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‘Bamboozled’ 20 Years Later: We All Shortchanged Spike’s Classic Film
The movie is finally getting its due — and is somehow even better considering what came in its wake
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I was nervous about watching Bamboozled in 2020.
Spike Lee’s 15th film, originally released in 2000, is a satire about the entertainment industry, race, and America’s love affair with minstrelsy and blackface. At the time, it was an obvious and necessary reaction to shows like The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, the embarrassingly stereotypical (and thankfully short-lived) UPN sitcom about a slave and his owners.
I saw Bamboozled when I was 16. At the time, the problem wasn’t just Desmond Pfeiffer; shows like Homeboys in Outer Space prompted Lee to say that he’d rather watch Amos ’n’ Andy than anything on UPN or WB. Like many Black kids my age, I knew that the versions of Blackness that studios and networks were putting into the world weren’t right but in ways I didn’t quite understand or have language for. Bamboozled gave me that language and earned my loyalty in return; I spent most of my adult life calling the movie my favorite of all time. So when the news came that Bamboozled would be entering the Criterion Collection, a library of lovingly restored movies revered by film nerds, I knew I wanted to write about it. However, writing about it would mean that I’d have to revisit a movie I’d championed but hadn’t seen in years. Let’s just say it: I was worried that the movie would age like a racist White lady.
After all, Lee in the post-Bamboozled years has been at his worst when he’s using movies as a soapbox: think 2012’s Red Hook Summer and especially 2015’s farcical Chi-Raq. I was afraid that Bamboozled — which at the time also received polarized reactions from critics — would feel didactic and convoluted today, especially to a now-33-year-old me who better grasps the concepts the movie covered. I was afraid that the movie would play into the respectability politics that defined the late ’90s, when gangster rap was seen as the bane of Black existence and Bill Cosby was telling us to pull our pants up.
