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November 1, 2005

imaginary dope for imaginary ghettos

Department of apropos of nothing: jimi iz recently posted a filmclash wherein Deep Cover and Shaft go mano-a-mano. I don't have much to say about Shaft, but Deep Cover's is one of my fave flicks. How come? In no particular order, a few points of interest are sketched out below:

1 - Deep Cover's McGuffin - i.e., Fishburne and Goldblum's initial quest to produce and market a side-effect-free super-high - has always struck me as vaguely science-fictional, afrofuturistic even. For one, their chemical grail is clearly on some next-level, as-yet-unmade shit, a veritable tricorder of ghetto speed: non-addictive, aphrodisiacal, hang-over free. (For those of you untainted by drugs or their associated culture, in real world terms the pair's hypothetical shit seems to sit somewhere between ecstasy and some kind of nicey-nice meth, with a pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg thrown in a la Tyrone Biggums' recollection of his first taste of crack.)

The happy making super-drug is just an opening gambit, of course, a combustible designed to launch Deep Cover on its ultimate arc. That the super-drug thing is as doomed as Jeff G's homoerotic dream of a coked-out, irony-driven black-Jewish comity doesn't undermine its appeal as an initial, vaguely utopian feint, though, the pair's search for a transformative urban upper not so much sitting in contrast to R. Raygun-era memes of mutant crack-babies and zombie base-heads but running in parallel, an alternate history to the actual age of crack.

Perversely, it's precisely the 80s and 90s nightmare tropes about crack cocaine that make possible (if not exactly necessary) the slew of later, science-fictional tropes for drug production that you'll find in any flick from here to New Jack City where enterprising heads cook product in NASA-style clean rooms tucked into the corners of abandoned tenements. (I call this "perverse" because coke/crack is largely pre-Paleolithic from a technology-standpoint, concerned as it is with the power of, like, fire.) The 80s/90s image of colored drug addiction, forced as it was to answer to three different masters (white racism, black middle class embarassment and hip hop's amoral fetishization of the hustle, i.e., hate the game, not the mind/body destroying player) was always more than the insufficient images Lalaland was built/intending to provide, so one of the ways flicks processed the excess energy was to recast the security and communications technology used by street corner hustlers as proto-cyberpunk. Think Ice-T in Ricochet, where dude isn't just Denzel's bad seed pal from back in the day, but the owner-proprietor of a drug factory so futuristic it could have been lifted straight out of Tom Clancy or lesser William Gibson. Or think (in a later example) Belly, where DMX hears about an esoteric next-gen heroin while watching MTV News and Louie Rankin's Lennox faces off against a razorgirl-type assassin.

(True. You're thinking the 90s were all about recasting current consumer technology as the first glimmer of the cyberpunk future - "You will..." are now / did - but I think there's something extra going on in the AA directed drug flicks like Deep Cover.)

2 - The cop/not-cop war of I-against-I that has Fishburne agonizing throughout Deep Cover is a classic syndrome that's afflicted movie narcs, house negroes, spies and hostages alike since, uh, jump street. It's also the central conceit of Philip K. Dick's 1977 sci-fi novel A Scanner Darkly, wherein a drug called "Substance D" splits protagonist Bob Arctor into warring personalities, one belonging to a/the cop, the other to his drug dealer quarry.

Among other glories, Scanner Darkly contains the single most amazing stoner set piece ever, wherein some high-as-a-kite motherfuckers argue at length (and convincingly) about whether or not a bike they've found has seven, ten or twelve gears. It really has to be read (high) to be believed.

For an additional feedback loop into item #1, consider that the racial problematic (crudely stated, doubled consciousness) Deep Cover translates into genre-pic dialectics (i.e., to cop or not to cop) is, much like its hypothetical super-drug, almost immediately science fictional. I mean, what's double consciousness if not a sort of duel between homunculi? (Or, how about a Matrix-type reality effect produced by the implant that's been stuck deep in the metaphorical rump of black identity by white supremacy?)

If I remember correctly, Scanner Darkly avoids any explicit entanglement with race (there is some kind of SoCal Latino / Central American / Indian overlay) but so what? The nut of all afrofuturist fanboy enthusiasm is ever the sneaking suspicion that any science-fictional notion worth its alien salt encodes (and thus lays bare) some aspect of the IRL race dynamic. That kitchen-sinking, singularity-craving impulse may be a tad adolescent, but that doesn't make it necessarily false. In a Baconian Universe (as in Kevin Bacon), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man sits a mere two star degrees away from H.G. Wells'.

John Amos was in All Over Again (2001) with Robert Loggia
Robert Loggia was in Greatest Story Ever Told, The (1965) with Claude Rains

John Amos was in Ralph Ellison: An American Journey.
Claude Rains was in the Invisible Man. Two steps, just like I said.

3 - Speaking of Baconian universes, Deep Cover screenwriter Michael Tolkin also co-wrote Deep Impact, where mother Earth gets KA-BLATTED by an asteroid on a black president's watch. His directorial debut was The Rapture, which also pondered the connection between late 20th Century forms of debasement and transcendental utopia, Mimi Roger's swinger finding god just in time for the second coming. Go figure.

4 - Finally, Deep Cover contains one of the best crackhead set pieces ever. Lots of heads will claim Chris Rock's Pookie from New Jack City and some hold out for Sam Jackson's Gator for Jungle Fever. The dudes with chronic masturbation issues fantasize double Halle Berry features from Losing Isaiah and the aforementioned Jungle Fever, and those of you got here yesterday are rooting for Chappelle's Biggums. All legit points of view, but Deep Cover's Kamala Lopez Dawson offers a bar-setting clinic. First off is the fact that Lopez-Dawson engages her single, key scene with the rabid, desperate gusto of the Hollywood C-lister taking their last/best shot for the brass ring. Her cracky Belinda tears through the genre's entire repertoire of effects with startling economy, ranging from the de rigueur "I'll suck your dick!" to the pathetic moment when the busted crackhead decides to monetize their own child. When Fishburne demurs on all counts, her crack-blunted pride erupts (the spark is tiny and internal: she mistakes his moral outrage for haggling, i.e., another market referendum on her value) sending Belinda into bang-zoom shifts of gear and timbre that transform her from an emblematic, impulse-control lacking social loser to a transcendent object of debasement. She dies at the end, of course, for eveyone's sins to be sure, but largely for her own.

It really is a great scene, and when I get some time I'll post a transcript of the dialogue with a chart outlining her zigs and zags.

eNd.

Posted by ebogjonson in screened, on November 1, 2005 4:00 PM

Comments

Posted by: Kamala Lopez-Dawson at February 4, 2006 1:26 AM