Pimping the Ride

Photo by Andrew Hetherington/Redux

I’ve long believed that when it comes to judging black movies, the most accomplished film critics — most of them white, it must be said — lose their minds. Whether it’s due to a sense of political correctness, low expectations, fear of racial confrontation or just plain ignorance, reviewers tend to suspend their critical faculties and evaluate black films not on the basis of story, acting or character development, but according to a peculiar criterion that really boils down to one question: Is it black enough? In the beginning, that meant a movie that jibed with simple images and social roles acceptable to white folk — domestics, entertainers, comic relief and con men. (Hattie McDaniel’s history-making Oscar win for Gone With the Wind has, unfortunately, endured less as an acknowledgment of her talents than as an indictment of the industry that circumscribed those talents to fit an image that it wanted to see.)

Almost 70 years later, though it has been mitigated somewhat by the black freedom movement and the fitfully successful effort by blacks to seize control of their own media images, “black enough” still means blackness approved by a predominantly white mainstream culture. Of course, many blacks are themselves solidly part of the mainstream now and seemingly willing to accept the pejorative as status quo — one of the many strange and insidious effects of freedom. But looking at ourselves through the eyes of others and believing what we see isn’t anything new. What has changed markedly since the days of Gone With the Wind is the widespread embrace of black pathology, especially black urban pathology, as the standard for representative black images. Instead of non-threatening maids and minstrels, we now have whores and murderous gangstas being marketed as cool, hip and, above all, real. Such characterizations don’t debase black people, we’re solemnly told, they honor them; they tell our essential truths. A pimp isn’t a bad reflection on black folk — he’s our Everyman, our salt of the big-city earth. This is a new age; the old meanings don’t apply anymore. What’s most disturbing to me is how willingly critics and other gatekeepers of popular culture routinely reinforce this kind of Orwellian logic. And increasingly, they’re going a step beyond, sanctioning these dangerous stereotypes as not only permissible, but human. Which brings me to Hustle & Flow.

We all know that this film had some built-in traction because the screenwriter, Craig Brewer, is white and therefore automatically controversial. But let’s get some other things out of the way: Yes, John Singleton produced. Yes, the film has been championed by the likes of cinematic activist Spike Lee. Yes, Singleton and Lee have both made notable films of their own, some of which were specifically aimed at countering the black pablum coming out of Hollywood. Can they be wrong-headed sometimes? Self-serving, shortsighted, willing to ignore the content of a black independent film for the sake of proving that it too can find that coveted crossover audience, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, March of the Penguins and dozens of other low-budget hits of the past decade? In a word, yes. Now back to the subject at hand. I was suspicious from the moment I read all the prerelease Hustle hype and saw the lurid billboards advertising the film, which blanketed South-Central like so many velvet paintings. Even so, I went hoping for the best; nobody has to convince me that Terrence Howard is a good actor. But 15 minutes into a showing of the film at the ArcLight Theater, I realized that not even Howard, as the movie’s pimp-rapper protagonist, DJay, could temper the fact that Hustle & Flow is bound to be the most despicable film of 2005.

At a time when white fantasies about black urban life have become routine, this movie, couched in full indie street cred courtesy of Sundance (where it won the Audience Award for dramatic feature), takes the genre to a level of exploitation and insult unique to the millennium. This is a nigger-fest minus some of the saturated color and amped soundtrack that a studio-produced movie would have — in short, minus the gloss that at least acknowledges the cartoonishness of the whole enterprise. But no such self-awareness exists in Hustle and its stripped-down “real” world, where all black men are thugs, criminals or rap artists, or — what’s the difference, really? — aspiring to be. Otherwise, they’re not authentic black men, which is one of the movie’s most pernicious racial messages (and, believe me, there are many). So intent is Brewer to stay on message that he turns DJay’s high-school buddy Key (Anthony Anderson), a middle-class man with a legitimate job, into the antihero — a sap with a nice house, devoted wife and church habit who can’t fulfill his destiny until he starts laying down tracks for “Whoop That Trick” (née “Beat That Bitch”). Too bad that Anderson, who skewered such tropes so brilliantly in Malibu’s Most Wanted, is stuck having to do this role with a straight face. He deserves something more evolved.