Cinema’s Most Misrepresented Character
This story is part of my weekly “Have you seen …” series where I highlight movies that I think are under-appreciated, misunderstood, or simply worth talking about. New entries are published every Wednesday.
Okay, so you’ve seen Shaft. Wait, what? You’re telling me you haven’t seen Shaft? I mean, like, the original Shaft — not the god-awful 21st century reboots.
Okay, so you haven’t seen Shaft but, like, you know what it’s about. You’ve heard the theme song, you get that he’s a badass black private detective, so you don’t really need to see the movie. Buddy, I’ve got bad news for you — just about everything you thought you knew about Shaft is wrong.
If you’ve watched either of the two Shaft sequels starring Samuel L. Jackson, you’d be forgiven for having a misconception of the original. Hell, even if you haven’t seen the new ones I understand why you’d be wrong. Take Donald Glover’s massively popular 2012 standup set Weirdo (available on Netflix at the time of writing). In it, Glover makes an admittedly hilarious joke about what it would be like to have John Shaft played by Michael Cera, but during the joke he makes a somewhat confusing claim that Shaft’s defining quality is that he “slaps women sometimes.”
As a one-off punchline it’s pretty funny, but Glover takes it even further, imagining a Shaft-themed ride at an amusement park where the patron pays to hit several women at the same time. The worst part of this joke? Shaft doesn’t hit women.
Full disclosure: I have not seen Shaft in Africa, but judging by the movie’s virtually non-existent box office presence, neither has anyone else. In all other movies in the extended Shaft universe at the time of Glover’s set, the man himself does not once hit a woman.
Glover is not alone in his misconception: the trailer for 2019’s franchise reboot featured a profoundly un-funny bit in which Shaft Jr. Jr. must explain to Samuel L. Jackson’s Shaft (John Shaft’s nephew) that it’s wrong to beat up women — a claim that nephew-Shaft finds positively silly. The movies themselves got it wrong.
Given all of this misinformation about the true nature of John Shaft himself, the original movie warrants a (re)watch. It’s far from a perfect film, but its central character is one that deserves a serious deep-dive. In the 1971 film, John Shaft is a black private detective who maintains a tenuous relationship with the NYPD and has no trouble seducing women. Sounds right, right?
Except that’s hardly the entire story. The man himself is positively bohemian: he lives in Greenwich Village and maintains a collection of books and records that I have yet to see rivaled in a New York City apartment. He sleeps under a massive expressionist painting of some kind of clown and frequents his local tavern across the street. Though not one to shy away from violence, Shaft is seen throughout the film using his intellect to outdo his enemies rather than his fists. Not exactly the Shaft that has come to live in the minds of many today.
Just look at the original film’s poster: here, he’s a slick warrior for a Harlem being invaded by white mobsters. The imagery here definitely plays a more masculine, violent Shaft, but it doesn’t lend any credence to interpretations of the man as some kind of oafish brute. John Shaft is a fundamentally complex figure who has been steamrolled by the forces of cultural history into a collection of many of the worst stereotypes associated with blaxploitation films.
It’s at once both shameful and unsurprising that cultural history has been so reductive to the figure of John Shaft. He is rightly an icon in black culture, but somehow over the years has been tainted with tinges of toxic masculinity that the character himself simply does not maintain. Don’t get me wrong, John Shaft is no male feminist — his disregard for women is a punchline throughout the film — but he’s miles away from being a physical abuser. That it took just a few decades for a black intellectual bent on justice for his people to be turned into little more than an Isaac Hayes song and woman-beater is disappointing, if not expected.
If there’s one thing about the film that strongly resists misinterpretation, it’s the finale. Though the group itself is not given a name, Shaft requests the assistance of a collective of black militants in rescuing a local crime boss’s daughter from a group of white mafiosos. The men storm into the mob hideout, sometimes swinging on ropes, and dispatch the gangsters with precision efficiency. In a movie seemingly designed mostly for entertainment, it’s a poignant reminder of the power that oppressed groups can wield when working together.
It may seem like a stretch to some, but the gross misrepresentation of John Shaft in culture feels not entirely divorced from other racial issues plaguing American society. If the image of a heroically multi-faceted black man is compressed in just a few years into that of a comically violent thug, what other transformations are happening every day, right under our noses?
