Spike Lee talked me into it.
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is a difficult film. Difficult to watch and difficult to approach. And that was certainly the intention of Melvin Van Peebles, the man who just about single-handedly made the film -directing, writing, producing, editing, and composing it, all while playing the title role for good measure. It originated in his desire to break from the system he had been working in and to create a true black power movie that Hollywood would not allow; it was designed to piss off the man and make white audiences uncomfortable and alienated. Indeed that is still its effect more than fifty years on.
Sweet Sweetback was inarguably a vital film for the black community. It is of course often credited with spearheading the blacksploitation genre of the 1970s, though crucially unlike many of its imitators its chief creators were all black themselves. As such it can’t help feeling more raw, its fury and emotional themes more authentic. As Lee and many others have said, including Barry Jenkins and Ava DuVernay -folks you might not expect to be influenced by this work, Van Pebbles demonstrated with this movie that it was possible for black people to take control and tell their own stories their own way; with enough passion and just enough resources, they could do so unencumbered by any white institution. Filmmakers like Lee and John Singleton, Boots Riley and even Ryan Coogler ran because Van Peebles walked.
Still, Sweet Sweetback’s disarming artistic choices and fraught contents make it a movie tough to get on board with now in spite of its significance. It can be taken solely on the terms of what it conveys in its vivid messaging, but there’s quite a bit one has to ignore to get there. It really does not hold anything back, both in its maverick approach and intensity of style, and that is both a good and bad thing.
But I suppose that could be expected of a movie with this particular premise, namely that the titular Sweetback, a man raised and groomed by prostitutes with very little identity or value to his community beyond being a sexual dynamo, is targeted by the police as a scapegoat in the recent murder of a black man -the cops naturally being so viciously racist it doesn’t really matter who they pin it on, at least until Sweetback escapes their custody and beats the hell out of them. And the rest of the movie is more or less a cat and mouse chase between Sweetback (a near totally silent character it’s worth noting) and the police, involving various degrees of sexual escapades and violence against the cops.
In both of these respects, the movie is very explicit, though more notably in the former than the latter. Fight scenes are choreographed and blood faked, but most of the sex scenes, and there are several, are unsimulated. I don’t know whether this had more to do with Van Peebles’ lack of experience (though he had directed two movies previously) or the resources-scant guerrilla-style filmmaking that necessitated for several scenes to convincingly look like they were actually shooting a porn movie. The distinction is marginal here, and it is in big part the tangibility of everything being shot that contributes significantly to by far the film’s most uncomfortable scene right at the beginning where a young Sweetback, played by Melvin’s own son and eventual filmmaker in his own right Mario Van Peebles, is molested at the brothel. Though this scene is simulated, it’s really impossible to get past the blatant child sexual abuse of its filming and it casts a pretty sickening shadow over the rest of the film. The intent of the scene aside and what it is meant to communicate vis a vis Sweetback’s curiously unconventional black masculinity and sexuality (and even just the toxic culture of sexual exploitation and expectation imposed on male black youths more generally), the manner in which Van Peebles chose to express this is heinous, irresponsible, and shocking purely for its own sake. What trauma it left on Mario is unclear, he has grown up to be a steward of his father’s legacy and black power cinema more broadly, and even starred as his father in his own biopic on the making of the film, Baadasssss!
Past that elephant, as indicated there is something interesting in the way that Van Peebles portrays black sexual masculinity through this character. As much as the movie fetishizes his sexual prowess it also implies rather strongly the scars of his abuse, and though he again partakes in several intimate sex scenes, Sweetback is not ever comfortable with them. He is a cold and detached figure and essentially a sex slave, as seen in the fetish-heavy sex show early on that appears to be his primary mode of living. This may have been the inaugural blacksploitation movie, but Sweetback almost feels like a subversion of the established trope -he is not smooth or cool as Shaft and SuperFly would be, and he is far more often the seduced than the seducer in his sexual escapades. But in this, he is still some subversion of white society’s archetype of a black man, a deeper side to the film’s black power comment perhaps lost on multiple audiences of the time through the aggressive and hyperbolic language of the film’s advertising.
But that promised a lot more direct and coherent confrontation as well, which isn’t always the case -limited resources and equipment sometimes harming the film from really accentuating its points, such as in the first time Sweetback beats up a cop. The movie tries to create a sense of righteousness against the Man, but the film’s style can get in the way of the impact that might have, with a few exceptions like the car set on fire or the interrogations of Sweetback’s boss Beetle (Simon Chuckster). Yet even these feel incredibly stagey, the language of the cops though no doubt authentic rarely delivered with any believable menace. Van Peebles reportedly wanted the movie to look like something that could’ve come out of a major studio, but if that was the goal, he failed dramatically. Obviously the sex scenes are a major part of that, not so tasteful as even the lowest counterparts from a major studio -as seedy as the pornography of the time if not so intense. And a few other things Van Peebles shows that are inherently transgressive don’t feel like they say much of anything -is there any real point for instance in showing Beetle on the toilet taking a shit in real time? The compositions are very clearly chosen at a moment’s notice out of what was most convenient, and though the editing itself can be effectively punchy, it is way more avant-garde than the mainstream in how it translates. The use of music, original work by Earth, Wind & Fire prior to their breakthrough, feels a little directionless in how it is employed. And there are so many insert shots of Sweetback running or performing a minor stunt that don’t feel all that important or impressive without the cops immediately on his tail. I can see a bit of the DIY charm in there, but still it translates in an awkward way. And honestly, I was surprised how little we actually see of Sweetback fighting the man -his killing of a cop itself is meant to be radical enough.
Far more interesting than the movie was the process of making it -some of the stories there wilder than what was even seen on screen. Sweet Sweetback was one of the great efforts of guerrilla filmmaking of its time -virtually nothing was shot with a legal permit. Because no movie studio would touch this film (and it secured funding through a loan from Bill Cosby of all people -in another facet of the movie that has aged poorly), it spread the money and resources it did have very deliberately. Van Peebles and his crew would legitimately be evading the police in order to get the footage they needed. And the stories that came of this are just bizarre. Several in the crew were required to be armed given the nature of some of the places they were shooting and the fact that the production was non-unionized. Hauntingly there was very nearly an incident like that Rust shooting, because someone had accidentally stored one of these real guns in a prop case. The guns were also used as veiled threat against the Hell’s Angels who were hired as extras for a few scenes -including as voyeurs to one of Sweetback’s sex acts. On that subject, Van Peebles actually contracted gonorrhea from one of the sex scenes and consequently applied for worker’s compensation from the DGA, which he then just rolled into the movie’s budget. The car they set on fire actually drew real firefighters that make it into the finished film, and they had about as much professionalism as anyone else on set given the cast was largely comprised of first time or non-actors -several of the sex workers were real sex workers. In the midst of this, it is very jarring to see one real actor show up in a small part: John Amos, who right around this time was appearing as weatherman Gordy on the decidedly wholesome Mary Tyler Moore Show. It’s this kind of stuff that makes me figure Melvin Van Peebles’s Baadasssss! might be worth watching, especially given his own perspective as witness to much of this, all over a mere three week shooting period.
Van Peebles's stark intentions for the film on a thematic level are broadly more successful in the context of this communication, though still feel a touch restrained. It is not so intense as later films of its genre in fighting white supremacy head on -again, there isn't a lot of confrontation from Sweetback. Mostly, it is the vindictive depictions of police officers that feel like a radical statement, along with the fact that Sweetback totally gets away with his crime, via the image of the dead dogs that the cops had sent after him (real dead dogs provided by a humane society, so you can cross animal harm off of this movie's offenses). The message that Sweetback will come back to "collect some dues" from the white man again feels a touch toothless given his relative lack of proactive action. Still, it's not fair to overlook the abundance of heretofore unseen black pride that this movie demonstrates, how the rawness of its tendencies cultivated a new cinematic language for black artists, and the significance of this film being completely in the hands of black creatives, utilizing their voice with brashness and boldness to comment on the routine injustices they face, but making it into a cathartic exercise rather than a meditation on their plight. Van Peebles was open in wanting to make the film entertaining in its presentation of a victory for black people over a white system, and that necessitated rendering the film explosive and brazen. The Black Community is evoked several times through the movie in both its construction and audience, and never once are they made out to be a victim.
Certainly this made a splash with the Black Panthers -Huey P. Newton designating it required viewing for party members for its themes of black empowerment. The film wasn't universally accepted by the black liberation movement though, with other groups and scholars decrying a perceived fetishization of poor black culture, an adherence to certain stereotypes around manner and dialect, and the self-serving hero figure who is of course Van Peebles himself -also the rape scene was a point of contention with some black viewers even then. Nonetheless, the movie was immensely popular with black audiences -as Spike Lee discussed recently on the Criterion Channel. It made back more than one hundred times its minimal budget. This in spite of the white reaction. Black voices were really the only ones that mattered, but it is worth noting the white American industry's reaction to this film was pretty extreme. It received an X-rating that famously became a part of the movie's marketing campaign and in some markets outside the U.S. it was heavily censored or banned outright. And obviously it ruffled the feathers of even many white audiences who just heard its title. But of course this kind of reception Van Peebles craved.
There is no removing Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song from its important place in film history, though on its own terms it has perhaps rightly been eclipsed by the genre it spawned. Its transgressive character does not always support its stated thesis and can be extremely off-putting to many otherwise inclined towards its perspective. The shoddiness of its production style is as often a bug as a feature, and the most curious components to its politics, and in particular its sexual dimension, are not interrogated. I won't begrudge what it meant, and those parts of its legacy that have formed the basis of a truly empowering and invigorating black cinema. But you'll have a tough time convincing me that any value outside of that context is not highly exaggerated.
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