Color Commentary
FX's creepy new race-swap show.
By Troy Patterson
Posted Wednesday, March 8, 2006, at 4:59 PM ET
The first problem with Black. White. (FX, Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET) as a serious documentary about race relations is also its first asset as an uncommonly charged bit of reality TV: The show's central figure, Bruno Marcotulli, is a regular guy with a big mouth and a closed mind. While he's a lousy lab rat—too stubborn and dumb to produce anything that might be described as a "thought" about race—he's an excellent jackass, and his personality is as good a mirror as any for reflecting some of the grotesque curlicues of American society.
Bruno and his family (partner Carmen Wurgel and her 18-year-old daughter, Rose) are the white family participating in a two-way project about passing. They share a house in the San Fernando Valley with a black family, the Sparkses (father Brian, mother Renee, and son Nick), and each of the six climbs into the chair of an Oscar-nominated makeup artist for a convincing racial makeover a few times each week. The producers then loose them upon greater Los Angeles—Beverly Hills to Baldwin Hills, Santa Monica to Leimert Park—tracking them on cameras that are hidden within handbags or present under the pretense that the filmmakers are simply doing a project about "family."
Grinning, good-humored Bruno is creepy on several levels. You could chalk up the fact that he is plainly turned on at first seeing Carmen in her makeup to universal perversities about sex and color, but how to account for the tear streaming down his blackface? He signed up for the show in a confrontational spirit. "I just wanted to really poke into the issue of race and see if any flames would emerge," he tells the camera near the top of tonight's episode. Elsewhere, he's kind of bummed out upon leaving a black comedy club, "I wish they had done more white jokes, frankly." And when he says, "I'm kind of waiting for somebody to say, 'Hey, n*****r!' " he does so in a tone that others might use to say, "I can't wait to see V for Vendetta."
Read the rest here....
Hybrid Mode
