Coffy

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Again, you can dispute this one's Klassik status. Still, part of the point of my K2K is to broaden my horizons, and I am woefully ignorant of blaxploitation films. I have some leave coming up and will be taking a week off work this month, and I figure I'll be doing a few marathon movie sessions. And I am strongly considering doing a blaxpolitation mini-marathon, just to knock off some of the more famous examples. I am eyeing Shaft, Super Fly and Across 110th Street.

I saw Foxy Brown a few years back and liked it, and here's another one with the same writer/director and same star. Overall, it may actually be more entertaining than Foxy Brown, although it doesn't have a payoff as good as the severed dick in a jar. One guy does get shot in the dick, that was alright.

Update 6/5/08:

A surprising number of my posts have been half-assed lately. Not intentionally, but for example yesterday when I was writing up Coffy I was feeling kinda sick and not much in the mood to write, and I completely forgot to make the one point I actually wanted to make. This happens sometimes. The worst is when I'm lazy and I just do some brief description of the movie and flatly state whether or not I liked it. That's exactly the opposite of what I set out to do with this blog. I don't want to review movies or just say if I liked them. I'm not doing plain value judgments here. I want to discuss some aspect, or background information, or even just some tangent that I find interesting. I like when I describe what lead me watch a movie, or how a movie fits into a genre or director's body of work. I like when I compare and contrasts movies. I like when I just talk about some other topic the movie made me think of. That's what I'm here for.

What I wanted to mention about Coffy was some thoughts I had about the feminist politics of it. Because on the one hand, we got this ass kicking, totally awesome heroine played by the great Pam Grier headlining an action/crime movie, which is way cool and progressive. But then on the other hand, the movie keeps subjecting her to possibly denigrating acts. I mean, for a large chunk of the movie she goes undercover as a prostitute, and actually sleeps with the horrible, manipulative pimp! Yeah, she fucks him over later, but only after she sacrifices her dignity to him. I wouldn't expect such a badass to lower herself like that. And she's constantly seducing the bad guys and kind of putting herself out there as a sex object. The movie, I think, wants to have a pro-female empowerment message, because she uses all this to get this best of the evil men and prove her womanhood (hence the penis shooting), but it still seems like she has to tarnish herself first.

But then I thought, hell, James Bond fucked a billion evil women just to manipulate the bad guys, and I never think of him as degrading himself. Maybe I'm just buying into some sexist, caveman notion that by fucking around, Coffy's somehow lowering herself.

I'm still conflicted. In Foxy Brown, Grier's character actually gets raped and then kills the guys who does it, and I remember thinking... why go that far? I mean, she's a strong female lead, how about having her kill the dudes before they rape her. In Coffy, there's a part where she seduces this weirdo misogynist guy who likes the beat up and humiliate women, because she's planning on killing him. She actually lets him push her around a little bit before pulling her gun out. Why did she wait that long? I'll give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they aren't reveling in this for entertainment's sake (well, I mean, I'm sure they are to a certain degree, this is after all an exploitation movie, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they aren't misogynists), and that they just really want us to hate these assholes before Coffy kills them. And I guess that's fair. But I think if Coffy narrowly avoided these attacks instead, the movie would feel more legitmately pro-asskicking-women.