Spike Lee discussed his new film, Bamboozled, before a packed audience at the ARCO Forum last night. Co-sponsored by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research and the Institute of Politics, the event featured a panel of five experts to discuss the film and representations of race in media.

Bamboozled, which screened at the Harvard Film Archive Saturday afternoon, takes a satirical look at the notion of minstrelsy in the 21st century. While the film explores the impact of a fictional television program performed in blackface, Lee said that contemporary minstrelsy need not take such obvious forms.

"In the new millennium you don't have to wear blackface to be in a minstrel show," Lee said.

He pointed to Will Smith's role as a golf caddy in the recently released The Legend of Bagger Vance as an example of his point.

"If you're coming to Georgia with black people getting lynched left and right, why are you....trying to teach Matt Damon a golf swing?" Lee asked.

The ability of minstrelsy to take many forms remained the center of the discussion for the rest of the evening. Panelist Stanley Crouch, an author and cultural analyst, said that the problem of minstrelsy prevails in media representations of all marginal communities.

"The dumb blonde, that's the female version of blackface....The Italian who's always eating pasta and shooting people, that's the Italian version of blackface," Crouch said.

The problem occurs, he explained, when the comic stereotype becomes the predominant image of the entire community.