TWO FILMS DEPICT BLACK ACCOMMODATION TO WHITE POWER
When the major networks announced sitcom line-ups for fall 1999, not a single minority person was cast, though minor networks featured “The PJs” and “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer,” both filled with Black stereotypes. In Bamboozled, Director Spike Lee delivers a riposte to the networks, critiquing even the portrayal of Blacks in “The Jeffersons” and “The Cosby Show.” At the beginning of the film, Continental Network System Vice President Dunwitty (played by Michael Rapaport) demands at a staff meeting of his team of writers that they must come up with something new. Afterward, Dunwitty tells Pierre Delacroix (played by Damon Wayans), the only Black writer on the staff, that his proposed series about successful Blacks will not sell, so he must think up something spectacular. Delacroix soon spots two panhandlers, Manray and Womack, and decides to design a minstrel show for them as “Mantan”(played by Savion Glover) and “Sleep ‘N Eat” (played by Tommy Davison), who respectively tapdance and tell self-deprecating jokes as slaves on an Alabama plantation. Designed by Delacroix as a satirical response to Dunwitty to end Black stereotypes, he says “I want them to be offended. I want to wake America up.” However, the show proves to be a smash hit among White Americans, who give Delacroix an Emmy. Ultimately, the former panhandlers cannot take the humiliation and quit. After the film ends, a montage of clips shows how Black performers have been demeaned over the years on film and TV (but excludes Jinn’s bumbling valet, the Steppin Fetchit of last year’s Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace). Although longtime filmviewers are well aware of the sad history of how Blacks were exploited over the years, Spike Lee informs the younger generation anew but appears not to notice the nonstereotypic roles of Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, and many others. MH
In Men of Honor Carl Brashear is depicted as a quintessential American hero. Although the film is based on a true story, director George Tillman, Jr., has not made a biopic but rather has added dramatic flourishes to make an exciting and heartwarming story. Born into poverty at Sonora, Kentucky, we first see Brashear swimming at an early age by diving deep into the local swimming hole. His loving African American parents want him to finish school, but he stops at the seventh grade to help his aging father (played by Carl Lumbly), a dirt farmer, to avoid being evicted as a sharecropper. In 1961, according to the film, Brashear (now played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.) decides that his future is in the Navy, so he enlists. When Carl says farewell to his family, promising to return, his father tells him not to return but to do his best. Assigned to the U.S.S. Hoist in the South Pacific, where African Americans are only allowed to swim on certain days, he works in the galley as mess steward. Frustrated that he cannot use his swimming talent, Brashear decides one sweltering day to show his prowess by jumping into the sea and swimming toward a buoy, but he does so on Friday, a day reserved for whites to swim (instead of Tuesday, reserved for minorities). When he quickly proves that he is the best swimmer on board, he is reassigned as Deck Seaman. Soon, he observes a deep sea diver, Leslie “Billie” Sunday (played by Robert De Niro), rescued from an underwater mishap during a salvage operation. Sunday’s physicians inform him that due to a resulting embolism, deep sea diving is contraindicated, so he is reassigned to train deep sea divers in a base at Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1963. Brashear applies for the training, sending more than one hundred requests, and is admitted as the first African American ever to be trained as a deep sea diver. He graduates, despite many obstacles, from his seventh grade education to racial prejudice manifested in many forms and by most of those on the base–excluding a fellow trainee, the stuttering Mr. Snowhill (played by Michael Rapoport!). Sunday, who has become an alcoholic, is so impressed by the herculean feats of Brashear that he becomes his steadfast friend, standing by him during later challenges, though initially he had shown redneck prejudice due to the fact that he also had a sharecropper background. After graduation, Brashear is assigned in due course to the U.S.S. Hoist, where the mission is to retrieve a nuclear missile that accidentally fell into the ocean off the coast of Spain and to do so before Russian deep sea divers. Although successful in the mission, he later has his leg nearly cut in half due to an onboard accident. With a bum leg, he can no longer be a deep sea diver, whereupon he requests amputation so that he can resume his career. Physical therapy brings him up to par, and in 1968 Brashear appears before a board of inquiry to appeal a decision to deny his request to resume his career as a deep sea diver. His request is granted in a dramatic test involving a new and heavier diving suit (200 pounds) that he must wear while walking twelve steps forward. In 1970, he fulfills his ambition to reach the rank of Master Chief Navy Diver, and in 1977 he retires from the Navy. Men of Honor shows the depth of racial prejudice in the Navy despite President Harry Truman’s executive order of 1948 to desegregate the armed forces. Carl Brashear’s refusal to consider himself a victim and his preference to act honorably stands out in the film as a tribute to one man’s determination; we also gain respect for him as we view how he finds a girlfriend Jo (played by Aunjanue Ellie) at a Bayonne public library and becomes a proud husband and father. According to the film’s tagline, “History is made by those who break rules.” But one of the rules broken by the movie is to date Brashear’s enlistment as 1961, whereas he actually joined the Navy in 1948 on hearing about Truman’s desegregation order. In addition, the film offers a Pollyanna scenario for the solution of racial problems in the United States that clearly accepts blacks in a subordinate role until helped by white do-gooders. Nevertheless, Brashear is one of only seven enlisted men now enshrined in the Naval Archives; the story is based on an oral history transcribed onto 164 pages. MH