Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Black Dynamite
2009 · Scott Sanders · Black Dynamite on Sightlines
A boom mic dips into the top of the frame. Michael Jai White does not look up. He finishes the line, the take holds, nobody cuts, and the scene walks on as if the ceiling had always been made of foam.
In 1975 that shot is an accident. The crew has no money for a second take, the mistake goes into the negative, and forty years later it is the thing people remember about the picture. In Black Dynamite it is a forgery of an accident, placed to the frame. That is a stranger object than a joke, and it is where Deleuze starts to earn his keep.
We forgive a film almost anything except faking its own evidence. Editing manipulates, performances lie, a wah-wah cue tells us what to feel before we feel it. But the flaw is testimony. A boom in frame means a real room, a real crew, a real budget that ran out on a Tuesday. That is the residue of the bargain André Bazin made with cinema: the photographic image carries a physical trace of what stood in front of the lens, so its errors read as more honest than its intentions. Scott Sanders counterfeits the trace. He shot on Super 16 color-reversal stock, which means the grain is not a filter laid over a clean image but the same chemistry that blew up Black Caesar's run-and-gun Harlem exteriors into that beautiful sandy mush. The artifact is material. He did not simulate an old movie. He manufactured one.
Deleuze has a name for an art that works this way: the powers of the false. He is not talking about lying. He is talking about making truth and falsity undecidable and then using that undecidability as the engine. His figure for the artist who does it is the forger, le faussaire, who does not copy an original so much as produce a provenance. Watch the stunt double who conspicuously fails to resemble White. You cannot settle whether that is an error or a gag, because it is fully both, and the film will not help you. Deleuze's related term is crystalline description: a description that builds its object and then takes its place. Adrian Younge's score does not quote Isaac Hayes. It reconstructs the Shaft template note for note, so completely that it does the actual work a 1972 score did, and a week later you half-remember Black Dynamite as something you caught on late-night television as a kid. The copy has eaten the thing it described.
The debts are specific and Sanders pays them in craft, not in reference. Dolemite is the foundational text, and what it supplies is its amateurism: visible mics, mismatched cuts, a self-taught kung-fu hero played dead straight. Rudy Ray Moore's accidents were real. Sanders converts them into timing, which is a harder job than it sounds, because a gag has to arrive and an accident has to merely occur. The Human Tornado hands over the escalating-absurdity structure and the deadpan-macho register. Three the Hard Way hands over the plot engine outright: Jim Brown foiling a conspiracy to sterilize Black Americans through tainted supply becomes The Man's anaconda malt liquor. Shaft gives the lone hero and the score that narrates him. Super Fly gives the wall-to-wall soul commentary that Black Dynamite over-literalizes until the music is doing plot work no music should be trusted with.
Here is where the film gets genuinely odd. Deleuze's account of postwar cinema turns on the action-image going slack. Characters start to notice they are moving through clichés, and once a film has that consciousness of clichés it usually loses faith in its own machinery: situation, decisive act, resolution. The standard result is irony, drift, a trip that transforms nothing. Sanders and White go the other way. They restore the large form at full power. Deleuze's large form is the shape where a global situation presses on a man until one act transforms it, and this film has it in mint condition: the ghetto poisoned with heroin and adulterated liquor is the encompassing situation, The Man is the binomial opposite, force against force, and the assault on the Honky House is the act that answers the whole. The circuit runs. It runs perfectly. It just runs with the casing off, so you can see every gear, and that is the invention. Most comedies about a dead genre stand outside it and point. This one rebuilds the engine to spec and puts it on a plinth.
What holds it together is White's body. Deleuze takes the word gest from Brecht: a posture that exposes the social or theatrical relation it belongs to. White never winks. He plays every absurdity with the granite seriousness of Jim Brown, and the unbroken seriousness is precisely what shows the attitude as an attitude. A wink would turn it into commentary, which is a smaller thing. Then the fights land, because his martial-arts pedigree is real. In a movie where the grain, the continuity, the dialogue and the music are all counterfeit, the one thing that cannot be forged is a man who can actually throw the kick.
Which makes every shot a lectosign, Deleuze's word for an image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and has to be read. Day becomes night between two cuts inside one scene. Normally you call that a continuity error and move on. Here it is what Deleuze calls a demark: the anomaly that breaks your habit of reading and forces interpretation. Black Dynamite is built almost entirely out of demarks, which is why it exhausts people who want jokes delivered and rewards people willing to read.
It flopped and became a password, then a cartoon. Its real bequest is a method: put the joke in the stock, the mic, the doubles, the timing, and never in a character's face. Master the thing before you send it up, and the sending-up stops being condescension.
So watch it once for the laughs. Then watch it again for the flaws, and try to find one that isn't deliberate. The open question is whether love and mockery can still be told apart by the time the credits roll, and whether the film's refusal to separate them is a dodge or the most honest thing a 2009 movie could say about 1975.
Concepts in play
- puissances du faux — Super 16 color-reversal stock and counterfeited production flaws (boom mics in frame, flubbed lines pressed on through) make it undecidable whether any given 'error' is an error or a gag
- le faussaire — the film is a loving forgery made from inside blaxploitation rather than a parody standing outside it — it manufactures a provenance, not a copy
- crystalline-description — Adrian Younge's score pastiches the Isaac Hayes/Shaft template note-for-note until it functions as a genuine period score, replacing the object it describes
- consciousness-of-cliches — the film is assembled entirely from genre clichés it knows to be clichés — stunt doubles that don't match, day becoming night between cuts — yet plays them straight
- action-image-large-form — the encompassing situation (The Man flooding the ghetto with heroin and adulterated malt liquor) presses until the decisive assault on the Honky House transforms it — the movement-image circuit restored at full power with its machinery exposed
- binomial — Black Dynamite against The Man, force meeting force from the street corners to the corridors of power
- the-gest — Michael Jai White plays every absurdity with the granite seriousness of Jim Brown, never winking — the posture itself exposes the genre's macho attitude as an attitude
- attitudes & postures — White's genuine martial-arts pedigree means the fights land for real — the one uncounterfeitable element in a film of forged textures
- the readable image — every shot must be read twice, once as action and once as citation; the image loses its sensory-motor self-evidence
- demark — day becoming night between cuts, boom mics dipping into frame, mismatched stunt doubles — anomalies that break habitual reading and force interpretation