Portrayal of African-Americans and Sexuality in Contrast to Hollywood

Amy,

I'd recommend using the markup to make your link "live" and attract more hits that way. Here, I'll do it for you:

http://amylaurenzoons.blogspot.com

You write well and you're certainly correct about how Sweetback challenged and confounded the historical conventions that had stifled African-Americans on the screen for decades, shattering the old stereotypes of meekness and asexuality like no film before it. Of course, some of those stereotypes had already started to dissolve in the years immediately preceding Sweetback (made in 1970, released in 1971), as seen to a relatively tame yet significant degree with Sidney Poitier (see his two famous vehicles from 1967, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night) and also with the ex-football star turned action hero Jim Brown. But Sweetback elevated the challenge to the status quo to a radical new level, one steeped in political consciousness.

That said, Sweetback's iconoclasm and shattering of most of the old stereotypes also fed into, created, or utilized alternative stereotypes. You write about the film not portraying blacks as sexual degenerates like in past movies, but Sweetback suggests (and perhaps plays into) the white stereotype of blacks as hyper-sexualized, almost animalistic and survivalist in their lust, with nothing in the way of romanticsm or sophistication behind their sexual feelings. This stereotype or representation is surely preferable to that of the meek, emasculated, subservient, asexual male shuffler or the obese, motherly, asexual "Mammy," but it is problematic in its own right. Likewise, I don't recall much character development or depth in this film. (To be fair, I haven't seen it since I was twenty in 2001, as part of a college course at the start of my senior year. I viewed the movie three times and wrote a paper about it, but I need to purchase the DVD and view it again, hopefully sometime soon.) The main character is violent and nearly wordless, living by impulse: liberated, autonomous, empowered, iconoclastic, inspiring, and sexually potent unlike most of the movies' black men before him, but also pretty crude, anarchic, and libertine. And while the film romanticizes him in one sense (I suggested in that long ago college paper that he proved analogous to a 'Black Jesus'), the character's dominant trait is one of cold anti-heroism.

Thus Sweetback established the template for the so-called Blaxploitation genre that would flourish in its wake. The filmmakers (or the one filmmaker in this case, an African-American named Melvin Van Peebles, in his late thirties) discarded certain stereotypes of blacks (as you intelligently discussed) yet replaced them with other, seemingly more dangerous stereotypes that threatened much of 'white America' (or at least the 'white establishment') and disturbed some in the 'black community' who would have preferred a nuanced, complex, sophisticated, and humanistic portrayal. But in many ways, the film (and those in this quasi-genre that followed) took certain stereotypes depicting blacks as hyper-sexed, violent, and animalistic, and exaggerated those notions and images while also lionizing them and turning them into icons, in effect 'claiming' the stereotypes (much as some blacks have 'claimed' the term 'n i g g e r' and some gays have 'claimed' the insult 'queer'), throwing them back in the faces of their 'oppressors' and almost mocking and relishing the fears of 'white America.' Shaft, released a few months after Sweetback in 1971 and starring Richard Roundtree, adopted a similar dynamic yet did not feature the dangerous political undercurrents of Van Peebles' movie, rendering it more accessible to white audiences and more popular over time.

Now, I'm not sure if Van Peebles was intellectualizing matters in this way while conceiving and crafting his film, but on some level, he clearly knew what he was dong. He could have portrayed a respectable, attractive black male, perhaps based on Sidney Poitier's characters, who is wrongly accused by the police and who then assertively flees or fights in court with a lawyer while enjoying a healthy (although not 'oversexed') love life with his wife or girlfriend. One could imagine Denzel Washington or Will Smith, these days, playing that type of character in that sort of narrative.

Van Peebles, however, dispenses with that kind of 'balanced' portrayal and effectively abandons one end of the stereotype scale for the other, presenting something that he knew would be brazen, raw, and offensive, if also ironically empowering. Indeed, Sweetback drew very mixed reviews not just from white critics, but also black ones. As the African-American magazine Ebony wrote in 1971, "if a white man had made this film, they'd burn the theater down," for it doesn't exactly dispense with black stereotypes. Instead, as I wrote earlier, it 'claims' them through a process of hyperbole, lionization, iconography, and irony, perhaps cleansing and redeeming them in the process. But because certain stereotypes are presented and perpetuated (whether Van Peebles saw them as stereotypes or not), there certainly was not universal approval of this film within the 'black community.' Many African-Americans could have surely done without it or held ambiguous feelings toward it, as Sweetback's treatment of black stereotypes and depiction of blacks is rather delirious and nihilistic.

Indeed, one could interpret Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song as essentially constituting an expression of 'black nihilism,' a concept which serves to shatter some stereotypes and further others. But the furthered stereotypes (to the extent that they exist) are ripped out of 'Whitey's' hands and rooted so deeply in a sense of African-American existence and consciousness that they become something new and perhaps inviolable, even as they are in some ways predicated upon old, musty, tainted phobias. Hence the representations of 'blackness' in Sweetback are fraught and as uncomfortable as they are motivational—a double-edged sword, and riveting for that reason.