Deep Cover: Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?

One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he is recruited for an undercover operation by the Drug Enforcement Administration to infiltrate the largest supplier of cocaine on the West Coast. Becoming “John Hull,” Stevens moves up the infrastructural pyramid of the drug trade as his assignment grows increasingly complicated by his success as a dealer, the shifting priorities of the operation’s mission, and his own sense of self. With questions of Black identity as its animating core, Deep Cover challenges many of the presumptions of noir and Black film.

The movie began as a collaboration between screenwriter Henry Bean and producer Pierre David, following their success with the noir Internal Affairs (Mike Figgis, 1990). They tapped Michael Tolkin to write a script, with Bean then revising as well as working with Duke on the material once the director came aboard. Loosely inspired by Michael Levine’s 1990 book Deep Cover, a nonfiction account of how 1980s DEA undercover operations involving Latin American drug trafficking in the United States were derailed by political subterfuge and incompetence, the screenplay was originally written with a white lead character. But before the project landed at New Line Cinema, which released Deep Cover following the 1991 box-office success of Black films including Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City and John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, an executive at another studio suggested changing the lead character to a Black man. “Impressed with the successes of Spike Lee,” that studio “was looking for a film that they first could ‘niche-market’ to blacks,” according to a 1992 article in the Los Angeles Times. For his part, Bean was intrigued by the suggested revision. “The details of blackness gave the character a particularity and resonance that it otherwise didn’t have,” he told the Times.

Deep Cover was Bill Duke’s second theatrical feature, after his adaptation of Chester Himes’s 1957 novel A Rage in Harlem (1991), which had followed television films such as the labor-union drama The Killing Floor (1984). While studying at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Duke had performed in a 1969–70 off-Broadway production of Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship and the 1971–72 Broadway production of Melvin Van Peebles’s Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death. Michael Schultz’s Car Wash (1976), in which Duke plays the troubled Black nationalist Abdullah, offered the first cinematic glimpse of Duke’s prodigious talent. Before you start reminiscing about Duke’s roles across the eighties, which include memorable supporting turns in American Gigolo and Predator, do yourself a favor and look at some of his extensive directing for episodic television. His direction is distinguished by his rapport with his actors—especially palpable in his receptiveness to improvisation—qualities that contribute immensely to Deep Cover’s sharp sense of character.

Film noir of the forties and fifties was often defined by whiteness, the ambiguities of crime and the law, masculinities and femininities in crisis, social critique, and a coding of all manner of difference with measures of aberrance, peril, and an evocative aesthetic profile of high-contrast lighting. Among other things, noir of that era also demonstrated pop psychoanalysis, New Deal heroism, and the latent celebration of the suburbs as a haven from the infrastructural catastrophes known as cities. Whether one considers it a genre, mode, or tendency, film noir must always be appreciated with its cultural and historical contexts in mind. This is why the term neonoir is an untenable, if not lazy, explanation for all latter-day noir films as derivatively nostalgic for noir’s supposed golden age. As James Naremore writes, “Film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema; it has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse—a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings.”

Noir is an idea that critics, academics, and the film industry have collectively “projected onto the past,” in Naremore’s words, to the detriment of understanding that this nostalgia constitutes a privilege that not all subscribe to or can afford. Set in a neon-soaked Los Angeles, Deep Cover stages not a simple derivation of noir but the meeting of the idea of noir and the idea of Black film. Bojan Bazelli’s cinematography shows how the aesthetic codes of classical noir can be expanded to accommodate a different sense of light and shadow, with all manner of high-contrast reds and blues used within the film’s evocative framings.

Deep Cover begins with a jalopy moving slowly down a street, the choral strains of “Silent Night,” and an intertitle: “Cleveland, 1972.” A voice-over quickly signals a flashback and the narrative conceit of retroactive contemplation: “So gather round as I run it down and unravel my pedigree.” The car pulls off the main drag into a parking spot as a cut to its interior reveals a man and a child and the voice-over resumes: “My father was a junkie.” Taking a bump of cocaine, the father looks at the son and tells him to “never do this shit.” The father’s insistence, increasingly agitated, is quickly tempered by tenderness: “Whatcha want for Christmas?” This is not a wonderful life. The sequence brutally closes on the father dying in the snow after his failed armed-robbery attempt at a liquor store nearby. Over a close-up on the face of the child, the voice-over closes the scene: “My father, when I saw him die like that, saw him find his grave in the snow, I only had one thought: it wasn’t gonna happen to me.”

In the wake of these traumatic origins, a second intertitle (“Cincinnati, 20 Years Later”) precedes three scenes of different Black policemen being asked a question by an administrative-looking white man, Carver (Charles Martin Smith): “Tell me, do you know the difference between a Black man and a nigger?” The third candidate is revealed to be the man narrating the film, Russell Stevens, who is neither stunned nor belligerent as he responds, “The nigger is the one who would even answer that question.” The rejoinder impresses Carver, who then pitches an assignment to go undercover and infiltrate a drug cartel by convincing Stevens that many of the flaws laid out in his psychological profile—“Resents authority. Rigid moral code, but with no underlying system of values. Insufficiently developed sense of self”—will become assets on such a job. Stevens is not being asked to go undercover as much as to simply fulfill his destiny by productively channeling his supposed criminal degeneracy. Thanks?

The voice-over that serves as a guide throughout Duke’s film, providing access to the main character’s interiority, represents one of the movie’s crucial borrowings from and challenges of the noir mode. As Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo note, “The noir convention is that the separation between the voice and the body of the detective gradually disappears as the film comes to the end, when we are gradually brought to the present of the narrative and to the reunion of the voice and the body of the detective.” A noir film rife with the sins (and fears) of the father, Deep Cover enacts the difference of a Black interiority with a voice that ultimately hovers in an irreconcilable present between the traumatic past and an uncertain future.

When Stevens, now John Hull, arrives in Los Angeles, he begins his advancement through the hierarchy of the drug network by procuring from street-level dealers. A few weeks into the mission, he meets two important characters: an LAPD detective, Taft (Clarence Williams III), and a lawyer who colludes with the drug traffickers, David Jason (Jeff Goldblum). Throughout the film, Taft encourages Hull to feel remorse for his “sin” of drug dealing—a doubled sense of sin that simultaneously invokes the piousness of the gospel and the violations of the Black community. He stands in as the patriarch lost in the Cleveland snow and as a Christian crusader.

Jason, who is variably coded as Jewish and white, manages the street-level distributors and provides legal services, and in his eventual partnering with Hull the movie comments on and complicates the interracial male couplings so central to the buddy-film formula. As Ed Guerrero notes, these pairings often operate according to the principle of a kind of “protective custody” that prevents the possibility of a critique of anti-Black racism and white supremacy. Deep Cover deviates from and viciously rebuts this aspect of the buddy formula.

One exchange in particular between Hull and Jason highlights the disobedience of the film’s coupling. With Hull in a hotel hallway growing impatient with Jason’s lateness for a meeting, Jason appears in a doorway, attempting to finish getting dressed and part from his lingerie-clad Black mistress.

HULL: David, we got to go, man.
JASON: How come I like balling Black chicks so much?
HULL: I don’t know, maybe you feel like you’re fucking a slave.
JASON: What do you mean, like a bondage thing?
HULL: No, like a racist thing.

As opposed to being merely an innocuous non sequitur, Hull’s comment reflects the dynamics of power and racialization that shadow Jason’s desire. The vivid retort of “fucking a slave” ruins any and all possibility of social problem-solving.

The scene immediately following the “fucking a slave” exchange involves Jason and Hull’s late arrival for a meeting at a downtown art gallery, whose owner, Betty (Victoria Dillard), launders money for the drug cartel. Foreshadowing the romance to come, Hull and Betty begin an antagonistic courting ritual of double entendres and lingering glances. Much of their banter occurs while Hull wears a wooden Indonesian Ramayana mask. The mask typifies Hull’s masquerade and ongoing performance as drug dealer/cop and the twoness that W. E. B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.”

Stevens/Hull’s dual identity is soon thrown into further crisis as Carver abruptly shuts down the undercover operation at the behest of the State Department, in order to protect the potentially politically useful leadership atop the targeted drug-running enterprise. Having fulfilled his previously untapped pathology, our protagonist is unmoored. Now in possession of one hundred million dollars in drug profits, Jason and Hull arrange a meeting on a docked cargo ship with Hector Guzman (René Assa), a Latin American ambassador who uses his diplomatic immunity to import cocaine. Jason begins pitching his dream scheme of designer drugs that would eliminate the expenses related to cultivation, refinement, importing, and labor. Guzman replies, “You racist Americans. You just want to cut us poor Hispanics completely out of the market.” To this, Jason responds, “There is no such thing as an American anymore. No Hispanics, no Japanese, no Blacks, no whites, no nothing. It’s just rich people and poor people. The three of us are all rich, so we’re all on the same side.” Postracial solidarity meets the ways of capital in the new global village of drug trafficking.

Deep Cover: Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?

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