FILM COMMENT : Days of Rage, Years of Neglect

Hollywood has always been adept at marketing rage involving cyborgs, fruitcakes, gangsters and extraterres-trials. Rage arising from relevant, recognizable social miseries has always received short shrift, and never more so than in this happy-face movie era.

But there is a sharp exception to all this bland homogenization: the current cycle of black-themed films. Whatever their individual merits, films like John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood,” about coming of age in South-Central Los Angeles, Matty Rich’s “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” about a distraught family living in the Red Hook projects, and Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” which centers on an interracial affair between a black man from Harlem and an Italian woman from Bensonhurst, draw on a fund of furiousness that’s not available to white filmmakers right now.

The last time there was this much racially oriented rage in the movies was during the so-called black exploitation cycle in the early- to mid-70s. It’s worth taking a look back to see how we got here from there.

Hollywood discovered back then that it was possible to turn a big, fast profit by targeting black audiences with inexpensively made films. And so movies like “Shaft” and “Superfly” and “Slaughter” pounced on the scene, their heroes lording it over the inner cities while turning the tables on the cowering white scum who got in their way.

The rage in these movies, mostly financed and distributed by whites, was as marketable as their soundtracks. It was rage in the service of a corrupt fantasy--that one could key into the American dream by amassing as much booty as any white overlord. It was a fantasy that degraded racial dialogue, and it wasn’t even heartfelt. Behind the jive was the same old Hollywood hustle. These movies were saying: Whoever owns the most, wins.

When the cycle passed, so did most black faces from the screen, except in supporting roles. So did the opportunities for most black directors and screenwriters. Only in the comic arena could blacks hope to achieve superstardom, since comedy is perceived by the white status quo as less of a racial threat than drama. What was so disheartening about this era is that the stage was not even set for a more honest and comprehensive depiction of black lives. When Hollywood realized it could score no more killings with its Shafts and Superflys, it folded the tent and went home.

The commercial success of rap music with both black and white kids accounts in part for the latest unfolding; many of the new movies are heavily promoted by rap soundtracks. But, on a broader level, the current explosion in black-themed films cannot be understood without recognizing the paralysis of expression it comes out of. The frenzy of activity is to some degree a direct-action response on the part of a new generation of black filmmakers to the decades of enforced inactivity of their predecessors. After almost 20 years of marginal involvement by black filmmakers in Hollywood, the movie companies have recognized that black audiences will actually go to movies that reflect their own lives. And, like the black exploitation cycle, this new movement will last for just as long as Hollywood can make a buck off it--and not a moment longer.

What this also means is that for now the studios will not back off from marketing such films despite the violence that sometimes accompanies their exhibition. In this the studios are absolutely correct. The recent mayhem that followed the opening of “Boyz N the Hood,” in which two were killed and 33 others wounded in theaters around the nation, should not be employed as an excuse to clamp down on these films. If movies that explore urban violence sometimes bring some of that violence into the theater, that’s an argument for tighter security, not pulling the plug. And if such movies offend those commentators who believe only role-model-perfect black experience should be on the screen, that’s an offense more suitable for the public-relations than for the dramatic arena.

There’s a key difference between the black-themed films of the ‘70s and now, just as there was a difference between, say, “Shaft” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” In the Sidney Poitier era, films involving blacks were essentially addressed to white middle-class audiences. (Black audiences were much more vocally derisive of the cop-outs and false pieties in these films, as in the hand-clasp, brotherhood-of-man ending to “The Defiant Ones.”) Whether they were preposterously ennobled or demeaned, black people in these films were comprehended almost exclusively in terms of how whites saw them. Both the ennobling and the demeaning were dehumanizing.

Because the “Shaft” cycle of films was aimed more strategically at black audiences, the range of black characterizations in them were wider and wilder. The black filmmakers who worked on many of these movies could dabble in the kinds of ghetto folklore and caricature that had been kept out of most of the high-toned black-themed films of a decade earlier. But the thrust of these movies was still gaudily opportunistic. They thumped for the most flagrant, high-style success: big cars, big guns, big scores, mistresses black and white. The movies were a sexual and psychological taunt to the white power structure, but their heroes ached to commandeer its upper echelons.

The opportunistic agenda of these films was as neatly defined as the liberal-pious agenda of the Poitier era. Both in their own ways sought a connection to white society. One of the defining characteristics of the new generation of black films is that they don’t actively seek that connection. What they seek instead is a connection to one’s family, to the neighborhood. The disintegration of black family life, both of one’s own family and the family of the neighborhood, is apprehended as the source of black America’s tragedy; the reintegration of that life is what “Boyz N the Hood,” “Straight Out of Brooklyn” and, in its own blocked, garbled way, “Jungle Fever” are all about.

If “Boyz N the Hood” is easily the most interesting of the recent black films, it’s because, at 23, John Singleton is still close to his subject and he has the verve to bring it to life without a lot of slick tricks. It’s raw in the best sense--a movie about the horrors of South-Central Los Angeles made from the inside out. Young as he is, Singleton understands how to dramatize his rage; his film is as polemical as, say, “Jungle Fever,” but for the most part you don’t feel like you’re being lectured to. The polemic rises naturally out of the material: Small kids walking home from school talk casually about a shooting they witnessed; three friends pick their way through an overgrown lot to check out a dead body; gang cars roll silently through the streets; the clatter of police helicopters provides nightly accompaniment.

What one senses about “Boyz” is that it’s a film the director had to make or he’d go craz y . On a far more modest level, that’s what you get from “Straight Out of Brooklyn” too, although at 19, its director, Matty Rich, is still finding his way. (He still lives in the Red Hook neighborhood where he filmed.)

It’s so rare now to see an American movie that looks like the director ached to make it. Most Hollywood hands have long since worn out their saddles riding the studio merry-go-round. Young black filmmakers, if they can stay free from commercial co-option, have the power to energize the movies by working on new-to-movies material that really means something to them (and therefore to all of us). The same principle applies to black actors, which is perhaps why many of the performances in these new films seem so rapt and unfettered.

The danger here may come not from studio co-option but from a subtler lure--the danger of being incendiary for its own sake. The trouble with “Jungle Fever” is that it offers up its anger like a smorgasbord: It’s a veritable pig-out of agitation. Lee’s free-form rage in “Do the Right Thing” had bite because he was trying to honestly explore his own hatreds and confusions; the film was attacked by people who felt he should have made nice, like in the old days--as if a movie that really dealt with the confusions of modern race relations could be anything but divisive and unresolved.

But “Jungle Fever,” which was calculated to broaden the social canvas of “Do the Right Thing,” is a far more demagogic work, crammed with an amazing array of offensive caricatures ranging from garlicky, lug-head Italians to Holy Roller black patriarchs to a pair of cringing-cur white bosses. The central interracial relationship between Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra is dead weight: Lee’s implicit disapproval freezes it at the core.

You get more of a sense of the horrors of black-white racism from “Boyz,” where there are virtually no white characters, than you do from “Jungle Fever,” where there are plenty. And that’s probably because Singleton is detailing the effects of racism without making a big finger-pointing fuss about it.

Lee’s film doesn’t give racism its full measure of horror. He doesn’t explore its insidious subtleties. He’s too busy caricaturing racists, and he can’t see the person for the caricature. The social reality of “Jungle Fever” isn’t really that far removed from the prevailing reactionary agenda that attempts to set the races apart by playing up their antagonisms.

The black exploitation cycle of the ‘70s was designed specifically for black audiences, and whites for the most part stayed away. It would be a grave mistake to assume that the new cycle of black films is exclusionary, not only because some of the movies are good but also because, with whites and poor blacks moving further and further apart in society, movies are one of the few remaining ways in which racial gaps can be bridged. Or has the white audience become so ghettoized that it can’t accommodate even screen images of black poverty? A movie like “Boyz N the Hood” shocks the complacency out of you. You realize when it’s over that it’s not so much a “black movie” as a movie about America’s inner life.