Plain-clothes cop  (2000)

for Chris Tucker (1972- ) and Charlie Sheen (1965- )

One could be forgiven for believing that in order to make it big in the movies, black men today are obliged to portray undercover agents (think of Eddie Murphy, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, Chris Tucker, Cuba Gooding Jr. …). To get a better sense of this obligation, we should consider what's important about the characters that they play.

Since U.S. police policy frequently perpetuates and amplifies race and class inequity, the idea of equal protection under the law is sometimes only imaginable through civil disobedience. And if film audiences know this to be true on some intuitive level, then race- and class- phobias in media culture might be explainable in terms of white or affluent audiences' use of media to represent civil obedience and complacency. By giving black men a fictional responsibility—to enforce the law in secret—we might invert those fears of black 'insubordination' and violence. The attractive inversion would function on two dimensions: instead of publicly declaring dissent, African-American action stars must become private instruments of conformity (see illustration).

The plain-clothes cop is a morally uncomplicated character. Except in exceptional moments of irony, the hero's reward is uninteresting to him. Like their white counterparts, the black plain-clothes cop wants not to be bothered by institutional or civil order (or even the civil rights of suspects). He comforts us simple, clear, and unilateral solutions. When a higher purpose is at hand, he is the picture of loose indifference, but unbeknownst to his enemies, he is coiled like a tight spring. When the right time arrives, he makes no mistakes, and he brings scathing humor to the service of an undeniable social justice.

So Plain-clothes cop, for piano, is a straightforwardly metaphorical and programmatic composition; it is about a white moviegoer's process of identification with, and in relation to, a black subject. It might be heard in two halves: the first one a sort of restrained chromaticism suggesting the enviable freedom of a comic action hero, the second retreating into an aria, a passive viewer’s emotional stasis. The internal and intimate world of each half—the first always melodically 'incomplete' and the second fraught with a kind of repetitive collapse of rhythm—suggests, I hope, a quantity of time much larger than that which is required to hear the piece. As with real-life experiences of triumphant and scathing wit, "the right time" just never seems to arrive.

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