I got a hustler spirit, n***a. Period

- Jay-Z, Public Service Announcement (Interlude)

He may have plastic or a PayPal account, but Luke is old school, and he would always have a stack of cash on his person, because he would remember the desperate, lean times when he was broke.  More than likely, when asked for a dollar, Luke would pull out a knot, peel off a hundred, and ask Tony if he had change.  Given Luke’s history, I also can’t imagine him deciding to live on principle, literally and figuratively, now that he has a wife and child to provide for financially:

In the above sequence, from New Avengers: Vol II #7, Victoria Hand distributes the team’s first paychecks to them.  Luke refuses, claiming that the money will make him beholden to Captain America and he doesn’t want his team to be answerable to anyone, even Captain America.  Now remember, earlier Luke was willing to hire the aforementioned Victoria Hand, over his own wife’s objections, because Captain America vouched for her.  So, Bendis’ Cage will gladly do what Cap says for free, but he won’t take a paycheck for it?  That doesn’t make any sense.   As a result of the paycheck situation, Jessica tries to have a private conversation with Luke over their family’s financial situation, but Luke elects to have the discussion in front of his team members.  Jessica then reveals the embarassing truth that the Cage-Jones family is broke.  In the above scenarios, Bendis’ interpretation of Luke Cage makes the most significant departure from the character’s established history.

Luke Cage is a hustler in the most positive interpretation of that word.  He’s a street entrepreneur. It’s central to his character. After all, the title of his original series was Luke Cage, Hero For Hire. He’s the type of guy who is always looking for the angle. He’ll search for a way to make the most of his present circumstances, while keeping one eye on the horizon for the next opportunity.  The above scene from the first issue of Luke Cage: Hero For Hire was his “I-shall-become-a-bat” moment.  It was not only the first time he put on his costume,but it established that from the outset, Luke was a savvy businessman who intuitively understood the power of marketing.

Through the years, readers have mocked Luke Cage’s metal headband and yellow shirt with the butterfly collar, but Luke was always in on the joke, too. Luke recognized that superheroes were popular, and with his newfound abilities, he could capitalize on the public’s fascination with them to make money.  He knew the costume was “hokey” the moment he put it on, but also knew he was selling the image of a superhero that anybody could hire.  If that was his image — his brand –then he needed to look the part.  Therefore, Luke used his meager reward money to satisfy his most immediate need for accomodations and then INVESTED the rest into funding his innovative business venture as a hero for hire.  Without a bolt of cloth made from unstable molecules or Peter Parker’s sartorial skills, he bought a combination of off-the-rack pieces and assembled a makeshift costume.

In the Marvel Universe, prior to his affiliation with the Avengers, Luke Cage operated on a fairly limited scale. Although his base of operations was New York City where most of the Marvel Universe’s hereos are based and he enjoyed regular interactions with them, Luke’s own influence and reputation was fairly regional, with a few notable exceptions. Although the Avengers may offer a steady paycheck, health insurance, and the occasional belly rub by Captain America, it seemed more likely that Luke Cage would view his stint in the Avengers as a stepping stone to new opportunities and a way to build his profile on an international stage.

As I see it, the closest real-life parallel to Luke Cage is 50 Cent.  50 Cent came up hard, and had an extensive criminal history, which along with his well-received mixtapes, earned him street cred with the underground hip-hop community.  His street cred was cemented by surviving an attempted assassination attempt, and the nine bullets he took that nearly took his life became in integral part of his biography.  Historically, part of the allure of Black music with White America, from the blues to jazz to hip-hop, has been the aura of danger, the forbidden, and the illicit that surrounded it.  50 Cent understood that, and used his business savvy to package his muscular frame, alpha male swagger, and violent history into a carefully calibrated brand to become a platinum-selling artist.  At every stage of success, 50 Cent pushed this brand and fine-tuned the image.  50 Cent sold a thug image, but thugs don’t sell flavored water franchises to Fortune 500 companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.  Hustlers do that.   That should be Luke Cage in a nutshell, except replace “thug” with “superhero.”

One of the principle obligations of a writer is to tell a good story with characters that people care about. In this regard, Brian Michael Bendis has always been tremendously successful.  Finding and developing one’s unique voice for on character who has a long, established history must be one of the special challenges for writers of serialized fiction.    However, I do believe that writing for a Black character requires a hard-earned understanding of the interior life of a Black man. I say “hard-earned,” not because you have to be Black to write Black characters, but because that interior life is not something Black men often discuss in frank, open terms, among outsiders or even among ourselves. It’s not what we say, but how we say it. It’s not something you’ll find in most of pop culture. Sometimes it can be dominated with feelings of shame and fear that we mask with bravado or bluster. It’s the constant weight of the realization that if the next man screws up, it’s a reflection on that person, but if you screw up, it can easily become an indictment of an entire race. It’s the hidden truths and brutal pain that we respond to in the humor of Richard Pryor or vintage Eddie Murphy It’s an interior life that is symbolized by the sharp, but casual nods we give to other Black men when we pass each other on the street, sometimes accompanied with a “Wassup?” That other guy may otherwise be a complete stranger, but the nod is a silent acknowledgment of a shared experience that says, “I don’t know who you are, but I know you.”

It’s an understanding that’s hard-earned, but it can be uncovered. In the director’s commentary to Foxy Brown, the film’s writer/director, Jack Hill exhibits well-deserved pride over the speech Foxy’s brother, Link (Antonio Fargas) delivers to justify his life of crime. Is Link right? No, he doesn’t have to be. He’s a character in a movie, not a walking polemic. Hill did his research, and using James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time as a resource, gave voice to a frustration that was, and sadly still is, echoed by young Black men around the country. There shouldn’t be any “politically correct” way to write Black characters, because that thinking usually leads to perfect paragons of virtue, who tend to be perfectly boring. As the film’s writer, Hill’s had no responsibility to make Link perfect and uplifting, but he did have an obligation to make Link’s voice and ideology authentic to who the character was.

- JEP

LINK:

Understanding Luke Cage: Part I of II

In this void of recognizable villains, the exceptional performances become particularly notable.  This week and next, WORLDOFHURTONLINE.COM recognizes the Top Ten Villains of Blaxploitation.

So, without further ado, let’s start the countdown:

#10 – SHELLEY WINTERS as “MOMMY” in Cleopatra Jones (1973)

Standing at a gorgeous 6′2″ inches in stocking feet, decked out in the fly-est gear, and driving a tricked out sports car with secret compartments bristling with weaponry, Tamara Dobson’s Cleopatra Jones was a larger-than-life superhero.  However, if Cleopatra Jones was the silver screen’s first Blaxploitation superhero, then Shelley Winters’ “Mommy” was the Joker to her Batman.  Winters delivers a memorable performance as the wildly temperamental, foul-mouthed lesbian crimelord who took shit real personally when Cleopatra Jones called in a military airstrike on her Afghan poppy fields and destroyed $40 million worth of heroin.  The woman who had earned an Oscar nomination the year before in The Poseidon Adventure chews the scenery like a starving man tearing through a bag of beef jerky and throws caution to the wind with a wildly campy, yet tonally correct, bravura performance.  A running gag involves Mommy cursing out her goons for their latest failure, only to be interrupted by her some sexy, leggy, busty beauty who brings her some needed item.  Mommy always stops mid-harangue and says “Thank you [insert name].  You’re the only one around here who understands Mommy.”  The beauty of the joke is that it’s a different woman each time.

#9 JOSEPH MASCOLO as “GUS MASCOLO” in Shaft’s Big Score (1973)

Joseph Mascolo played Mafia don, Gus Mascolo, as the polar opposite of Shelley Winters’ “Mommy.”  Gus was a refined, dapper man of culture who seemed to view contract killings and numbers rackets as an ugly, but necessary way to finance his rarified tastes.  When we first see Gus, he is arriving at his penthouse apartment via helicopter.  Gus changes into a smoking jacket and ascot and has his henchman pour him a drink before sitting down to practice a bit of classical music on the clarinet.  Gus demands similar refinement from his thugs, who inevitably disappoint him.  He chastises them for interrupting his music and failing to appreciate the subtleties of fine cuisine.  If it weren’t for the killing and grave robbing Gus engages in later in the film, he’d be a pretty classy guy.

#8  DON GORDON as “HANK” in The Mack (1973)

Hank was the ultimate corrupt cop and I’m certain that for the audiences sitting in those darkened theaters in 1973, he was a perfect stand-in for every cop who had ever shooed them along, pulled them off the street for a line-up, or tried to cave their skull in for demanding the right to vote.  When the movie opens, Hank and his partner have just cornered the protagonist, Goldie (Max Julien), in a drug bust.  Goldie’s car flipped over during the shoot-out, trapping him inside.  Instead of offering assistance, or calling for help, Hank and his partner stand outside the car, spitting racial epithets at Goldie and casually debating whether arresting Goldie would result in less paperwork than shooting him in cold blood.  Hank might just be another dirty, celluloid cop if it weren’t for the depth and inner turmoil that Don Stroud invested in him, particularly in a scene involving an overweight Black prostitute he hired to blow off some steam.  The sight of the inebriated Hank baring his soul to the disinterested prostitute while he paws her breasts and confesses his fat fetish (”I like women of substance.  Big.  Meaty.”) using racially charged metaphors is creepy, repugnant, and pathetic in equal measure.

#7 GEORGE MURDOCK as “FATMAN” in The Mack (1973)

You’ll recognize George Murdock the minute you see him.  He’s the type of reliable character actor that makes audiences say, “Oh!  THAT guy,” because he’s been in everything from Barney Miller (where he played recurring character Lt. Ben Scanlon) to The X-Files to Star Trek: The Next Generation. As Fatman, he plays Goldie’s former employer; a crime boss who fancies himself as something of a mentor to Goldie during his time in the drug game.  Although Goldie has carved out a comfortable niche for himself as a pimp, Fatman wants Goldie to come back into business with him.  I appreciate Murdock’s Fatman for his complexity, because his interest in Goldie is both profit driven and paternalistic.  Goldie earned a lot of money as a drug runner for Fatman and he dismisses Goldie’s earnings of “$2,000 a week” from his hookers as “chicken feed.”   However, when Goldie refuses to come back into his employ, Fatman is forced to confess that Goldie’s operation is drawing too much attention from the Powers That Be, so it may be best to fold his business and come back under Fatman’s protection.  Fatman turns out to be correct, but his Devil’s bargain was no deal for Goldie, who needed to make a clean break from the criminal life.

#6  KATHRYN LODER as “KATHERINE WALL” in Foxy Brown (1974)

Kathryn Loder playes Katherine Wall as a cool, calculating, drug dealing madame with a firm grip on her criminal empire.  The only weakness in her formidable, icy exterior are her feelings for her pretty-boy boyfriend, Steve Elias (Peter Brown), who offsets Katherine’s calmness with hot-headed bravado and bluster.  Foxy Brown is out to avenge the death of her boyfriend at the hands of Katherine’s men, so she engineers a perfect moment of poetic justice against Katherine by depriving the madame of her boyfriend…or at least the “boy” part of him.  Kathryn Loder’s Katherine becomes increasingly unhinged and erratic throughout the course of the film as Foxy’s plan unfolds, so in the final confrontation between the two women, Katherine’s primal wail at being left “to suffer” becomes a fitting metaphor for her fragile, unraveling mental state.

Next week, the countdown of the Blaxploitation’s Top Ten Villains continues with the top five fiends.  See you next week, and enjoy the opening weekend of college football.

- JEP