Review of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) by Edith N — 23 Mar 2010

Maybe the Origins of Blaxploitation, but Not Its Shining Light.

Spike Lee hails this film as the movie which told black people they could make movies without having to fight their way into the studio system. This, to me, raises the question of why he thinks black people needed a movie to tell them that specifically. After all, terrible movies had been made on the cheap outside the studio system pretty much since the dawn of the studio system. Roger Corman had, by the time this movie came out, been making terrible movies outside the studio system for fifteen years and had been hiring people who later became famous to work on them. I'll admit I don't know what Roger Corman's stance on hiring black people was, but I also don't think that's the point. I'll admit finding someone to play them was more challenging, but if certain of the puppets-in-the-corner movies could get made, so could horrible movies by other people.

I have had to rely on Wikipedia for a plot, here, because I couldn't figure out what was going on. In the first shot, we see young Doesn't-Have-a-Real-Name (Mario and then Melvin Van Peebles) lose his virginity to a prostitute four times his age. She dubs him "Sweetback" because of the, shall we say, precocious size of his genitalia. (We'll get back to this.) He grows up in the brothel, and as an adult, he is himself, I think, a prostitute--but in fiction, it's possible for a prostitute, even a young one, to be a male who services females exclusively. Anyway, things happen, and a cop dies, and Sweetback has to go on the lam, which is intended to end by crossing the Mexican border. On the way, he manages to solve many of his problems by that self-same impressive genitalia. Like you do. During this run, we find out that his name is Leroy. Probably. It's all psychedelic and confused, as was the fashion at the time.

The obvious place to start in analyzing this movie is its racial politics and sensibilities. I have to tell you, it doesn't paint anybody of any race well. Pretty much everyone comes across as a stereotype, and never a positive one. Sweetback is made into a folk hero, but basically all he seems to do is work in a brothel, get arrested, and kill a cop, then go on the lam and escape The Man. We'll get back to the sexual aspect of things soon, but it's not as though he was contributing anything else to his community. I find it rather worrying when all it takes to be a hero is to defy the cops. Yes, the cops in this movie are corrupt and racist in stupid ways, but that still seems a little silly. Lots of people defy the cops, and killing them doesn't bode well to me.

And then there's the sex. I've often found it interesting to flip gender or ethnicity and see if a concept is still revolutionary or praiseworthy, and I don't think Van Peebles would have found it so. The black community, at least the vocal aspects thereof, has been fairly vocal about how black women with white men is exploitation, but Sweetback sleeps his way down to Mexico including having sex with a biker moll in front of the entire gang. (Apparently, Van Peebles got gonhorrea while filming and called it a workplace injury.) When young Sweetback sleeps with the prostitute, we're supposed to be proud of his precociousness--did I mention that Mario was fourteen and the character, apparently, ten? Anyway, I'm not sure puberty had fully visited young Sweetback, and either way, that's really, really inappropriate. Simulated? Not the point.

I disliked this movie both visually and viscerally. There are a lot of dodges used in filmmaking when the budget is low, and this film uses them, uses the then-popular psychedelic montage, uses any trick it can to make the film seem more than the sum of its parts. It just isn't, though. I am, as we have discussed, perversely fond of blaxploitation, but part of my fondness is the genre's finding heroes where you wouldn't think there were any. That would have been a great thing for Sweetback--some untapped vein of true heroism. However, what we have, bluntly, is a drain on his community. He hasn't contributed a single thing except a disease vector to anyone. And if what's on camera is any indication, the women wouldn't even have had much fun while acquiring whatever they got. When we say size isn't everything? That's because it's true.