When people complain about “systemic oppression,” whether it’s systemic racism, systemic misogyny, or “systemic greed,” they’re not thinking about quotas and hiring practices. They’re complaining about pop culture. If much of the racial animus unleashed in the last 15 years, first by Barack Obama and then by the Bernie Sanders/AOC wing of the Democratic Party, appears inexplicable in a government and corporate world increasingly run and staffed by non-whites and women, consider the pop culture of the first decade of the 2000s. As insufferable and censorious as the New Political Correctness was when it emerged around 2014 and peaked in 2020, it didn’t come out of nowhere. Growing up in the 2000s meant constant exposure to nudity, sex, graphic violence, drugs, and criminals, a monoculture in its last decade with simple, devastating messages: You’re fat. You’re ugly. You’re a pussy. You’re black.
That last one stung more than people realize, even now. If black Americans struggle with a certain amount of insecurity and neuroses, it’s easy to see why, not only because of our country’s history and the way it’s taught, but by the way the mainstream media talked about black people before 2016 (not 2008: keep in mind there was a news blackout in Ferguson in 2014 and here in Baltimore in 2015. It was only with the frivolous #OscarsSoWhite campaign in early 2016 that the press started wearing the kente cloth). I remember following Hurricane Katrina and finding for the first time media bias in real time: a picture of two white people in the water with supplies were described as “scavenging,” while black people with similar supplies were described as “looting.”
This was two years after the release of Adam Shankman’s sleeper hit Bringing Down the House, a slapstick racial comedy starring Steve Martin and Queen Latifah that made $164 million against a $34 million budget. It was number one at the domestic box office for three weeks in a row, but today, it’s curiously overlooked; I think many people conflate Bringing Down the House with the broadly similar Cheaper by the Dozen, also starring Steve Martin and released later that same year. Martin is yet another harried and square suburbanite, but there’s no abundance of kids in Bringing Down the House—it starts off in the least kid-friendly place there is, an online chatroom. Over the credits, Martin and Latifah exchange messages and agree to meet in person: he’s a divorced tax attorney, and she’s, well, she’s “Lawyer_Girl,” and Martin buys it wholesale. He’s lonely and clearly desperate, on the skids not only with his ex-wife (Jean Smart), but also with his two kids, who feel like he doesn’t care about them.
Latifah shows up to Martin’s house and she’s no lawyer. In fact, she says she’s just been released from federal prison after an ex-boyfriend framed her in a bank robbery. Martin flips out and frog marches her out of the house, but then Latifah “goes ghetto,” starts screaming, and nearly wakes up the whole neighborhood. Betty White lives across the street, and she comes out to ask Martin if he’s okay. “I thought I heard Negro.”
Martin does kick Latifah out of his house the following morning, but later that day he comes home to a full on ghetto invasion; Latifah invites everyone and their mother and they take over like an invading force, conquerors in Sean Jean. It’s remarkable the way this is depicted: the scene is all masters and inserts, with Martin always far away from the camera, surrounded by and drowning in black people. Black, black, black… it’s the same way you’d shoot a house swarming with bugs, or zombies. Keep in mind this is a PG-13 slapstick comedy, a true four-quadrant success that millions of Americans saw; there’s no doubt it was a key Millennial movie. If the New Political Correctness has curdled into pure racial resentment and anti-white racism, it’s probably because non-white Americans now in their 20s, 30s and 40s were bombarded with images and scenarios like this, along with all of the implied values and attitudes they projected.
But there’s something for everyone here: Martin doing an overblown Chinese accent to get out of a phone call, Eugene Levy as the nebbish best friend to Martin’s WASP, and a brutal bathroom fight between Latifah and Missi Pyle, who plays Jean Smart’s sister (Pyle, who spent over a decade playing roughly the same age: late-20s, early-30s). Latifah slams Pyle’s head into a marble wall, and that’s near the top; Pyle ends up suspended from a hook by her hip, framed as if in a comic strip. This kind of Loony Toons violence was part and parcel of the early-2000s sex and race comedies, and it was only with the emergence of Judd Apatow’s deadly serious “comedies” in the middle of the decade that hyperbole and exaggeration bordering on magical realism left American theatrical comedies; it’s been so long now that audiences have forgotten the formula, unsure when and where to take the leap.
But in 2003, black and white audiences were eager to take in Bringing Down the House, equally amused by the house party invasion as Martin’s transformation into a blinged-out wigger at the end of the movie, “Fo sheezy,” “My neezy,” “G thang,” it’s all there. If Breakfast at Tiffany’s is shocking today, it’s only because Mickey Rooney is a supporting character popping in and out of the movie. Here, there’s no escape—why should there be? Bringing Down the House is a well-crafted example of something we’ve lost and are worse off for: the racial comedies that bring people together through stereotypes and broad generalizations, fun for the whole family. With so much ambient racial resentment coursing through the country now, there’s plenty of material for a new era of multicultural capitalist comedy, but no one will touch it, not realizing these kinds of movies improved racial relations, however reductive they were.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM