Barber Shop

The movie Barbershop takes place in Chicago's South Side, a predominantly Black community, where an all-black clientele take their chances with an uneven assortment of barbers. This movie features a variety of black archetypes who deal with each other on a daily basis. For example, there is "the hottie with an attitude" Terri Jones  who must decide whether to get rid of her two-timing boy friend once and for all. Then there is the "the ex convict who wants to turn his life around," Rick risks being framed for a theft to serve a life sentence as a 3-time loser. Of course the "wannabe,"Isaac, the shop's white barber who feels an affinity with the rest of the group because he has a black girl friend. Dinka is a Nigerian who appears clueless and asks advice on how to make it with the women. There is also the stereotypical black who is white on the inside, Jimmy is using his earnings as a barber to work his way through college and, as the most educated of the group is looked upon as patronizing.Cedric the Entertainer plays the wise Eddie who is the eldest worker at the barbershop.

Barbershop could be looked upon as a story about the tensions created within the place by people whose opinions run the gamut on different subjects such as, conventional politics, relationships with the opposite sex and the way real men think they should talk about women. For the community in which the main characters live in, the "barbershop" is the central gathering place where men could be men, as Cedric the Entertainer says during the movie.

Although the movie does not reveal anything I haven't already seen in other movies that focus on a minority group, it is interesting to see that every racial group has that one person that fits a certain stereotype. For example Eddie, would be the Sensai if it were an Asian film. Barbershop does a good job of capturing the essential character traits each of these stereotypes possess. The Barbershop itself depicts that common place that the people of a community go to find out the latest news or to just hangout. What we have discussed in class so far is extremely true, every social group has the same stereotypical character archetype. Little details vary here and there from culture to culture.