In this episode, host Brandon Jenkins speaks with Stephane Dunn, author of "Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films". They discuss the portrayal of women in blaxploitation films by looking at Pam Grier's "Foxy Brown", Tamara Dobson's "Cleopatra Jones," and more. This Episode's Blaxploitation Watch List: Coffy (1973) Cleopatra Jones (1973) Foxy Brown (1974) Shaft (1971) Super Fly (1972) Black Caesar (1973) Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) Dolemite Is My Name (2019)
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Brandon: Welcome back to There’s Something About Dolemite. I’m Brandon Jenkins. And this week, we’re talking all about Sassy Supermamas.
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Brandon: Blaxploitation is credited with breaking the mold when it came to storylines involving black characters, and birthing a new crop of talent, both on and off camera. Before all the doors is kicked open, rules he rewrote an opportunity created, it often engaged in the same old two step. The problematic betrayals of women, specifically black women.
Often women were relegated as mere sexual objects. Props used to bullshit the status of the film’s male lead. You don’t have to look far either. With these types of depictions ramped and out in the open. Like in 1974’s Willie Dynamite, a story of an enterprising pimp on a quest to the baddest mack in New York City. I mean, just listen to the film’s trailer.
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Brandon: There were slight exceptions to this. Every woman who graced the screen wasn’t always an extra or a moda character. Think, Tamara Dobson, who started as Cleopatra Jones in a 1973 movie with the same name.
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Brandon: Jones posing as a model, was also a crime fighting federal agent on a mission to rid her community of drugs, and the people who profit from them. She was independent, but her relationship with her boyfriend was the driving force. Dobson’s character is maybe the closest to genre it gets to gender equality. With Cleopatra exhibiting a unique take as a pioneering sophisticated heroine, in a film devoid of hyper sexualization and service to men.
And you cannot discuss the err of Blaxploitation without talking about Pam Grier. For me, she’s really the first person that comes to mind when I say the word Blaxploitation. Grier, in many ways, came to embody the era, due to her prominence as the genre’s leading lady, starring in well over a dozen films, such as Coffy, Hit Man, Scream Blacula Scream, Sheba, Baby, and of course, Foxy Brown.
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Brandon: Grier’s characters in these films have some variation, but they are trends that persist. Many of her roles provide contrast to the soft meek roles that women of all races were being offered at this time. Like Dobson, she took on the role of heroines that often kick ass and have a certain prowess and resolve. A woman that can hop in the driver’s seat, and get to where she needs to go.
But across these films, she almost always is defined to the lens of male fantasy. A sexy chick, who despite her other attributes, is first and foremost desirable to all men.
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Brandon: And consider that she was a star of the movement, like this is fucking Pam Grier we’re talking about. The queen of Blaxploitation. This is nothing of all the other roles divvied out to women working in these films. From extras supporting cast members. Many of these characters were often subjectated to hoes, dancers, sidekicks, or just some fly ladies that let the male characters and the movie going audience know, if you want it, you can have it.
With these issues still holding weight, but often on the fringes of popular culture, we decided to send it to today’s discussion on black woman’s presence and Blaxploitation. We want to better understand the women who came to prominence and era. The characters they played, the forces in society that contributed to these roles and the lasting impact of Blaxploitation’s portrayal of women in our modern cultural movement. Let’s jump right into it.
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Brandon: And here with me now is Stephanie Dunn, filmmaker, professor of Morehouse College, and the author of Bad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas. How are you?
Stephanie: How are you today, Brandon? Glad to be with you.
Brandon: I’m doing pretty good. Before we dive into talking about Cleopatra Jones, and Foxy Brown, can you briefly describe the characters and who they are, as in what they do, and just a general recap of each of them?
Stephanie: So, the three films that I are sort of the iconic female, black female centered vehicles in that era are Coffy, Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones. Coffy and Foxy Brown starred the, stars of course, the unforgettable Pam Grier, Miss Pam Grier. And in Cleopatra Jones, and its sequels, Tamara Dobson, is the lead actress. And in Coffy and Foxy Brown, Pam Grier portrays really sort of working class woman who encounters reasons to take revenge to go on basically a female revenge journey.
And Foxy Brown, it’s when her lover is killed, and that’s the second film. And Coffy it’s her baby sister is hooked on drugs and she’s going to take down basically the drug cartel. And so, she does, in part by going in disguise, going undercover, if you will, as a prostitute to infiltrate the organizations. And in Cleopatra Jones, Miss Tamara Dobson, a model, in real life, plays a special agent to the US Government, whose mission is to basically stop the flow of drugs from Turkey in the film into the ghetto and the community that she’s from. And so, that’s basically sort of the plots of the three films.
Brandon: A lot of your book, I want to Bad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas. I love the title.
Stephanie: Yeah, you just love that title, I can tell.
Brandon: In your book, you talk about, at this point in time, you know, having a love/hate relationship with these characters. I think you kind of describe it as the Barbie Doll narrative.
Stephanie: Sure. I mean, it’s sort of this thing. On the one hand, there’s this like sort of exciting sort of like black bad ass in this, if I can say that on the screen, but that’s the name of the title, the book also, right.
Brandon: Yeah, you can go ahead.
Stephanie: Right, so I can say that. And so there’s that right in your face. I mean, at the end, they win, right? They get the bad guys and they’re the last ones standing. And it’s true in Shaft, it’s true in Super Fly, it’s true in Coffy, Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones, for the most part.
But then, along the way, there’s all of this sort of like, there’s rape and, you know, there’s prostitution and there’s women, you know, being relegated to, and especially in the male staring ones, right, to being sort of basically bitches and hoes, even by name, right? So, it’s part of the stable. And even in the female led version ones where you’re loving the beautiful Pam Grier, and the beautiful Tamara Dobson on screen, live, and in such beautiful color. You know, they are quite sexualized, right? Quite objectified. Obviously, they’re there to really illicit that male gaze, a traditional male gaze.
Brandon: You do, you look up to them, because they exist, you know, and they’re showing an aspect maybe that people hadn’t seen before in film, but also they’re kind of on loop and repeating a lot of poisonous or toxic ideas. Is there a moment where you ever had to stop engaging with it, or were you just kind of brush it off and keep moving?
Stephanie: Well, there’s two parts to that. I remember something that I read that Bill Hook said a long time ago. And it really stayed with me, really resonated. That films were, you know, a mix that were filled with sort of conservative and radical, you know, sort of like points. And they are. And I think that’s true of a lot of films. Those films are just graphically, because of the time period, and you got a lot of those big grade action films, not just so called Blaxploitation, right, with all of that sort of like X rated, or you know, extra R rated sort of graphic material, right? These very excessive sort of language that sexualize, they’re racialized, and all of that stuff.
And so, on the one hand, you know, I understand it in its time and its place, but also celebrate it for those films really marking how we were transitioning and grappling, right, with the radical movements, and their impact on the social and cultural and political fabric of American life, right? And the feminist movement, black feminist movement. The black liberation struggle, obviously, with the black power movement and the civil rights movement.
All of these current. So, these films really come out of all of that transition and all of that like sort of wonderful, you know, we are going to, you know, shake things up and change the status quo. They represent that. But, as happens a lot, they got very watered down, and exploited in some ways in terms of it, becoming sort of this, you know, sort of formulaic thing, right? The black power figure minus really sort of a logical or rational sort of like really sort of plan for revolution as it really was in real life.
Brandon: Yeah. I kind of want to focus more specifically on the two characters you brought up. You brought up Cleopatra Jones, which was played by Tamara Dobson, and Foxy Brown, which starred Pam Grier. And you’ve talked a lot about how they parallel one another, and also sort of the predicaments that they’d find themselves in, in these Blaxploitation films. But, when you look at their diagram, what ways are they different?
Stephanie: They’re very different. And I think they purposely, because Pam Grier, you know, created by Jack Hill, her character is by Jack Hill and American National Pictures. And then if I recall correctly, Cleopatra Jones, you know, is this major studio, right, and traditional studio it came out of.
So there was, obviously, when you look at them sort of, I think, an attempt to, first of all, sort of coral the success of the one. I believe that it was Foxy might have came before, I think, Coffy, or vice versa. But, they came out roughly within the same sort of 18 months, or 24 months, these films, between ’73 and ’74.
And the one was sort of the more PG rated, Bad Ass, you know, like black, you know, heroine, the film, and that was Cleopatra Jones, right? They, you know, took away the sort of overt sexualization of the thing, right, and the plot that was in Coffy, and Foxy Brown.
And you have her elevated to a special agent for the government, right? And she’s empowered in ways that the characters that Pam Grier played, specifically in Coffy and Foxy Brown, are not. She’s, you know, a working class girl, right, who sees this right, the a mission, a revenge mission, so to speak.
And with Cleopatra Jones, it’s not pivoted as, or sort of situated as a revenge mission, per say, right? Cleaning up the drugs infiltration and the bad guys who bring it in. It’s more of, it’s part of her government mission that has her community and origins in it as an added sort of, right, importance to the work that she’s empowered to do by the government. She’s, you know, literally, you know, turned or modeled at after James Bond. She’s very James Bond like, right? Black action sort of female heroine character.
Brandon: What are some of the other ways that actresses in these films were affected by these types of roles, good or bad?
Stephanie: Well, I think that, here’s the thing about these films. They started a lot of the careers of people, right? Like Pam Grier, and Richard Roundtree and many others who endured. And we seen for some years now, and have lived beyond that moment to star in many other things, to be in many other things to show their, you know, their talent, and their acting jobs beyond those sort of iconic characters.
And that’s really a beautiful thing that it, that genre gave some black directors and folks an opportunity into the Hollywood door as, you know, writers or directors and actors and so forth. I mean, the great Gordon Parks directed Shaft, right? So, there’s that. And his son, Super Fly. And so, you had some of their creative ideals being able to be that, right?
But then what happens, is that those talents weren’t really maximized, because they got pigeonholed, you know, these talents. They got confined. And that was unfortunate, because Hollywood had, you know, was notoriously, and still is, notoriously sort of faddish, and about, you know, economics. So, it was good as long as the getting is good, but then what about all of that black talent.
Brandon: Yeah. I want to take a look at just some of the perception of the characters on screen, namely the costumes and the way that their bodies were portrayed. How were they largely used in these Blaxploitation films?
Stephanie: So if you’re talking about costuming and wardrobe in relation to Blaxploitation films generally, where there were more male vehicles, male led, male starring vehicles. And those vehicles, obviously, Shaft, and Super Fly, Black season, Godfather, all of those, you know, films that we see. Women are, of course, you know, dressed, you know, very from either very sexually, because they’re always situated to appeal to their man, right? And it doesn’t matter how many women he might have, the point is if she’s the main sister, or what have you, right, they’re still this sort of like kind of sexualization, or sometimes if she’s the good girl girlfriend, you know, we may see her in her work gear, be that as a nurse, usually, or something. You know, something akin to that.
And you think about women, of course, Ruby Dee was already doing her thing and other characters. But they were not in these starring sort of roles, and vehicles. And certainly not, they were usually the wives, or the girlfriend, right? Certainly not as bad ass characters, action characters.
Brandon: I guess when you look at the lasting impact to that, I’m wondering how do people come to terms with this? You know, how are you watching this film and maybe being one of their early depictions of a black woman in some agency, but then also seeing all the circumstances that she’s place in?
Stephanie: The way that we come to terms with sort of the war in currents in these films that are, you know, tagged in this Blaxploitation genre, or like Coffy and Cleopatra Jones, and even Shaft, the male vehicle ones. Is that we recall and we remember that this has been our dilemma since the inception though of American cinema as a major form of entertainment.
But at the same time, black spectators have not been blind, right, to the problematic representations of themselves. So they may fall in love with an imitation of life, right? Like they might a Foxy Brown because we love the story of someone trying to make it, or a woman trying to make it, right? Or a woman trying to get revenge, because people have, you know, hooked her young sister on drugs. We get that, we feel that, right? And we love that we are being wrapped into a narrative that is about women.
But that doesn’t mean that we don’t then go wait, whoa, right, when she is part of that narrative, if she’s right, or she’s on the floor groveling in front of the white guy, the white criminal, like you know, even though she’s, at quote, acting, right? This is the story within the story. We see that too, and we’re not naïve to it, we’re not going, oh, this is cool, not by a long shot. We’re disturbed in those moments.
So I’m saying that our history with Blaxploitation, our love for it, is not a blind love. And that hasn’t been the case for our navigation as moviegoers in America cinema, in the first place, well before the 1970’s films.
Brandon: Okay. I was going to say like it sort of like you have to, again, like you have to be able to hold them both in your hands and appreciate it, but then also critique it, and I think that’s fair, especially as a true fan.
Stephanie: Absolutely. And that’s what true fans do. It’s like you don’t really have to love everything about it to love it. It’s, you know, that’s ridiculous. It’s like, I love that movie, but I hated the ending. How many times do we say things like that, right? I loved it, but I hated that ending. Like, why did they do that.
Brandon: Yeah.
Stephanie: But we love it.
Brandon: Well now we’re fast forwarding to today, or just the time since these films. In what ways have you seen these portrayals of women in Blaxploitation films have a lasting effect in pop culture and film today?
Stephanie: So one of the things that fascinated me about that the genre that gave us Coffy and Foxy Brown and Shaft, and so forth, is the way that they live on. And so even into my high school and college years, what was so utterly fascinating to me is to be part of a generation listening to rappers like Foxy Brown, who named herself after Foxy Brown, which I talk about in my book, right?
And Little Kim, and taking on just these monikers of like, quote, the bad bitch, right? So you see all of these sort of influences that live on in generations that weren’t even alive yet to go to these movies. And yet, people like Snoop Dog, right? I mean, who is Snoop without Super Fly? You know, the influence of him. You can’t even imagine something like that. And we know that from Afeni Shakur that Tupac, you know, ate up these films like they did Scarface, right? These Blaxploitation films. They all saw these films and loved these films.
And what’s interesting is that we keep going back to 70’s culture, which is sometimes, I think, pop culture. You know, this sort of goofy sort of like, you know, fun, sort of flower child, sort era, you know, Charles Angels, right? This stuff that was completely fantastical, right? But we keep remaking them.
Brandon: Okay, final question. What three films are must watch for you?
Stephanie: Of the genre that we say is, you know, the Blaxploitation genre, or and the female ones, or what?
Brandon: I would say just the genre at large.
Stephanie: Okay. See now you’re really wrong, because that’s like asking me, you know, to name the most important three books, or something, and so. But I will name three of them. But, I resist the notion that they are the ones you got to watch, because I still go, oh, then maybe I should be naming the other ones as soon as I say that, right?
But absolutely Shaft is there. And then see, I’m going to defy the rules and I’m going to say one, is got to, number two has two films, Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones. See I said them almost together so they can count as one.
Brandon: They’re equals, okay.
Stephanie: See what I’m saying? And then I would say that number three, I’m going to the same thing, but I think I’m justified. I’m going to say Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Super Fly. Because Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song I don’t define as a Blaxploitation film, but it’s really the film pointed to sort of setting the whole thing off. And then you’ve got to watch Super Fly, because Super Fly has so much of what we’ve been talking about, right? Those problematic and also radical occurrence, the history of our kind of strange serger and American cinema. With the good, bad beautiful and ugly in it.
There’s a whole study that Super Fly raises in terms of the black power movements, you know, influence and their critique of it, or their embrace of it. And you know, other peoples that end up, lazy peas critique of it and our sort of antipathy to it. Yet, it was, you know, it was a hit, right? It was, you know, a hit movie and it’s continued to be this iconic film with an iconic character that came to live to still live in hip hop, which is why, as I say, you know, imagine Snoop without that character, I can’t.
Brandon: Okay. I feel like that’s a really solid list with some really solid reasoning to it. So I think I got a little bit of homework. Stephanie, thank you for speaking with us today, and thank you for this list.
Stephanie: You’re welcome.
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Brandon: Thank you all for tuning in. Before we go, we’ve got a quick message Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who stars in Lady Reed and Dolemite is My Name.
Da’Vine: She’s the voice of reason, she’s the heart. There’s a level where it’s maternal, it’s intimate, it’s affectionate in which he needs that sounding board. You know, need of moments where he feels insecure, like if he has the passion, but he needs that second voice of reassurance so that they can go out and do it.
Brandon: Check out Dolemite is My Name out on Netflix right now. Share your thoughts about the show by Tweeting our friends at Strong Black Lead. This show is collaboration between Netflix’s Strong Black Lead, and Pineapple Street Studios. Special thanks to executive producers, Jasmine Lawson, Jenna Weiss-Berman, and Max Linsky. Shoutout to my producers, Agerenesh Ashagre and Jess Jupiter. Our original music is by Daoud Anthony. Tell your friends about the show, and make sure to rate and subscribe There’s Something About Dolemite on Apple Podcast and Spotify, and wherever else you get your Podcast. That’s our show, we’ll see you all next week.
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