It appears that this week's critical readings have most students confused versus enlightened. This is where our interpretation of theory, even my explanation of theory, can fail if we do not have a context to apply it to our everyday lives. I want you to think about Annemarie Bean's concept of "double inversion" as an act of "recycling". Think of In Dahomey as a play where Black actors "recycle" and then "reuse" images of Blacks as conceived by Whites. Actors such as Bert Williams an Aida Overton Walker refashioned, or "inverted" these images into attempts to subvert the negative images presented by White minstrels. In terms of gender, and the concept of "double inversion", Bean refers to the performance of "color" vs race--White minstrels taking on the gender and "color" identities of black women and men. Black women minstrels would take on the role of "double inversion" --through their performance of "male" characters. Their performances were an attempt was to invert ( thus inversion) the previous representations of Black men and women.
Keeping these ideas in mind--how might you relate these concepts to contemporary popular "race and gender" performances ? Examples includeMarlon and Shawn Wayans playing White women, Eddie Murphy's performanc eof African American women in Norbit and White men in Nutty Professor , Martin Lawrence's performance of Black Women in Big Mama's House, C Thomas Howel's performance of a Black man in Soul Man, Theyk White Rapper showetc? How theater come to influence these types of performances? Do you see traces of minstrelsy in these works at all? How do they differ from both White and Black minstrelsy? Are their any "inversions"?
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I hope this makes sense. I've been watching VH1's The White Rapper Show, and I think a lot of the ideas we've been studying apply, albeit indirectly. Though it does seem to come from a genuine love of black culture, one could say many of the contestants on the show are performing a sort of minstrelsy by acting "hood" or whatever despite their very questionable backgrounds. For instance this one dude John Brown is from Davis, CA and calls himself the King of the Burbs. He's clearly grown up in a sheltered, affluent environment, but he speaks in a decidedly urban way, wears giant tee's with rappers' faces on them, and keeps talking about something he calls "the ghetto revival." At first I really hated the show because it's not really about who's the best rapper. None of the contestants on the show are particularly talented, and the amount of actual rapping that goes on is negligible. But I think what the producers (the Ego Trip collective of hip-hop writers, none of whom are white) are trying to do is invert the stereotypical black images that the white wannabe-rappers are portraying, by putting the contestants through challenge after challenge that prove their ignorance of African American culture/issues. At bottom, I think, is an attempt to reclaim hip-hop as something inherently black, and maybe a desire to take away from whites the trend-setting power they now seem to have over the medium. Both of which I think are futile. But it's really interesting if you watch the show this way, instead of as a legitimate skill-based contest (a la diddy's making the band, haha).
Also, I think Tyler Perry's work probably applies to this whole topic, but I've never seen any of his movies, so I'm not too qualified to elaborate.
I think that Eddie Murhpy's characters in The Nutty Professor are strongly representative of modern minstrelsy. The grandmother represents the Mammy character to a tee, with her very memorable "Hercules, Hercules" bit. Actually, Eddie Murphy's roles in recent years have often involved playing stereotypes that hold over from Minstrelsy. These have included an Uncle Tom character entering a haunted mansion and a mix of the Buck and a trickster character in The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
TNT had a "Will Smith movie night" last week, featuring Men in Black 1 and 2 and Wild Wild West. While watching these movies I became very frustrated with Smith, an actor I have always held in high esteem. Smith is now considered an "everyman" in the entertainment world and I have been watching him since he was the Fresh Prince. The problem now is, how to deal with the paradox of being a black everyman.
Smith is always portrayed as the black guy surrounded by many whites. This also goes for his target audience, white kids like me who just love Will Smith...So, when a situation calls for Smith to say something racially witty (Men in Black's line directed at Tommy Lee Jones "The driver used to be black but he kept getting pulled over" and the INNUMBERBALE lines of the same sort) he sounds like a white man. Or, if he needs to sound tough (Indepdence Day's dog fight when Smith yells "Oh no, you did NOT shoot that green shit at me!") he makes it sound right because it's slang.
The paradox to me is this: should I dislike Will Smith because he says whatever the producer or writers tell him to and makes millions of dollars off his blockbusters? Or do I accept him for what he has been to me, a charming guy who I've grown up watching and would pay 11 bucks to go see in anything he does? Smith is successful because he is the black guy who can play the white guy, but he's still black.
I'm thankful that Smith has not breached the line of going too far for entertainment's sake. He has made responsible choices since he has become one of the world's biggest actors even though he got there by playing witty, over-sexed, trigger happy black men. I have always stood behind Smith but watching films like I saw last week made me think about him in a larger sense.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is the characters Tyler Perry portrays in his plays and movies. The Madea character is clearly a throwback to the Mammy character. I also think that Tyler Perry's playwriting style can be linked to the style of In Dahomey and carrying on the tradition of the black musicial, with the actors breaking into songs much in the manner that they do in In Dahomey .
As far as the other examples mention above, it's been a while since I've seen most of those movies but I thinking back on them I think most of those roles simply playing into the sterotypes for the most part, because they are played for laughs. Especially in like the Nutty Professor and Big Mama's House. I think what people find often find funny is something that they can recognize. Which why I think that the urban comedy plays very well with white audience because there is that playing into sterotypes present.
I agree that this type of comedy is funny but it can be considered another form of minstrelsy. When men depict women it's not in a positive way it's always stereotypical. Eddie Murphy always plays big fat black women and that in itself is disrespectful. The White Rapper show to me is funny but it just shows how global hip hop has become. It's okay to enjoy rap music and indulge yourself in hip-hop culture but I think the whole acting black is a strange concept because what does that exactly mean? What do most black people act like? If you can pinpoint this then how many of those things are stereotypes? It's a slippery slope.
Thinking about all of the cross-dressing, cross-gender performances I have seen, which I'll admit, have been all been in the context of comedy (i.e. The Nutty Professor, Big Mama's House, White Chicks), there doesn't seem to be racially subversive, not even a little. In an interview with the Wayans, Marlon said that Shawn was looking at Paris and Nicky Hilton in a magazine and just said, "We should play White chicks". They chose to do the movie because it would be funny, and even though it trys to be deep, it merely focuses on the misunderstandings between men and women regardless of race. "Big Mama's House" is the same way. The producers of that movie probably thought that it would be funny to dress up hip, fast-talking Martin Lawrence in a moo-moo and have him talk in a female Southern drawl. And now, with Eddie Murphy's "Norbit", the producers want to (a.) capitalize on Eddie Murphy's recent "Dreamgirls" success and (b.) even before "Dreamgirls", get Eddie Murphy back into the American mindset as the guy who can play various characters (a send up to "The Nutty Professor"). All of the movies I listed and the performances therein rely on stereotypes and minstrelsy to make them funny. But as for ironic nudges to the audience about how the stereotypes are wrong? Don't think so.
I agree with a lot of what has been said already, esp in regards to the observation that today's gender and racial swapping performances are merely done for the sake of laughter, there are no inversions. Today's popular entertainment does not recognize subversion, it only seeks to get people to spend money and the easiest way is to give them something they can recognize the humor in easily. Today's audience of popular entertainment wants to be fully engaged and anesthetized by mindless entertainment. The main reason for this, I think, is that bringing in social and political issues are too heavy to them and it distracts from the entertainment, but I dont think there is a clear distinction between being overtly political and just being aware in your art and performances. As, I said before Dave Chappelle is an artist who was well aware and used his creativity to address problems he saw and he used subversion and some race/gender performances. All that other stuff is just for laughs.
I think one thing that really stood out to me when I was reading the Bean article was the comparison between than and now. One thing that stood out was how the black women, often played black men as more dignified characters. Although it was still all about comedy, these characters were not always idiot scarecrows. However, today, when the opposite happens, black men play black women, the dignity of black women is often lowered. They create these loud, obnoxious, overbearing women (Norbit, Big Mama's House). Its a comedic twist on the way black men allegedly look at black women. Its like whereas before when blacks portrayed one another there was this desire to find some way of uplifting one another, while slowly poking fun, today we bash each other and try to assert ourselves as the superior gender.
as i look back on this topic, i have a hard time completly buying into the idea of inversion. while aida overton walker certainly represented herself based on white sterotypes, she was also making money. when the show wasnt running, she was teaching aristocrats the cakewalk. there is a certain utilitarian quality to the subjectification that has been present in our collective history. presently i see this in the instances you set forth. do the wayans brothers intend to comment on the establishment of "whitness" by assuming white characters in the movie "White Girls"? Possibly. But in the end, they are doing it because it is a film which they will be paid. Just like in "Bamboozled", there is an element of inversion, or intention behind the action. I am sure of that. but you have to call a spade a spade, and in this case, the wayans brothers are in my opinion getting paid, and racial theory is only viewed as secondary, if at all.
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