We Are Always More Than Our Pain
Beyond Basquiat
By bell hooks
Undoubtedly, there is no black artist in the United States who could see the film Basquiat and not feel a deep emotional connection to the character. Any of us who are at all remotely successful in this culture interact with a hegemonic white power structure wherein the ideas that circulate about black people are utterly shaped by racist stereotypes. We listen and cope with all manner of silly racist nonsense or misinformation without responding with rage and hostility the vast majority of the time. We know our rage will not be understood and if we express it we risk being labeled difficult, hard-to-work with etc.. If we are working with and/or for a white person with whom we have a rapport we may take the time to teach them about racism and what must be done to divest of racism's cultural legacy. Mostly as the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar told the world years ago we wear the mask that grins and lies. No one can hope to understand the life and work of Jean Michel Basquiat if they are unable to see the whole picture, the mask, the person behind the mask, the person who became the mask.
Julian Schnabel's film would have been more accurately titled if it were called Basquiat: As We Imagined Him. Such a title would have invited everyone to understand that this very private "we" consists of a racially unenlightened white world who knew him, sometimes up close and personal, but most often at a distance. Even the many and varied white folks who were his close friends and lovers speak of him as though they never really knew him, as though it was clear that the it Basquiat he showed them was always a persona on display. He was always holding something back.
Representations of black folks as "modern primitives" currently over-determine the ways images of blackness are constructed in the mainstream cultural imagination. No one seems to be concerned with hearing the testimony of black folks who knew Basquiat (the two black characters in the film who say anything are his fictional parents -- their words are limited to a few sparse sentences). Schnabel's film is not really a work that imaginatively interprets the life of Jean Michel Basquiat. It treats him as though he is merely a compelling artifact in a particular milieu. The social context that enabled a Basquiat to emerge is what this film is about. That context is always and only white. And it is the "critic" in the film whose voice has prominence, who has the power to name, describe, interpret, theorize. There are two critics in the film Ricard and Basquiat's long time friend Benny. They have ideas about art. They are the thinkers. Basquiat is what writer Zora Neale Hurston once defined as a "Negro pet".
The Basquiat of Schnabel's imagination never thinks deeply about anything. According to this
version of his identity, there is nothing to unmask. Like Popeye we are encouraged to think of Basquiat as "i yam what I yam" with no layers of the psyche to be revealed. In the film, Basquiat is portrayed as pure primitive, a creature of instinct, made perverse by the alien landscape he dwells in. Embedded in the exposed white cultural landscape of the film is a notion of social Darwinism—one which suggests that the wild child might have done better if he had never entered the landscape of displacement and dislocation -- in other words if he had stayed in the jungle.
Schnabel's film does not imaginatively interpret the life of Jean Michel Basquiat, instead it suggests that he had no life, that he was merely consumed by infantile yearnings -- the most glaring one his desire to be accepted and loved by the mainstream white world -- not just the art world. That longing is personified during a scene at a fancy restaurant where a table of white men in suits mock Basquiat. Since this film, like any good "sitcom," is family entertainment, we are not allowed to hear what these men are saying. We see their mocking glances, their laughter. No harsh racism unveiled here, no words of contempt expressed. Basquiat responds by paying their bill without their knowledge. What a way to respond to racism. This is definitely the stuff of liberal white fantasy. The real Jean Michel Basquiat, like his fictional counterpart, enjoyed fulfilling such fantasies, giving white folks that bit of the other they had a taste for. The parts of himself that might have been deemed less palatable are never seen in this film.
In the restaurant scene Basquiat's "internalized racism" 'is on display not the horribleness of white racism. However, it remains the rare moment in the film where audiences are given any sense that he struggled with the issue of racial self-hatred. His desperate longing for the affirmation and approval of white men is never explored. It is depicted as "natural." Significantly, the restaurant scene shows that his obsession with whiteness extends beyond the art world.
Even though Jean Michel Basquiat had close and casual black friends, they are absent from the Schnabel family drama. That seems fitting since the film centralizes whiteness. Schnabel's film has nothing to do with blackness, it is a glamorous entertaining portrait of a white world. From the onset the film lets us know that this world has no use for black men, especially those coming from the street. Basquiat's exclusion from the world of whiteness occurs daily, whether its the white male in the diner who requests that he leave for acting out (pouring syrup on the table) or the upper class art dealer Mary Boone dismissing him from her gallery when she no longer desires his presence. Again and again., the film makes it clear that the antics to be watched are those of hip glamorous white cool.
It is this world Basquiat longs to enter. When he first approaches Andy Warhol and the rich male art dealer with his work, he desires to be recognized by them, to be seen. He shares his art as an offering, wanting them to notice him. At the onset of the film blackness is constructed as the site of pathology, of madness. As the movie opens Basquiat is shown as a little boy going to the museum with his mother. They stand together looking at Picasso's work. Suddenly, she begins to cry. Of course the mother speaks only a few lines in the film. She has no narrative - no name; the story belongs to Schnabel. These early scenes imply a causal connection between her gazing at Western art and the ensuing nervous breakdown that will lead to her institutionalization in a sanitarium.
The sequence of events suggests that Basquiat flees the drama of black family life by entering the anonymous world of the streets. Slumming, living in a box like a needy homeless person, he turns his back on the materially privileged world of his upbringing. Life on the down low is fun for Basquiat. Without any explanation for why he chooses to leave home for the streets, the film presents his fascination with slumming as "natural." He's more at home in the streets than anywhere else. The message seems to be that "you can take the boy out of the jungle but you can't take the jungle out of the boy."
Since the film does not critically interrogate either Basquiat's positioning or the white world's response to it, he appears as the happy darky on the art plantation, the perfect embodiment of Hurston's "Negro pet." Like, a big puppy dog, Basquiat jumps around, his big shit eating grin on his face. In the racist white imagination on display in the film no black man is a "thinker." Hence there is no effort to show Basquiat in the act of existential self-reflection. He is instinct pure and simple. In this cinematic portrait it is this trademark which endears him to white folks, especially when it is coupled with a willingness to give away art or sell it cheaply.
Whiteness stands out in Basquiat because there are no visible people of color in this version of the New York cultural scene. This absence highlights the spectacle of whiteness -- of white fantasy. Here is hip white liberal capitalist cool at its best. Every white person in the film is driven by desires for money and/or fame. Coupled with hedonistic lust for pleasure and power, they desire fulfillment by any means necessary. Basquiat's presence, his willingness to do anything for success deflects attention away from their cultural cannibalism. He makes them appear more humane. Inhumane whiteness is redeemed by irredeemable blackness. This is especially evident in the cinematic portrayal of Basquiat's love relationship. Gina, his girlfriend, is the white girl cure for every black boy suffering from internalized racism. Beautiful and unconditionally accepting, she is the perfect portrait of Madonna -like innocence.
When the little black boy beast is acting out, Gina is charmed. Even though she works for a living, she is attracted by Basquiat’s complete lack of concern with money. In this world of gender polarity roles are reversed. The white woman is the stereotypical male figure protector-provider, and the black male is the object of desire, feminized by the gaze. When Basquiat and Gina first meet it is the gaze that unites them. Gina is beautiful, sexy, open, and incredibly passive in the face of Basquiat's acting out. A true dream girl, she is wounded by her innocence. Audiences might like to think a satiric element underlies this representation but the film glorifies both Gina's initial innocence and her fall into rage and disgust. The camera is fascinated with her looks. For long intense moments we are compelled to fix our gaze on Gina's beauty and ponder why she would be so captivated by the beast.
Her beauty draws men to her. That train of admirers includes Basquiat's close friend Benny. Somehow even though Gina finds the infantalized black male's sexist acting out seductive and enchanting, she responds to Benny's misogynist overtures with low grade "feminist" contempt. By the time she explodes with Basquiat, unleashing her rage at the same infantile narcissism she first found attractive its too late. Intensified by drug addiction, his narcissism is so no connection is possible. Faced with the reality that addiction is not about relatedness, Gina lets go. Her drug like fixation on Basquiat cannot compete with his desire for a real fix.
Throughout the film Basquiat's drug addiction is trivialized. Thematically, it cannot compete with the spectacle of his compulsive yearning to be accepted in the world of whiteness. Schnabel does not expose the evil in this paradise. It is consistently depicted as fascinating, full of glamour, pleasure, and passion. Depicted as exclusive yet willing to be open to the vernacular, whiteness is a world of possibility. It is the site where the power to define, name, and interpret lies. It is the place of magic. This film gives us white supremacist capitalist patriarchy at its most alluring. No wonder those who are on the outside looking in, long to enter its closed circles.
In this magical world of white power, white folks can be as "nasty as they wanna be." That nastiness is personified in the characterizations of critic Rene Ricard and gallery owner Mary Boone. They are the predators in this film, the users who scheme and plan, the hunters who stalk their prey with cheerful ruthlessness. Throughout the film Mary Boone keeps a smile on her face. When Basquiat shows up at her gallery wasted, wanting attention, she slaps on her plastic smile and her phony politeness act, even as she silently mouths obscenities when his back is turned. It is difficult to know how to interpret such scenes. Since the ridicule and mockery of Basquiat is always gentle, never harsh, it is easy to see these scenes as sheer comic relief. Yet they deliver a powerful message, informing everyone that we should not be too critical of white culture. After all "critique spoils the fun."
In the spirit of fun, Julian Schnabel, the father of this family drama playfully mocks himself. The successful painter in the film (the one for whom the system has worked) Albert Milo, is Schnabel's alter ego. Flaunting his success, he is the perfect portrait of the "great white male artist." It is his character that lets audiences know the white family is intact and not pathological. Significantly, in A scene where Basquiat is shown m dropping his self absorption long enough to respond to Milo's daughter, drawing a picture of her, Milo evaluates the portrait, telling her in the voice of authority that she is much prettier. Since when did the artistic merit of a work have to do with the issue of beauty solely -- well evidently when the subject is a girl. Milo's casual dismissal of Basquiat's work is not unlike the plastic grin on Mary Boone's face. His elegant home is the new plantation where Basquiat may dine with "massa." When Basquiat leaves pissing in the hallway on his way out, massa don't care, instead he tells his daughter what is taking place and then invites her to dance. Domestic bliss is restored in the white family even though the native has momentarily disrupted the harmony by his presence.
One could easily imagine another filmmaker shooting this scene so that the attention is not on the glamorous white artist and his family but on the anger of the confused self-destructive black artist who may be pissing in the hallway as a form of critique and not because he is so out of it that he cannot find his way to the bathroom. With no critique of white paternalism, the film Basquiat ultimately works as an apology for the crude vampirism of the art world in general. That crudeness is merely personified by its response to this particular black artists. Reporting on an actual encounter between Jean Michel Basquiat and his first dealer Anita Noser Gina Alhadeff reminds her "that a magazine article some years ago accused her of keeping Basquiat locked up. ‘Well!’ she said impishly, 'there was a skylight’." Whether real or fiction, however innocently spoken, all such comments sanction the representation and the treatment of Basquiat as a primitive wild child who needed to be kept in check by symbolic civilized parents; they dehumanize him.
Just as Schnabel's movie does not account for the complexity of Basquiat's being, it does not explore the reasons a historically non-liberal, racially exclusive white art world hierarchy embraced him. The only interaction in the film which hints at white fascination with the other in a way that is not purely cannibalistic and exploitative is the characterization of the relationship between Andy Warhol and Basquiat. These two men seemed to recognize one another. Sharing both a hunger for fame and a longing to create, theirs is the only bond of intimacy in the film. Moreso than Basquiat, Warhol stands out as the artist who desperately desires to be accepted by the mainstream even as he longs to maintain his position "on the edge." Unlike his black comrade, Warhol's wildness does not offend because it is constantly mediated by his allegiance to capitalism and the marketplace. Depicted as always calculating the value of Basquiat's work, even more so than the art dealers, Warhol is portrayed as the ultimate pimp -- the true culture vulture. Yet throughout the film, he is shown to be consistently respectful of Basquiat's work as an artist.
Overall, the film offers a portrait of Basquiat as the un-serious artist, who is merely lucky; talented yes, gifted yes, but unable to use these gifts in a sustained, meaningful way. Tragically, this film will not be seen by many people as a fiction -- an imaginative interpretation. Instead, they will treat it as documentary. In the Disney like world this film evokes, there is no recognition of co-dependency. No
one really acts to critically intervene on Basquiat's addiction or his acting out. By choosing a black male actor whose splendid figure is on display throughout the film, there is even a refusal to acknowledge the toil addiction takes on the body. We are not even compelled to witness his physical pain. Throughout the film Jeffrey Wright's physique is clearly that of a robust muscular healthy adult male. In fact he must act the buffoon to convey the sense of impishness that Basquiat embodied physically. It was precisely the fact that his black body was more like that of an adolescent male that made it a non-threatening black male presence in the eyes of most white folks. Let's face it. No white folks have suggested that they were terrified of Basquiat, that his physicality frightened them.
Yet the scene where he stands in the car, celebrates this awesome physicality. And that is why it appears so fake and utterly false. The triumphant moment of glory before his death that the film gives him is a pathetic offering. Like the plastic smiles and the phony affection it will not call out the living spirit of Basquiat. The forces that broke Basquiat's spirit are never named in the film. This work betrays his memory by suggesting that he gleefully chose to be broken -- longed for it. No doubt sado-masochistic longings prompted Basquiat's action but like all of us, he was more than his pain. Until that more is explored, the world will never understand his anguish or the way in which he worked, creating a rich and meaningful body of art in the face of unbearable pain.
