Sweetback’s life as a joyless sexual commodity is summarized in a clever and surreal early sequence, in which we see him climb into bed with a woman as a teenager and stand up a grown man. Sweetback is hounded by music wherever he goes, like all the voices he’s ever heard in whole life, including traditional spirituals, militant diatribes, and contemporary funk, all run together and overlapping. The music is provided by no less than Earth, Wind and Fire, with contributions by Van Peebles and his son and daughter. Also, as part of its era, “Sweet Sweetback” features a lot of nudity—the movie was justifiably rated X, although there’s no actual coitus—and one could make an easy and convincing argument that not all of it is necessary. The “ban” on nudity in American films only lifted in 1967, I think, and, like a painter getting brand new color, the heretofore inaccessible form of self-expression is used perhaps too liberally.
And now to play the history card: “Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song” is a groundbreaking step in the modern idea of independent film. With very, very limited resources and equipment, it’s as guerilla as anything by Robert Rodriguez. Stanley Kubrick was filming outside studios and backlots as early as 1955, but if history has taught us anything it’s that just because Kubrick does something it doesn’t mean anyone else can. The making of “Sweet Sweetback” is chronicled by Melvin Van Peebles’ son Mario in the new film “Baad Asssss!” in which the father is played by the son. A tale of broken cameras and bounced checks, “Baad Assss!” is about how you basically have to be a tyrannical S.O.B. to get a movie made in 19 days for no money. With its tone of determination and irreverent whimsy, it definitely qualifies as a “dram-edy,” and modern audiences will probably find it more compulsively watchable than the film upon which it is based.
Of course, “Sweet Sweetback” also gave birth to “blaxploitation” films. The phrase “exploitation film” is tossed around a lot without anyone bothering to define it, but this is what I think an exploitation film is: a cheap, inferior, even campy copy of a cheap, sincere, original that made a lot of money. It is the genre that is being exploited. It took me about the first third of “Sweetback” to start taking everything at face value. Movies like “Coffy” and “Detroit 9000” have programmed us to see those situations and ideals with at least partial irony, and to compare them more to “Lethal Weapon” than Toni Morrison. Van Peebles made “Sweetback” because he was tired of seeing negative stereotypes of non-white characters in Hollywood movies. So, yeah, maybe I am giving the movie a few extra points for historical significance; maybe I’m going a half-star higher than if it came out last week for the first time. In the case of blaxploitation, irony of ironies, the mold Van Peebles made with “Sweetback” rapidly became just another stereotype. Nonconformist black antiheroes, sexually aggressive and wary if not downright belligerent to police, began to crop up at theaters everywhere. Did the new stereotype become a joke and ultimately damage Van Peebles’ ambitions? Well, the Man’s just like that.
Finished April 21st, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
Page one of "Sweet Sweetback." Back to home.