ebogjonson.com

May 26, 1998
BLACK BEATTY

[ebog note: Why is EBOG reposting old articles?]

Cruising the Negro streets for some kind of fix, some kind of juice, energy, or spark with which to reanimate moribund arts and politics has a long history, one that's managed to produce some interesting things despite the distorting effects of white America's ongoing quest for darktown excitements and sexual chiaroscuro. There may be something chillingly mercenary about white folks who use the black inner city as the backdrop for their perennial passion plays of outlawry, idealism, and transgression, but that doesn't mean there aren't definite sparks and energies to be had up in that particular ghetto motherfucker nonetheless--this no matter how many white folks get off in weird, sometimes embarrassing ways while in the pursuit of their fantasies of getting funky with the other. And anyway, at this late date, slumming is a national pastime on which white people have no monopoly. The sort of ecstatic niggerization that's landed Warren Beatty and Bulworth kudos from here to The New Yorker is the stock-in-trade of legions of black folks too, professional others who invoke the ghetto and its narrow band of realness for authentication and moral authority every single day of their lives.

No, if there's anything off about Bulworth it's not so much Beatty's belief in the old liberal verities or the sorbetlike, palate-clearing powers of black people, but the little details that are supposed to give that belief life. There is something admittedly odd and curious about an old-school Hollywood idol rapping and gamboling with the tuneful lovelies of Compton, California, but the odd and curious thing is how fundamentally ludicrous a spectacle Beatty's created, a kind of sideshow that speaks as much truth to the ridiculous as it does to power. Beatty's film is chock-full of extended and admittedly commercially risky tough talk, but by choosing to package its sermons in satirical, surreal images of the star rapping badly about insurance companies or grinding against Halle Berry like some wild, supernaturally animated noodle, Bulworth inadvertently chokes the life out of the very people it wants to speak for, reducing the particular textures and colors of inner-city life, style, and especially art to the broad strokes of an abstracted political truth about disparities between rich and poor. That truth is important and raceless to a certain extent, but there comes a point when, if an aging white guy really and truly wants to be anyone's nigger, he has to display what the kids like to call skills, abilities that J.Billington Bulworth sorely lacks by satirical design. Folks might want to hold the truth-and-content side as distinct from the skills side, but in a country where white boys from coast to coast can do quite passable imitations of black boys, why settle for Warren Beatty's unless you believe black people are just plain funny?