By Hank Rosenfeld
Sitting in a white man’s barbershop in downtown Santa Monica, talking it all over with Pete. Pete the Barber is Greek and he loves speech. We can talk about anything in here. Except that movie, “BarberShop.”
“Did you know a new golf course opens every three days in the U.S.?” one customer will say, looking up from his newspaper. That kind of talk. “When ya gonna cut the mayor’s ponytail, Pete?” asks another man, waiting for a trim.
Nobody in Pete’s had seen BarberShop. Until this one guy came in. Hippy-hop-hipster, this one, no doubt, probably even read Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” once or twice. But as un-hip, un-hopped up males, the rest of us hadda ask him: Hey, where’s the appeal to our demographic?
Reverend’s “Shrapnel & Jester,” he said, have threatened a boycott if MGM doesn’t issue a public apology and remove the scenes — when issuing the video and DVD of BarberShop — that make jokes about Rosa Parks, ML King, and Jackson. The Times reported that Jackson hasn’t seen the movie. This newcomer to Pete’s did, and here’s what he told us:
“It’s Spike Lee/August Wilson-light,” he said. “Spike is much tougher with the truth, in fact he made his own movie about a barbershop decades ago. And like in a Wilson play, there are great characters doing great ensemble work here. But being from Hollywood and not Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the dialogue hits us over the head too much. But I dunno, mebbe an audience numbed by summer action needs schoolin’ in the fall to hear what BarberShop wants to say, you know?”
Like somebody said, it ain’t my demographic.
The truth of this flick, said the kid, is that, “These two idiots never get the joke. Why? Because they’re part of the joke! Jesse gets totally dissed! And even though New Yorker says Cedric the Entertainer is made up to look like Frederick Douglas, its clear he’s basing this loud-mouthed fool barber on Sharpton!”
No wonder they’re upset.
496,“I can’t see Jackson sitting there watching a movie that shouts ‘F--- Jesse Jackson!’ at him, can you?”
Well, Pete’s customers laughed at that. We should go see this. In the wake of the CleanFlicks controversy — CleanFlicks is the company that takes films like Private Ryan and edits out war violence — this censorship comes off as extremely bad timing, don’t it?
The LA Times didn’t print the “offensive” words about Rosa Parks: “black ass.” (Take that, Ma Rainey) “Rosa Parks didn’t do nothin’ but sit her... down,” the Times reported Cedric the Entertainer said. NBC News ran the whole thing. NPR, in its report, bleeped only the word “ass.” The kid tells us that in the movie this putdown is followed by a discussion of Parks’ work for the NAACP. How she knowingly used the incident — as Huey Newton and Abbie Hoffman and others who knew how to use Media did back then — to give impetus to the civil rights movement. The kid says maybe Jackson is threatened by a different comment by Cedric: “We need to stop lying,” and engage in some “healthy conversation.”
“Maybe he’s afraid the truth about his doings after King was assassinated might come out,” the kid said.
79A,“No, that isn’t it,” another customer said. “Jackson and Sharpton are media savvy and know critiquing it will bring people like us to see it.”
“Ohhh,” said the guy behind the newspaper. “I get it: They want my demographic to be exposed to the African-American conversation.”
Sharpton told NPR that had the jokes, “been about the Pope or Mother Teresa, MGM wouldn’t put it out … and that’s not censorship, that’s respect.”
“Sharpton is just mad because he ain’t in Barber Shop and Jackson is,” the kids told us. Apparently Jesse’s face, his clean-shaven mug, is hung on the wall of the shop like other celebrities. What more could he want? Pete the barber smiled at this. His wall has pictures of the Pope, Hillary Clinton, and other ladies on it.
“What more does he want?” I threw in. “Residuals, maybe. Like the black militant in Network who has his own show and demands: ‘Where’s my goddamn residuals?’”
Nobody got this reference.
When I went to see the movie, I noticed on the marquee that the title “BarberShop” has clipping shears under it. So cut THAT, I thought, you clean-flickin’, tongue-clickin’, supersize demagoguin’ goons you. Hey, preachers! Leave us kids alone!
I thought BarberShop had touching takes on history and culture. Sure the old clown bits are so slow to payoff they’re freaking painful. But in the middle of the movie, Marvin Gaye’s great dance number “Live it Up” appears just in time to diffuse a brawl. How you gonna beat that?
That night on NPR I heard a woman from the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute — the woman is an institution! — say: “Some things are sacred, and that out of reverence” they shouldn’t be made the butt of jokes. I thought of the Groucho Marx line: “Irreverence and reverence are really the same thing.” Nothing is sacred, because everything is. Especially the truth? On the way home, I saw Sharpton has a new book coming out.
(Hank Rosenfeld is a self-described Laughrican-American.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 12, 2002. Read the original PDF.