Bamboozled

No doubt Spike Lee has a very defined view and opinion on the subjects that his films usually cover but I feel like the matter here got out of hand. It was weird and obscure but also unfocused.

In this depiction of race and race relations, the white man is still in power and is only interested in exploiting black people and assuming black culture. The white TV writers and bosses are stupid, insensitive, and racists who love racist material. This is, of course, a racist presentation of white people. On the other side, you've got essentially two kinds of black people. Authentic blacks who are part of the resistance, and the sellouts. You can tell which ones are the sellouts because they wear/perform blackface and get shot to death by the authentic resistors. The whole thing is unbelievably blunt, simplistic, and thoughtless exploration of race, power, and the history of racism in America. I suspect many will presume there is some kind of enlightened message buried deep within the satire that emerges with enough searching and pressure, but there's really no excuse for the kind of 2-D typecast representations of whiteness and what Lee sees as modern day uncle toms who play along. It's a crap way of telling stories, and it's a crap way of looking at life too for that matter. Looking at people and seeing only objects is, after all, kind of what started this whole race mess in the beginning.