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... s carrying on a tradition that is passed from father to son- -a father who runs from his responsibilities and blames all but himself -- and that this pattern repeats itself from generation to generation. So Duff changes -- he accepts the responsibility of being a father and husband and learns what it is to be a man. His decision to return to Josie with his son offers some hope to his situation. Symbolically, Duff's decision conveys the importance of being there for his family -- being a man. The image that Roemer imparts in Duff is not one about race, but about manhood and adult responsibility.
This is the kind of positive character -- one that grows -- that audiences need to see. Charles Burnett, who has made such acclaimed films as Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), describes what kind of films young black audiences need: Self esteem has to be rebuilt. And very few films contain things that could inspire their audiences -- such as real heroes -- everyday people who accomplish something and make sacrifices, real people you can applaud and not basketball players. Commercial movies are escapist. Not everybody has fantasies about judo-chopping someone to death. We need stories dealing with emotions, with real problems like growing up and coming to grips with who you are; movies that give you a sense of direction, an example. (q.
in Reynaud 331) Film reviewer Shelia Rule says Nothing but a Man "avoid[s] the conventional pitfalls of sentimentality, pre achiness and demeaning stereotypes and instead present[s] its characters with the full range of human qualities" (C 16). Characters like Duff are the kind of images that Hollywood needs to portray in American films. Hollywood does not, however, totally ignore independent filmmakers. Rather, it takes the techniques and innovations and ideas developed by the independents and co-opts them for its own economic and political gain (Bourne 15). Although black creativity commonly sets American entertainment standards, black artists rarely benefit from their own work (Edmond and Hayes 122 - 23).
Thus, blacks do not get a voice in the media they help define. "We almost never get the opportunity to be creatively involved in telling our own stories, " says Stanley Robertson, an independent film producer, "We get culturally raped by other people. It's the denial -- the exclusion -- that bothers me" (q. in Horowitz 17). One of the best examples of Hollywood profiting from independent film is the Blaxploitation films of the 1970 's. Black audiences were demanding to see black actors cast in positive roles, and Hollywood responded with what is now called Blaxploitation. The Blaxploitation formula replaces the traditional white male hero, "substituting a highly serialized black male hero who exercises power over white villains as an attempt to recode the Hollywood image of black men" (Lott 226).
Hollywood took Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) and used it to create a formula for films featuring black action heroes who stand up to and ultimately triumph over the "man" -- white America's political machine. Gordon Parks Jr. 's Superfly (1972) follows the Blaxploitation formula and casts a black man in the role of a hero. But the film fails to provide a positive role model for young blacks because it applauds the exploits of a drug dealer who effectively commits an act of genocide against his own race for profit. Superfly has all the appearances of empowering its black characters -- many of the traditional black film stereotypes are reversed. The film's hero, Priest, is not sexually sterile as many of Hollywood's depictions of black men have been. The long love scene in the bubble bath gives Priest a sexually human dimension that is commonly lacking in black film characters.
Priest also has a sexual relationship with a white woman, but he ultimately rejects her. Unlike the typical Hollywood interpretation of black-male-with-white-female sexuality, Priest is not a sexual threat to the white woman and the purity of the white race, as Gus in Birth of a Nation is, rather he has racially reversed the roles of the plantation owner and female slave. She is one of his dealers and Priest is merely claiming his right to sex as her master. And the white-oriented standards of looks, too, are juxtaposed, which seems to empower Priest's character. When the brother at the craps game calls him "white-looking, " Priest punches him out. Looking white is bad and black is now truly beautiful.
These reversals of black and white seem to suggest that Priest is in a position of power and is in control. But the structure of the economic character relationships in Superfly tells a different story: the corrupt white cops literally enslave Priest and Eddie in their jobs. Instead of being factors in the production of white cotton on a plantation, Priest and Eddie deal in white cocaine in the city. And Eddie promotes the slave myth; with the same slave-myth mentality put forth in Hallelujah, having " 8 -tracks and color TVs in every room" is just an updated version of the happy slaves on the plantation. Although they are in the city and not on a plantation, the relationship of the white cops to the black dealers parallels that of a slave-based economy. The whole movie plays upon the fact that Priest wants out of the drug- dealing scene.
Priest's struggle as the black protagonist striving to escape the symbolic enslavement of white slavery is what makes him a heroic figure. Priest has the "street cool" of urban black culture. He has a style that makes it easy to want to be like him -- the big car, the clothes, the hair. He has the walk and the talk, and he even has a funky Curtis Mayfield soundtrack that plays for him everywhere he goes.
Priest is cool. But behind all this cool are the movie's flaws. It cannot contain the surplus that comes out of the montage of users enjoying coke: the victims of urban drug dealers and the violence that surrounds them. The way Priest plans to finance his retirement -- selling 30 kilos of coke for a cool half million in cash -- is paramount to genocide. Priest saves his skin at the expense of his own race. Black people, especially black males, need positive role models, not drug-dealing action heroes.
The allure of movie characters like Priest -- the cool poses and the clothes and the car and the funky soundtrack -- makes everybody want to be like them. But this "cool" allure sends the wrong message to an impressionable audience, who embrace the criminal aspects of these characters as part of the "cool" package (Johnson, "Part 1 " 16). Dennis Greene condemns the effect of this "cool" on black youth: This situation would be bad enough if economic exploitation of the community was the only consequence. But it isn't. These films validate the pathologies they depict. The constant projection of the black community as a kind of urban Wild Kingdom, the glamorization of tragic situations, and the celebration of inner city drug dealers and gangsters has a programming effect on black youth.
The power of music in film is a particularly seductive and propagandist ic force which... has rarely been used in a positive social manner. (28) Bowing to public pressure, the Blaxploitation...
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Research essay sample on Representations Of The Black Male In Film
