Bamboozled(2000)
dir. Spike Lee
The minstrel show, on prime time.
Where to watch: Rent only: Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango At Home (~$3.99)Letterboxd ↗
Pierre Delacroix, a Black TV writer, pitches a modern minstrel show as a deliberate insult to get fired, and the network loves it. It becomes a hit, and the satire spins out of his control. It was shot on digital video and is one of Lee's most uncomfortable films.
Why it’s here
The film turns the lens on who profits from caricature and who agrees to wear it. What's punk is that Lee refuses to make it comfortable: the audience laughing is the target. What's pedagogical is media literacy in its harshest form: how a joke becomes a product, and how the person making it stops being able to say no. It contains harsh imagery by design. Pairs with Sorry to Bother You and Network.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- North America
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine That Warped America's Brain!
David Mikics (ed.)
Why MAD taught kids to distrust everything.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Rachel Held Evans
She followed the rules. The rules lost.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Accidental Death of an Anarchist
Dario Fo
The system slips on its own banana peel.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
bell hooks
Who gets to count as a woman?
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
America (The Book)
Jon Stewart & The Daily Show Writers
A fake civics textbook. More accurate than the real one.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Antiracist Baby
Ibram X. Kendi
Woke from day one.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Black Boy
Richard Wright
The autobiography Jim Crow didn't want written.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Caste
Isabel Wilkerson
India, America, Nazi Germany. Three caste systems. One logic.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST