The problem with winning is that it creates and promotes the idea that someone won. From this already shaky foundation invariably flows obsequiousness, and from obsequiousness we get the kind of silly and unempirical brand of empiricism that can only be incubated in the minds of people who are dimly aware that something large happened, was important and definitive by virtue of the fact that it was large, and also probably loud, and whose importance, loudness, and largeness are actually enhanced by the fact that nobody currently alive today was alive when the thing, whatever it was, happened. After all if the thing that happened – which, and I want to be sure we’re clear here, could be literally anything, or nothing – was as large as everyone says it was (or wasn’t, it doesn’t matter) then whatever, exactly, transpired in the moment that made our current moment inevitable must have itself been inevitable, an inarguable consequence of the universe that the Large and Therefore Correct thing would win, so good and thoroughly tenderized, apparently, were all of the other participants in the game. Following from this – because we insist on applying Darwinism to everything, because we’re weird – is the inviolable belief that those other ways of being that were snuffed out of existence during what was apparently a competition are not worthy of being missed, or even remembered, unfit for life as they must have been. They lost, you see. That’s bad. We don’t like that.

All of this brings me to what I really wanted to talk about today, which is Pam Grier doing karate and driving planes into cocaine dealers while rocking a 70s pantsuit. I am not being cute, so let me try that again: All of this brings me to what I really wanted to talk about today, which is Pam Grier doing karate and driving planes into cocaine dealers while rocking a 70s pantsuit, all against the backdrop of the stuff I mentioned above. The apparent ease with which she does this blows my mind: the rules are large, and paternal, and witness to and advocates of their own authority, and they won, and they won a long time ago, and all of this means they must be right, but Grier keeps violating them, and nothing bad is happening to her. This is sacrilege to someone like me, who craves the rules, and who refuses to question the self-lionizing murk from which those rules and their sovereigns emerged, claiming victory in a struggle whose details and basic fairness they are always reluctant to expound upon.

This conflict amounts to a lame-ass millstone around my lame-ass neck, crippling my ability to give delightful movies like Foxy Brown the kind of egalitarian eye they deserve, because – as if you didn’t see this coming – ironic and scholarly detachment aside I am one of those obsequious meat-monkeys forever convinced in the infallibility of that style of storytelling which has dominated Hollywood ever since the twin catalysts of people getting tired of watching footage of trains coming at them and the son of a Confederate colonel having some neat ideas for camera angles sent us down the path were are currently on. This really is a thing I struggle with, and makes me forever fear that I am missing details.

But Foxy Brown is dope as hell, both as a movie and as an enduring breath from one of those vanquished timelines, so review it I shall. After all, how will I learn, unless I make an ass of myself, at least a little…?

Foxy Brown Review

If you don’t enjoy the opening credits to Foxy Brown 1) what is wrong with you 2) you should probably just stop watching before the movie starts in earnest, because the rest of its ninety minute runtime is pretty much just that amazing, rotoscoped and solarized catalogue of Pam Grier’s generously-provided charisma played out again, only with a thin layer of plot laid over it to placate the narrative expectations of you, a boob. And when I say everything about the movie can be tasted in those opening credits, I mean everything – the pitfalls of its limited budget; the way in which those same pitfalls are simply rolled up, confidently like they were placed there on purpose, into the larger sweep of the film’s style; the occasional ignorance as to how a movie like this is “supposed” to play out; the much more common awareness of and contempt for how a movie like this is “supposed” to play out – everything. The credits open with Grier winking directly at the camera, because there is no other way to open them.

Foxy Brown isn’t just a good movie, it is a relief – from the turgid style of filmmaking that haunts us to this day, to the expectations of women in film, to the rules of how something is supposed to feel, and at what moments, the stultifying way in which most movies only feel calculated feelings so that they might align with some pixie-fart of a standard yoked upon us by, I don’t know, whoever directed The Great Train Robbery. Just like how Dolemite, to be unloosed from the glorious and uncorrupted pressure-cooker of Rudy Ray Moore’s mind only a year later, would roll along to the beat of its own confident rhythms, Foxy Brown lilts its way from credits to close with the standard accoutrements of film not meekly and obediently worked into its structure so much as retrofitted to embellish Pam Grier’s latest mood or outfit, dangling from the fabric alongside anything else that might accentuate her easy style. Does the story ever turn on typical beats? That depends: do those typical beats give Grier more kindling to add to the fire, or at least to the smolder? Whenever the answer is yes, then, yes, probably.

Foxy Brown is held together by the physics of its own vision in a way I am constantly forgetting anyone is free to do whenever they want. The expansion of its tissue is never weighed against the mordant bylaws of whatever body has inflated itself to the scale of Sheriff ‘Round These Parts but instead is just kind of felt through and experienced in a way that is so goddamned refreshing that even its stranger strands of logic have an undeniable poetry to them. You could view an opening credits sequence that features Pam Grier just kind of doing whatever she wants as amateurishly unstructured, or you could appreciate it as creativity unbounded. I prefer the second one, because God fucking knows I don’t have the nerve to dance like that.

The Story, or:

The Thing That Needs to Be There so Great Things Can Transpire

Ahaha, story. Sure, whatever. Alright, here’s the skinny: Foxy Brown lives in Los Angeles. It is not clear what Foxy Brown does, other than be there for people and refuse to take even free-sample-handed-out-at-the-mall levels of shit from anyone. Her brother calls her from a payphone one night because he’s in some visible-from-space levels of trouble with the local drug cartel, so Foxy bails his ass out with a bout of classy and sophisticated attempted vehicular homicide. Concurrently, her man, a former government informant, is getting the finishing touches on his plastic surgery so he can re-enter society under an assumed name and face. Concurrently-concurrently, that same drug cartel, the one that Foxy politely asked to leave her brother alone by running them over with a car, and which is led by a woman who sounds decades older than she is, which never stopped annoying me, are expanding their reach, and are keen to knock off Brown’s man, too, for the whole informant thing. Foxy is at the middle of this, calmly deciding whose ass to kick first.

This is all fine. Things need to happen in a movie, otherwise the screen at the theatre would just be two hours of that weird 16 oz. cup with the freaky face telling you to turn your phone off, and that the movie is also available in braille, or whatever. No, much more interesting than any one component of Foxy Brown’s plot is the apparent process by which these many structural points are chosen, and how they are strung together to constitute the movie’s personal and wonderful take on storytelling. See, in a typical movie you’d have the calmly-then-rapidly swelling urgency of one main plot thread, a contiguous chain of events dominating your viewing while a few, lesser, strands of thematically-similar sub-stories kind of snake around next to it, to be cut away to when you’re afraid the audience is getting bored with the principle one. But in Foxy Brown, once the details of the story are given to us, revealed with a flourish by a waiter who understands that the presentation is part of the meal, they are then just kind of chosen, à la carte, for the rest of the runtime, with priority not going to that one big narrative idol that everybody else prostrates themselves before but rather whatever feels right in the moment. This is an ass-backwards inversion of how the process usually goes, and it is glorious. In Foxy Brown the beats of the story are chosen only insofar as they allow for the purest possible expression of the filmmakers’ vision, which is a prioritizing of their own creativity over whatever has been written down in some Joseph Campbell handbook. The notion of plot is democratized this way, as the movie refuses to accept one standard formula for storytelling and instead presents in its place a wholly their own interpretation of how shit could, would, or should shake out.

Take Brown’s man, for instance (she takes him, a lot, but we’ll get to that later): his introduction is all kinds of random. We just suddenly see Foxy as she visits someone in the hospital, which like in all good B-movies is just a room with concrete walls that the filmmakers rolled a bed into and hung a curtain around, and the dude has bandages all over his face. Is this a mid-season episode of a television series, and we’re supposed to know who that is? No, just our protagonist’s love interest, whose decisions prior to the movie are the catalyst for pretty much everything that happens in the movie, introduced almost as an afterthought.

But here’s the thing: it fucking works. If you’re like me and you’re frowning at the bluntness of this guy’s introduction, because you’re the type of person who walks into a business and tells them that the sign out front says it’s when it should say its before skipping back out the front door and leaving everybody inside deeply and powerfully confused, you might miss the subtle genius – there’s a reason we don’t get the usual, Hollywood-approved introduction of Foxy driving to the hospital, flashing back to memories of her man, letting that John Williams score swell, blah blah blah: because they had some fucking commentary to get to! Foxy’s man has been given a new face and a new identity by The Man after serving him as an informant, and those new accoutrements are savagely white. Notice how when Foxy and Mr. NewFace leave the hospital together he’s wearing some middle-aged dad nonsense, as contrasted with all the people they meet outside, who are wearing what looks like the result of Earth, Wind, and Fire’s tour bus colliding with the hair and makeup department of a Bruce Lee movie. We are ripped away from the comforts of The Way You Typically Introduce a Love Interest not because this movie doesn’t understand how to introduce a love interest but because the story has more and complex designs upon Foxy’s man and what he represents. This is a fucking salvo against rote filmmaking, and it exists because the movie is smart enough to realize that a story obligation such as Love Interest Man isn’t an obligation at all – it’s a thing that people do when they make movies, sure, and do it a lot, and without much insight or reflection, but incuriousness about something doesn’t make it a rule.

The Logic of Logic, or:

Just do What Feels Good

And whenever Foxy gets a moment with her man, they fuck. In positions inspired more by Looney Tunes than the Kama Sutra, with seemingly comic irreverence. Or so you’d think, you white-bread bitch! Yes, just like with Mr. Man’s introduction in the hospital we are once again, uh, let’s say eschewing subtlety in filmmaking, but the bluntness of their relationship is not some swing-and-a-miss attempt to mimic a mainstream movie: we cut right to the fucking because that physical, uninhibited, completely joyous expression of their relationship constitutes the terms on which the movie wants to cast their relationship. And why the fuck not? Why can’t sex be the relatable and intimate way in which our protagonist and her love interest make known the strength of their bond? Nutting is just another, completely viable way to express passion, one that takes all the boring Puritanicalism – sorry, I mean propriety – that has long been considered the preferred, if not only way to present love in the medium of film and replaces it with legs straight up and the warranty on that mattress getting the stress-test of a lifetime. Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris, but Foxy and her man? They’re more into Greek.

And the film actually, legitimately goes somewhere with this sweaty thread, so don’t tell me I’m just plucking a signal from the noise! Sex and the value of a man being directly tied to his ability to impersonate an industrial-strength vibrator on the set of a Asia Carrera movie are themes that the movie keeps coming back to, and in increasingly compelling and challenging ways! That sentence was weird as hell to write! The head of the drug cartel/prostitution ring/novelty necklace association, for instance, is herself deeply in love with a man, also mostly for the sex. These two are thirsty in a way that nearly matches Foxy and her beau for “do you think the people at this funeral will notice if I blow you behind grandpa’s tombstone” levels of energy. So how does Foxy’s escalating rivalry with this woman culminate (oh, no, spoilers for a movie from a half-century ago that you’re never going to watch, oh I’ve committed the crime of crimes fart wheeze barf): Foxy castrates the motherfucker’s boyfriend, then delivers his dick to the her in a fucking jar. Again, the literal details aside (I mean, meditate on the literal details for a second; it’s a dick in a jar) we should be fascinated and impressed by how the movie handles the material, how the beats of a typical film are absconded with and recast on terms better-suited to express the prerogatives of this film. And the prerogatives are: sex is fun, and a legitimate way to illustrate passion! In keeping cartel-lady’s boyfriend alive but, uh, helping him lose a couple of pounds Foxy is saying, “the worst part of losing my man is not getting to have his flawless cock inside of me anymore, and I want you to feel that same sense of loss. I don’t have to kill your man to accomplish this, because sans-dick he is as useless to you as my man’s corpse is to me.” That, if nothing else, is one hell of a thesis statement on modern romance.

And how about Link’s role in the movie? Foxy’s brother, the one whose desperate call initiates the story proper, goes from being the short-term narrative catalyst, to our comic relief, to an underhanded and reprehensible figure, to dying miserably and without redemption. You could chalk these heavy and disparate storytelling responsibilities up to the movie not being able to afford enough actors to fit all these roles, or just bad writing suffering from lack of scope, but to me it’s more of a sign of how many people Link has to function as. He is a tragic figure fucked over by society (his rant to Foxy early on in the film about how it’s impossible to start a legitimate business is actually, sincerely moving) even as he’s depressingly hilarious in his bleak assessment of the world and his role in it (his line on the phone of “look: there’s two big motherfuckers waiting to beat the living shit out of me. As soon as these two cops finish their goddamn lunch,” is a more desperate and darkly, inadvertently funny look at the human condition than anything I’ve ever written in all of my attempts at somber self-seriousness) even as he’s a shithead for immediately betraying his sister to the drug cartel, even as it’s frustrating and deliberately unsatisfying that he dies without any chance at redemption!

In a “normal” movie Link’s death would be more drawn out and obvious, with the dealers abducting him and putting a phone to his mouth and telling him to say goodbye to his sister, and Link finally being granted an heroically absolving moment by apologizing and quickly telling Foxy where the bad guy’s base is before being offed, or whatever whatever. But in this movie he’s just fucking his lady when the hitmen show up and blow him away. He never apologizes to Foxy before this happens, doesn’t even see her again after betraying her and their subsequent falling out when she realizes what he has done. Link just betrays her, then dies, then is forgotten. You can only call this bad filmmaking if you, like me, have had your brain hardened into certain expectations for character arcs and story beats. But when viewed on its own terms Link’s story is absolutely a tragic and beautifully-crafted non-arc, one in which we’re denied any catharsis and Link is denied any redemption, simply falls into the same fate that he pretty much predicted for himself at the movie’s onset. I’m just saying, if Shakespeare had written it, you’d be forced to study it in school.

If I Want Kung-Fu in My Movie Then There’s Going to be Kung-Fu in my Movie, or:

Dolemite’s Razor

We will now discuss kung-fu being in this movie. Here is the chain of reasoning that led to kung-fu being featured prominently in this movie: the filmmakers wanted kung-fu in this movie, so they put kung-fu in this movie. But does this seemingly random inclusion of high-kicks and funk, which should scream of amateurism, or at least boring pandering to the audience, serve another and deeper purpose? Oh, good, you’ve been paying attention! The kung-fu is dope, don’t get me wrong, but this is weight-bearing kung-fu, people. The first fight scene that the movie treats us to also introduces the neighborhood watch, a group of well-meaning (and apparently Bruce Lee-loving) men who defend their homes and streets from pushers and pimps by punching them very hard. Not only is this a fun and silly way to ease us the audience into the otherwise grim topic of urban decay and disillusionment with the system, it also establishes the existence of a noble, kung-fu-based society in Foxy’s orbit, one whose services she will utilize during the film’s climax! That is legitimately good setup and payoff, Chekov’s Gun but with punching and a wah-pedal!

And the karate interludes are just one part of a series of seeming non-sequiturs that when taken as a whole show a movie that isn’t unfocused so much as focused on a narrative pulse different from what you’d anticipate if you grew up only watching mainstream movies. How about when the movie interrupts itself to do an aside during which the corruption of the white, American legal system is confronted, insulted, and publicly exposed? The entire sequence where Foxy goes undercover as a prostitute in the service of the cartel she is trying to bring down doesn’t actually glean new information or help her materially in any way (she already knows where the cartel leader lives, has been to the lady’s house, so she could just, you know, ring the doorbell and shoot everybody) but the movie, imbued with its own enviable energy, wants to keep bouncing from thing-it-finds-interesting to other-thing-it-finds-interesting. And it does so with such sincerity that we the audience can’t help but be charmed and endeared along for the ride.

And it just so happens that at this moment the thing the movie finds interesting is how the harrowing reality of life on the street is facilitated by corruption at levels higher up, in this case in the form of a judge who colludes with the cartel to help their dealers get off with light sentences. So what happens when this same corrupt judge hires Foxy and a friend for the night? A comic-commentary-interlude, of course! Foxy and the other prostitute lure the man into a hotel bedroom, strip him, mock his tiny dick, then throw him outside sans-pants (a terrible pants condition to be in, if you’re a citizen of note) where his reputation is ruined when a bunch of proper white ladies find him. This doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with the plot of the movie, which should only bother you if you think the plot of this movie is the thing you’re supposed to care about!

And amazingly, because this movie’s plot and emotional beats are so virtuosically their own, even that non-sequitur is non-sequitur’d by another, more flooring and real moment when Foxy’s prostitute partner, at first laughing with Foxy at how unafraid she is at subverting the mob’s will – during this silly scene of stripping a corrupt judge naked, which is silly, and making no attempt to be anything other than silly – suddenly falters mid-laughter into hysterical crying, explaining that the reason she is unafraid is because nothing matters anymore, because the mob has taken everything from her, and she is now looking forward to death. Jesus fuck. Some filmmakers break their brains trying to make their movies seem as organic as possible, and in doing so oftentimes make the artifice more pronounced in the effort (ladies and gentlemen, Judd Apatow!) but the breaks leftward and rightward and sincere-ward and goof-ward in Foxy Brown are so fucking sudden and raw that nobody could have pre-envisioned them on the page. This is not unwieldy writing, or bad filmmaking – it is expression unbothered by form, and it is fucking art.

Foxy Brown

Well, here we are. At first I thought the worst part of Foxy Brown was Pam Grier’s acting, because I am dumb and sniff glue. Specifically, dumb-and-slightly-younger-me thought her performance was frustratingly variable, changing gears on a seemingly scene-by-scene basis, giving me nothing to compartmentalize into a nice, convenient box labeled “Protagonist.” And then, like a man waking up from a glue bender, I had an epiphany: I, a dullard, was judging Grier’s acting based off of how I infer a performance, lead or otherwise, should be, which is another consequence of watching the same types of performances over and over again and internalizing those beats as some kind of rule for acting. This was very silly! In a film like this, in which the tone and style are constantly changing in accordance to an internal logic completely independent of whatever the “rules” are supposed to be, you need an actor equally agile to tie it all together, to make that shit work, and work believably. Grier isn’t all over the place, she’s a goddamn Swiss army-knife!

This is how we get Foxy as a badass when she needs to be, a background character who seemingly forgets how to fight when she needs to be, someone improvising because she’s in over her head when she needs to be, someone who knows exactly what she’s doing when she needs to be, someone thoughtful and full of wisdom about the community when she needs to be, and someone who really just wants to get ruined, and I mean fucking smashed, by her man when she needs to be. The sexist stereotypes of women – particularly black women – are embraced with her horniness, then undercut immediately with her guile and resolve, then embraced ironically during her impersonation of a prostitute, then rendered blunt and horrifyingly during a sequence in which she is raped. Grier’s performance, which I, moronically, like a stupid person, who is bad at thinking, took to be lacking is in actuality much like the movie itself – taking from the palette of available tropes whatever it wants to work with in the moment, but feeling no sense of obligation towards them, no mindless urge to put these tropes on a pedestal and mindlessly propagate them. Everything – fucking everything – is in play for someone like Grier, who is talented enough to see all of the levers available to be pulled at any given moment, and irreverent and confident enough to go for the one no one will expect.

Trouble Every Day

I can’t, however, fit the entirety of this movie into the lionizing cast of Deliberate Statement, Everything Was on Purpose. Close, but not quite. Some aspects of the film are troubling, or outright grotesque, as entrenched in the shittiness of their own time and narrowness of thought as so many of the sacred cows of storytelling that the film takes undeniable pleasure in tipping over. For one, Foxy gets naked. A lot. I’m all for celebration of the human body, and even more for not giving a fuck, but, uh, the genre isn’t called exploitation because it’s respectful to its subjects. As on-board as Grier might have been with her character’s sudden urge to change outfits according to a clock that apparently only she can hear, she really doesn’t need the pandering in order to hold our attention, is too good at what she does to have to appease the dudes who are watching the movie, and the dudes who made it (another reason to pump the breaks on the prose-poems over this film: it was written and directed by a dude, which throws some of its more… explicit decisions into a shittier light). There’s also a scene of sexual assault that, while handled as tastefully as you could hope for in a movie that features a woman being handed her boyfriend’s severed dick in a jar, again seems like the movie being as blind towards some of the barbaric expectations inherent in filmmaking, particularly low-budget filmmaking, even as it is lucid about others. I try to untangle the good from the bad when this happens, but it’s not possible; progress is mean and ugly, and characterized more often than not by beating old biases to death with newer, only slightly less shitty ones.

The End

When you’re an old fart like me it’s hard to watch something clash so dissonantly yet so successfully with the “proper” structure of storytelling that you’ve spent your entire life nodding somberly towards and taking notes about in a desperate attempt to be taken seriously. One part of your brain keeps telling you that what you are watching is wrong and needs to be identified as being wrong and chastised for being wrong, and that the wrongness must be brought to people’s attention, as without this public service what will become of the rules, the rules which give me meaning. But another, smaller, much more limber part of your brain – the part that probably knows how to dance just through sheer intuition and knowledge of its own body, even though you’d never give it the chance to try – keeps pointing out to its larger, more turgid brother, “if everything about this is wrong then why does it work perfectly, its parts fitting together as well as any parts of any ‘proper’ movie ever have?” This is a damned good question to ask, and your big brother brain just kind of falters in response.

It’s like pulling yourself from long-dried concrete, watching movies like this, and standing up and dusting yourself off and realizing you’re in a different, less comfortingly-tamed timeline, one in which all of the vanquished structures from your home world are just kind of strutting around, living again and feeling no need to explain why. You feel less smart, which sucks, especially if you’re me, and feeling smart is the closest you’ll ever come to driving a Ferrari. But it also means there’s a lot more to watch, and learn from, and that can’t possibly be a bad thing.