On their late-‘90s mathcore classic We Are the Romans, Botch roasted punk bands that used politics as a gimmick on “C. Thomas Howell as the ‘Soul Man’.” This long and esoteric song title refers to the 1986 comedy wherein Howell, a spoiled white UCLA grad, disguises himself as black to snag a full scholarship to Harvard that’s earmarked for the most qualified African American candidate in the L.A. area. The comparison is unusual, but apt: just as subpar straightedge bands drew in fans with promises of a message, so too did Soul Man pique the public’s interest with a scabrous, polemical premise, only to present ticketholders with a lame, weirdly tame formula rom-com.
Given that premise, Soul Man is, inevitably, a blackface comedy first and foremost. That likely needs no qualification for most people, and justifiably so. Still, it is a distinctly modern blackface comedy, in that it’s about blackface, using it ostensibly to comment on how blackness circulates in the white imagination. For Howell’s Mark Watson, blackness offers an opportunity he took for granted until his father, in a fit of therapeutic self-emancipation, decides to cut him off. In seeing the scholarship as an exclusive racial privilege rather than an overdue reparation, Mark is a poster boy for Reagan-era white aggrievement, and indeed Reagan is namedropped numerously throughout.
But Soul Man doesn’t have the nerve of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled or even Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder, and it labors fatally under the bean-counter logic that Mark needs to be likeable. As the movie breezes through opening scenes of rich kid decadence—essentially the PG-13 version of 1987’s Less Than Zero—replete with Mark and his best bud Gordon (Arye Gross) hatching plans to exploit antitrust loopholes and retire at 30, anticipation builds for a show of the racial bad faith (if not outright bigotry) that would be this lifestyle’s logical adjunct. Instead, almost as soon as the visual shock of Mark’s makeover is broached, he waves away any ethical misgivings by showing that he did his homework: the only qualified candidate has chosen Stanford instead, so if Mark didn’t claim it, the scholarship would go unused. The blackface is plugged in as a lark no different from the hijinks of, say, Zack Morris or Ferris Bueller. Mark enters his brief tenure as a black man essentially as a tabula rasa onto which experiences of racism—overhearing two classmates repeatedly tell racist jokes; getting hassled, then arrested, by a cop; getting beaten by Southies in jail—are inscribed. He’s never given a point-of-view on, say, whether reverse discrimination is a thing, probably for the same reason that the VHS cover declines to show him all made up: alienation is not very profitable.
So Soul Man steers in the opposite direction and settles into sitcom rhythms, as most reviews complained. Granted, calling a film a sitcom can be a pretty lazy critical tactic. Not only is it based in the presumption of TV as a degraded medium, but more to the point, there’s nothing innately criminal in adopting a format that, by virtue of its well-coordinated punchlines, goes down easy. Indeed, I approached the film holding out hope that it would prove an undersung bit of “termite art,” in Manny Farber’s famous formulation, generating social commentary not through mouthpieces but through the tensions between provocative imagery and generic structures. In a post-Rachel Dolezal age, when not a Halloween goes by without some pampered, young dingus—as in my own Northwestern University—dusting off the old shoe polish tin, what cuts close to home is not the comforting notion that an instance of racial masquerade is an Event, but that it is, on the contrary, woven thoroughly into the fabric of everyday life and its attendant placating myths. What, then, could be a more subversive way of bearing this out than forcing blackface into the context of the sitcom’s easily digested resolutions of social contradictions?
Only one scene comes close to realizing this potential, and “close” is key, because it’s a wholesale rip-off of Annie Hall. A few weeks into his first semester, Mark has dinner with the stuffy New England family of his white lover, Whitney (Melora Hardin), and the film shows him from their individual points-of-view. Her mother imagines him as a bodice-ripping Mandingo, knife clutched between his teeth. Her father (Leslie Nielsen, in a wasted role) sees a pink-suited Superfly, verbally abusing his impregnated daughter. Her brother, meanwhile, looks up from the Prince video on his portable TV, and sees the Purple One himself, axe in hand. In a movie so painfully out of touch with black popular culture that, in 1986, its primary touchstones were Huey P. Newton, Muddy Waters, Shaft and Sam Moore—who rerecorded “Soul Man” especially for the film with, God help us, Lou Reed— an allusion to white children’s ravenous consumption of Prince is unusually perceptive.
Ultimately, though, the sitcom pursuits prove to be Soul Man’s biggest liability—other than not being very funny. Especially galling are Mark’s attempts to avoid an old UCLA classmate (Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a thankless, pre-Elaine role) by pretending to be deaf and dumb. Then there’s the painful screwball climax that finds Mark navigating between his black love-interest Sarah (Rae Dawn Chong), his parents and a sex-crazed Whitney, providing early evidence that Hardin was doomed from the start to play empowered women who end up abject and marginalized, even on a putatively progressive show like “Transparent.” Perhaps most emblematic of the film’s banalization of serious subject matter is Mark’s pathetic appeal to Sarah at the end: “How do you feel about interracial relationships?”
Incidentally, Rae Dawn Chong, the progeny of Tommy Chong, is herself of mixed racial heritage—poignant, considering how curiously bereft the film is of actual black characters. The few there are have either a few perfunctory lines or, in the case of the vexed servant in the dinner scene, none at all. The only exception aside from Sarah and her too-cute son is James Earl Jones as Professor Banks. With his unmistakable basso profundo and pitiless impatience for Mark, he’s easily the film’s most intriguing character. He inveighs Mark to “work twice as hard as these white little shits,” evoking the conventional wisdom that black folks have to work twice as hard to get half as far as their white counterparts. His apparent indifference, even hostility, to claims of racial bias anticipate a similar character from 2001’s How High, far and away the superior comedy of racial difference at Harvard. Unlike that film’s white-washed dean, though, Banks is given no history to make sense of his behavior. Soul Man is too caught up in endearing its white lead to us and cracking jokes about “jungle fever” and his poor basketball skills.
If ever a forgotten comedy called for a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead-style rewrite, it’s Soul Man. The wearer of blackface—even if achieved, implausibly, through tanning pills—is, as a rule, far less interesting than the actual black folks who have to endure him.
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