It is impossible to talk about the Superfly movies — the original from 1972, and the 2018 remake — without addressing the controversy aroused by both.
I have been a fan of the original SuperFly since I was a teenager, mostly because of the incredible Curtis Mayfield soundtrack (which I listened to repeatedly on cassette in my VW Beetle), but also because I also thought (for good or ill) that SuperFly was incredibly cool.
Around that time, I made the mistake of telling my jazz dance teacher in a summer class at SF City College— a beautiful young black woman I greatly admired — that I loved Superfly. She looked at me with a kind of pity and concern, and said “You know, that movie had a devastating effect on the black community.”
I feel embarrassed to this day she had to school me like that.
The term “blaxploitation” was coined by president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP in anticipation of the 1972 release of the original Superfly. He abhorred the criminal stereotypes portrayed in the movie, and even more so the personal charisma and sexual power of the Superfly character himself. “The transformation from the stereotyped Stepin’ Fetchit to Super N_____ on the screen is just another form of cultural genocide,” he was quoted as saying in “Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film” by film historian Ed Guerrero.
Other opinions about the image of Superfly have been in play as long as the movie has been around. Todd Boyd, a professor at USC’s School of Dramatic Arts, told Tre’vell Anderson at the LA Times in 2018, before the release of the Superfly remake: “The images (of blaxploitation films) were transformative because they did have this anti-establishment approach and were in a lot of cases about consciousness and politics….(Superfly) was really empowering to audiences because you had a black character who not only got an opportunity to tell off ‘the Man’ and speak truth to power, but he did it with style. It was cool and hd a flash to it. It was what cinema was supposed to be. It’s what people would now call ‘woke.’”
In 2018, Missouri state senator Jamilah Nasheed (D-St. Louis), the Senate Minority Caucus Whip, urged St. Louis-area residents to boycott the Superfly remake.
“The last thing we need in our city is a movie perpetuating and glorifying again, drugs, gangs and violence… SuperFly exemplifies everything that’s wrong with the African-American community, and so what we’re saying is, enough is enough,” Nasheed is quoted as saying on Missourinet.com.
The 1972 Superfly, which was directed by Gordon Parks Jr. (son of Gordon Parks, who directed Shaft) is arguably the jewel in the crown of Blaxploitation films from the seventies — largely because of the indelible, jittering-on-the-edge of madness performance by Ron O’Neal, who elegantly delivers the realness in his portrayal of a stressed-out street hustler who does coke all day.
In the opening scene, Youngblood Priest is naked, snorting coke, next to an attractive, sprawled-out naked white lady. She paws at him and keeps asking needy questions like, “Are you leaving?”
“Yep,” Priest says after a beat, somewhat contemptuously.
“When are you coming back, Priest?”
He lets the question linger there until she asks again. He says nothing, just leaves. He has all the power in the relationship. She isn’t even his main girlfriend.
There is much more street-level desperation in the original movie, which shows the actual junkie life and its attendant horrors — chase scenes involving dogs, tenements and chain-link fences. There really isn’t any glamorizing of street life; all Priest wants is to make one big score and escape Harlem forever.
The outfits are much more memorable in the original Superfly than in the remake, largely because the stylings are reflective of an active, living counterculture: plaid suits, afros, leather trenchcoats. Tunics color-blocked in Paul Klee hues. Turtlenecks and long custom jackets with crazy op-art patterns and gigantic lapels. Chuck Mangione hats and ochre corduroys. Glasses with gradated lenses. Fabulous handlebar mustaches. Western-style zip-up jackets and fedoras, complete leather suits with superfluous brass buckles.
This high style extends to Priest’s car: his black 2-door Cadillac ElDorado convertible has a customized grill from a Rolls Royce mounted in front, and crazy chromed headlight covers, which makes it especially pimptastic — and this is important because it is such a unique expression of street style that could not have merely been bought; it had to be invented.
The political economy driving Priest to cash in his chips and leave the drug kingpin life is mentioned in a variety of conversations. Priest’s friends don’t believe he can be anything but what he has already become, and argue that he has already arrived at the promised land.
“You’re gonna give all this up: eight-track stereo, color TV in every room, and can snort half a piece of dope every day? That’s the American dream, n____, ” says Eddie, Priest’s closest friend.
“I know it’s a rotten game. It’s the only one the man left us to play, and that’s the stone-cold truth.”
Priest is, as Curtis Mayfield sings:
“A man of odd circumstance
A victim of ghetto demands
Leave me burning for style
And I’d like to trip for a while…”
Priest’s dilemma is utterly relatable to anyone who has ever hated their job, and yearned to be something outside of and beyond what is conventionally expected of them. He is not the kind of guy who wants to tap out of coke dealing and find a job in sanitation with good dental. He is a hustler to the core, with shinier dreams and more exclusive tastes.
“What would I do?” Priest asks rhetorically, about going straight. “With my record I can’t even work civil service or join the damned army... work at some jive job for chump change day after day? If that’s all I’m supposed to do, then they’ll have to kill me, ‘cause that ain’t enough.”
The plot involves various deals and betrayals, finally placing Priest (SPOILER ALERT) face to face with the crooked cop who has been providing him with cocaine, and using this leverage to play puppetmaster. In perhaps one of the greatest “Take this job and shove it” - scenes of all time, Priest growls at the cop.
“You don’t own me, pig, and no motherfucker tells me when I can split.”
“Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” asks the cop.
“I’m talking to you, you redneck faggot.”
The scene is utterly gratifying on an almost physical, primal level, even to a suburban white lady like me. It’s a profoundly stirring message of outright rebellion, which works especially well now that drugs are starting to lean toward legalization while the cops have gotten exponentially more paramilitary and predatory.
Superfly 2018, played by the exceptionally smooth young actor Trevor Jackson, wears a “conk” hairdo — the kind of relaxed Prince-type style that made Denzel stick his head in a toilet in “Malcolm X” when the feds shut off his water. People tease Priest about his beautiful hair all throughout the movie. A rival is moved to call him a “perm-fade wearing motherfucker.”
Even Priest’s old mentor and martial-arts sparring buddy Scatter
(played by he late Michael K. Williams, who was famously Omar in “The Wire”) gets in on the hair-teasing action.
“I taught you how to dress, but you took it way, way left. With your Morris Day-lookin’ hair.”
“Who the fuck is Morris Day?” Priest retorts.
Priest 2018, unlike Ron O’Neal, doesn’t use drugs for anything but making money. Intelligence is his strong suit - he researches the shit out of everything and everyone in his purview.
Superfly 2018 operates out of Atlanta, and chandelier-spangled strip clubs where $1 bills fall like confetti from the mezzanine, thrown by a rival drug dealing gang called “Sno Patrol” that wears all white everything— leather motorcycle jackets, fur coats, white jeans, white hoodies, white fur vests with tigers embroidered on the back, white guns, white cars (they even shop for all-white coffins, when the situation calls for it.)
2018 Superfly psychologically picks up at the beginning with the climax of the original film’s ending, where Priest checkmates the corrupt police captain with intimate knowledge of his family. The new Superfly tells a rapper who owes him money a terrifying array of intelligence about how his aunt plays the keyboard at her local church, and other potentially harmful details.
“God is great, God is powerful, yeah,” says Priest 2018. “But even more so: God is all-knowing, and that is what makes him scary as shit.”
In the 2018 remake, Superfly looks like he stepped straight off a Milan runway for Ermenegildo Zegna. His wardrobe is top-shelf, Italian, and very expensive. The list of brands mentioned in the film reads like an editorial out of the Robb Report — he is conversant in all the secret labels and trinkets of the absurdly wealthy. When his friend Eddie is trying to convince Priest to stay in the game, Priest stops him.
“Is that a George Daniels watch on your wrist?…”
(George Daniels only made 27 watches in his career — and one of them sold for $4.6 mil.)
“It’s nice, but do you think it’s smart to be wearing that at this time?”
“These dumb motherfuckers don’t know what they’re looking at,” argues Eddie.
“I’m not talking about them, Eddie. I’m talking about the police. One cop sees you wearing a $600,000 watch, he’s gonna wonder….”
One wonders why the cops aren’t more interested in Priest’s
$93,000 Lexus LC 500 [URZ100], but perhaps that’s because there are so many Mercedes-Maybachs driving around in Director X’s version of Atlanta. (Yes, the director is actually named Director X - he is a prolific, if grandiose, Canadian video director who has worked with artists like Drake and Ariana Grande.)
Priest and his gang are all about flying under the radar, however,
Priest lives in a massive white architectural LA-style palace of glass and high ceilings, and is in a ‘thruple’ with two girlfriends. In a scene that recalls Ron O’Neal in a bathtub with his glorious ebony moll, this Priest takes a shower with both of his live-in girlfriends, who are also quite fond of each other, and soap.
Priest 2018 discusses his situation in various narrations while he drives.
“I gave people jobs when there were no jobs…now I got operations all over the city. Isn’t that what the American dream is all about?”
Unlike the previous Priest, the 2018 version has purchased an art gallery for one of his two girlfriends; there, he rubs elbows with the glitterati of Atlanta politics.
“Everyone loves a hustler, don’t they Mayor Atkins?” Priest asks the mayor while looking at a large urban painting. “They just can’t help it.”
The dialogue is somewhat more ham-fisted than the original. At one point Eddie screams at Priest: “You still talking about this dumb-ass shit about us getting out the game and finding somewhere safe to land? We black men! There ain’t nowhere safe on this fuckin’ planet!”
(Then they get in a fistfight, and Priest puts Eddie in an MMA Sleeper Hold, choking him out.)
There is at least one nod to feminism. When the shit is coming down with Sno Patrol, his two girlfriends start to argue about how best to handle it.
“Everybody shut the fuck up!” He yells at his two arguing girlfriends.
They both stop screaming at each other, and start screaming at him. He can’t control his ladies, which is nice.
There is a fairly hilarious twist when the white cop arresting Freddy, one of the drug gang, is singing Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty” while he searches the car.
The hardest dirty cop in the mix is a white blond woman with a calligraphy tattoo on her neck who swaggers like Training Day Denzel. She rolls with another guy - a dirty cop who ends up shooting Freddy at a routine traffic stop after scarily shouting “Put down the gun!”
“Were you beaten as a child?” asks the lady cop.
“All the time,” says the guy cop, casually.
Freddy becomes dead, just as the famous Curtis Mayfield song describes (somewhat presciently anticipating the Black Lives Matter movement.)
The 2018 Superfly owes a large debt to Brian dePalma’s Scarface — the big Atlanta mansion belonging to Sno Patrol seems to have been built deliberately to include the double staircase Tony Montana stood his ground on in the infamous final scene.
All in all, the Superfly remake isn’t a bad movie, despite its being about 35 minutes too long. What ultimately disappoints the most is how conventionally materialistic Priest is. There’s no street fabulousness about him; he ultimately escapes into the kind of scenery that is exclusive to extreme wealth. In the end after all the bullets are shot (SPOILER ALERT) Superfly and his one surviving girlfriend are pictured on the deck of a megayacht in Montenegro, looking like a print ad from Town & Country. It’s a Kardashian-vibe polluted paradise; very sterile and elitist. If he was truly a rebel, I couldn’t help but think, he’d be somewhere more bohemian, doing something much more interesting — dancing with the gypsies in a flamenco cave in Andalucia, perhaps — not just going out like a black hedge-funder with a black credit-card. His dreams, in the end, felt capitalism-contaminated and unoriginal. The 1972 Priest, one feels, made a future for himself with considerably more soul.
SUPERFLY VS. SUPERFLY