Dope Peddles Trite Racial Stereotypes

T he outdated title for the Sundance Film Festival hit Dope demonstrates today’s cultural retardation about race. Its story of a black high-school student, Malcolm (Shameik Moore), who wants to escape his California ghetto environment by selling drugs and going to Harvard, trades on a checklist of politically correct clichés: 1) a protagonist named after a political icon, 2) his black single-parent home, 3) his ethnically and sexually diverse Latino and lesbian best friends, 4) his gangbanging environment, 5) his drug-dealing antagonists, 6) nostalgic pop hits as musical score, and 7) Obama-worship.

For writer-director Rick Famuyiwa, a first-generation Nigerian American, these clichés are a pass to mainstream acceptance. Millennial audiences may no longer care about Nineties hip-hop, but Famuyiwa is aiming at behind-the-curve whites who are just catching on (thus, Sundance marveled at the word “dope,” which used to be hip-hop slang for “good” — decadently derived from old-time slang for drugs).

Famuyiwa’s personal, stuck-in-time obsession with Nineties hip-hop culture (which was just as overbearing in his 2002 film, Brown Sugar) guarantees that his storytelling matches the racial befuddlement stirred by recent anti-police protests and the Rachel Dolezal scandal. Everything in Dope appeals to the obsession with black urban victim stereotypes and reinforces them.

To ensure crossover appeal, Dope incorporates contemporary trends: Malcolm and his friends dress throwback style (his flattop fade haircut and Nineties gear), and they like to “do white sh*t,” calling themselves “geeks” and forming a rock band named Awreeohs — a play on the Oreo-cookie idea of black on the outside, white on the inside.

Yet Dope isn’t caught up in cultural anxiety, like last year’s Sundance favorite, Dear White People. Famuyiwa simply takes a comic approach to problems that still plague black Americans; he placates the mainstream audience, which is more than willing to both appropriate black culture and sentimentalize its social pain. This is the most egregious exploitation. Famuyiwa’s terrible ADHD plot structure introduces tragic characters, then drops them with no follow-through: Rakim Mayers plays Dom, a Denzel-style sexy thug; Roger Guenveur Smith does a wild-eyed monologue as Jacoby, a corrupt community activist; and Chanel Iman, as his drug-crazed daughter, Lily, seduces virginal Malcolm, then goes on a vomiting, urinating binge (she’s a Noah Baumbach gamine except she’s not white).

Given how Famuyiwa manipulates expectations about contemporary black lives, it’s no surprise to see Malcolm chase after the Harvard University carrot while also pursuing cute criminality. When Obama-aspiring Malcolm finally dons a Trayvon Martin hoodie, Famuyiwa mixes his metaphors unacceptably. It’s hard to imagine a worse social comedy than Dope appearing this year.

*      *      *

It’s still exciting to hear Eric B. and Rakim’s “Juice (Know the Ledge)” and Public Enemy’s “Rebel without a Pause” in Dope; these avant-pop classics overwhelm the dull movie. So does Malcolm’s reference to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” the template for Famuyiwa’s quotidian narrative. Malcolm defends his term paper on Ice Cube, saying, “If Neil deGrasse Tyson was writing about Ice Cube, this is what it would look like.” Doubtful. Dope falls so far short of Cube’s ribald-confessional social satire that it renewed my appreciation of Kendrick Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly.

Lamar, hip-hop’s most conflicted artist, tries to make sense of history, reconciling fabled ideas of black revolution and deprivation with present-day trials; he’s more moving than Dope’s antics. Lamar’s vocals mimic historic pop voices with a panache that Richard Pryor would envy. Yet he’s thoughtful — socially conscious — in ways most contemporary pop musicians — and filmmakers — have abandoned.

In “King Kunta,” the album’s hardest, greatest track, Lamar combines swing and funk to express unabashed political awareness. Hollywood — let alone Sundance — still isn’t ready for this kind of Afrocentricity. (When I was on the Sundance jury in 1990 and we gave the Grand Prize to Wendell Harris’s Chameleon Street over To Sleep with Anger and Metropolitan, the gesture was meant to reward originality and audacity. That’s what I hear in the Roots-referencing “King Kunta.”) Lamar, not Famuyiwa, brings the spirit of Roots and Chameleon Street to pop music. The song’s George Clinton funk (“Atomic Dog” remade to outdo Snoop Dogg’s inventions) isn’t mere R&B nostalgia; it’s fresh, R&B purposefully reborn — a musical raised fist.

Yet Lamar doesn’t go for blind defiance (“I’m mad but I ain’t stressed”). He evokes Public Enemy’s slave history in “Can’t Truss It” and puts it in daringly modern terms. The Ferguson and Baltimore riots didn’t evince Lamar’s intelligence. When he raps “Everybody wants to cut the legs off ya,” the castration fear is also a matter of social resentment — including resentment of black-on-black violence. When invoking Michael Jackson’s “Annie, are you OK?” it becomes a supreme piece of pop. This sharp-mindedness is what’s missing from Dope.

Lamar’s recurring motif addresses black pop history: “I remember you was conflicted” is repeated throughout. The past is not just instructive to Lamar, it inspires him to speak more clearly, strongly, honestly. (“I got a bone to pick!”) When he raps: “Rappers did it to themselves,” he means to protect his sensitivity from the vagaries of showbiz exploitation. He has sensitivity that Famuyiwa has yet to realize. (The title Dope lacks the complexity implicit in the Seventies black classic Cooley High.)

But the halcyon era of black pop music and movies (the Eighties and Nineties) is over. No wonder the media haven’t extolled Lamar’s remarkable album, given tracks like “(We Gonna be) Alright,” where Lamar proclaims: “Let me tell you about my life / Pain-killers only put me in the twilight.” No one at MSNBC or NPR wants to hear that self-awareness. It refuses their pity — and their piety. That’s why Lamar ends his opus talking to a dead man.

In “Mortal Man,” Lamar engages a tape of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, asking for advice. Their mock conversation is pathetic, proof of a young black man’s inability to find a living ideal. “I remember you was conflicted,” he begins. What Lamar calls “survivor’s guilt” is his self-consciousness about the morality young black men forge for themselves. That he trusts in Tupac’s inanity (“I see myself as a natural hustler”) shows that Lamar is desperate for role models. This same dilemma drives Alonso Ruizpalacios’ Gueros, a superior youth film to Dope. Lamar’s pretend conversation is heartbreakingly futile. It symbolizes the hip-hop fan’s longing for guidance, yet there are only dead (or morally bankrupt) celebrities like Tupac to mislead them. Lamar’s pleading voice contrasts with Tupac’s experienced arrogance, illustrating the tragedy of a generation that becomes misinformed or politically deceived. Pop-star fame versus black anxiety.

Dope is appalling in its demonstration of how black filmmakers strategize getting paid by telling Hollywood’s white power structure what it wants to hear (Precious, 12 Years a Slave, The Butler, Selma) rather than expressing the problematical feelings heard in Lamar’s “u” (his lyric “Loving you is complicated” addresses women, whites, the world) and in “i” (proclaiming “I love myself” in the midst of society’s scorn and indifference). In both songs, Lamar’s lower case is a rhetorical effect. The inauthentic racial identity in Famuyiwa’s Dope is literally lower case.