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August 8, 2005

late rizer (updated 8.9.05)

Finally got around to seeing David LaChapelle's much-hyped Rize last night. Overall verdict is that I'm glad to have been introduced to krumping and its putative inventor Tommy the Clown, but my feeling of gratitude doesn't extend to director LaChappelle. The images of dancers and dancing LaChapelle recorded make for genuinely great clips (thanks, Dave!), but the non-dancing parts of the doc suffer from a woeful lack of ambition and imagination.

I'd deliberately avoided Rize while apartment hunting in LA last month, as bounding out to see it at that particular juncture felt like self-conscious (cynical?) geographic bandwagon jumping. (Kind of like someone moving to NYC post 9/11 and immediately trying to autodidact/google themselves into terror connoisseur status, if not quite veteran.) Being introduced to a given black scene by any form of professional media (alternative weeklies, for example, or independent films) always induces a series of anxieties in me - jealousy that I hadn't gotten there before Livingston, followed by depression at having projected myself into the Livingston (native informant?) slot in the first place. Rize is just a rote journey of pseudo-discovery, though, so the worst I experienced was a newbie-Angeleno's cartographic confusion about the neighborhoods and streets depicted on screen. (South LA vs South Central, anyone?)

Outside of scoring cool points for the director and tugging at liberal heartstrings, Rize's main conceptual ambition seems to be winning the essentialist side-bet that's played out between the dance sequences and ghetto uplift set-pieces. LaChapelle uses soundtrack, ethnographic source footage and his subjects' pre-installed conceits about the souls of black folk to craft a kind of Afrocentrism-for-Dummies sub-plot, one where the goal is to go from West Africa to Watts in as few steps as possible. Unfortunately, Rize lacks the context or rigor to succeed as any kind of anthropology or ethnography, being instead a kind of Dr. Phil meets Robert Farris Thompson amalgam where getting out of bed while poor and black is enough to earn you installation as a streetcorner santero, mambo or houngan. In that kind of slack, credulous cultural framework, krumping's somatic innovation (pop your chest and ass fast enough and some curious-looking shit happens) isn't offered for consideration as African American dance, but for consumption as a tasty piece cultural resistance cut from the eternal mystery meat (loin?) of a transcendental, Afro-Atlantic ecstasy.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing we should throw the conceit of Afro-Atlantic ecstasy out the window. I wouldn't presume to cut a movie about a place I'd never been to pieces unless I believed I was armed/authorized by some formed of unique underlyingness, be it blackness or good filmmaking or conceptual consistency. The problem is that Rize doesn't take its own premise seriously enough to interrogate it. The now-and-foreverist cultural frame lets LaChapelle off the hook of having to put any effort into getting beneath the thick layer of ghettocentric cliche that krumping swaths itself in the second it aspires to the status of movement. By taking everyone and everything at face/dance value, Rize effectively forecloses whole potential avenues of exploration, like, for example, how krumping connects (or not) to Hollywood's various vogues of the black dancer, from breakdancing flicks to the ubiquitous stripper of hip hop video and movies. (It would have been nice for LaChapelle to note that while the early masterworks of b-boy cinema are set in the Bronx, almost all the later commercial successes - Breakin', or You Got Served - take place in LA.)

And speaking of vogues: what's with how so many of the male dancers in Rize scanned (to me at least) as queer? (My gaydar was probably primed by intertextual background noise about LaChappelle and his photographic "muse," transsexual Amanda Lapore, with a less work-friendly image here.) Gay, straight or indifferent, how masculinity gets performed in krumping was worthy of more explicit excavation, but the purportedly unabashed LaChappelle keeps a strangely chaste distance from the question, this even as his camera soaks in images of black men daintily applying make-up, or prowling across leopard-print satin sheets, or squatting down to do the stripper dance, beefy ass cheeks flying. Gender provocateur Chapelle takes up the question of the stripper dance from an entirely heterosexual and parental POV, i.e., is it "nasty" for an eight year old girl to slide her crotch across the floor like a dog with worms. (Rize's answer - surprise, surprise - is an emphatic "no.") Sure, as numerous on-screen informants testify, the stripper dance has long evolved past its origins as a form of female sexual display. But the film's actual ass-enabled sequences belie the feint towards asexual respectability, each enthusisatic twerk articulating a clearly gendered grammar governing when and where the ass is to be deployed in anyone's face. (It's largely absent in hyper-masculine inter-crew battles, which focus on the chest, but seems fine in ecstatic, familial intra-crew ciphers. A third form of usage comes in the crews who disavow use of the stripper dance altogether, their forbearance bandied about like a point of honor.)

Rize confers on Tommy the Clown the credit for inventing krumping by combining his clown schtick with the stripper dance. (Although most people seem to buy Rize's chronology there is inevitably some controversy about this.) You can easily riff your way through a plausible chain of ass-causality starting with Tommy: clown gets to doing the stripper dance in the largely female and todder-lish arena of the ghetto birthday party, dance jumps a few gridlines thanks to that viral-culture-mutant thing, and all of a sudden young black men all over LA are escaping the dangers of gang life by getting down on all fours and shaking their money-makers like, well, their lives depended on it. It's a wonderfully loopy and clearly incomplete scenario whose twists, turns and decision points would have made for a great documentary. Too bad LaChapelle lacked the courage (or the engagement) to film it.

Posted by ebogjonson in city of angels, screened, on August 8, 2005 12:56 AM