Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: “I’m Gonna Say a Black Ave Maria For You”

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is rightfully considered responsible for launching blaxploitation film. As Amy Abugo Ongiri asserts, “With this wish-fulfillment narrative of masculine emancipation, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song virtually invented the ‘superspade’ narrative formula that almost all later blaxploitation films would follow.” The term blaxploitation did not begin to circulate until late 1972. A blending of Black and exploitation, it was initially used as a pejorative critique of the emergent brand of seventies Black film by Junius Griffin, then president of the Hollywood–Beverly Hills chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People): “These films are taking our money while feeding us a forced diet of violence, murder, drugs, and rape. Such films are the cancer of ‘blaxploitation’ gnawing away at the moral fiber of our community.”

Blaxploitation films are often framed by critics, pundits, and fans as cinematic responses to the Black cultural nationalism of the time, though many were vague about any concrete or complex allegiance to Black Power and the Black Aesthetic. The success of Sweet Sweetback indeed established a formula for success, yet the ideological content of the work it inspired was often disappointing. Marketed to inner-city audiences and driven by the finance principle of low investment and high return, blaxploitation thrived through a commodification of Black cultural nationalism as pop phenomenon. Yet there are other values attributable to blaxploitation besides the strict terms of capital and industry. Kara Keeling contends, “Blaxploitation played a profoundly important role in adjudicating between a range of political positions vying for recognition as Black Power during the late 1960s and early 1970s and in presenting their resolution in the form of commonsense black nationalism.” It’s vital to appreciate that not all Black films of the seventies can be adequately labeled as blaxploitation but that many were made possible by the popular cycle, even though they ultimately exceeded the expectations of the industry, critics, and moviegoing public, including Bone (Larry Cohen, 1972), Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973), Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973), The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973), Claudine (John Berry, 1974), and Coonskin (Ralph Bakshi, 1974).

The film opens with a young child (Mario Van Peebles), hungry and seemingly destitute, having been taken in by the sex workers of a brothel. Perversely scored by a rendition of “Wade in the Water,” the next sequence shows the boy being coerced by an older woman into having sex. The woman deliriously cries out “Sweetback!” and through time lapsing, he rises postcoitally baptized as a dispassionately cool man. Quasi-Oedipal, parodically vernacular, shockingly obscene—this act of initiation and passage serves as Sweetback’s origin.

The sequence that follows reveals an audience at a live sex show featuring two women, one dressed as an ingenue and the other dressed as a bearded older man and wearing a strap-on dildo. Echoing the opening sex scene between the woman and the child, this sequence offers a performative reversal with another transformation as a new performer appears, the “good dyke fairy godmother,” who magically turns the older-man figure into Sweetback as the dildo becomes a real penis. Following his dutiful service, Sweetback is enlisted by two LAPD detectives to participate in a police lineup. On the way to the station, the detectives stop and arrest a young revolutionary named Moo Moo (Hubert Scales), take him to a secluded location, and begin beating him. At first, Sweetback is handcuffed to Moo Moo, until the detectives separate the two, leaving Sweetback to bear witness to the beating. Writing on the formation of the rebel, Albert Camus considers the unquantifiable way that an individual decides to rebel as a decision to refuse to lose anymore: “Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?” The sequence of Moo Moo’s beating is constructed as a rhythmic montage of the brutalization and shots of oil-rig pump jacks, accompanied by a chilling mix of the sounds of the rigs and the beating—a pairing that hints at how policing and resource extraction are similar processes. Throughout this brutality, there are several shots of Sweetback simply looking before he starts to beat the detectives unconscious. This is a moment of revolutionary consciousness and activation in the same vein as Camus’s preservation insight. Significantly, the majority of Sweetback is set in the Watts section of Los Angeles, five years removed from the Watts Rebellion, an event of urban uprising triggered by a police brutality incident. The film bears out the historical and cultural resonance of this uprising.

As Sweetback lifts the wounded Moo Moo, the young revolutionary asks, “Where we goin’?” and Sweetback responds, “Where’d you get that ‘we’ shit?” While this is the first dialogue spoken by Sweetback, Van Peebles’s voice functions throughout the film. Van Peebles composed the music, performing as Brer Soul, a persona he had first used for his 1968 Brer Soul album on Stax Records. His spoken-word style is known as Sprechgesang, a form of vocalization between singing and speaking that he had started using in the French theater. With Sweetback primarily a mute performance, Van Peebles’s nondiegetic voice produces an uncanny dynamic of disembodied multiplicity. As Tavia Nyong’o notes, “If we understand Brer Soul as the mask behind the mask of Sweetback, we begin to hear the multiple as opposed to singular channels through which this trickster figure becomes seen and heard on-screen.” Another important presence on the soundtrack is Earth, Wind & Fire, especially the band’s “Sweetback’s Theme.” The constant aural presence of the song’s funk vamp conveys the ceaselessness of a percussive and rhythmic eternity. Amanda Howell put it well when she wrote: “[The song’s melody] does not ‘progress’ in the sense a melodic line would, but it continues [with] its shifts in key and tempo followed by reiteration, then repetition. As persistent as Sweetback himself, the music effectively forestalls any possibility of his stopping or failing or being captured.” In this way, the soundtrack does more than idly accompany or accent the visual and narrative schema.

The majority of the film moves as a swirling exercise of scene upon scene of Sweetback running. The persistent cuts between frenetic movement and stillness echo the final sequence of Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô (1970). Sweetback moves with the perpetual motion of fugitive cartography, mapping Los Angeles with a renegade fury. Blackness propelled across the cityscape under the vigilant surveilling of police cruisers and helicopters acts as an absurdist and abstracted commentary on the quotidian precarity of Black life. Sweetback acts as a mythic force, further illustrated by inserted sequences of random folks speaking of him in a way tending toward the folkloric and fantastical. As Robert Reid-Pharr astutely observes, “Sweetback represents such a pure fantasy of blackness (the outraged, running Negro who exists wholly outside the social) that he becomes less a man than a specter, a dream, a ghost operating decidedly outside the machine.” The spectrality of Sweetback reaches a crescendo in a scene in which a woman presumed to be Sweetback’s long-lost mother is asked about him. As if unwinding, she ponderously speaks across a sequence of different takes: “I might have had a Leroy once, but I can’t rightly remember. When the kids get older and bad, they usually take them away from me.”

The cycling of Sweetback’s racing finally leaves the city for the rural and desert areas outside of Los Angeles, toward the Mexican border. Now donning less-than-hype wares, Sweetback resembles someone less citified and closer to a field hand. As Paula Massood richly elucidates, “The images of Sweetback chased by the dogs resemble those of an escaped slave making a run for the border. But . . . in a curious inversion, the Promised Land is not the North, as it had previously been, but rather the South and Mexico.” Highlighting this temporal shift, the soundtrack takes on a greater sacred and Africanist quality, with the inclusion of more gospel and kalimba. In the end, Sweetback does escape across the border, but the film chillingly suggests that the spirit of the rebel remains, with the closing words that he will return “to collect some dues.” Not a nod to an impending sequel, the message is an extradiegetic signal and direct address to the outlaws to come.