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Village Voice, June 27, 1995
Blaxploitation, Part I

Nobody showed for my blaxploitation viewing party except for one woman who wanted "Chocolate" as a pseudonym. Cole had gotten green around the gills he night before and taken to a sick bed, while W. called me from a friend's place to explain that they were making "barbecue" and wouldn't be over until later. (That must have been some good barbecue, because they didn't show either.)

I think Chocolate was a little annoyed by the lack of attendance ("You mean it's just me?"), but I knew she wouldn't let me down. In college, we were the kind of overly ironic black people who did recreational drugs and watched cult films and were therefore considered liabilities to the race. These days, reminders of that time tend to fill Chocolate with a nervous nostalgia. I didn't have any weed to take the edge off (it was with the "barbecue," unfortunately), so I just popped a tape in and hoped for the best.

Chocolate had already seen Superfly so we started with Foxy Brown. As the trailers spooled by she asked who was going to be at "the conference."

"What conference?"

"The conference that they're showing all these movies for."

I told her Film Forum was having a retrospective of blaxploitation flicks and these were the first two being screened. She rolled her eyes at me. I wondered out loud if the genre maybe embarrassed her.

"No, I just want to know why they're showing them. White people run the Film Forum, right?"

"As far as I can tell."

"So why are they having it? 'Cause it's the summer so it's time for everybody to get loose or something?"

"I guess."

For a long while Chocolate only comments on Pam Grier's breasts. "Look at her boobs," she says. "They're nice and big and she has this old fashioned black woman's body. She'd have to be harder now to be a star, like she worked out, but she has a really flat stomach even though she's pretty curvy."

"Do you feel affirmed by that?"

"Only when she's not getting beat up and raped."

Chocolate decided near the middle of Foxy Brown that she didn't really like it. "Does Pam Grier always play a prostitute?"

I told her that I had seen her play a nurse, a voodoo priestess, and a magazine photographer, but Chocolate wasn't impressed: "She gets tied up and raped by those rednecks. How come that all goes on forever but the scenes with her [black] boyfriend are so short? I thought these were supposed to be for black audiences. Why would a black audience want to watch a black woman tied up getting raped by some fat rednecks?"

"'Cause it's summertime and everybody wants to get loose?"

"No, seriously."

"What do you expect? American International Pictures was always into the exploitation end of things, like biker flicks and low-budget horror." I knew something about this from when sex was the main event in blaxploitation flicks for me, a neat way to pass off more prurient interests as film connoisseurship and race consciousness. In college, all three melded into endlessly loopy discussions of theory. A room full of my friends (high as kites to the last lit/cinema major) could sit and spin meditations on intentionality and "low" art, on black masculine posturing, on hustling as a functional metaphor for the black intellectual classes and the cut of Pam Grier's bell-bottom pants, as one of us rewound over the same two minutes of Scream Blacula Scream like it was some wigged out Zapruder film.

This wasn't quite happening with Foxy Brown today, though.

"I thought this was supposed to be really funky and crazy," says Chocolate, a little sad. "This is just crazy and trashy."

"Don't you like her clothes and her Afro?"

"The Afro's cool and I like what she's wearing now [black leather pants with a short black leather jacket, a black and white blouse cut on a low horizontal line across her breast] but I don't know..."

"So you don't like it."

"I don't think they should be discarded. I mean, they're like those black collectibles, like those porcelain Mammies and little lawn jockey salt shakers. I don't think they should be destroyed, but I wouldn't want to own one."

Things had gotten a little grim so I ask Chocolate if she thought Foxy Brown's rape is where Quentin Tarantino got the idea for the rape scene in Pulp Fiction.

"Huh?"

"Well, the rapists are rednecks in both movies and the ropes are very s/m, hence the Gimp."

Chocolate finishes the last of the beer off, mulling that one over. "I can see Sam Jackson being Priest from Superfly...."

"Right. They're both trying to get-out-the-game."

"...but you're saying Ving Rhames is really Pam Grier."

"Exactly. He's Foxy and Bruce Willis is a young Tarantino watching this movie, only he's so twistedly into the black charisma thing that he can't decide whether to identify with Pam Grier or just get in line to fuck her."

"But if that were the case, then Quentin-slash-Bruce Willis would want to get with Ving Rhames."

"True, but Quentin doesn't run deep that way, so he compartmentalizes his desires so that his Bruce Willis stand-in can rescue Foxy-slash-Ving Rhames..."

"Acting out his black-hero identification."

"Right--while he also gets to fuck another Pam Grier stand-in himself because he's married to a black nurse in Pulp Fiction. And Pam Grier plays a nurse in Coffy."

"But that's a whole other movie!"

I smile big, white, triumphant teeth at her. "Your point being?"

Another friend comes over during Foxy Brown's last five minutes. When he chides me for not having enough beer, Chocolate takes to calling him Ripple, O-Dog, Forty-Dog, et cetera. I tell him he'll just be Forty in my piece.

"That's cool. Hey-this is Foxy Brown, right? The thing about this movie is that you're like six minutes in and--Breasts."

"It is," says Chocolate.

"That or she's about to go down on this white guy. Or is that Coffy?"

Chocolate suddenly gasps. One of Foxy's compatriots is about to cut the white drug dealer's penis off.

"Aw shit," says Forty. "This is the best part."

It happens off-screen but Chocolate can't watch anyway.

"Curiously enough," opines Forty, "a lot of these movies were written by white people. That's deep: white guys writing about getting their dicks cut off by black women with big tits."

"This is good too." Foxy is taking the penis to the guy's evil boss-cum-girlfriend and Forty is breaking the scene down for us. "Now boss lady's gone through so much in this movie, right? Business all fucked up, probably going to jail, but what really fucks her up is when her boyfriend gets his dick chopped off. She's like: 'Shoot me!' Like she goes through a whole bunch of shit but she can't live without the dick."

Forty and I go on a beer run and then pop Superfly in. Chocolate gets all excited, clapping her hands together and getting all churchy. Curtis Mayfield had Forty humming and lip-synching.

"Yo! Is that James Baldwin?"

It's the opening credits and two junkies are making plans to rob Priest of his drug money.

"What?"

"Rewind that. That dude looks just like James Baldwin."

We've had enough to drink to give the possibility that James Baldwin had a heretofore undiscovered cameo in Superfly gets a good deal of discussion. This goes on until all of a sudden Priest is in bed with one of his white women.

"She's just a trick." says Forty. "Priest loves his black woman."

"How so?" I ask.

"He's just using those white women. Not like Shaft who was into that whole Greenwich Village bohemia thing."

"Shaft had a white woman?" asks Chocolate.

"That's ALL he had. That's what always trips me out about it. Shaft has this natural but sleeps with white woman in Greenwich Village, and Priest has this crazy perm [VV editor's note: actually, that was Ron O'Neal's unprocessed hair] but loves his black woman."

As if by divine intervention we find ourselves a the scene where someone yells at Priest, "Look at me, you white lookin'--!"

"Priest is the tragic mulatto," says Forty with mock sadness. "But, damn: he's sure got all the dark-skinned brothers out working for him."

"Chocolate: "And sleeping with all the white women for tricks."

Superfly slides by in fits and spurts, even though we think we're watching it very closely. I ask Chocolate and Forty if they noticed any weird slippage effect.

"It's like there's a hidden movie inside," says Chocolate. "Like that long part with all the photographs in the middle about cutting and selling the coke. I've seen this before but I was really surprised by that, like we were watching the director's cut or something."

Forty agrees. I ask him if he was stoned the last time he saw Superfly, "Yeah?" Forty says.

"Well, about now your first buzz would be wearing off," I explain, "and you'd be getting sleepy, so unless you fire up another joint you aren't really concentrating, whereas you were smoked out for the beginning, so it's all vivid."

"Yeah," says Chocolate. "I thought it was just because the ending was kind of anticlimactic, like the third act wasn't written properly."

"That means you fucked up, Bro," says Forty. "How are you gonna set something up like this and not have any weed? It's like, unscientific."