Lucky Black Men and Those Left Behind:

“It's not about art. It's about... sequel! One film, one… can make an entire career. Just look at me! Batty, batty, batty!” (Hollywood Shuffle 21:55-22:07). Townsend’s debut film follows Bobby Taylor on his journey to the screen in a semi-autobiographical account of Townsend’s own obstacles breaking into Hollywood. After Taylor lands the role he’s seen preparing for at the beginning of the film, he begins to question the ethicality of playing a “jive” character as a Black man, experiencing various visions and daydreams depicting the pantheon of black stock characters in the American cinematic tradition. When he has to perform one of these characters in front of his family, he comes to his senses and retires the role, instead taking up the post office job suggested by his grandmother and starring in a commercial for USPS to close the narrative. Singleton’s debut film follows Tre Styles on his journey through boyhood, in a quasi-memoir of Singleton’s childhood in South Central LA and others’ whose he knew. Although the four boys at the beginning of the film are clearly signified as the plot’s locus of attention, only Tre makes it out of the hood, while Ricky and Doughboy are murdered and Little Chris is paralyzed. With the rest of his close peers dead or forgotten, the focus returns to Tre, and the tenets of Black masculinity and Black manhood are exhibited in his survival and escape from the ghetto by the rearing of his father- a notable absence from the other homes in the neighborhood. 

Both narratives are centered around the home as a place for nurturing, learning, rearing, and growing, and the two most affecting factors on the portrayal of the home- after race or Blackness- are class and gender, with all of these subsumed under the larger structures of (cishetero)patriarchy and white supremacy. While these structures inform the antiBlack violence that Singleton and Townsend are both primarily combatting, both of their films still fall short in combatting the gender and class violence that work alongside antiBlackness, especially in media portrayals. Both films- while historically and culturally important to Black Self-representation in American film and “The Framing of Blackness” (moreso the case with Boyz)- frame educational/vocational/financial success as primal importance for Black resistance, thereby rightfully prioritizing a class analysis in the representation of and response to antiBlack racism, but simultaneously neglecting and/or disgracing its female and/or poorer characters by prioritizing Black masculinity, Black manhood, and capitalism. 

Both films are incredibly accurate in portraying the Black American condition from the Black gaze, especially when the characters are faced with racist violence, physical or not. This is unsurprising though, since both scripts were based on real life events experienced by the directors and released in the same period of American cinema when films depicting Black Americans from the Black gaze were finally gaining a foothold in the industry. This new breakthrough was obviously reflected within these movies as well, but in very different manners to address the same institutional practice: Bobby fighting for a spot in Hollywood only to be limited to USPS commercials and Ricky finally achieving the SAT requirement for the scholarship to USC but only after being gunned down. However, upon further inspection we see that Townsend and Singleton are actually highlighting the delimited ontology of Blackness in this country, and our world in general: if Black people want to enter the entertainment industry- whether through acting or sports- it must be in accordance with white supremacist mandates, such as Taylor having to perform an Eddie Murphy-esque character and Ricky having to perform well on a “standardized test”, informed by racist and cisheterosexist standards, to play ball for the university up the street. Moreover, Blackness must only occupy the spaces deemed appropriate by White society, meaning not only does that previous maxim apply for every career industry, but also that the origin of Blackness is constantly (re)written by White society, both in terms of history and the physical spaces that Black people occupy in this country. Boyz n the Hood was the first time such a young Black director was given so much creative direction on their own project, and it was also the first Black (coming-of-age) film to receive such universal acclaim, including record-breaking accolades from The Academy, but it still only displayed Black people in ghettos, in throes of pain, in cycles of violence, in ceaseless turmoil. Above all, most of the violence inflicted upon Black people within the movie was committed by their own racial peers, which begs the question: if Ricky was shot by a white man in a hate crime rather than a Black man because of petty discord and the film still was Black directed, would this movie have been so accepted by Hollywood in 1991? Would that scene be so cemented in American cinematic history? Would this film have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry? While these films depict the directors’ realities, the fact that they are what represent the beginning of Hollywood’s acceptance of Black-written-and-directed Black films highlights the historico-cultural American tradition of defining itself with displays of antiBlackness, and how this is reflected on the screen. 

The capitalist twin flame of antiBlack violence- especially its portrayal in American cinema- is class violence, manifesting itself in the family in Hollywood Shuffle, the carceral culture in Boyz n the Hood, and the socioeconomic realities depicted in both. The first thing to note is the dualistic nature of the depiction of the home by Townsend. On the one hand, the co-habitation of (nearly) three generations in one household highlights and arguably comments on the financial situation of the family, especially considering Taylor’s day job; however, on the other hand, the Black gaze into this home shows that the love, information, and knowledge shared by the the grandmother would be lost if Bobby did not hear the conversations going on in that house, outweighing the societally connotated negatives associated with non-normative family units. Singleton’s critique of prisons further highlights the spatiotemporal limitations placed on Black people. Doughboy and Little Chris’ prison records prohibit them from going to school or attaining quality jobs, forcing the former character to go back into gangbanging and selling drugs. Here, however, we see how easily someone as progressive and problack as Singleton can fall into the trap of reifying the very same type of extremely antiBlack, classist rhetoric that they condemn. 

At the nexus of Blackness, class, and gender, we see the politics of these directors, but mainly Singleton,  fall short in offering holistically antiracist messages. The complicated valorization of Doughboy is made problematic when we consider that he could have been Carol’s dealer. Carol was a darkskin mother of several children who only briefly appeared in the film twice to reify her status as a crack addict and reckless mother. Singleton could’ve easily left these two scenes out, as they did nothing to advance the plot, but her existence was simply to remind the audience of this crack whore, Welfare Queen stereotype that had now been reinvented as a social critique devoid of the actual critique. What does it mean for Doughboy’s character to be relegated to a second-rate status below both Ricky and Tre, and yet for Carol, whose “morality” cannot be any worse than a gangbanging, crack dealer, to be placed at the very bottom of the totem pole and exist only to occupy rock bottom? It signifies the continuation of the pantheon of racist Black caricatures in American film, meaning that in order for Singleton to be accepted into Hollywood like Taylor wanted to be, he had to leave certain groups behind. 

The one-dimensional characterization of female characters to either reify white supremacy- in the form of colorism, misogynoir, and classism especially in relation to drug use and abuse- or to serve the male lead; the two-dimensional analysis of class and it’s relation to antiBlack violence; and the two-dimensional analysis of Blackness (because both directors fail to depict or even address the manifestation of racialized gender violence on Black women) serve to provide important contributions to Black representation on screen, but unknowingly reflected the patriarchal attitudes that have permeated the Black community, so that it’s more accurate to denote Black male representation on screen. In watching both films, only Tre was the one able to achieve his dreams and not be offset by the invisible hand of racism. Is this because of his skin tone, his present father and his bank account, his virginity and his girlfriend’s, or his acceptance of Black capitalist rhetoric that Furious instills in him? And is Singleton critiquing that these facts are translated into advantages in our social matrix, or does he believe they’re actual advantages that reflect individual morality? I believe the latter, given the valorization of Tre and the alignment of his story with that of Singleton, and this reflects the American tradition of continually (re)framing Blackness in White terms.