Blaxploitation Education: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
One of the more perplexing entries in the genre...
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Written, composed, produced, directed, and edited by Melvin Van Peebles
1971
This is apparently one of the seminal entries in the Blaxploitation genre, although looking at it 50 years later, it’s kind of hard to see why. Storywise, it’s barely a movie, and it has a fairly uncharismatic central performance by writer/director Melvin Van Peebles as a guy who is amazing at sex and who manages to escape from a manhunt by the police. That’s about all there is to the movie; it’s just one long chase scene, before ending abruptly with an on-screen title promising that the character will return and get revenge.
Its success may have partly been based on some genius marketing by Van Peebles, who splashed the phrase “Rated X by an all-white jury!” on the posters. In reality, he refused to submit the movie to the ratings board, which automatically resulted in an X rating. However, it would probably have received that rating anyway, if only because of the horrifying opening scene, which depicts its main character’s deflowering as a child. Van Peebles cast his 14-year-old son Mario in the role, and he appears nude in a sex scene that borders on child pornography. It’s way beyond the pale, something that is hard to watch now and should have been back then.
Unfortunately, I suspect that the scene is supposed to be comedy, the kind of joke that people still make about how awesome it must be for teenage boys to have sex with their teachers or other older women. I always find those sorts of jokes upsetting; when adults have sex with children, that’s a sex crime, regardless of the genders involved.
The moment here is meant to serve as an origin for the main character. He’s taken in off the streets as a young boy by the women at a whorehouse, and one of them decides to sleep with him. He’s apparently so good that she screams “You’ve got a sweet, sweet back!” giving him his name. A sudden edit sees the elder Van Peebles rise up from the bed, showing that he’s grown up to become a renowned sex god.
The plot, such as it is, kicks in when some cops take Sweetback in for questioning for reasons that I didn’t really understand, but on the way, they get called in to a demonstration and end up arresting an outspoken Black leader named Mu-Mu (Hubert Scales). When they stop along the way to beat Mu-Mu up, Sweetback snaps and beats the two cops bloody, then goes on the run. He doesn’t exactly seem to be down to join the Black cause; when Mu-Mu asks “Where we goin’?” he replies “What’s this ‘we’ shit?” and takes off on his own.
He tries to get some help from various people, but he quickly becomes public enemy number one, with the police trying to hunt him down at all costs. At one point, he gets captured by a couple cops, and when they call in to the station to find out what they should do, the commissioner (John Dullaghan) says they should question him to find the location of Mu-Mu, while also noting to reporters that the suspect fell down and got some bruises, giving the officers the go-ahead to beat him up as much as they want. Fortunately, he manages to escape when some demonstrators set the officers’ car on fire.
Later, he does manage to reconnect with Mu-Mu while getting a ride out of town with some guys, although he doesn’t do anything to find him; he just notices him walking down the street. The two of them end up resting in a shack in the woods, where they’re found by a motorcycle gang who say they’re trespassing on private property. The gang decides that Sweetback is going to have to duel a member of the gang named Prez, who is depicted as being strong enough to lift up a motorcycle and having cool knife-throwing skills. But after Prez’s helmet comes off, it turns out she’s a woman, so Sweetback chooses the weapon of “fuckin’” for their duel. As we know, he’s amazing at sex, so the gang lets him go after he pleasures her.
Sweetback and Mu-Mu get found by a couple more cops, and there’s a rather unexciting fight scene in which Mu-Mu gets shot and Sweetback manages to kill both the officers. Then, when a Black motorcyclist shows up to help Sweetback escape, he tells him to take Mu-Mu instead, stating that Mu-Mu is “our future.” I guess this is meant to show his growth, but it doesn’t really matter, since both Mu-Mu and the motorcyclist get killed by the cops offscreen.
Most of the rest of the movie involves Sweetback on the run. I think the main action of the movie is meant to take place in Los Angeles, and his ultimate goal is to make it to Mexico. He spends a great deal of time trying to make it across the desert, being chased by cops in cars and helicopters and managing to shake them off by trading his distinctive outfit (a suede vest-and-pants combo and a poofy-sleeved shirt) with a random white guy. Eventually, he apparently makes it across the border, which we learn through an on-screen title reading “WATCH OUT: A BAAD ASSSSS N***** IS COMING BACK TO COLLECT SOME DUES…”
With so little in the way of plot or characterization, the movie relies on style in an attempt to entertain. Van Peebles takes an avante garde, experimental approach, layering scenes in edits that repeat lines of dialogue and using multiple exposures to show several moments on screen at the same time. He adds color filters or silhouettes of legs running, as well as montages of urban scenery (including repeated shots of a neon “Jesus saves” sign), giving the whole movie an impressionistic vibe.
He also throws in a lot of general weirdness, making for a rather unique depiction of what the Black community (which is the star of the movie, according to the opening credits) may or may not have been like in the early 70s. A sex show early on features a pairing between a woman sporting a Bride-of-Frankenstein-style afro and what first appears to be an old man, although when he disrobes, he appears to be a woman wearing a strap-on dildo. Except when she removes her fake beard, it turns out it’s actually Sweetback, and the “dildo” is his real penis. Then a guy wearing a dress and wings and calling himself the “good faith fairy godmother” waves a sparkler around and invites one of the observers to have sex with Sweetback. When a white woman volunteers, she gets shot down, since “the offer is only open to Sisters.” Other notable moments include a Black guy who shines a white guy’s shoes by rubbing his ass on them, as well as a preacher who wears a leopard-and-tiger-print getup and pledges to say a “Black Ave Maria” for Sweetback.
Van Peebles also fills the soundtrack with jazzy music accompanying Sweetback’s flight, including a memorable track in which he repeats variations on the phrase “Come on feet! Do your thing!” It makes for an enjoyable accompaniment, attempting to liven up what seem like endless scenes of Sweetback running through various locations. As mentioned, Van Peebles doesn’t give the character much in the way of charisma, and he barely speaks throughout the movie. There are lots of other performances by actors who seem to be amateurs (to put it kindly), but with such a gaping void of personality in the central role, it’s hard to really care about what happens to him.
The movie also features plenty of scenes in which the cops question Black people about Sweetback’s whereabouts, and none of them are willing to provide any helpful information. Theres also a scene where some cops raid an apartment where a Black guy is in bed with a white woman and beat him half to death, but when they realize hes not Sweetback, one of them says, “So what?” Nowadays, none of this seems out of the ordinary, since it’s understood that Black people have plenty of valid reasons to mistrust the police. However, at the time, it may have been an exciting confirmation of people’s attitudes. Perhaps that’s one reason for this movie’s success: it was an unprecedented look at the ways the police and white society in general were/are always ready to crack down on Black people, and it provided a somewhat triumphant example of one person being able to stand up to oppression and prevail against impossible odds, even if that just meant escaping rather than being gunned down like so many others.
I can’t in good conscience recommend this movie, although I suppose it was worth watching as part of this project simply for historical value. It’s a curiosity, an example of a filmmaker taking limited resources and throwing lots of ideas at the wall, even if he didn’t really seem to have much of a purpose other than being provocative. There was definitely something that resonated with Black audiences, including the idea that Black heroes can stand up against authority and prevail. But that would be done much better in other films, in a manner that was more entertaining and less confusing. While Van Peebles may have helped lead the way for others to succeed in this genre, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is probably best recognized as a building block that people are aware of but don’t pay too much attention to.