The film, Hollywood
Shuffle, was really interesting to me on many levels. For one, as Harriet
Margolis brings up, it uses self directed stereotypes to make a point. The
point being that there is a lack of substantial roles for African American
actors in film and television and the characters that are there are stereotypical
and misrepresented of actual African Americans. Through the use of satire, Robert
Townsend uses these negative stereotypes put out by the mass media and turns
them against Hollywood. The film is obviously a comedy but to a white audience
I think the intent was supposed to make them think "should I really be
laughing at this?"
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The narrative is split
up into two parts, the real life of Bobby Taylor, an aspiring actor who has a
crappy job ("Winky. Dinky. Doooog!") and his fantasy sequences that
represent the mental and external roadblocks he encounters being a black actor
in Hollywood. The dream/fantasy sequences reminded me of the ones characters on
my favorite television series, Six Feet Under have, which basically brings to
light what the individual character is feeling internally. In Hollywood Shuffle
these sequences, including "Black Acting School" and "Sneaking
into the Movies", all deal with stereotypical characters from movies
featuring black actors. I think the comedy and satirical nature of these
sequences really bring out how ridiculous these stereotypes are and also how
true it is that films and the media misrepresent African Americans. This is why
the jokes make white people laugh uncomfortably. Again, the question is "should
I really be laughing at this?"
Hollywood Shuffle deals with racial and stereotypical issues in a very different way than those of other
films such as Crash, which is not a parody at all. However, there is a scene in
Crash that makes me think of Hollywood
Shuffle. Terrence Howard's character in Crash, a film director, gets told by a
white producer of a film that a certain actor is "talking a lot less black
lately" certainly inferring that the actor must act less intelligent to be
in a black character's role. In Hollywood Shuffle, Bobby gets told to act
"more black" by the white director and producer of the black
exploitation film he gets cast in. It is interesting how these two films are
completely different in genre but bring up the same points of how African
Americans are represented in film.
There really is the constant thought about "should I be laughing at this?" throughout the movie. Admittedly, I didn't find many of the jokes all that funny. But when I did find something funny, I felt like I should be keeping my amusement to a minimum. I think that it's easier to laugh at - and a little more acceptable- when you realize that many of these "stereotypes" are exaggerated and simply made up by white directors so that they have material to work with.
ReplyDeleteI also compared this film to Crash and I forgot about the scene of Terrence Howard at work and the white guy making the comment about the black actor. That scene was not comedic, it was just ironic that the white guy was telling the black guy about how much a person is acting black and it is offensive, as most of the scenarios in Crash are, compared to Hollywood Shuffle where it was comedic. The comedic approach for Hollywood Shuffle worked because as you said, I questioned if I should be laughing at this versus Crash where you aren't laughing at all.
ReplyDeleteGreat Crash comparison. I completely forgot about that scene. I feel like humor was the right way at portraying what black actors go through in the Hollywood system. instead of feeling uncomfortable and looking away Townsend allows you to laugh and not feel too uncomfortable while still giving you time to think about what he is showing on screen.
ReplyDeleteI really like your question about whether you should be laughing at those particular stereotypes. This is the discomfort of what Margolis terms "self-directed stereotypes"--African-American in-jokes, basically. I'd have liked to see you take on just a bit more what it means to be a white person laughing at black stereotypes, especially with regard to the issue Margolis raises of how easy it might be to misread or misconstrue, to not understand the self-directed stereotypes as satirical, but instead to read them somehow as some aspect of reality.
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