David and “Hull” wish to rise in the drug game to achieve the same carte blanche, suggesting how capitalistic offenses spurn others in a game of free enterprise dominos. This scene rhymes with the first interaction between Russell and Carver, as Carver, like Felix, is empowered by status to do and crush whatever he pleases. Given Felix’s power, David knows he can’t retaliate against this humiliation, not yet at least. Throwing David’s Jewish identity in his face, Felix continues to slap the rattled man. David has slipped in Felix’s estimation, as “Hull” has become his new prize catch. Every scene in Deep Cover is volatile, insofar as you never quite know where it’s going at any given minute, with long violent, absurdist riffs that reduce drug trafficking to a huge seriocomic dick-measuring contest.Ĭase in point: the moment in which Russell, assuming the role of dealer “John Hull,” watches as a drug lawyer and budding partner, David Jason (Jeff Goldblum), plays “slaps” with an upper-level lord, Felix Barbossa (Gregory Sierra). Here and in other films, such as his extraordinary 1984 TV movie The Killing Floor, Duke fluidly homes in on how the macro textures of a corrupt society influence the micro details of everyday interactions. In his mixing of politics and pulp, and in his disregard for easy platitudes, Duke is reminiscent of Samuel Fuller, whom he worked with as an actor ( Street of No Return) and whom he mentions as an influence in a new interview recorded by Criterion for this Blu-ray. Despite its myriad resonances and tragic echoes of current events, the film isn’t out to lecture us, allowing the characters to honor their own disreputable hungers. Everyone in Deep Cover attempts to transcend, and empower, their cultural identity with money and social ascension, embodying how society intensifies our insecurities while offering capitalism as an all-purpose cure of the same.ĭeep Cover is richly textured, electric, and viciously funny. Michael Tolkin and Henry Bean’s screenplay is loaded with obscenities, with the question that Carver asks Russell at the start of the film serving as a kind of riddle and thesis statement. It’s raw and blunt and operatically poetic, leaving scars and raising queasy questions about our casual complicity in our own and others’ oppression. This tension is always palpable in Fishburne’s extraordinary performance, in which he plays a “straight man” role with a kind of tortured, self-compensating swagger that’s still sensual as hell.ĭeep Cover isn’t the sort of skittish, self-congratulatory civics lesson on racism that’s released and obligatorily applauded on an almost monthly basis nowadays. It’s clear that Russell is used to messing with people like this, and his defenses are manifest, yet he still follows orders. Carver, a white man in power who sees others as means to an end, not only dares to ask such a question but to presume to know the “correct” answer, which Russell takes in embittered stride. This dialogue, probably more scandalous for audiences now than in 1992, is a deliberate shock to the system-a way of clearing the air and exposing the resentments and contradictions driving the characters and America at large. Which is to say that he’s a perfect cog in America’s endless war on drugs. operative, Carver (Charles Martin Smith), who asks him a question that cuts to the neuroses driving the film: “Tell me, do you know the difference between a black man and a nigger?” This question has ruffled several other officers, but Russell, unfazed, says that “the nigger is the one who would even answer that question.” Carver is impressed, as the response, coupled with Russell’s subsequent actions, suggests a paradox: a controllable autonomy on Russell’s part, as he resents the corrupt and racist authority that he nevertheless seeks to impress. (Laurence Fishburne) is an up-and-coming police officer in Cincinnati who’s summoned by a C.I.A. Bill Duke’s 1992 film Deep Cover has a deeply ironic premise, in which a black man is ordered by a white-driven government to assume a life that he has worked strenuously to escape.
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