Congolese poet Tchicaya u Tam’si’s seminal collection of political works Le Ventre, or The Belly, describes the organ as a place where everything must reckon with itself before inevitable dissolution. Belly (1998), the only feature film directed by music video maestro Hype Williams, has a scene near the beginning that in its startlingly clear distillation of its characters, harkens to the work that shares its namesake. During a moment of calm following a successful robbery, the incendiary capo,  Tommy (the late DMX), reproaches the cold stare of one of his disciples, and as punishment, forces him to disrobe and flaunt the body his clothes and jewelry once adorned.

Enough has been written about Black male artifice, but it’s rarely grazed how self-referential it is. Watch a snippet from Power (2014) or Snowfall (2017) or any modern crime drama centered around a brooding Black male, and observe the influences of Frank Lucas, Omar Epps, and likewise forebears. Even those forebears themselves, two of whom Belly prominently features, were notably referencing the famous pimps and hustlers they were reared in admiration of. Figures like Iceberg Slim, whose attempts at criticizing the decadent paths that led to their notoriety, were instead heralded as living testimonies of their success. And that’s the dilemma Williams is confronted with in Belly. Chiefly, the question of how someone that’s apart of a system can effectively critique it, and most likely the question you’ll still be asking yourself when the film cuts to black. 

Contrast the last fifteen minutes of Belly, with the last fifteen of a movie like Tales From the Hood (1995), which, after dedicating the brevity of itself to all that scourges Black existence, uses its dying breaths to assail how those malignancies can turn ouroboros and consume ourselves. Exactly the point where Belly ends: right before tasting its own ass and realizing how fetid it is. Yet for that to be possible, the film would first have to be interested in showing its ass, the reluctance of which manages to be both its weakest and strongest aspect. 

The film is beautiful, jaw-droppingly so. The images that grace the screen can only come from someone tapped into the allure of their world. Of blue light on dark skin, the brilliance of gold, as well as unsavory things such as jail cells and strip clubs. Dirty things beautified to such extents that they beg the question of whether there is such a thing as showing your ass in a world where black asses are routinely fetishized. That regardless of what you depict, and how you depict it, those unacquainted will view it with the willful negligence of a Rorschach, commodifying and thereby normalizing the conditions surrounding them. If anything, Belly benefits from being buoyed upon the crest of that commodification, arriving a little after it began and a long while before it petered out. A portrayal of a time that wasn’t entirely ideal, but is truncated enough to momentarily convince you that it was.

Belly
1998
dir. Hype Williams
96 min.

Screens (on 35mm!) Wednesday 8/23, 7:00 p.m. at Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the continuing series: Hip Hop at 50