Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In Your Hood

Sorry baby. You know there ain't no positive black females in these movies.- Ashtray's Mother, Don't Be A Menace

Paris Barclay, Don’t Be A Menace 1996

Loc Dog: Never forget. Either they don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about being a menace to South Central while drinking your juice in the hood. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what it’s all about.

Mailman: What the fuck is he talking about?
—Marlon Wayans, Don’t Be a Menace

How far do I have to zoom out before any of this makes sense? People speak about being compassionate and helping the poor but even a cursory glance shows that this is not the case. After going beyond well-fed, the rich recline in their chairs and claw for their screens. It is the time of night when they metamorphize into floating eyeballs becoming techno-voyeurs.

No one wants the poor to become not poor. What the rich want is for them to stay right where they are. On the verge of one little slip-up that would tumult them into years of debt. It’s not that dissimilar from The Matrix. The robots need the battery-body to be alive to get any juice out of it. Definitely not living, but definitely breathing.

The rich need the poor so they can feel better about themselves. They need the huddled masses to vote for them so they can become President or whatever. They need the downtrodden so they can fly around the world to attend conferences or whatever. And they need the suffering of the people in the slums to entertain them. People like to say they are empathizing with the suffering but they are not…they are entertained by it.

Drug dealin' just to get by
Stack your money 'til it get sky high
We wasn't s'posed to make it past twenty-five
Joke's on you, we still alive
Throw your hands up in the sky and say
We don't care what people say.
—Kayne West, We Don’t Care

This leads us to the Blaxploitation film. Movies set in and made to target urban audiences. John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood and Poetic Justice. The Hughes Brothers Menace II Society and Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. Black neighborhoods in these movies have more in common with the rings of Dante’s Inferno than the day-to-day. If we believed these filmmakers, the moment any young black kid shows any talent he is immediately gunned down. An observation that the parody Blaxploitation film Don’t Be A Menace turns into a scene.

Local hoodrats Ashtray (Shawn Wayans) and Loc Dog (Marlon Wayans) drop their friend off at college, excited that someone has finally made it out of the ghetto. As soon as they turn their backs, he is immediately shot by a sniper. The camera cuts to a fist-bumping white man who hurridly crosses off the name Luke on a list that includes other African Americans.

The film works so well due to the fact that the films they are parodying are already so outrageous. It zooms from scene to scene and mocks the parts of these “serious” films that were supposed to well…depict life. In the world of Don’t Be A Menace, there are no logical breaks to hood life. Grandma just don’t give a fuck. She smokes only big-ass blunts and reminds Ashtray that he still hits like a bitch. The hardest G in the block still lives with his parents. And all the babies born and raised here, sip malt liqueur through their bottles.

The attentive viewer will not let the layers of irony slip by them. How can a parody of a hyper-reality be more true to life? What is in this film that makes us laugh? The remembrance of the original film? The parody? In the same way that the tripartite of “perception” includes perceiver, perceived, and perception—the likely culprit is original films, the parody, and whatever the filmmakers thought was funny about them. These elements blend together to create a somehow realistic comedy about the ridiculousness of life which includes hood life and the people who tried to profit from said life—and this film which profits off profiteers and the original. Life may be stranger than fiction but at least fiction has to make sense.

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