Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer, 2019)

The 1970s were an interesting time, to say the least. I recall my parents sending me out of the room so they could listen to filthy Richard Pryor records with titles like "That N*****'s Crazy" and "Bicentennial N*****," telling me I could laugh along with the misadventures of "Mudbone" when I was older. And yet, when I became older, it somehow didn't seem as appropriate to listen to those albums, and my parents no longer had them anyway. There as a tacit understanding that maybe they weren't meant for us after all, and those murky racial lines of the 70s were starting to harden up -- a good thing in some ways, not so good in others.

One of the things I found myself thinking about while watching Craig Brewer's effortlessly entertaining showbiz biopic about Rudy Ray Moore was the history of the thing, and the broad connections between the 70s and 2019. We hear a lot about how in the Internet age, there is no more "monoculture." Supposedly Americans all used to listen to the same music, watch the same TV shows and movies, and adhere to the same sets of basic facts. But isn't this just a white people's fantasy? There was always a separate pop cultural sphere, going back to Oscar Micheaux's "race movies," the hard blues and jazz of the juke joints, and the comedy and theater of the "chitlin circuit." It's from this unique strain of black popular culture (itself a direct response to segregation) that Blaxploitation, and Dolemite, were born.

Eddie Murphy embodies Moore as an indefatigable hustler, someone driven by a fair amount of confidence and a whole lot of desperation. His ambition is driven by hunger, but also by a sense that his community isn't being served by the mainstream. As he repeatedly asks in the film, where are the titties, kung fu, and the jokes? Moore saw an opening, given that both Blaxploitation as it existed prior to Dolemite, and the black theater as represented by the kind of work Jerry Jones (Keegan-Michael Key) was doing, were based in racial-uplift seriousness. As Dolemite Is My Name shows, Moore was down with that program but also recognized that everyone has the right to just fuck around.

Snoop Dogg's appearance reminds us of Dolemite's connection to rap and hip-hop, another African-American artform that began in the streets and was created by DIY entrepreneurs selling their wares from the backs of cars. Ultimately this is an origin story about disenfranchisement, and the need to make your own breaks when the dominant culture is utterly unequipped to comprehend your vernacular. White culture didn't want anything to do with Blaxploitation, or Dolemite, until it figured out how to make money from it, and this is true of any marginal mode of expression. Barring some utility, everyone is supposed to stay in their demimonde.

In a sly nod to the Russian-doll nature of this particular problem, we have the backyard barbecue scene. Toney (Tituss Burgess) makes an offhand mention of being gay. Everyone else, politely but firmly, tells him they don't want to hear about that shit. That's because there's no place for his identity in their world as of yet, just like there was no place for Rudy Ray Moore's flamboyant pimp persona in mainstream society, until he made a place for it. As it happens, Toney's place will be coming along soon.