8 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Any genre should include among its subgenres some form of the heroic epic. But black film has been characterized by an absence of the hero in the tradition of El Cid, King Arthur, or even King Chaka of the Zulus. Instead, black heroic tradition, at least in the movies, has borrowed from older Afro-American traditional folk heroes, among the most influential, the trickster modelled after Br'er Rabbit orthe "bad nigger" modelled after Staggerlee, thesexual outlaw of black urban folklore.

To be more precise, the urbanblack hero has been a "picaresque" hero in the original Spanish sense derived from the Latin; that is, a rogue or knave whose episodic fortunes are the subject of a long narrative. In still another English variant, "picaroon," the meaning is more specifically knave, brigand, and even pirate. In this sense the success of the heroic black film derives from its main character,whose outlawry and hustling a living outside the social system laid down by whites, provide a fantasy motif for naive audiences.

Of all the subgenres of blackfilm, the picaresque, because of its facile evocation of impulsive, immediately gratifying, violent revenge fables, most lends itself to exploitation and corruption. Indeed, many of its recent exemplars have been dismissed by black andwhite critics alike as "blaxploitation" films, made with no more ambition than appealing to urban black youngsters by feeding their revenge fantasies. Unfortunately, like most exploitations of black taste, they concentrated on teasing their audiences rather than fulfilling their hopes, and on exorcising the devils of the tribe rather than celebrating its beauties. Predictably, such "blaxploitation" movies soon fell from favor and were rivaled by Oriental martial arts movies, a new generation of science fictionmonsters, and other arcana. By 1977, a major black southern university opened its spring term film series, not with one of the ephemeral black heroes like Shaft, but with The Texas ChainSaw Massacre.

After World War II few black actors combined aesthetic and box office success with the creation of good formula movies in keeping with the outlines of the black genre. Sidney Poitier is the best example of the distinguished, intelligent black actor whose work, despite its quality, offered little to black fans of genre film. Indeed, some of his movies bordered on contributing to a white generic cinema in which the Afro-American figure was seen mainly as the embodiment of a society where good race relations and racial integration of social life were grudgingly becoming the norm. His work left no opportunity for other actors to developa stark and uncompromising black picaroon; since Poitier's character had succeeded with or without him, the picaroon's place in the postwar black film was both needless and counterproductive.

Black intellectuals, who yearned for a blossoming black genre film as a gimmick to stimulate mass black social and political consciousness, charged Poitier with compromising principle in exchange for white praise. Fora quarter of a century, beginning with the United States Army training film, From Whence Cometh My Help (ca. 1948), he had infused hiswork with a quiet, controlled intensity. It wasas though by an act of will, he had contained asmouldering resentment which he had channeled into acceptable behavior. For genre fans, that was his flaw. His heroes were acceptably cool but too reasonable and too lacking in passion forrevenge. Poitier rarely made a poor film. Indeed, his finest work, Lilies of the Field, earned him an Oscar. But black genre fans wished for a black hero who was more than a famous medical researcher or diplomat, coolly superior to surrounding white society. They wanted not merely a man apart, but a genuine black outlaw. Poitier, without success, did his best to comply in The Lost Man and The Organization, but his picaroons lacked a quick trigger finger.

On the other hand, many "blaxploitation" versions of the picaresque hero were worse than compromises. Frequently the shameless products of marketeers who teased without satisfying the deep-seated resentments of urbanblack audiences, the films merely choreographedviolent fantasies. No one knew with certitude their impact on audiences, but black psychiatrists and social workers feared for the black children who might thoughtlessly respond to the odious stimuli in an antisocial way. The professionals, despite the occasional shrillness of their warnings, had just cause for anxiety. In almost two hundred movies, a string of witless, brutal black heroes smashed the empires and fortunes of a succession of grotesque, boorish white villains and their sexually unsatisfied white women. Unfortunately for considerations of verisimilitude, the whites bore no resemblance to the shrewd white heavies from real life. They were implausibly neurotic, sexually deviant, mindless, and insensitive. It was never clear to clever black viewers how such stupid whites had achieved so easily toppled powers.

Only occasionally "blaxploitation" movies offered good acting, tightly pacedwriting, and honest interracial rivalry. Gordon's War (1973), Willie Dynamite (1973), Cool Breeze (1972), Melinda, and some of Fred Williamson's movies all had their finer moments. Even then, Jim Brown's expensively mounted "crossover" movies that only superficially resembled the genre, regularly outdrew "blaxploitation" films.

By 1973 the cycle of "blaxploitation" movies was spent. In its place, Run Run Shaw and a corps of other Southeast Asian producers, who had been supplying movies to overseas Chinatowns, discovered their own formulas were those that American producers had missed or neglected.

Instead of intricate plots that ended with the shattering of Mafiosi empires, the Chinese and Singapore movies offered sureand direct revenge for personal rather than socially collective hurts. The formula rarely wavered. A good Chinese family resides in poor but happy circumstances. A Mandarin vice lord has his way with the hero's sister. She is sold into slavery. The vice lord murders the hero's parents. Up to this point, the hero has accepted his lot with diffident stoicism. But at the climax, belated according to Aristotelian formulas, he takes up his disused martial arts andslashes through a company of inept bodyguards. He fights the heavy to the death in a bloodily choreographed last reel.

No Hollywood movie depicted white heavies with such unre-deeming malevolence; therefore, revenge against the white world could never be so unreservedly free of guilt. Young black audiences who watched Oriental martial arts movies could guiltlessly identify with aChinese hero, who killed an inhumanly evil adversary, who was also Chinese. The blacks were simply once removed from the ensuing mayhem and therefore could join in the delight of rich revenge fantasies.

On the other hand, overtly universal American themes, such as the success myth of Horatio Alger, held scant appeal for young black audiences. Myths of aspiration, even during more innocent times, had lacked conviction. As early as the teens, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company had produced with marginal success The Realization of a Negro's Ambition, followed by Oscar Micheaux's films with their black secret agents and cops, and later in the depression, by a host of race movies featuring heroic black bourgeois success images. Best among the fables of black aspiration were Broken Strings (1940) with Clarence Muse's sensitive violinist, Spirit of Youth with Joe Louis playing himself, Keep Punching withHenry Armstrong's fascinating self-portrayal, Micheaux's The Girl from Chicago with itsblack federal agent, Bronze Buckaroo with Herb Jeffries's faithful imitation of Tom Mix, and Gang War with Ralph Cooper's hard-boiled Harlemite. But like the much later Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, they proffered coolly successful heroes, who overcame the barriers to upward mobility in ways that were unavailable to urban blacks.

Clearly, the picaresque hero promised more direct fulfillment to blacks on the bottom rung. Like Noble Johnson in Lincoln'shalf-century-old Trooper of Troop K, orRalph Cooper's slick gangsters, the picaroon was an outlaw, both alien to the black bourgeoisie and a victim of white cupidity, who would fight with savage directness. And yet the formula did not allow him to vanquish every white enemy, for his audience would surely desert him in favor of the more stylized pleasures of the martial arts films. According to these preconditions, Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song exemplifies the picaresque subgenre.

Van Peebles's movie appeared on the crest of a wave of black neo-nationalism, and therefore served, despite horrendous weaknesses and ambiguities, as an iconic expressionof deep-seated black resentments that flared briefly in the form of a nascent proto-national feeling. Only months earlier, other, better-focused black movies appeared but found no black national mood with which to touch fire. Shirley Clarke's The Cool World came and went, exciting only intellectuals and critics. Leroi Jones's Dutchman played upon black emotions but lacked urgency or clarity. Van Peebles's own Watermelon Man (1970) almost spoke for a coherent mood. He had taken a good idea byHerman Raucher—that liberalism was always easier from a distance and involved psychic risks when practiced in smaller circles such as neighborhood and family—and turned it into a half-baked nationalist tract. Unfortunately garbled in translation, its resentments came from the muzzle of a blunderbuss and its nationalism drewlast reel laughter rather than black exultationor white fear.

Van Peebles felt that Sweetback would be different. Out from under major studio control, raising funds in a helter-skelter manner, and even, so the story goes, receiving completion money from Bill Cosby, the finished film challenged the rating system of the Motion Picture Association of America, insistingthat the white body lacked the requisite socialdata to label black movies made for black audiences. It outraged blacks and whites alike, evenas it exemplified the generic traits of picaresque heroism. Despite the tasteless extremes that almost guaranteed there would never be another Sweetback, the elements of the picaroon came through with a strength and conviction that gave shape to the black heroes of the next half-decade. It is the role of such exemplars not to be critically good so much as to point tothe future.

36. Before the relative freedom of Sweetback, Van Peebles learned his craft in the Hollywood studio system at Columbia Pictures. (© Columbia Pictures Industries)

As an exemplar of the genre, Sweetback exploited all the elements of the formula: a detailed and graphic social anatomy of the black underworld that established credibility; a carefully segregated point of view, which unfortunately misfired because no white character was allowed a shred of humanity; a set of symbols and gestures that bore a great freight of outlaw meaning; and a ritual of mayhem that almost orgasmically released upon the film audience the picaresque urban outlaw as a mythic black redeemer.

This is not to say the formula succeeded entirely. Van Peebles seemed to possess more conviction than experience. His anatomy of the lower depths was like that of Dostoevsky : sincere but unfounded in first-hand experience. Van Peebles was the social observer, at least as wide-eyed and astonished at what he reported as any white outsider. Moreover, Van Peebles, like John Wayne, made the title role an extension of himself, at least as modified afterhis flight from the world of university button-down shirts and tweeds. As Wayne's roles as theRingo Kid in Stagecoach or Rooster Cogburn in True Grit symbolized his personal political philosophy of Jeffersonian individualism, so Van Peebles modeled his heroic role on the social rebellion expressed in his own lifestyle. But as director, Van Peebles seems only to play the role of the ghetto rebel. Like Wayne's director, John Ford, Van Peebles was the outsider, the anthropologist, who has been made anhonorary member of the tribe.

From the first flicker of theopening titles, as the credits announce that the stars are "The Black Community" of Los Angeles, the viewer recognizes the anatomy of the black urban scene. As though the viewer knows thatsuch a sentimental, overly grateful tip of the cap may seem too romantic and have a hollow ring, the main titles end with a final dedicatory line which announces that we are witnessing "a hymn from the mouth of reality." Such a deliberate confession tips us off that the movie will be set in the mode of hyperbole rather than documentary reportage. We are thus told to expect exaggeration of realistic details which invoke black group images. By magnifying observed social detail, the reportage will make anatomy serve as a sketch pad for a future black nationalist revolution, rather than an accurate view of current reality.

The opening dedication tells us that we have crossed into a revolutionary combat zone: the film is for "all theblack brothers and sisters who have had enough of The Man." From then on the camera carries usthrough a hyperbolic flight of Mau Mau rhetoriclaced with erotic fantasies. Indeed, according to the director, that was the point. "The black audience finally gets a chance to see some of their own fantasies acted out," he announced. Unfortunately, the black audience is thusgiven a titillating fable of black sexuality asa palliative for its historical political impotence. In this sense Sweet-hack was a counterrevolutionary, an enemy of the people, a masturbatory flight rather than a germination.

Indeed, the narrative of loosely strung episodes and alternately flashing and shadowy images begins with sex rather than politics. Sweetback is a black manchild-waif, taken into the social circle of a brothel where heis nurtured, drafted into service as a sexual instrument of the whores, and finally becomes a darkly silent sexual performer for the titillation of the largely white patrons.

White police, in search of a patsy to spend the night in jail as a putative suspect in a murder case, intrude and arrest Sweetback as their suspect. Moments later, they are diverted from their mission by a radio signal to pick up a black prisoner, whom they brutally beat under the cover of darkness. At first Sweetback watches impassively, acting out his role as a routine arrest in the murder case. But rage mounts within the amoral and apolitical stud, and in the heat of the moment, he beats thecops senseless until their handcuffs are dripping with blood. It is like a first step toward an eventual conversion. The event changes Sweetback from a hustling picaroon into a political outlaw whose consciousness intensifies with eachframe and with each picaresque episode. He had begun the film as a political eunuch and a sexual performer. By the second reel the roles have merged.

Sweetback's transformation experience would have been implausible but for borrowings from the genre of film noir. Van Peebles, a lifelong moviegoer, saw how to use that genre's darkened streets, glistening half-lights, bumbling and villainous cops. Even the raspy sound, some of it, one guesses, unintentional, contributes to the urban streetscape.

37. Sweetback's (Melvin Van Peebles) political conversion is plausible aslong as cops are shown as vicious exploiters ofblacks. The third-degree interrogation is the choreographed symbol of the political point. (Cinemation Industries; Museum of Modern Art)

Thereafter the film is at its best when it follows Sweetback's Odyssey from picaresque whimsies to political awareness, andat its worst when hyperbolic sex-linked violence triumphs over the political thread. We see, for example, his growing sense of outlawry through the eyes of his own people, those who must take the risks if urban guerrillas can expect towin. At an early high point they ostracize him as a "dead man" and send him off with a parabletoned last supper of the condemned.

Nevertheless, such hyperbole and exaggeration become no more than clever throwaway lines unless they emerge from a plausible setting of anatomical social reality. It was the reason for the popular success of George Orwell's 1984 and for the failure of the movie version of it. Van Peebles knew something of this and created a tour de force of visual signals, of grainy tableaux of vacant lots, trashy street scenes, parti-colored by paint-peeling graphics hanging from disused storefronts. Inthe backrooms, storefront churches, and on street-corners, we see the defeated and passive blacks, who hustle each other as though a reminderof the beginnings of Sweetback's journey.

38. Sweetback's (Melvin Van Peebles) relationships with blacks, includingthe prostitutes he is used by, are almost vulnerable and human. (Cinemation Industries; Museumof Modern Art)

It becomes more clear that Sweetback is maturing from picaroon hero into theclassic mode of the sojourner on a holy quest. We might even anticipate that he will go forth into the wilderness (although to expect him to build a votary chapel would be stretching the point). The movie makes good use of a fragile lacework of images that could easily crumble, as long as Sweetback survives in the city within black circles. The film stumbles only when,likeSt. Augustine, he goes into the desert in flight from society, there to be purified by theexperience. It is here that the movie loses itspoint deep in the southwestern desert, remote from the community whose plight presumably concerns us.

Out in the yellow broken hills, the premise goes astray and Sweetback's simple nationalist politics bloat into a self-indulgent fantasy. Like Marlon Brando, John Barrymore, or Lon Chaney indulging themselves by playing twisted, ugly roles Van Peebles/Sweetback hasbecome a Simon of the Desert, loping down the dry concrete bed of the Los Angeles River and into the crags where he feeds off the live raw denizens of the rimland. Politics give way to narcissism. Symbolically, the movie has ended. Theblack community has been deserted. Sweetback jogs from one disconnected escapade to another, brushing against groups of migrant Mexican pickers, riding atop rickety busses, pausing only for a heroic display of sexual prowess that brings a pagan motorcycle-gang mamma to screaming orgasm.

Away from the city even the pungent white heavies suffer for want of persistence and constancy of image. Not only has the black urban lumpenproletariat been abandoned; the white heavies and degraded troglodytes, who had fed off the sexual aberrations in thewhorehouse, the brutalities casually inflictedby the police, and the delectable humiliations thrust upon weak and helpless Afro-Americans, have also disappeared.

Both black and white images were central to the film's political point. Absent and half-remembered, they render the movie pointless. We recall, not a white racist social system, but rather vague, one-dimensional, wet-lipped decadents leering in brothels, and sadistic cops, who rightfully die in their flaming squad cars—all of them perfect Horror Comix cartoons that teach us nothing. The blacks, more naturalistic and less exaggerated, are less interesting, and Van Peebles easily sheds them for the fantasies of the desert. He becomes Pasolini shooting The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), taking the movie into the desert where heelects himself Christ, dedicates the future of blacks to his second coming, and thereby inadvertently castrates the present-day black masses for whom he has claimed so much anarchic socialstrength. Like Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata (1952), the Hollywood biography of Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata, Sweetback has given blacks only a wraith to pray for and denied them all hope except that which resides inhimself, and his promised but improbable return. Protesting too much his vengeful return to the black community, and as though the rhetoric of the cinema fails to convey such highflown messages, Sweetback's last baleful message promising his return is superimposed over the frame like a thirty-second television spot made for a used-car dealer.

This is not to say Sweetback plays its audience entirely false. Almost subliminal images which jog against the message of the movie suggest that Van Peebles, despite frequent cocky disclaimers, was sincere, if not in command, of the medium of cinema. One example illuminates this point. A cadenced black preacher's sermon becomes the occasion for first hinting at Sweetback's messianic demiurge; it is all plausible because at the time Sweetback is, like an urban guerrilla, still concealed from view deep within black haunts. But it is as though Van Peebles is unsure he can maintain the power of such images using only the mode of social realism.

Later when he has an opportunity to restate the message in allegorical terms (acceptable to black mass audiences because it conformed to legends of black sexual prowess), he throws aside the chance. The incident beginsduring his sexual adventure among a gang of white motorbikers, which was intended to cast Sweetback into an aggressive symbol of black sexuality. Instead, Sweetback mounts the skinny whitewoman, servicing her in plodding, conventional missionary style. The prosaic wide-shot can arouse nothing in the woman or the audience. Van Peebles then abandons the mode of literal reality that has characterized the early reels, substituting red-tinted, jangling, negative prints over which we hear her too shrill orgasmic scream. Sweetback, it becomes clear, is not a sexual messiah at all, but merely an adolescent streetcorner braggart.

Nevertheless, Sweetback remains an extremely useful black genre film, not only because of its consistent use of the cool-handed black outlaw and other genre traits, but also because so many genre variants were stimulated by the film's splashy financial success. Thus the point is not whether it entirely succeeds in being faithful to its own romantic political convictions. True, the lone ending in the desert, when it seems to promise an eternal return, rings false. But the movie, like Vidor's Hallelujah!, remained on target as long as Van Peebles fixed on the setting that formed the premise of the movie. Vidor's pastoral sequences and Van Peebles's ghetto footage both ring true. Yet, when each shifted focus to another locale, their films misfired.

Nonetheless, in the early going, Sweetback maintains a pointedly segregated focus through which racial politics may be seen with particular vividness. The film's symbols of white oppression and black defeat, byvirtue of their heavy-handed caricature quality, depersonalize revenge motives in a manner similar to a martial arts movie. Of all the "blaxploitation" movies, Sweetback was most able to convey a dirt poor ghetto ambience with startling conviction. Thus, as a social anatomy of the poor black lower depths, it is without peer, at least in its early reels. Therefore, aslong as Sweetback remains in the city, he stands tall as an outrageous symbol of the loser whoimpulsively strikes back. And as long as he isin control of the situation in his small circle, he speaks to his audience through the fluid, easy-riding mode of the aesthetique du cool style adapted by urban youth. Following its release that this generation of black audiences spent millions seeking its sequel in two hundred cheap imitators is testament to the film's power, despite its empty promises of redemption by a tin black Christ.