I've just seen the John Waters film Cecil B. Demented. Well, it was OK. Actually I hate the kids, and it was definitely a film made with the kids in mind. But then, if it was propaganda, it was at least propaganda in a righteous cause. John Waters obviously has a lot of respect for Spike Lee. The kids in Cecil B. were standard issue multicultural, which was a bit of a disappointment. The racial politics of Pink Flamingos was much more intriguing. We see Divine going to the post office and striding along the sidewalk. Strange that it's a black neighbourhood. We see the passersby looking astonished, but in a guarded rather than a hostile way. The post office workers are too shocked to say anything. This is the White Queen, maggoty-beautiful, casting all shame to the winds.

By the way, I think the same actor who plays the Chief on the tropical island in Emanuelle in America is the same man who spoons out the eye from the severed head in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. Spike Lee's Bamboozled wasn't the first film to mash its teeth into race prejudice, to inhabit its stereotypes to such an extreme degree that they transgress themselves, bursting into liberating pieces. Joe d'Amato (who else?)'s films are a richly coloured travelogue, a wildly-spiced carnival of racial stereotypes driven to their last absurd limits, a racial delirium. And I think that the actors enjoy themselves, by and large. The three above-mentioned directors all prefer to work with a a team they know well, a travelling community of the otherwise unemployable (and in the case of Spike Lee, who else would give African-Americans such decent parts?), forming a supportive environment for the creation of a liberated community.

The carnival of perversion, dreams of miscegenation. Divine with the giant lobster. The best scene in the oeuvre.

Sombre too, as we watch the black minstrels burning the cork before the mirror, the candle flame shining in the curve of the spoon. And in the shots of the toys and little ornaments at the end of Bamboozled, we see the complexity and strangeness of hatred, the eerie fascination of these defunct, absurd objects. Seeing the sequence of old films, silent-era, talkies and cartoons, all showing negroes in absurd or demeaning roles, one wants somehow to reach out and pay some sort of honour to the players. Why is this? Some sort of yearning, not guilt or self-hatred, not sentimentality either, exactly. A girl with a scarf on her head, looking out to the left and smiling, how well-observed it is, and how tenderly moulded. Are black people better observers of whites than vice versa? Compassion arises from precise observation, from simply deciding to look. In all these objects (many from Spike Lee's own collection), we see something divided aginst itself - complex, hostile, and full of longing.