Black Females in Film: Carmen Jones & Foxy Brown
And indeed these women do display strength, especially Pam Grier, and a detached independence, especially Dorothy Dandridge, yet they still fall victim to the male-dominated ideologies of race in conscience-liberalism and Blaxploitation. That said, it seems inevitable that the women would reflect the male construction because just as blacks had to struggle to change the perception of black stereotypes in film, black women had to struggle twice as hard. This makes it all the more impressive that these two actresses embodied and in some ways transcended the collective view of their generation and helped define the ideology of the era they lived in.
Author Donald Bogle claims that “Carmen Jones was the celebrated movie that established Dandridge as the definitive tragic mulatto.” Her own tragic performances reflected her own tragic life and she became an actress who in many ways transformed herself into a product. Bogle argues that the image she created was actually based on the old stereotype of the tragic mulatto. This can be seen repeatedly in the film, notably in the two scenes where Carmen shows her belief in superstition and acceptance of her own doom. The first instance occurs when Carmen and Joe find a feather on her doorstep, and the old voodoo-lady warns her of bad spirits.
Later Carmen gets the nine of spades while playing cards in Chicago. She immediately accepts it as the card of death, and says that Joe will be the one to kill her. Here we see a departure from the male ideology, for Joe dismisses these superstitions as silly, yet it is a departure based on old stereotypes and one that only brings doom to Carmen. Right after she gets the card of death she grabs Husky the boxer and kisses him, aggressively setting her tragic downfall in motion. She embraces her own destruction, and actively accepts her role as the tragic mulatto.
Contradictions are what make an alluring and exciting character, and Dandridge displayed hers on screen with a new kind of energy that excited audiences. Carmen was depicted as wild, yet she always seemed to be the one in control of the conversations. But perhaps the power of her image preceded her, for Carmen does not live up to her own promises, instead willingly putting herself in the hands of fate. At first Carmen plays the male role in the relationship; she is even so bold as to hit on Joe in front of his girlfriend in the opening scene. She playfully sings to him “If you’re hard to get I go for you, if I love you that’s the end of you.”
Carmen is the player, and Joe is the pursued object, and Dandridge’s sexually enticing performance made her seem quite a powerful and dynamic manipulator. What she does to Joe is cruel, especially when she instigates the fight between Joe and his superior officer. After the officer claims that Joe will get four years for striking a prisoner, Carmen instantly jumps into the officer’s arms knowing it will cause Joe to fight for her. She then skips town with Joe to Chicago but quickly gets bored and dumps him, dramatically changing his life and then deserting him. This story arc is almost identical to the stereotyped mulatto in Birth of a Nation, in that both women use their raw sexuality to seduce and thus start trouble.
If the goal of conscience-liberalism is to eliminate race, then Carmen Jones is successful in the sense that there are no white people in it, but unsuccessful in the sense that stereotypes still abound. However, this is mostly due to the fact that the lyrics and music by Rogers and Hammerstein were written in the thirties, thus an old language reappeared that had been absent for several years. Harry Belafonte’s character in the film is also subject to a collective stereotype, that is he plays the good boy who leaves the good girl for the bad girl, and is destroyed because of it. Thus the downfalls of Carmen and Joe reflect each other in that they both betray the one that loves them the most. Carmen is a variant on the male character that is unfaithful, restless, reckless, and desperately wants the thing they can’t have, that is of course until they get it.
Foxy Brown’s Pam Grier is a variant on the Blaxploitation era and differs from Carmen in that she is not nearly as ambiguous or contradictive. Foxy’s intentions are clear, and her story arc is simple and goal-oriented. Like Carmen, she uses her sexuality and cunning intelligence to deceive and get her way, yet Foxy is aggressively pursuing a goal, whereas Carmen is aggressive and detached. Foxy wants revenge for her dead boyfriend, and she takes on his previous role as an undercover detective when she confidently plunges into the underworld on her vengeful tirade. Thus Foxy is even more of a direct reflection of her man than Carmen was, in that Foxy loves him and then becomes him, whereas Carmen pursues, loves, and leaves. Grier’s character is a unique composite of ideologies, what Bogle calls a “hybrid of stereotypes, part buck/part mammy/part mulatto.”
Bogle also suggests that Foxy resembles the old-style mulatto, much like Dandridge, in that the camera treats her like an exotic sex object. Both actresses had their sexuality exploited for the sake of pop entertainment, and one wonders how much progress the black actress has made in the twenty years that separate the two films. According to Bogle, not much progress was made, “these action heroines pointed up the sad state of affairs for black women in the movies. Very few films attempted to explore a black woman’s tensions or aspirations or to examine the dynamics of sexual politics within the black community.”
Grier’s character is no doubt a direct variant on the male Blaxploitation heroes such as Sweet Sweetback. Like Sweetback, Foxy resorts to violence out of personal matters, yet somehow the films try to disguise it as political. However there are strong undertones of race in “Foxy”, in that the powerful crime family is white and Foxy employs her militant black activist friends to assist her in revenge. And when she does succeed in her unforgettable revenge, Foxy seems to vindicate herself, but it’s hard to see how she vindicates her community.
Her castration of Steve says that since the white lady took her man then she will take the only part of Steve that is appreciated, and she leaves them both to live and suffer. So presumably the drug cartel continues, and the community still has not broken from the slavery of hard dope. However Foxy’s arc ends the way she wants it to, she carries out her revenge despite the setbacks and torture, and thus she seems to be a more progressed character than Carmen in that she successfully controls her own fate. Therefore one could find a positive political message in Foxy, much like Jon Hartmann’s contention that “Sweetback does indeed offer Blacks a strong model which could inspire them to collective action.”
If we classify these women as variants on their male counterparts then we must acknowledge that the films they existed in were products of American pop entertainment. These women submerged themselves into these male-dominated worlds, and they seemed to play around with the racial and gender stereotypes in a manner that suited their desire. So they did not rupture the male constructions of race, but they did prove that they could be just as strong and powerful as any male.
