American Pimp: documentary.  Written and directed by the Hughes Brothers. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

Popular culture’s fascination with that of the African-American ghetto is evident everywhere. Its presence can be felt in the adoption of ghetto slang by white suburbanites, and in the extreme popularity of “gangster” rap.  It is also evident in a recent generation of films that take on the topic of coming of age in the ghetto, including John Singleton’s seminal Boys ‘n the Hood (1991), and the Hughes brothers’ Menace II Society (1993).  Along with their successors, these films have come to constitute something of a genre in their own, praised for their grittiness and unflinching attention to the harsh realities of growing up poor and black in this country.  As O-Dog says at the beginning of Menace:  “This is the truth.  This is what’s real.”

In a time where one is likely to hear “pimp” substituted for “cool” on the schoolyard playground, the Hughes brothers are venturing another expose.  This time, however, their medium is truly documentary, and their subject that enigmatic figure-turned cultural icon, the Black pimp.  Garishly dressed, bedecked in gold and diamonds, the pimp is a testament to financial success despite the worst conditions, and a myth for which most of us have little or no real-life correlative.

American Pimp is a film woven from interviews, old photos, documentary footage, and stock scenes from Seventies Blaxploitation films like The Mack and Big Willie Dynamite.  Brothers Albert and Allen, toting camera and microphone respectively, have set out to reveal the true nature of the pimp’s existence.   We are introduced to men like Fidora-and-spats-clad San Francisco entrepreneur Fillmore Slim.  At seventy-seven years old, Slim is a pimping legend on the West coast. Then there’s Gorgeous Dre, a New Orleans pimp who speaks with the rolling drawl and conviction of a Southern Baptist preacher, and informs us that pimping has been around since “the beginning.  Now Mary Magdalen, that’s pimping!” 

In all we meet some sixteen pimps of all ages, in cities across the country from Honolulu to New York.  All are charismatic, deft with their distinct breeds of pimpspeak, and outspoken on the topic of what Oakland rap artist Too Short—in quick step with the taxonomical vogue in contemporary academia—easily refers to as “pimpology.”  Structured around  intertitles borrowed from pimp parlance—“breakin’ off” (bringing a woman into prositution), “ knockin’” (stealing a prostitute from another pimp)—the film unfolds like a dissertation on pimping; covering all the bases, as it were.  The problems, sadly, lie in those that aren’t covered.     

Prostitution, after all, is the world’s oldest profession, an upheld example of capitalism at its basest.  There may be no other subject that embodies the collusion of economics, gender, and race in America as does the black pimp.  Yet somehow, the Hughes brothers manage to circumvent two of these topics entirely and to poke at, rather than examine, the third.

American Pimp opens with a series of direct-address interview clips, taken in public places across the country.  The subjects are predominantly white, invariably non-black, and each shares their own concept of a pimp.  Once the picture is underway, we meet only black pimps, until the topic of legalized prostitution is introduced and a white Nevada brothel owner is interviewed.  From these structural decisions alone, the possible existence of white street pimps, or “legitimate” black brothel owners, is totally precluded.  Moreover, the opening sequence poses a dichotomy where the world is full of white people with misconceptions about pimps, and black people who are pimps.   The Hughes brothers make quick work of undoing what likely begin as the best of intentions.

The film comes closest to realizing some kind of potential with a remark made mid-way by pimp-cum-bluesman Mel Taylor, who makes the films few poignant political observations.  Taylor points out that black pimping began in the Antebellum era, when white men were still taking advantage of black women, and some freed men had the presence of mind to make tell their women to charge for their services.  That observation is substance for a documentary in itself.  Alas, the film quickly lapses into the kind of banal sex/money/power clichés that are usually exhausted by track three of your average Top-40 rap album.

American Pimp does its greatest injustice to women.  As a whole, the film includes no more than five prostitutes as interviewees. These women are relegated to soundbites which, like the Blaxploitation clips, are used only as abstracts to generate topics for the prolific pimps to expound on.  In one such sequence prostitute Spicy remarks that fear of murder at the hands of a “trick” is very real for working girls.  The spectator is subsequently subjected to the recollections of several pimps as they recall how difficult it was for them it was lose their “best” bitches.  The names and stories of these women are clearly not as important as the agony caused the pimp by their death.  That he might be the least bit complicit is never even addressed.

To their credit, the filmmakers have crafted a smoothly flowing, beautifully photographed documentary.  Yet the adoring camera is without a single, redemptive hint of self-consciousness, and is so flattering at times as to make the film play like a commercial for pimping.  This is only reinforced by a conclusion which would ask one to believe that pimping is just another stepping stone on the road to family, religion, and self-worth.  Where does a young man sign up?

Better to start a fiction film with a proclamation of truth, than to buttress such an ideologically loaded film with the term “documentary.”  With its extant misogyny, and insidious evocation of damaging stereotypes, the Hughes brothers have only succeeded with their latest film in laying mortar to walls they claim to be breaking down.  At best, American Pimp panders to the kind of fetishism American popular culture reserves for the poor urban black.

Chalk one up for the teenager rolling the suburban strip in mom’s Acura, bumping Snoop Dog.  If he’s feeling kind, he might even bring his bitch.