Read enough reviews of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and you will eventually get the feeling that it must be the “ugliest” movie ever made. A good reason exists for the number of critics who felt moved to comment upon the “ugliness” of the film and not as a commentary upon its content, but literally the aesthetic quality of the way it looks on the screen. Much of the film was shot on Mini-DV camcorders—and not super-high quality ultra-expensive models available only to Hollywood directors. A significant portion of Bamboozled was quite literally shot with the exact same kind of camcorder anyone could walk into a retail store and buy. So, yeah, Bamboozled does have quite the extraordinary cinematography credibility of Do the Right Thing. But that hardly makes it ugly.
That the directorial brilliance of Spike Lee is on full display in the stunningly beautiful scenes that make up Do the Right Thing is pretty much beyond argument. That same directorial brilliance is on display in Bamboozled in a different way. For most the scenes in the film, Lee was shooting simultaneously from at least three Mini-DV cameras and one sequence used 12 Mini-DV camcorders and three 16-mm film cameras at once. All these cameras going at one time meant that Lee had a wealth of choices from which to edit together the final film. Does the quality of what is being watched suffer as a result of most of it being filmed like and with the same hardware as the average home movie?
Of course. How could it not? There is a reason that PanaVision never sold its cameras in the local Sears. A denigration of expense in tools cannot help but lead to a denigration of quality, but quality in filmmaking is not all about how pretty a movie looks. Michael Bay’s films are stunning works of Renaissance art on the technological basis of how pretty the picture is compared to the how pretty the picture is when shot on Mini-DV. Nothing that Michael Bay has ever managed to do with that quality of technology can in any way compare to what Spike Lee does with his “ugly” images in Bamboozled.
Bay usually works with ten to twenty times the budget which Lee was given for Bamboozled. That budget was 10 million dollars and while 10 million dollars may seem like a lot of money, it can get used up pretty quickly. Considering the sheer volume of narrative information that Lee’s screenplay intended to present, the choice to ugly up the look is probably the once choice he made that allowed him to wield his influence over everything aspect.
Lee himself provided the explanation behind why his film looks “ugly” to some reviewers. Every dime that a filmmaker goes over budget can usually be made up for with extra influx of cash. But for every dime of extra cash that goes in, a dime of creative control comes out. That is even so when the creative control of the film means that the writer, the director and the producer are all the same person. Even when that person has the legacy and credibility of Spike Lee. The choice to film perhaps as much as 90% of Bamboozled using such low-tech cameras meant another type of trade-off. In exchange for making a film that may critics would deride as “ugly” Lee ensured that he would retain full creative control over the making of the film. And in the process he avoided having to release and “uglified” version of his vision.
That vision was also criticized, of course, but at least those who criticized the content of Bamboozled as being “ugly” were criticizing Spike Lee’s vision and not the vision of others which would always be attributed to Spike Lee. In a film which is—to a significant degree—about the ugliness that comes from compromising your integrity versus the imposition of ugliness on those who maintain their integrity, even the choice to make an ugly-looking movie is a certification of Lee’s uncompromised influence over Bamboozled.
