Floyd Patterson’s wearing black shorts. The defending heavyweight champion of the world Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) is in white. That is the battle in 1965. Black against white. Good against evil. Christianity against Islam. America against the world. These two gladiators are fighting for more than the Heavyweight Championship of the World. They’re fighting to see who’s going to be a player in the new world order. Patterson is the good. He’s is a Christian, follower of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and an hope of the new Black American world- an integrationists’ dream. Ali (who commentators as well as Patterson still refer to as Clay) is evil. He hates America. He hates whites. He follows Elijah Muhammad and is in the Nation of Islam. He’s a proud big mouth who’s braggadocio is going to get him in trouble. He’s too proud and too cocky. He must be defeated. That will be the only way to shut this kid up. The crowd boos every punch he lands. Needless to say the Las Vegas Convention Center is a cacophony of boo’s this evening in 1965.

Ali eclipses Patterson. The power of his left hand is only matched by the playfulness of his right. The calm on his face is that of a Zen master. Patterson is only one in a line that will lose this eternal battle. The righteous vs. the unrighteous. Which one is which is unclear contextually in 2002. Ali is the star. Patterson is only a rung on the ladder to greatness. Ali is The Greatest. His punches are like the waves in the ocean. Patterson is a man drowning in a sea of uppercuts. He throws wild shots that seem to glide off of The Champ. Round 8- Patterson is looking to get leverage. Even when he gets inside he’s ineffective. By round 9 the commentator slips and gives Muhammad Ali his proper respect and call him by his chosen name. The name of his adopted faith. It’s a fight to get the respect given any other man in simply being called by his name. Patterson stands his ground. He must defeat this kid. His back is bothering him. He’s not as young as he used to be and Ali moves like the ether. The eleven thousand strong in the convention center can’t muster enough cheering to encourage Patterson to a win. They seem to not be able to convince themselves that Ali is evil but they must continue trying. Patterson can’t seem to get off a punch. He’s trying to stay away from Ali who runs out at the beginning of Round 12 anxious for battle. Patterson’s confused and on the receives the message of every hook Ali delivers. Ali hits his mark every time. The referee Harry Krause ends the fight. Patterson concedes to the 24 year old- Muhammad Ali. Winner and still the heavyweight champion of the world.

After the fight Ali thanks Allah for his supreme boxing wisdom and gives thanks to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad for his prayers.

Interesting. I’ve been getting a barrage of comments on my “300” post that mostly consist of people telling me to “chill out, it’s only a movie”. I have no idea who these people are and they have obviously only read post and not the entirety of my blog. I’m a media studies scholar. I’m a media literacy expert. It is my job in life to read the context of things on a grander scale than those prescribed. Of course, it’s only a movie but if we don’t contextualize the entertainments we’re being fed, then we aren’t aware of what we’re being told to think. America doesn’t create entertainment to entertain you. This is a capitalist society that creates commodities that serve the greater needs of the prevailing power structures. It depends on us being sheep and having no/low critical thinking skills to go to jobs to make a pittance of what someone is making on your backs. During the 1940’s the medium of film was the most powerful propaganda machine for creating support for WWII. Do not think for a second that Hollywood is there to entertain you. It is there to sell you things. Lifestyle particularly. So for all of those who find it necessary to leave me comments simply about “300” who haven’t read my thesis or any of my other work, while I appreciate your visit, you can save your typing time. Your comments are simply annoyances if they hold no serious critical comments. Thanks.

This film is about 300 Spartan warriors lead by King Leonides who held against King Xerxes and his horde of “Persians”. You can read any review somewhere that will tell you of the debate brewing about this movie. I agree with most criticisms and cringe at the affirmations. That being said here’s what I think:

Propaganda. Blatant sheer racism. The upholding of American national identity at its most precise. Americans racist xenophobia against Iran was so clear (really against the whole world that doesn’t adhere to the same code or is the same color) that I laughed out loud. Spartans discarded the weak, sickly, or misshapen babies leaving only strong warrior men born to Spartan women. They respect their women above all. These women would have been crushed beneath the weight of the soldiers who’s airbrushed six packs made even the boniness of the women pale in comparison.

That’s not really how I want to say that either. I left the theater furious. They’ve got all the blacks and people who look like me behaving like animals when the Persian Empire was one of the greatest forces of civilization in history. (Ironically enough the Persians believed in truth above all else, no wonder we’re at such a historical impasse.) Making the Persians a hyper-sexualized conglomerate of all non “Western” people who are all slaves to a megalomaniacal god/ king monsters exemplifies America’s demonization of those who don’t share their adolescent mindset. In Xerxes harem, the traitorous hunchback is offered the pleasures of the flesh from beautiful women of color who smother him with kisses, undulate seductively beneath him and (sigh) lick his hump. At that I stated, in perhaps not my quietest inside voice: “This is some bullshit. The only women who look like me are licking a hunchback. Black ladies will even fuck a hunchback. This movie is some real bullshit!” I concede the inappropriateness of that behavior, but I was incensed.

For the generation of young boys sitting in their basements playing their x-boxes and wondering what this world has in store for them the idea of doing something for glory must be appealing. It’s appealing to me. To believe in something so strongly that you’d give your life for it has moved men and women since the beginning of time. But at a moment when America’s intention is to overpower Iran, to not place this film in a contemporary context belies a naïveté I don’t believe we can afford as a democratic nation right now. Americans are the world leaders on propaganda. I know I help create it. We have created a national identity out of who we want to be or at least want the world to believe about us, not who we are. We tell ourselves so many lies and ingest so many that we can’t separate them. A friend of mine said it was propaganda for going to the gym and working on a six-pack. It most certainly is. Because that’s what we believe about ourselves. We believe we are those perfect, powerful, noble Spartans. Well then we’d be doomed, because the majority of Americans couldn’t lift a spear nor hold a shield and would run the other way before risking their life for another. But we’re not all soldiers. Oh, yeah right… Abu Ghraib & Gitmo. Right. Soldiers.

The black lady licking the hunchbacks back made me really mad though. And they were the only women who’s ribs you couldn’t see. They could be warriors. Not those bony Spartan women. And the homophobia… Did I mention that Xerxes was all done up like a video ho? So terrible.

Oh and Leonidas’ last speech of the movie stating that they fought against mysticism and tyranny. Really? Is he running with Giuliani next year? This thing was a mess and it was not the best movie since the Matrix. What a load of crap. That’s what got me in there. But imagine the feeling you might have had (I know I did) when I first say the Matrix. Not only was it visually stimulating, but also the story was unprecedented. They worked in tandem. This story was so bad that the effects meant nothing to me. But I’m old school. I still go to the movies to learn something about myself or others that don’t exist in my real personal life. Yes it’s an escape, but there has to be something that draws you into a fantasy of escape that truly grabs you. Something that holds you rapt. But I’m old school.

Maybe more later, but I do feel better now.

In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles produced, directed, edited, and starred in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which has now been dubbed the first “blaxploitaion” film. The films of the decade that followed used the commercial success of this film showing a Black man against the system and diluted the revolutionary-ness of the image to cater to white mass-market sensibilities. It’s this marketing and the re-appropriation of the caricature to a commercially viable creation that concerns me. As long as rappers can espouse “thug life” as cool and make lots of money from it- for themselves and more for their white owned record companies- this stereotype retains it’s power to terrorize white America while creating dangerous situations for Black men at large. The phenomenon of racial profiling is hinged on this caricature.
In Sweetback the movie’s stars were the Black community. In later movies, such as New Jack City (directed by Melvin’s son Mario Van Pebbles) the idea of community is used only to create a market for its own destruction. I use New Jack City as an example because it shows the generation of children born in the blaxploitation era and raised in the Reaganomics era of excess. Given the rise of drugs and violence in everyday urban life and the image of whites living “Dynasty” lives on TV, these children (now teenagers and adults) see money as the great equalizer. But the pursuit of material comforts demand an individualist capitalist modus operandi that is destroying the Black community and making Black men moving targets while commodifying Black women. In New Jack City, while they gave away turkeys to the community at Thanksgiving the “Cash Money Brothers” were in the process of turning a low-income apartment building into an all-inclusive crack haven. Therefore their seemingly generous gesture was really just a marketing scheme to win the trust of the community they were about to decimate and murder for profit.
Now with the popularity of everything hip-hop, what began as protest and revolution in lyrical and musical style, the line between commercialism and revolution has been smashed. Hip hop/ rap is used to sell everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Chevy cars. Hip-hop as a culture has, beginning in the mid ‘90’s become about “money, hoes, and clothes- all a nigga knows” (Notorious B.I.G. “Juicy”). The line between fiction and reality in hip-hop has blurred and the drug dealers become rappers Notorious B.I.G., Snoop Doggy Dog, Fat Joe, Jay-Z, Master P. are just a few of the more popular (and lucrative) examples. The violence needed to become a successful drug dealer bled into the reality of being successful rappers. Even rappers who had more middle class upbringings, like Tupac, fed into the brute stereotype because it sold albums. The “badass” moved from being an agent for revolution to a puppet for capitalism. Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac paid for their roles with their young lives.
The flip side of this image is the searing of it in the minds of white America. The brute image was created to instill fear of free Blacks into the minds of the post Civil War white consciousness, particularly white women. The conglomeration of the sexually indiscriminate and uncontrollable Black buck with the violent animalistic Black brute is what can be seen today most in media images. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was the visual marriage of the two images locking the Black man’s sexuality with violence leaving the brute image as a predominate staple of American popular culture. In the “Law and Order” clip I showed in class the perception of the threat of rape, whether real or imagined, got a man killed. The perception of violence got Amadou Diallo massacred. Emmett Till was murdered for allegedly looking (sometimes the story is whistling) at a white woman in Mississippi in the 1950’s. It’s a commonly held perception that Black men are dangerous and they are being sold as such. From the Supreme Court to Brentwood, even outside of the hip-hop community Black men are dangerous.
But are they? I think so. I think so not because of the threat of physical violence but as a Black woman who is acutely aware of the psychic violence that is currently breaking down the Black community and communal ties. I’m aware of being called a bitch or a ho or being perceived as a gold digger or being bought for the price of a dinner. The media doesn’t tell me that’s how I’m treated, experience does. The rapper Nas released a song “You Owe Me”; he tells a young lady that she owes him her body because he’s bought her things. Female rappers aren’t blameless either; they perpetuate the wonton sexuality slave masters used as an excuse for their rapes of female slaves. Yet my concern is with the Black men, because it’s costing them their lives.
Sweetback was necessary viewing for the Black Panther Party because a Black character standing up for himself and rebuking a comfortable life as a nonentity was unprecedented. He used his sex to get himself out of trouble and even his sexual encounters were communal activities. He moved from being controlled by it to controlling it and using it as power. There are still flaws in that schematic, but he’s not a victim. Nino Brown killed his “brother” G-Money in New Jack City over what came down to his capitalistic individualism at the expense of the Cash Money Brothers (his created community), but still in the midst of that, a woman he “took” from G-Money. The notion of being “your brother’s keeper” keeps literally getting shot to bits and forget about being “your sister’s keeper”. There is no responsibility taken by these men (and women) for their actions. Yes- as an artist one should have the right to express themselves however they see fit. But it’s the proliferation of this one image for more than a century that is obviously gotten into our psyches as well. The saddest part is that as evidenced in the Fat Joe and R. Kelly video “We Thuggin’” simply being Black and Latino means thug… because they’re singing, dancing, talking about what they have and ogling women. That’s not thuggin’ not by Nino Brown’s standards. The contemporary rappers with their “ghetto fabulous thug” mentality now equate sex with money with power and it’s destroying the community- by my estimation.

This is an incomplete thought, but I saw the new Spike Lee and I have to say something. It was the top grossing film this weekend and the most money in a single weekend Spike has ever made. But I didn’t like it. It reeked of Spike Lee. The story was hot. The actors were hot. Denzel was doing that thing he does now, like Bill Duke in the police scene in Juice, a lot of “smiley talking”. Spike didn’t write it but it still sunk into preachy monologues. How?

And the reality is- Jodie Foster’s character was bad as hell. She was the kind of woman that I still hope to be when I grow up-only with a stronger moral compass. But how could the word “cunt” still be used to describe her? No, really? (Spike didn’t write this one either.) Isn’t bitch bad enough anymore to describe assertive women with questionable ethical behavior? I think bitch still works.

Oh and did I mention the part where the female bank robber is remembered for her rack and in trying to identify her, the women who fit the big busted profile are asked to unzip their tops.

Okay, that’s enough for now. I’ll have more later.

For those of you who have received my mix CD’s as December holiday gifts… you’re familiar with what is affectionately called “The Cheemix”. Today is a day for that. I’ve posted a bunch of other things I’ve written for various school projects. Here’s another:

Claim: Femme Fatale or What’s Brian DePalma Thinking?

A lesbian jewelry heist at the Cannes Film Festival leads to a double cross leads to a suicide leads to a stolen identity leads to a photographer leads to… who knows? In this weaving heavy handed film laden with inside jokes thumbing its nose at Hollywood and Bizarro world Hitchcockian references, subplots are really plots and seeming randomness becomes the key to understanding. Twists and reversals make a script great. Yanking peoples emotional chains and playing cinematic mind games generally makes people angry. Yet, and this is the big one, it’s fascinating. You might want to throw things but you have to know what’s going to happen. That’s the most annoying part of this movie. Once you come to grips with the fact that nothing is what it seems you have to know the truth. You know the whole things a set-up, but how? Why? It’s hard to say it’s horrible. (Not impossible, though). It might be- but not boring. This is a film for adults. Not just because of the utterly bizarre and gratuitous striptease scene, but because you have to think. You might not want to or like it… but think you will. As a side note: Rebecca Romijn- Stamos is a model. Hello? A model. Brian DePalma keeping her silent during the first quarter of the movie doesn’’t erase the fact that she’’s the “Femme Fatale” of the title and eventually, to let us know what’’s going on, she must speak.

HAIKU:
Too much deja vu
Antonio Banderas
Really, what’s going on?

Roger and Me
Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me” is a perfect metaphor for the search for the culpability of corporate America. The film follows Moore searching for GM chief executive Roger Smith to bring him to Flint, Michigan to see the devastation the closing of the plants (which were the economic backbone of the city) has done to the community. This film follows a clear path and there are no extraneous moments. It is a three year culmination of events detailing the personal and communal tragedies of a formally prosperous town. Though this vision is decidedly anti- corporation and is edited in a way that shows both sides, the weight of the argument on the side of the fired auto workers is clear.
Moore’s genius in this film is his clarity. From the beginning the viewer is clear on his position and can thusly posit themselves in a way that avoids manipulation. Even those not suffering from the lay-offs and with a set position of “it’s not that bad” can see how it is that bad for others. Those feeling the effects of the economic downsizing can feel they have a champion and know their story was told. Those outside of Flint can make their own decisions and still have a choice in their opinion on the facts of the case. Yet, Moore has told the audience from the beginning whose side he’s on. He told his history in the town and how he’s a part of it. Although it’s a documentary this film isn’t a documentary with no comment. Moore has the advantage of having a personal history with these people in addition to being a journalist, which adds to the different dimensions of his evaluation.
While trying to interview Roger Smith and bring him to Flint to see the ghost town it had become, Moore made a poignant comment on corporate America. Corporate America was given a body and a name- Roger Smith. The elusiveness at finding someone to hold responsible in corporations is clear. The levels of bureaucracy are so deep and multifaceted, yet Moore’s tenacity and subsequent failure at even speaking to Roger Smith is a painful illustration of how powerless individuals can be in the face of corporate power. This story doesn’t have a happy ending. People are displaced. Communities are destroyed and it’s “nobody’s fault”… it’s just how business has to be in a competitive capitalist society. That’s a sad but true statement that was beautifully illuminated in this film.