Give Me the Gun, Carlton
Lessons in Masculinity and Loss from the Fresh Prince
“I got in one little fight, and my mom got scared.”
— Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, opening credits
They surround me on the corner of Western and Orange, a few feet from where I go to high school. It’s late afternoon, a gray, blank sky just beginning to seep blue. I have my younger brother’s iPod shuffle with me. I must have misplaced mine.
Four brown apparitions: Chicanos like me, and yet —
I remember their shapes, mostly. Three thin and tall, the last heavy on a bright red Beach Cruiser, a lit blunt loose in his left hand.
“Pocket check.”
“What?”
“Pocket check, homie.”
What insecurities grow out of being a victim of random “street” violence? For me, there were a set of somewhat perverse questions, beginning with: When did they decide to jump me? Was it after I made that sharp left turn out of Twila Reid Park and into Orange Street? Or had it been earlier, when I jogged into the men’s room to take a clumsy piss, not remaining still long enough even to aim squarely into the steel, open-mouthed urinal?
And did it have anything to do with my light(er) skin? Could they tell I was brown, like them? Did it have something to do with the way I walked, ran? Did they read into the steady motion of my limbs and back, in my faraway gaze, an effeminacy, a weakness? Did it have anything to do with me? Did one brown body say to another, “No mames guey, you’re full of shit. You can’t even take a white boy like him.”
As I experienced it, the assault on my body was also an assault on the tenuous identity I had fashioned for myself. What kind of (brown) man am I to be taken down like this? On Facebook, I struck a pose of bravado and obscured what had physically happened to me:
four big ass guys came at me earlier today. Tried to take my lil brother’s ipod. Used my wrestling moves and got away (:
Looking back, I can trace the root of my insecurities to more general anxieties about performing gender and racial identity. Too sensitive to play “macho”, too white too play “brown”, too poor to play “white”: where could I look to find my rendition of masculinity reflected back at me?
“Gender is the repeated stylization of the body.”
— Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
Watching reruns of 90’s sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on TBS is how I gathered my masculine scripts: each episode an instruction, a how-to guide for performing black — but also conceivably brown — masculinity.
With the arrival of Will Smith, the nephew from working-class Philly, in Bel- Air, there also arrived the possibility for a radical re-staging of black masculinity on television. Will is outlandish, stylish, his prep school jacket worn inside-out. In contrast to his Uncle Phil’s hulking, commanding presence, Will’s loose-limbed, playfully affected manner makes him border on the dandy. Will lips-syncs to Jennifer Holiday’s rendition of “I Am Telling You” — and with such enthusiasm that Uncle Phil stumbles away in discomfort. Will dances with his lil’ cousin Ashley in her bedroom; gives his dweeby cousin Carlton a big, wet kiss on the cheek; and laughs often and hysterically, crumbling to the ground (or living-room couch) in tears.
And yet, it is precisely this opening up of what can be read as masculine that gives Will his particular charm. He embodies a ’90s cool best described as a relaxed intensity, a playing-it-by-ear style that privileges spontaneity over the reiteration of entrenched norms.
There are worse scripts to re-enact.
A few months after the assault, I am watching a late episode of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (Dark Aunt Vivian has, by this point, long been superseded by Light Aunt Vivian; Will is engaged to girlfriend Lisa; and Lil Nicky is well, there). Will and his cousin Carlton stand over an ATM machine, arguing.
“The stupid thing couldn’t cost more than sixty dollars!” Will says, exasperated. It is dark out, the “stupid thing” a now-busted life raft he had accidentally cast out into the living room. The extravagant life raft was, of course, Carlton’s.
“It cost eighty,” Carlton counters, and the two go back and forth.
A shadow passes over them. Both turn. Will recognizes immediately — you can see it in Will Smith’s subtle, knowing glance — that they are being robbed.
“Let’s have the money,” says a rough voice, out of frame. Will complies: “Carlton, give him the money.” But Carlton, evidently dazed — Alfonso Ribeiro conveys much in Carlton’s darting eyes and slouched posture — rushes over, reaching too quickly into his pockets. There is gun fire —cartoonish, ’90s sitcom gun fire. The title of the episode is, fittingly, “Bullets over Bel-Air”.
For most of the scenes that follow, Will and Carlton play out the two forms of grief typically sanctioned for men in a hyper-masculine, black (and brown) culture: laughter and violence. Hospitalized, the bullet missing his spinal cord by an inch, Will tries to laugh the shooting off. “Just think,” he quips to his distraught mother (just flown in from Philadelphia), “I moved out here from Philly because we thought it was too dangerous.”
Carlton, however, is—and this is atypical of him—violent. “I can’t believe you all think this is some kind of joke,” he says to the others gathered around Will, then storms off.
In the episode’s climax, Carlton reveals to Will that he’s bought a gun.
WILL: Carlton, are you outta your mind, man? You walkin around carryin a gun, what you think you gonna do with that?”
CARLTON: For protection.
WILL: …. You think it’s that easy to shoot somebody?
CARLTON: I’ll close my eyes.
Carlton’s “I’ll close my eyes” is telling; here is a man performing hyper-masculinity, reiterating entrenched norms. Carlton is grieving through his refusal to grieve, turning to hyper-masculine scripts that fetishize the phallus. What does a man do when he has been emasculated by a gun? He buys a bigger gun.
Moreover, Carlton’s unwillingness to look at the person he will shoot is a reiteration of his own refusal to recognize himself as a victim of trauma, as the man in front of the gun. Carlton’s false bravado exposes the hyper-masculine posture for what it is — namely, a grief characterized by the refusal to grieve. But Will’s excessive clowning too, is a refusal to attend to the psychological wound inflicted on him through the infliction of the physical (bullet) wound. Critically, Will’s making-light-of assault and Carlton’s hyper-masculine posture are symptomatic of the same underlying issue: a refusal to come to terms with their shared traumatic experience.
And yet, it is Carlton’s exposed grieving that compels Will to look.
WILL: You owe me, man. I saved your life, you owe me. Give me the gun, Carlton.
Will’s outrage cuts deep. It strikes not only at the injustice of the assault, but at the lengths we—us black and brown and lightly-brown bodies—are willing to go to avoid the embarrassment of emasculation, of being undressed by the gun. But his anger is also a distinctly black anger, an anger at the lack of black scripts, the lack of black men grieving on television.
Here is the episode’s final frame: a close-up of Will lying in a blue hospital gown, his hands over his eyes, weeping.
I’m crying too.
Lying on my couch in the early morning, my brothers still in bed, my mother and father still out, I cry quietly to myself.
Will’s exposed grief exposes my own grief, my own unwillingness to look at the psychological wound inflicted by the assault. Will’s weeping is a transgression, a disavowal. It forces me to consider: Black and brown manhood can look like this?
