Spike Lee's most misunderstood film is a scandalous satire about a self-loathing black TV writer (Damon Wayans) who creates a modern variety/minstrel show. His message — and it's a visionary one — is that even in our relatively enlightened era, the racist images that have defined America are still very much alive, encoded in the DNA of our pop culture, with its fetishization of African-American ''otherness.'' In Bamboozled, an entire society paints itself in blackface to be ''cool,'' and that, Lee suggests, is a new form of slavery. —Owen Gleiberman