The End of the Line:
Josephine Baker and the Politics of Black Women's Corporeal Comedy
Halle Berry 911
It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since the black
feminist trickster-playwright-turned-screenwriter-turned-novelist
Suzan-Lori Parks created a comedic heroine who actively grappled with
her own sexual exploitation in the film industry. Although Parks's
collaboration with director Spike Lee was allegedly a fraught one (and
how could it not be? See his film She Hate Me), the film that
would result from their creative involvement with each other—Girl
6—would nonetheless produce one of the most memorable scenes of
black female nudity in recent memory, save for the now infamous coital
scene in the Halle Berry classic Monster's Ball.[1]
In Parks and Lee's rendering of spectacular black female nudity, the
fictional heroine, an actress know only as "Girl 6," sits uncomfortably
in the glare of camera lights during a screen test and struggles to
deliver her monologue for a rude and rapacious director played by
Quentin Tarantino. In the icy glare of a camera-driven inquisition, "6"
(as she's called in the script) is coaxed into disrobing in a move that
hurtles the scene into the violence of history. With her dress pulled
down around her waist and in the throes of a dizzying elixir of
resignation, rage, and disbelief, our heroine morphs into Sojourner
Truth, Frederick Douglass's Aunt Hester, and the slave "Delia" in a
well-circulated antebellum daguerreotype from South Carolina,[2] all
canonical representations of violation and toplessness. It is 1996, but
the film suggests (as if we needed reminding) that it might as well be
1846, 1896, or 1926 at the Folies Bergère. Indeed, black female
corporeality remains in danger of being captured in the void of someone
else's fantasies, caught in the eye/I of someone else's lens.
Yet Parks's screenplay posits a solution to this harrowing situation
in the deliciously histrionic scene that immediately follows this first
one. "6" meets up with her acting teacher (played by the remarkable
Susan Batson, whose only crime in life is that she put Sean "Puffy"
Combs on Broadway). And I argue that it is the acting coach's words that
crackle with the spirit and ethos of Josephine Baker's brilliance as a
comic corporeal performer.
6: [mumbling] "The reason I consented to doing
this is because I wish to clear my name ..."
Coach: [yelling in disgust] " ... Where is the pain? ... C'mon!
It needs a bottom! Where's the bottom! What's this shallow shit? A
bottom!"
6: "No! I can't think—"
Coach: [yelling with more frustration] "... Drop into the pain!
DROP-INTO-THE-PAIN! ..."
6: "I can't think straight—''
Coach: "Acting is about doing and feelings! Drop into the
pain!..."
6: [mumbling her lines once again]
Coach: [mocking and mimicking]: "The only reason. The only
reason. The only reason!"
6: "Look, I went into an interview, big Hollywood interview,
and this asshole tells me to take off my shirt."
Coach: [yelling] "So what?!!! So what?!!! SOOO WHAT! GROW UP!
Grow up now!"
6: "What are you talking about?"
Coach: "I'm talking about you growing up. I'm talking about
you facing the reality of this business."
6: "Which is?"
Coach: "Taking off your top, BABY!"
6: "That has nothing to do with the work. You taught me about
the work."
Coach: "It has plenty to do with the work! That's the
business, honey bunch! MAKE IT ART! Turn it into something special! Do
you get it? .... Are we going to grow up? ..."[3]
With a heated, Eartha Kitt purr, 6's instructor demands that she
locate what the monologue lacks, and she implores her pupil to "DROP
into the PAIN!" Passionately, she commands her to recognize the gaping
hole in her performance—to realize that it, in fact, "NEEDS A BOTTOM."
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Next page
| 
