REACHING HIS MYTHICAL apex in the 1973 film Shaft in Africa (tagged by promoters as "The Brother Man in the Motherland"), the breakthrough character of John Shaft was ultimately relegated to the ash-heap of poorly conceived '70s tropes. He had a good run--three feature films, an Academy Award for Isaac Hayes' score, and even a TV series. In the end, though, the very conception of John Shaft was found to be tragically flawed: more exploitative than realized, more cartoon than hero. He was even branded a digression from the true path of black emancipation in cinema: Clayton Riley, an African American reviewer for The New York Times, called him "an extended lie, a distortion that simply grows larger and more unbelievable with each frame."

Now Shaft has been resurrected, his stained image whitewashed in the wisdom of historical manifest destiny. Under the dubious guidance of John Singleton, Shaft has been recast according to the ubiquitous ironic esteem that has enabled us to come to terms with our most foolish '70s icons. He is "still the man," but his sexual appetite is tamed, his violence more justified, and his enemies more cartoonishly racist and evil. Yet still, there are problems. Allegedly, star Samuel L. Jackson refused to read lines ascribed to him in the script, on the grounds that they were written by a white man, Hollywood screenwriter Richard Price.

Ironically, the character of John Shaft has always been the invention of a white man. Connecticut journalist Ernest Tidyman cooked up the character of Shaft in his eponymous 1970 novel. Evidently, the craze to reinvent African American characters at the time had reached such a fevered pitch that anyone--even a white man--could create the quintessential black icon. Which, when you think about it, is just as it should be, and indeed how it remains. In the grand civic unconscious, icons--especially badass icons--create their own contexts. And besides, it never pays to scrutinize pulp fiction.