Action Films: Depictions of the Black and White Male Body

Despite the fact that both Blaxploitation and buddy-cop films can be classified as subcategories of the action film genre, films like Shaft (1971) and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), two very distinctly different action films, are not often paired for analysis. Due to the fact that each is an action film and the nature of such requires that the plot center around a strong, usually male, protagonist, a film predicated entirely on the narrative of a passive, asexual black hero would not succeed at the box office as an action film unless that black figure were paired with a strong, self-sufficient, dominant white partner. Therefore, it can be argued that one of the reasons that characters such as John Shaft, played by Richard Roundtree, were "allowed" by Hollywood to be portrayed as hyper-sexualized studs in Blaxploitation films like Shaft was because such films contain no strong white male character to overpower and overshadow a main black character, as Mel Gibson does Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon 4.