American Stories: Barbershop and 8 Mile

If not for the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Barbershop might have been merely one of the most popular black films in American history. Written, directed, and produced by blacks, this tale of a day in the life of a barbershop on Chicago’s Southside raked in $75 million in box office receipts (on a $12 million investment) last fall. But what gave the homespun comedy the cachet that propelled it onto prime-time talk shows and high-circulation editorial pages across the country were Jackson’s and Sharpton’s attacks on it for disparaging African American civil rights heroes and their demands that MGM, which produced it, cut the offending sequences or face a black boycott.

The reverends’ appeals went unheeded by black moviegoers and MGM alike (the producers offered their apologies). Jackson and Sharpton got one thing right, though: Barbershop is a sassy film. What it affronts, however, is not the dignity of African Americans at large but the presumptions of various elites, black and otherwise.

Jackson and Sharpton picked up on one such challenge: the movie’s sharp rebuke of self-aggrandizing, censorious political leadership. In the scenes that they wanted to cut, the barbershop’s employees and patrons, all but one of whom are black, get into a noisy argument about African American political icons. The squabble is provoked by allegations made by Eddie, the senior barber in Calvin’s Barbershop, and a graying veteran of the civil rights activism of the sixties and the seventies, that Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and, not incidentally, Jesse Jackson have gotten a lot more credit than they deserve; while the thousands of black men and women who, like himself, also sat in and went to jail have gotten a lot less. Eddie attributes Parks’s celebrity to her association with the “N Double A C C P” [sic], dismisses Jackson with a four-letter obscenity, and calls King “a whore.”

Some commentators have suggested that far from validating Eddie’s views, Barbershop holds them up to scorn: everyone else in the shop loudly protests them. But Sharpton’s pique, at least, was probably a response, not fully conscious and certainly never fully articulated, to something in the movie that threatens his style of politics and leadership far more than the disrespectful remarks of a single character: a vivid depiction of ordinary people’s relish for frank talk about their common life. When Eddie criticizes Parks et al., he’s a minority of one; but he speaks for everyone present when he describes the collective exchange as “nothin’ but healthy conversation.” The filmmakers give the last word to a passing mailman who gets caught up in the verbal fray: “I love this place,” he says as he heads for the door at the end of the scene. Though Barbershop explores the grounds of su...