William Douglas Street Jr.
CHAMELEON STREET
B
USA (94 mi) 1989 d: Wendell B. Harris Jr.
I think, therefore I
scam.
—William Douglas Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr.)
Not an easy film to appreciate, as it grates on your nerves,
yet it offers a rare glimpse into the changing identity of being a black man,
where this is an extremely provocative yet oddball film selected from the
archives of black independent filmmakers, a mix of blackness, academia, and
exaggerated satire from Wendell B. Harris Jr. who wrote, directed, and starred
in this film that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in
1990, but only received a limited release afterwards, completely disappearing
from view before falling into complete obscurity Despite its limited success and widespread
critical acclaim, the director has never made another film. While bizarre and overly weird, at times
hilarious, but also baffling, feeling intellectually aloof, distancing itself
from viewers in the haphazard way it plays out, lacking narrative coherency,
the essential message extracted from this film is just how complicated it is to
be a black man in America. Loosely based
on the real-life exploits of Detroit conman and high-school dropout William Douglas Street, Jr. who
demonstrates a chameleon-like gift for becoming what people want him to be,
assuming false identities under the guise that he can make more money as
someone else than he can by being himself.
Sort of the opposite of what’s portrayed in Black Like Me, a 1961 book recounting the experiences of a white
journalist traveling through the Jim Crow era of the American South disguised
as a black man, this portrays a black man impersonating a fictitious identity
in prestigious positions more commonly associated with whites, like a doctor or
lawyer, professions that require graduate degrees, while Street himself had
limited education. This was not without
consequences, as Street was continually arrested, accumulating two dozen criminal
convictions (and one jailbreak) for his lifelong efforts over the course of 50
years. In this film, Harris puts himself
in Street’s persona and invents his own screenplay, opening the film where he’s
being interviewed by a white prison psychiatrist who’s trying to unravel his
motives. Used to being the smartest guy
on the room, with a wide variety of interests, Street is the kind of guy who
quickly sizes up the situation by reading others, offering what they want to
hear, being the best version so that he puts their mind at ease, feeling
comfortable with who he is, even if it’s all a lie. The plain truth about blacks is that they
remain an enigma for white America, who are historically immune to being
understood, still outside the realm of white comprehension, even if they freely
adopt cultural references, like soul music, rap albums, literature, or support
Civil Rights legislation. The original
sin of slavery has permanently altered the landscape in America, where the
racial divide was never deeper.
The film backtracks to Street’s earlier years in Detroit,
still living with his parents, working for his overbearing father installing
burglar alarms, where we see him hanging out in a work van between jobs, smoking,
shooting the shit with coworkers, spending time at a local bar afterwards with
the boys, each commiserating about how they don’t have any money, conjuring up
the age-old thought, “Do I have to deal drugs in order to make money?”
imagining in his head the conversation he’d have with the dope dealer, the only
steady job in the neighborhood, where it’s not about the dope, but the business
of making money. The fact this is exaggerated to comic
extremes suggests it never happened, yet it’s an option available to every
black man growing up in urban centers.
Street does all right for himself, marrying a lovely and intelligent
woman, Gabrielle (Angela Leslie), yet she has a taste for shopping sprees,
reminding him every morning when he leaves for work to “Make some money.” Perhaps prodded by her incessant demands, his
first scam is writing an extortion letter to the wife of Detroit Tiger baseball
slugger Willie Horton’s wife, delivering it to her door when he’s out of town,
asking for $50,000 to avoid making public incriminating photos of Horton having
sex with other women. However this plan
backfires when his best friend and accomplice, Curtis (Anthony Ennis), signs
Street’s name at the bottom of the note and sends copies to the local papers,
eventually exposed as a sham.
Interviewed afterwards like he’s some kind of celebrity, he passes it
off like some kind of joke, but really it was too stupid to be believed. In real-life, Street was arrested in 1971 for
extortion, receiving twenty years’ probation, but only after successfully
impersonating a baseball player, where he was actually invited to try-outs by
the Detroit Tiger organization. Next he
poses as a journalist from Time
magazine, interviewing female USC basketball star Paula McGee (who plays
herself), claiming “She had the four ‘B’s…black, beauty, brains, and
basketball.” Yet he’s eventually
exposed, tipped off by a misspelling in his description of duties, which leads
to a more thorough background check. Gabrielle
is dumbfounded that he misspelled a word in his own self-composed background letter,
thinking he’s just another hare brained knucklehead. Similarly, he has interactions with real-life
Detroit mayor Coleman Young, playfully resurfacing in moments of history, much
like Woody Allen’s earlier mockumentary ZELIG (1983). While the film is multi-layered and complex,
serving as some sort of biting social commentary, much like Jeffrey C. Wray’s
recent The
Evolution of Bert (2014), it also offers a black perspective akin to Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the
inherent blackness in these impersonations is virtually unseen by his white
counterparts.
Among the more surreal sequences is Street’s ability to
obtain a student ID at Yale University, offering free entrance to the library,
which feels like a sacred entrance into hallowed grounds, where he attempts to
teach himself French by immersing himself in Édth Piaf. Surrounded by beautiful white girls, dressed
in a black leather jacket, shades, and a beret, pretending he’s from
French-speaking Martinique in the Caribbean, he passes himself off as some kind
of looming revolutionary figure, calling himself Pépé Le Mofo, uttering phrases
he’s familiarized himself with, which works like a charm until a Belgian
exchange student points out the obvious, exposing the fact that he’s not even
speaking French. Undeterred, he steps
into a screening of the Jean Cocteau movie BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946),
identifying with the Beast, of course, while meeting up with a rapturous
version of beauty, the Yale-educated, French-speaking sophisticate Tatiana
(Amina Fakir, a University of Michigan student who won Miss Black America in
1985) from Kenya, who briefly becomes his love interest. But when she discovers he’s already married
and that he deceived her, she can’t trust him and loses interest. One of the wild scenes of the film is a
masquerade French Revolution party they attend dressed as Beauty and the Beast,
where incredulously he runs into Gabrielle.
This kind of anarchistic freedom is short-lived, both in terms of
extravagant film style and relationship-wise, as neither woman forgets his
betrayal. While Tatiana is darker
skinned and more of his intellectual equal, his natural inclinations prefer the
lighter-skinned, less educated woman, claiming he’s “received 400 years of
conditioning by the Man,” suggesting he’s not responsible for his own sexual
appetites. Little more than a smug
opportunist, the self-righteous nature of Street comes across as sexist and
misogynistic, perhaps representative of the times, or more accurately the
Blaxploitation era of the previous decade that this film parodies, but also his
tendency to blame others and never hold himself accountable, with women bearing
the brunt of his inner rage, as they never accept him for who he is. In this way, that’s part of the challenge of
being a black man, as he’s constantly nagged and criticized by black women, who
offer him little wiggle room, finding him inadequate, which may stimulate his
desire to take refuge in someone else’s identity. While he takes a turn as a corporate lawyer
from a prestigious law firm, easily his most outrageous stunt is assuming the
role of a Harvard-educated intern at a local hospital, impressing the nurses,
while lauded with praise by the white doctors.
While the film reveals one harrowing incident where he’s asked to
perform surgery under the observing eyes of the ranking physician, consumed by
doubt and uncertainty, immersed in his own sweat, he’s alleged to have
performed 36 hysterectomies before being discovered (all successful, by the
way), spending plenty of time in bathrooms scrutinizing medical journals. The film has the unpleasant feeling of being
preached to, while also hustled by the filmmaker himself, as if it’s all a con
job, like he’s performing a brilliant vaudeville routine, yet the extreme
severity of his situation offers clever insight into the hoops blacks must jump
through to be accepted by white society.
Revealing the difficulties blacks encounter when pursuing the American
Dream, so long as he can act white enough and pass for a productive member of
society, he’s viewed as non-threatening, color neutral, and easily accepted,
but the moment he’s perceived as “black” in an overtly racist America, it
changes the entire power dynamic, effectively sending his black ass back to
prison.
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