Melvin Van Peebles: Praisesong for the s**t disturber
Remembering the fiercely independent chameleon of black American cinema and culture
“Never meet your heroes,” the old warning goes. “You’ll only be disappointed.” Whoever came up with that was someone no doubt chagrined by the look, the creative output or the personal behavior of one of the icons he or she once revered. But it ain’t necessarily so. Some of us manage to keep moving, in the time-honored tradition of a shark; some of us push back against the expected lethargy of the tide of years.
Melvin Van Peebles was one such baadasssss. The filmmaker, writer and native of Chicago exploded into the mainstream popular culture in the volatile, unpredictable early ‘70’s with his first independent feature, Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadassss Song (1971), a raw, wild film that pushed every button in the finger-wagging majoritarian culture, a motion picture created by a filmmaker determined to tell a story “about a brother getting the Man’s foot out of his ass.”
The movie, which starred Van Peebles as a bold outlaw on the run in the streets of south-Central Los Angeles, featured his protagonist shooting dirty police officers, coupling with white women, and otherwise trashing social conventions en route to his own evolution from a pimp and exploiter of his community into someone unafraid to, in Van Peebles’ words from a 1971 interview, “stand up on his hind legs” and take on the status quo of law and authority.
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Van Peebles did that with gusto, on his own terms, and successfully. Sweetback was made for about $150,000; it went on to gross $15.2 million, a return on investment of better than 10,000 percent. The lucrative, fiercely DIY film genre generally known as “blaxploitation” was born, and American film would never be the same. Sweetback — its unswerving defense of black identity and agency in a dangerous time in America — paved the way for other films of black heroes and antiheroes, from Shaft to Superfly, Foxy Brown to Cleopatra Jones, Coffy to Hammer and more besides.
He went on to direct other films, but his life was already otherwise a wildly diverse canvas of experience: he was editor for a French edition of Mad magazine; he was a stock exchange options trader; he was a painter and playwright; he was an investigative reporter and friend of Chester Himes.
I’d met him a few times in Manhattan, in the 90’s; we met again years later, after he moulted into his guise of graphic novelist. It was in September 2009, at Bumbershoot, one of Seattle’s more comprehensive and entertaining festivals, when he was promoting Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus ItchyFooted Mutha, the graphic novel that was the basis for his film of the same name. He was as wry and tough and strategically crazy as ever, although at 77 he was a little slower, his voice a bit tamer — concessions to the onslaughts of time. But the trickster, the chameleon had never left him. He was still giving mainstream society the side-eye. He was still contemplating the next thing, and the next, and the next.
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Melvin Van Peebles passed on Sept. 21 at home in Manhattan, at the age of 89, surrounded by the family that sustained him, frustrating expectations by dying the natural death he once wryly said black folks weren’t supposed to die. The obituaries that followed the next day, the first full day of autumn, nearly all fell in line, dutifully describing him as the “godfather of black cinema.”
Which may or may not have been true. We can thank Mario Puzo, Francis Coppola and friends for imbuing the word “godfather” with an indelible silken menace, a diabolical sense of the transactional that didn’t suit Melvin Van in the least. He didn’t need to get over like that.
To my mind, MVP was more the shit-disturbing unifier of black American cinema and culture, a figure whose work and style and uncompromising independence was a bridge between Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, Rudy Ray Moore and Samuel L. Jackson. From feature films to documentaries, novels to screenplays, stage plays to recorded albums, the work of this mutha was and is everywhere, panoramic and timeless, and containing them multitudes.
