Bulworth: The Hip-Hop Nation Confronts Corporate Capitalism A Review Essay

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 8 (1998) : 73-80. Bulworth: The Hip-Hop Nation Confronts Corporate Capitalism A Review Essay James Allen and Lawrence Goodheart Co-written, directed by, and starring Warren Beatty, Bulworth (1998) is a scathing political satire that ranks with Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963). While Kubrick skewered assumptions about nuclear strategy at the height of the Cold War, Beatty indicts the current corporate manipulation of American politics. Bulworth challenges the reigning capitalist mystique through a tragicomedy that blends manifesto with farce and the serious with slapstick, in a format that is as enlightening as it is entertaining. The film is a mix of genres and stereotypes, common to mass-marketed movies, that Beatty nonetheless recasts into a radical message. He calls for democratic socialism and heralds the black urban underclass as its vanguard in a manner reminiscent of Herbert Marcuse’s formulation of a generation ago. The opening scene of Bulworth establishes what Beatty sees as the fundamental malaise of American politics today—that the rich rule the republic. The eponymous protagonist, Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, played by Beatty himself, is the case in point. The incumbent Democratic senator from California has cynically abandoned his former liberal principals in the wake of the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s that marked the demise of the New Deal legacy. Even his pompous three-part name suggests not only a prominent pedigree but also a pandering politician, one full of “bull.” During the last days of the 1996 primary campaign, Bulworth suffers a crisis of faith in his bid for renomination. As the camera pans the wall of his elegantly appointed office at the Capitol, photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X shaking hands, Rosa Parks, Huey Newton, Robert Kennedy, and a younger, idealistic Bulworth appear. The radical promise of the 1960s is contrasted with the vacuous words of his generic campaign speech— “We stand at the doorstep of a new millennium . . .” Bulworth’s hollow rhetoric rings reminiscent of President Bill Clinton’s own over-used cliché of “building a bridge to the twenty-first century.” Indeed, the film attacks the Democratic Party’s recent rightward drift. Like Clinton, Bulworth’s knee-jerk criticism of affirmative action, welfare, and the national government play on the platitude that what is needed is “a hand up, not a hand out.” The empty rhetoric is that of pollsters, publicists, and pundits that caters to the new conservative majority. The “triangulation” of policy—the midpoint between Democrats and Republicans—that consultant Dick Morris shrewdly plotted for Clinton is the geometry of power. Agonized by moral hypocrisy, a tearful Bulworth remains rooted to his desk chair, unable to eat or sleep for days. In a McLuhanesque moment, the medium becomes the message. The senator is reduced to channel surfing between hypnotic images of his superficial speech, naked women, professional wrestling, and other Pavlovian diversions. What Newton Minon, the former Federal Communications Commissioner, called the “wasteland of television” is a modern day bread and circus, an opiate of bourgeois culture. “I consume, therefore I am.” Image is reality. The suave, handsome Beatty plays on his own persona in portraying the linkage between politician and actor, Washington and Hollywood, that Ronald Reagan so effectively blurred. Beatty at once warns and beckons. What the voter sees is not what he gets; politics is artifice. For example, Bulworth and his ironically named wife, Constance, appear for the inevitable “family values” photo-opportunity. The depiction of the handsome, loving couple is, however, fraudulent, not unlike the troubled marriages of John and Jackie Kennedy, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Their teen-age daughter refuses to participate; Bulworth is oblivious to his spouse; and she is sleeping with his opponent. In despair and desperate, Bulworth hires a mobster to arrange his assassination, which is code named “the weekend research project.” He also makes a contract with a corrupt lobbyist to block insurance reform in return for a $10,000,000 policy on his life payable to his daughter. The mobster, a hitman with feelings, is confused; the lobbyist, the truly nefarious character, is gleeful. A gangster genre is added to the theme of spiritual angst with invigorating effect on the story. The didacticism of the movie is leavened by the conventional spectacle of a mystery replete with mistaken identity, car chases, femme fatale, and suprise ending. Through the last weekend of the California primary, Bulworth not only is dogged by his own disgust with sham politics but fearful of being killed. The macabre humor works well as his aides, Murphy and Feldman, the quintessential Irish and Jewish politicos, try to give Bulworth’s outrageous behavior the correct “spin.” Oliver Platt’s riveting performance of the cocaine-snorting Murphy is a model of modern Machiavellianism. At Grace A.M.E. Church in South Central Los Angeles, a distraught Bulworth abruptly cuts short his prepared address and tells the parishioners the truth. African Americans don’t vote enough or contribute much money to the parties, and that’s why Democrats don’t care about blacks any more than Republicans do. Besides, whites don’t like the way blacks supported O.J. Simpson in the trial in which he was acquitted of murdering his white wife. Pleased with his blunt honesty, Bulworth remarks to himself, “That was good, really good.” Appropriately his repentance and regeneration begin in the black church, a center of social activism since slave times. Despite the recognition of the severe problems of the ghetto, the movie celebrates the vitality of black urban culture. Much to the consternation of Bulworth’s handlers, three young women from the inner-city, including the alluring Nina (played by Halle Berry), join his entourage. After the newly honest Bulworth outrages Jewish moguls in Beverly Hills and affluent Protestants in Pasadena, Nina guides Bulworth’s odyssey through the netherworld of Los Angeles. At Jackie’s, an after-hours club, Bulworth is misidentified as first Clint Eastwood and then George Hamilton. The confusion is not only a wry comment on celebrity culture, but on the racial generalization that members of the other group look alike—“can’t tell them apart.” The scene further reflects the large disconnection between the inner-city club-goers and the politicians in power. Bulworth’s time and energy have always been spent with the rich in Beverly Hills. As a result, he is alienated from the plight of the ghetto. In turn, inner-city residents are divorced from their senator, because they lack money and therefore a political voice. Unfazed, the liberated Bulworth enthusiastically joins in the Dionysian ecstasy of song, dance, and intoxication. Amidst the compan (...truncated)