The Commodification of Blackness in David LaChapelle's Rize

Abstract

In 2005, fashion photographer David LaChapelle released Rize, a feature-length documentary about the inner-city Los Angeles dance movements of "clowning" and "krumping." The prestige-press lauded Rize as "a celebration" (Scott, 2005), a spectacular "visual miracle," and "unexpected knockout" (Travers, 2005). Many popular film critics praised Rize for revealing "another side" of South Central L.A., where young people use the art of dance to "rise" out of their social hardships. Most commonly, the film received accolades for its uplifting message. A review in the Washington Post, for example, noted: "That in disenfranchised communities beset by multiple blights of poverty, drugs and gang violence, there have always been stubborn, heroic artistic responses. This is simply one of the most dramatic and one of the most inspiring" (Harrington, 2005, p. WE37). In qualifying their admiration, critics commonly referred to the story as a "feel-good" movie about "hope sprouting where there should be none" (Burr, 2005, par. 1). Clowning and krumping were repeatedly treated as "salvational subcultures" (Harrington, p. WE37) that have "provided young African-Americans-most stranded in the war zones of South Central-a path away from the guns'n'poses of the area's self-styled gangstas and drug lords" (Brunson, 2005).The director, LaChapelle, is an internationally renowned photographer noted for his high-fashion celebrity photographs taken on surreal, extraordinary sets; thus, the film as a visual phenomenon is no surprise. His artwork typically plays with themes of excess aesthetically conveyed by a spectacular use of color and camp. LaChapelle's fantastic, vivid, and bizarre aesthetics are identifiable traits that run across his multi-media vita of music videos, advertisements, fashion, and fine art photography. Regarding his auteur status LaChapelle states, "My pictures are entertainment, an escape from the world we live in today. I never deal with death and violence; they're too everyday" ("High Fashion Fantasies," 1998, p. 54). Applying this statement to Rize poses a number of questions regarding the ethical and social responsibilities of a documentarian; one such question might ask how LaChapelle reconciles his own logic within a film made about the gritty, tough streets of South Central where death and violence for many of the area's constituents are "everyday" phenomena?Although his statement can be read in a number of ways, this paper argues that LaChapelle's own artistic vision ultimately compromises his role as a social documentarian of an inner-city struggle. If documentarians "speak for the interests of others" (Nichols, 2001, p. 3), then a number of ethical issues arise in the act of representing a community of which the storyteller is not a part. Structures of power, for instance, are implicit to the re-presenter/re-presented relationship and complicated by inherent social, cultural, and economic differences of either party (consciously or not). At the same time, it is possible that even highly reflexive modes of filmmaking and film criticism are privy to an essentializing discourse that predetermines a filmmaker's racial and class identity as inextricably at odds with the social actors he or she has represented on film. This research is no exception. Thus, this paper makes no claim to whether or not a white, wealthy, internationally-renowned popular artist is capable of bracketing his own subjective identity to adequately depict the "objective reality" of a black inner-city subculture. Instead, this research reveals through close textual analysis a number of highly structured formal codes that situate LaChapelle within the film despite his physical absence. Further, these codes offer insight to how the filmmaker views himself in relationship not only to the film's social actors, but to black culture as well.The tendency to romanticize black folk culture with "images of the black working class and inner-city dwellers as somehow inoculated from the devastation of their surroundings" is common in filmmaking, according to Johnson (2003, p. …