How to Get Away with Blackface: Performances of Black Masculinity in Tropic Thunder

In Ben Stiller's Vietnam War movie satire "Tropic Thunder," Robert Downey Jr. earned an Oscar nomination for portraying a white Australian actor who undergoes a "pigmentation alteration procedure" to play an African American army sergeant. Nearly a decade later, "Tropic Thunder" remains the movie that "[got] away with blackface" and Downey the genius who used the practice to preempt outrange rather than provoke it. Without question the most calculated aspect of this strategy was the film's use of an actual African‐American actor (Brandon T. Jackson) to criticize Downey's character for embracing blackface, while there is widespread agreement that Chino's presence was instrumental to the film's bid to “get away with blackface” (Garrett), I will argue in what follows that viewing Chino as a tool for ridiculing white racial hubris leads to a misreading of Tropic Thunder's complicated but ultimately reactionary racial politics. For what remains unexamined, almost ten years after the film's release, is that Stiller's movie “get[s] away with blackface” not by using Chino to delegitimize Lazarus/Osiris, but rather by using Lazarus/Osiris to delegitimize Chino—and, moreover, to undercut Chino's cultural authority as an African‐American male. The effect of placing a “real black guy” next to Downey is not to make Downey's imitation of black masculinity look more “ridiculous”; rather, it is to make it look better, more responsible even, than the version of blackness performed by Chino. This strategy in turn makes black criticism of blackface look hypocritical in light of what are, in the film's estimation, highly questionable representations of blackness put forth by Chino himself.