Black history class. Assignment details: This weeks film : The Mack” (1973). In this week’s reading, “The Rise and Fall of Blaxploitation,” Ed Guerrero makes the following observation:
This did not mean, however, that the newly emergent black macho images . . . were able to escape . . . Hollywood’s subtle, entangling system of racial devaluation. For the racial ideology and stereotypes that are but part of dominant cinema’s work are not fixed or static. Instead, they are a set of dynamic, lived relations and social transactions; the filmic conventions and codes of racial subordination are continually being reworked, shifting under the pressure of material, aesthetic, and social considerations (79).
For your assignment, I’d like you to consider Guerrero’s contention through an analysis of The Mack. Does this film challenge “the filmic conventions and codes of racial subordination” or does it merely “rework” them? Or does it do both? Please be sure to support your points with specific references to the film.