preach to no congregation. I’m too small to be a football hero and I’m too ugly to be elected mayor. But I watch TV and I see all them people in all them fine homes they live in and all them nice cars they drive and I get all full of ambition. Now you tell me what I’m supposed to do with all this ambition I got.
The dialogue’s rather serious signification on racial politics and specifically black masculine impotency or social and economic disempowerment is emphasised in Linc’s speech here.
Another speech, midway through the film, comes from a prostitute’s husband who finds that his claim to her is subordinate to white ownership of her sexual body. He is beaten when he challenges this ownership and demands to know what kind of world it is when someone can keep a man’s ‘rightful wife’ from her own ‘man and child’. The last speech of this sort is delivered by Foxy in the name of her murdered lover and her brother. Here, she rallies the support of a crime-fighting group of vigilante militants by playing on their sense of fighting for justice, though her fight is individualised rather than a communal struggle. Despite the militants’ questioning her motives, Foxy convinces them in her most impassioned dialogue in the film, reminding them that it could have been their brother:
I want justice for a good man. This man had love in his heart. And he died because he went out in his neighborhood to try to do what he thought was right.
These speeches, however, are minimised by the rest of the film’s dialogue, which stays on the level of racial epithet or a series of graphic sexualised and racialised exchanges.
While the 1970s wave of cheaply-budgeted black action films marked a rare moment of cinematic investment in black cultural aesthetics, the dialogue departed from Sweetback’s politically charged and aesthetically distinctive treatment as the mainstream perspective ultimately shaped and undercut the film’s representation of black identity. The dialogue became evermore cheap and explicit and almost an afterthought to the other staples that became so prominent in the genre, including the graphic racialised and sexualised drug crime or underworld spectacles replete with phallic egomaniacs like the black ghetto mob boss and drug lord or the white mafia head, and largely ineffectual, ranting militants. In 1971, Sweetback’s language operated as key aesthetic signifier of the politicised undertones, atypically offering a contemporary hero who was notable for his silence. Shaft began to anticipate an emerging genre’s less symbolic use of language and its evolution into more conventional popular American film dialogue patterns and into the sensationalist or graphic: gratuitous, profane and racialised as well as sexualised language that B-grade action flicks, specifically exploitation cinema, thrived on. By 1973, now-classic blaxploitation films like Coffy, Foxy Brown and Superfly demonstrated how racialised dialogue became cheap spectacle, serving to undercut any of the serious political undertones which had originally helped lead to the genre’s emergence.
notes
1 See Morrison (1992) for a useful discussion of how blackness functioned as a signifier for white authors, revealing a host of anxieties about identity, including racial and national concerns.
2 This rating intensified the controversy and curiosity over the film and undoubtedly helped attract black audiences and thus fuel the box office success that captured Hollywood studio attention (see Van Peebles 1972: 13).
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