Spike Lee (b. 1957) has been a public figure for nearly 40 years now, at least since his first feature She’s Gotta Have It (1986), and he’s been making movies for longer than that. I was just recalling how funny my friends and I thought he was in that film when he says “Please, baby, please, baby, please, baby baby baby baby, please” and only just NOW, like this minute, did I put two and two together and realize that he was channeling James Brown. At least I think he was. White people can be pretty clueless.
Back then, everyone thought he was the black Woody Allen, and he hated that, so he stopped acting in his movies, which I very much bemoaned at the time. At the time, I felt that Mo’ Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991) were okay but suffered from his onscreen absence. It took me a long time to realize that he made the right choice. He wanted to be seen not as the black Woody Allen, or even the best black comedy director, or even the best black director. He wanted to be the best DIRECTOR he could be, and to be seen that way. In the end, he has long since achieved the status of one of America’s greatest directors full stop. This came to me only recently, when re-watching Summer of Sam (1999) and seeing 25th Hour (2002) for the first time. (I’ll return to WHY I came to that conclusion in a bit). Anyway, I’ve seen a substantial portion of his movies, 15 or more, which is far from all, but enough for me to have some definite thoughts and feelings about this great America director. I’ll just talk about a handful of favorites:
Do the Right Thing (1989). This film came out just after I moved to NYC, so it always reminds me of that transitional time in my life. It was THE movie of the summer of 1989, it was all anyone talked during the weeks just before and after its release. Yes, people actually talked about it BEFORE it came out, which is a p.r. rarity most people in the film business can only dream about. I just now had to look up the timeline to remind myself of precisely why. It wasn’t the Crown Heights Riots, because that was in 1991, and it wasn’t because of the Rodney King riots because that was in 1992. It wasn’t even the Yusef Hawkins murder, which happened later in 1989. But you might see why many of these things fuse together in the memory after so long a time; this was a long stretch of racial violence. When Spike Lee wrote Do the Right Thing, he was thinking about the 1986 Howard Beach incident, although the public certainly had the 1987 Tawana Brawley case in mind at the time as well. Anyway, in the lead-up to the film, the public knew he was dealing with this stuff cinematically in some way, but no one knew what his take on it would be. Pundits wondered, would he inflame the violence further? Or would he, I dunno, preach to people, I guess? Hollywood seems to like that.
In the end, he did neither, he told a story. He served the moment by talking about the problems, but he didn’t tell anyone what to do, which probably irritated people who wanted one bromide or the other. Most people just loved it as a movie that had its finger on the pulse. A riot does break out in the story, but he’s hardly advocating for that, it’s depicted as part of a larger tragedy, it’s just characters acting out in a realistic way. What do you want, a fairy tale? Lee’s approach was similar to the one Shaw might take; he had all his characters talk about what was going on from every angle. He even had characters who served a kind of Brechtian function, talking directly to the audience. The sets were stylized, as in a play. He also displayed his knack for spotting new talent and creating stars. It was the first time many of saw John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Rosie Perez, Joie Lee (the director’s sister), and Martin Lawrence, and also had early performances by Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Edson, along with people we knew fairly well like Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Danny Aiello, Frank Vincent, and John Savage. Lee also commissioned Public Enemy to write “Fight the Power” as the movie’s theme song, a seminal moment in the history of hip-hop, and popularizing it with wider audiences.
Malcolm X (1992). I walked into Malcolm X with a skeptical attitude and walked out incredibly moved. In fact, within a day or two I went back to see it a second time. I’d read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and knew the story, but Denzel as Malcolm was more sympathetic than Malcolm as Malcolm. The Black Muslin leader didn’t mince words. The truths he told could be hard for white people, raised to believe a certain incomplete narrative, to hear. But that’s the power of cinema. You watched his evolution a a man from a cynic and nihilist to a man of conviction and a “true believer” to someone who was growing in compassion and would likely have gone on to be a steady voice of reason as the ’60s progressed. You felt his assassination as the same kind of loss as we customarily regard King’s. And in retrospect you saw why I chose the more militant Malcolm as a subject for a bio-pic rather than King, who would have been the safer, more comforting choice for white people. I was particularly moved by the scene of Malcolm’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and the change it wrought in his outlook. And just as impressed by Lee’s savvy in making it a key part of his arc, because it gave the non-black part of the audience an undeniable buy-in.
Bamboozled (2002) of course is the Spike Lee movie most relevant to the usual themes of this blog. (The title, btw, is a Malcolm X reference. I’ve even quoted it here myself: “Ya been took! Ya been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!”) The film is basically an indictment of the way American show biz has perpetuated stereotypes from its inception, all the way back to blackface minstrelsy. Damon Wayans of In Living Color plays a tv writer/producer who gets pissed off at a white network exec (Michael Rappaport) who’s been shooting down all his attempts to create shows about normal, sane, successful, intelligent black people. As a sarcastic gesture, he decides to teach his boss a lesson by submitting a proposal for the most racist tv show he can think of, a throwback to all the stereotypes. The all-black cast will wear blackface, and they will tap dance and tell all sorts of of racist, demeaning jokes. But the plan backfires; the exec loves the idea, puts it on the air, and it’s a hit. Meanwhile the performers who are on the show (Savion Glover and Jada Pinkett Smith) are confronted with the same dilemma that has plagued every black American entertainer before them. Swallow your pride and take the money? Or make a stand, get fired, and return to a life of struggle? The script has elements that remind one of Mel Brooks’ The Producers and of course Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. Character names refer back to Hollywood’s racist past (i.e., “Mantan” and “Sleep ‘n’ Eat“)…which reminds one that Spike’s given first name was Shelton, I’m guessing in homage to Shelton Brooks, since his dad was a jazz musician? Other character names are even less ambiguous: the Blak Family, Timmy Hillnigger, The Alabama Porch Monkeys. And the end of the film contains an entire clip sequence reminding the audience of the history that’s being evoked here.
Apparently critics and audiences were put off by the film, or merely frightened of it. It only grossed a couple of million bucks on a $10 million budget. As somebody who’s explored the lives of hundreds of black entertainers going back almost two hundred years, I think the truth is more complicated than Spike tried to make it here, though I can understand his outright rejection of the compromises his forerunners had made. Still, he might have been better served by the Shavian style dialogues that made Do the Right Thing so rewarding. That said…I was hugely appreciative that he had made a satire this stark. No one has any guts in Hollywood, no one ever REALLY calls anyone out, at least in narrative films. I found this movie incredibly smart and refreshing and a thousand times better than whatever other crap comedies Hollywood was making that year. The Hot Chick? Sorority Boys? Goldmember?
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) and If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise (2010)
The 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is later this year, and rest assured I’ll be returning to this topic in a big way then. In my view, anyone who doesn’t take the destruction of New Orleans (and the people who are the fabric of that city) personally can’t claim to love America. There are many reasons to hate George W. Bush; the way he dealt with this national crisis heads mine. Much like Martin Scorsese, Spike is as good a maker of documentaries as he is a teller of fiction. I think this multi-part series is his finest achievement. Like, I say, I’ll return to the topic later this year.
This post is already getting too long! But I want to wrap up by sharing what I thought was so ingenious about Summer of Sam and 25th Hour.
I remember being conflicted when I first saw the former film upon its release. I think like many people I was expecting something narrowly focused on the true crime story. Really it’s a movie that sets another tale against that summer as a backdrop to compare and contrast, and to show how events affect peoples lives. Adrien Brody plays a young man who is treated with suspicion because he looks and acts different. He’s a punk (like a literal punk music punk) and it alienates former friends and neighbors, even his family. Some suspect him of being Son of Sam. In the end, a gang kicks the shit out of him in the street. What is it, in the end, but a story about a lynching?
Similarly 25th Hour tells the story of a pretty nice guy (Edward Norton) who has made some mistakes and now is going to face a pretty stiff jail penalty for it. We spend some time with during his last hours of freedom, as he tries to make peace with friends and family before he goes away for a long time. It is a human predicament that black people face disproportionately. By putting these white characters into situations more commonly experienced by blacks, Lee seems to be making a practical effort to translate it for people too dense to recognize the humanity of black characters. He is trusting us to make the equation. But I think we’ve learned to our sad cost that empathy is not to be taken for granted. Those who have trusted the American People to Do the Right Thing have been disappointed more than once — now maybe to a fatal degree.