"Mandingo" is a mainstream, big-budget exploitation film obsessed with black bodies. Almost everything is about this fetish, which through enslavement, is principally sadomasochistic. There's the sex scenes, which are always interracial, always focused on the black body, whether male or female, and always under the power dynamics of them being raped. There are the examinations of them during slave trading, their beatings, the belly of the boy being stepped on for the supposed curing properties, the mulatto offspring, and the prize-fighting, too. The marriage of the white masters and, indeed, almost all of the white characters' conversations are focused on black bodies--the control, jealousy, raping and selling of them. There's very little here that subjects the slaves to anything beyond objectification of their bodies. Meanwhile, those of the white masters tend to be perceived as crippled in some way--the rheumatism of the father, the bum knee of the son, the loss of virginal purity of the wife. Through this system of voyeurism and the cinematic gaze, the spectator is forced into the uncomfortable position of identification with the white masters.
It's no wonder so many people find it offensive. It's as though we're co-conspirators in the exploitation of slavery--crippled by the fetish. Perhaps, it's even disconcerting that so many continue to defend the picture, whether gleeful from the outrageous excess of it all, or ignoring the narrative's soap-opera histrionics to consider it realistic because slavery was brutal, after all, or somehow ignoring the narrow focus and positioning of the spectator within the sadomasochistic fetishizing to consider this the 1970s version of "12 Years a Slave" (2013)--it's not. There are only fleeting moments where Agamemnon, Ellen and Mede assert or begin to discover their subjectivity by defying the "peculiar institution," but for the most part they comply with their stereotypical, subjugated roles as toms and "wench." "Mandingo" is obscene, but it's interesting to consider why we feel the way we do about it, whether or not we enjoy it and what that may say about us.
It's no wonder so many people find it offensive. It's as though we're co-conspirators in the exploitation of slavery--crippled by the fetish. Perhaps, it's even disconcerting that so many continue to defend the picture, whether gleeful from the outrageous excess of it all, or ignoring the narrative's soap-opera histrionics to consider it realistic because slavery was brutal, after all, or somehow ignoring the narrow focus and positioning of the spectator within the sadomasochistic fetishizing to consider this the 1970s version of "12 Years a Slave" (2013)--it's not. There are only fleeting moments where Agamemnon, Ellen and Mede assert or begin to discover their subjectivity by defying the "peculiar institution," but for the most part they comply with their stereotypical, subjugated roles as toms and "wench." "Mandingo" is obscene, but it's interesting to consider why we feel the way we do about it, whether or not we enjoy it and what that may say about us.