Shut Yo Mouth! Ethics in SHAFT!

By BARCODE 2x

He's a complicated man. No one understands him but his woman. And a2ethics.org!

Gordon Parks' seminal 1971 film Shaft begins with views of a sleazy, seedy Broadway. Movie marquees display dirty porn titles, but also films starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Redford. The marquees soon seem dimmed and the focus turns to the era's new kind of movie star. Richard Roundtree as Detective Shaft comes up out of the subway, walks out through traffic, cuts across town, and something new was born. Film was changed forever.

The crudely named 'Blaxploitation' era began. These action- and sex-driven films of the 1970s, made by black directors, were fantastical creations, born out of the fantasies and desires of the Black Community. There is as much social justice as plain-old ass kicking on display here, and Shaft is one of the films credited with starting it all.

Private Detective Shaft is caught in a lonely world. The cops want to sweat him for the manslaughter of crime boss Bumpy Johnson's henchman. The mob wants his services. And the Black Community doesn't understand him any more; his ethics are questionable now that he works for the crime bosses and the cops on a regular basis. Is Shaft part of the oppressive regime?

Shaft is hired by Bumpy to find the crime boss's missing daughter. The cops reveal a deeper plot; the Italian mob is moving in on Bumpy, and Shaft is caught in the middle. He calls in his old running partner Ben, who lives on the underground fringe, in a dope-ridden ghetto dungeon surrounded by other Black men that society has turned their backs on. The Vietnam war has left the Community scarred and deeply damaged, and Ben joins Shaft's effort, and an underground army is formed to find the girl, eliminate the Italian mafia, and flip the bird to the cops.

The cops are fools. Powerless, heartless cowards who have used Shaft to do their dirty work. Bumpy is using Shaft too, turning him into a target, and using Ben and the underground forces as a human shield. The Italian mob is the deadliest of all, and they have the girl. Shaft has landed in the middle of major societal conflict.

The messages and symbols in this film are everywhere. The labyrinthine scale and operatic tone of the film make it one of the best of the genre. Shaft is a superhero of social justice. In one scene he turns a fire hose on his White enemies. In another, Ben demands that Bumpy give $10,000 back to the Community for every Black male lost in this conflict. That was what the government was paying for boys lost in Vietnam. That's what it's gonna cost.

Nothing is what it seems. The tearful and melancholy crime boss is one of the most heartful and conflicted characters of the film. He hates to have to involve Shaft and the underground army. The cops and the mob have pulled Shaft in two different directions. And Shaft has had to establish priorities. The girl must be rescued. But even Shaft questions the mission. What is he saving this girl for? For money? For social justice? To stop the street war?

Who owns Shaft?

No one. Shaft has women, of course. They are his vacation, his escape from the world. He manages the stress of the job by silkily seducing multiple women. He can throw a guy out a window in the morning, and arrive at his girlfriend's house just hours later, naked in front of a roaring fire. He has an ex-wife downtown, a girlfriend uptown, a white girl who literally throws herself at him, and after a while, even the women are pulling Shaft in another direction entirely. He cannot be all things to all people. Women in 1970s Black Action films are fantastical, sexual creatures without their own liberation. Pam Grier's Foxy Brown and Coffy will also be covered here at a2ethics.org. Black women had their heroes in the 1970s too, and a new kind of heroine would come to her own kind of power, in time. But at another cost.

The ethics of a person in Shaft's position are unclear at the outset, but as the film goes on, his guiding principles reveal themselves. His main ethic is secrecy. He keeps private information from the various sides, and doles it out gently. His main priority is justice for the Community, peace in the ghettos, protection and advocacy for his misrepresented brothers and sisters. What risks should we take in protecting our communities? What is one's personal duty to oneself, and what is our true duty to our communities?

He is calling the shots. He is running the city's justice situation. When he corners five of the Italian mob's key hitmen in a bar, he secretly calls his police contact, who pathetically implores Shaft "What should I do?" Shaft organizes the police raid, the rescue of the girl, the murder of the bad guys, all in time to get on a pay phone and ridicule his police contact with a snappy one-liner.

In this current war, our government has brought in mercenaries to do the dirty work. Like Shaft, there are individuals and organizations paid generously to handle the rough stuff. No one is held accountable when private industries like Blackwater can be used for security, assassinations, interrogations. Middlemen, go-betweens, independent contractors who do the field work. These buffers are needed to protect the powerful and keep their hands clean.

Shaft is the go-between. The glue, the magic bonding element in a world at war. In a matter of days, he gets justice for his Community, through shady dealings with powerful forces. His methods are unsound; he requires guns, and ropes to swing in through windows. He has immense financial resources from the mob to cover bribes, but the money is used benevolently too. He redistributes some of it into the Community, buying a kid a bite to eat, etc. He is a Robin Hood. In times of trouble, are vigilantes the answer? Are criminal ethics something we all need to understand and use, when survival is at stake?