How often does a film feel dangerous? For that matter, how often do you come across any kind of art that feels truly dangerous, truly transgressive? And I’m not talking about the giggling sort of illicit thrill that you get from juvenile revelry in ‘mature’ subjects, like your buddies in grade school showing drawings of boobs or whatever. I’m talking about art that feels like someone has truly gotten away with some sort of crime, like some invisible boundary has been irreparably breached and nothing can stop the flood waters from pouring in and levelling all that they cross.
There’s a charge, a very special sort of charge when you come across a film that gives you that feeling. I remember the first time I saw Videodrome, it felt wrong to be watching it, the end result being a feeling like some diseased new intelligence had slithered off the TV and crawled onto my skin, a hideous perspective sinking beneath the pores and setting off a cancerous chain of enlightenment. Not bad for a cheap-o horror flick where James Woods grows a vagina on his chest and drops a gun into it.
I’m sure every film fan reading this has a special list in their head of the films that had that sort of effect. Films that shook them, that shocked them, that conveyed images that seemed to blaze off the screen.
Coonskin is one of those films.
Released in 1975 under a variety of titles ranging from Coonskin to Bustin’ Out to Street Fight, the film was written and directed by Ralph Bakshi to serve the dual purpose of pushing adult-minded experimental animation as far as possible, and to tackle America’s history of race and segregation head-on, using a narrative that blends folklore with Blaxploitation films the imagery of horrific racial stereotypes.
It’s hard to even describe how unnerving the entire film is, from start to finish. To begin with, the merging of live action and animated elements is flat out bizarre and unsettling. Bakshi will do things like have a live action tracking shot representing a character’s first person POV of walking through actual NYC streets. But when the character enters a location and the film cuts to a third person perspective, the character is now animated. Still photographs serve as a backgrounds, while other sequences jarringly combine animated characters conversing with live action ones. And occasionally, Bakshi decides to just say “Fuck it” and indulge in mind-shreddingly insane freakouts and dream sequences, the cinematic equivalent of smashing the audience in the face with a frying pan over and over and over again. Except the frying pan has racist cartoons taped to the front.
Oh yeah, the racism. See, as off-putting and troubling as the cinematic nature of Coonskin is, it doesn’t have anything on the actual content of the damn movie. The characters, every one, are appalling indulgences of the most racist imagery imaginable. Look at this shit:
Every character is like that! And it’s not just black people being represented in this manner. Gay people, Jewish people, Italian people, all are depicted in that same outsized manner.
Ralph Bakshi claimed to be stunned when people were offended by the movie. Ralph Bakshi is a very foolish man.
He’s also a brilliant one. Looking at isolated screenshots, it would be easy to chalk Coonskin up as the most racist thing to exist since…ever. But that is not what Coonskin is, something which is apparent if you actually watch the film and engage with what Bakshi is attempting to do. Fueling the film from frame one is both satirical wit and righteous, blazing fury. Bakshi isn’t reveling or exploiting racist imagery, he’s ingesting every awful, poisonous hypocrisy within mass culture and then spewing it back into his audience’s face. He is taking the disgusting shame that companies like Disney and Warner Bros. have tried to bury and forget and dragging it into the cold light of day.
‘This is the culture you inherit,’ the film says. ‘Look at it. This is the iconography of race that this country has and continues to use. What the fuck are you going to do about it? Put it in a vault next to Song of the South and act like it never happened? Look at it.’
Bakshi’s satire is ugly and upsetting, but then you contrast it with actual footage from fucking Fantasia:
Over and over again the film depicts both the empowerment and dehumanization that can be found in an image. America is embodied in a large-breasted blonde woman clothed only in the colors of the flag, repeatedly seducing black men with promises of love and pleasure only to brutally murder them. The hero of the film, Brother Rabbit, repeatedly utilizes stereotypes to lure his enemies into a false sense of security before easily dispatching them.
There is perhaps no more powerful example of this than a mid-film animation where a Steppin Fetchit-esque clown pulls off his form to reveal a hulking, contemporary black man. That one sequence says so much about the way in which iconography is used to both communicate beliefs and politics, and how that same iconography can become a medium of subversion and dissent.
As a formal experiment and as a narrative film, Coonskin is an audacious work of blunt force trauma. It’s also sadly/wearingly/frustratingly still relevant to how we in this country discuss race. Hence the danger.
Because, see, the dehumanization and stereotyping that Bakshi was railing against? We’re still fucking doing it.
Of all the appalling, indefensible things to happen in the wake of the Ferguson riots, perhaps none is more blatantly evil than the attempt by the media to recast Michael Brown as not an unarmed teenager shot to death and left to rot in the middle of a street for hours, but as a dangerous thug who needed to be put down for the betterment of the community or the country or whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be OK to kill someone for. It’s all an attempt to dehumanize a human being, to shut down the natural compulsion for empathy and human connection so that people won’t question the actions of the police, won’t threaten the ‘normal’ way that things work. We like to think that we are beyond such narrow minded prejudices, that we have left that kind of intolerance in the past. The shameful demonization of Michael Brown and the people in Ferguson only shows how mistaken that belief is, and only reinforces the sorts of stereotypes and iconography used to continue prejudice.
That’s why we need movies like Coonskin. We need art and artists that feel dangerous. We need people who are unafraid to bring the full force of their rage to bear through their art, who are unafraid to suck the venom out and spit it back. We need art that makes us angry. Coonskin was made decades ago, but the power within the frame still screams across the years.
And when you see a film that makes you feel that has that power, that raises the rage in your gut to a frothing boil, ask yourself what exactly is upsetting you so. Are you mad because of what you’ve seen, or mad because someone made you think about it?
