4
BROWNSTONES IN THE NABE, PROJECTS IN THE HOOD
Spike Lee said late in 1992 that he considered Malcolm X to be “a nice little coda” to the first part of his career (Sterritt 1992b). Nice sprawling coda would be more like it, but perhaps Lee’s choice of words was inspired by the nature of his next production, Crooklyn, one of his more intimate films – modest in scale, in cost, and in achievement, although I think most critics have underrated its importance as Lee’s most concentrated examination of middle-class family life in an African-American environment that strongly resembles the one in which he grew up and for which he has never lost his affection. In a fine example of Spike Lee dialectics, this 1994 production was followed in 1995 by Clockers, an emotionally wrenching drama where the decent neighborhood of Crooklyn is replaced by an impoverished housing project that couldn’t be more different – a place where crime, crack, and craziness reign supreme over junkies, children, and others too weak, ignorant, or foolish to keep control of their lives.
Family Life
The screenplay of Crooklyn originated with Spike’s sister Joie Susannah Lee and his brother Cinqué Lee, neither of whom expected Spike to embrace it as a project he wanted to direct. Spike was looking for a venture at the opposite end of the size spectrum from Malcolm X, however, and the intimacy of Crooklyn neatly filled the bill. Spike both produced and directed the picture, with his siblings as associate producers. All three shared credit for the final version of the script.
Named after a slangy nickname for Spike’s favorite borough, Crooklyn revolves around the Carmichaels, a black family living a reasonably contented life in a Brooklyn brownstone during the 1970s. The mother, Carolyn (Alfre Woodard), is a hard-working schoolteacher with five energetic kids to handle at home. The father, Woody (Delroy Lindo), is an out-of-work musician whose artistic ideals get in the way of practical matters such as earning a living and supporting his household. At first the story concerns all seven members of the household, but it soon becomes apparent that ten-year-old Troy (Zelda Harris), the princess of this little kingdom, will be the main character of the loosely knit narrative. As imperfect as she is adorable, she uses her status as the only girl in the house to coax special treatment from her parents, meanwhile indulging her penchants for nagging, fighting, and shoplifting for the thrill of it. Most of the film unfolds in Brooklyn, but a key segment depicts a visit to a Southern branch of the clan, which agrees to take Troy in when financial hardships break her nuclear family apart. There she copes with a straitlaced aunt (Frances Foster) and a high-spirited cousin (Patriece Nelson), learning lessons about life and maturing a little in the process. Near the end of the story she needs all the maturity she can muster, since her return to Brooklyn coincides with the descent of a serious illness on her mother. Before long, Carolyn dies, and the film’s conclusion is bittersweet.
Crooklyn is a conservative film, exploring middle-class family life in mostly positive and affectionate terms. In this context it’s surprising to encounter one of the most experimental stylistic gestures in Lee’s entire body of work. The centerpiece of the film, comprising Troy’s adventures in her temporary Southern home, was filmed with an anamorphic lens that squeezes a wide-screen image into a narrower full-frame space; in normal practice, the image would be unsqueezed by a compensating lens as it was projected, but Lee leaves the image in its compacted shape, giving this portion of the movie a deliberately distorted look that matches Troy’s feelings during her sojourn as a stranger in a strange land. Reception for this device was decidedly mixed. In my 1994 review I linked it to the adventurousness of Arthur Jafa’s cinematography throughout the movie, calling Crooklyn an “inventively cinematic film . . . with a camera that tracks, travels, swoops, and glides into every nook of its Brooklyn surroundings and every cranny of its characters’ lives.” By contrast, New York Times critic Janet Maslin (1994) derided “the bizarre trick of compressing images by using the wrong aspect ratio,” saying this “affectation” was “less likely to evoke Troy’s mental state than to prompt hasty trips to projection booths in movie theaters across the land.” I find the device quite effective, but Maslin was surely right about the projection-booth part.
Lee thought of Crooklyn as “a distillation of things that are remembered and imagined” about an important moment in his childhood and that of his siblings. “It really wasn’t my intent to make a film that reminisced about this grand old time back in the 1970s,” he told Roger Ebert in 1994.
I just wanted to tell the story of this young girl who was coming of age during that time. And also to show an African-American family that was not dysfunctional; that was headed by two parents. The mother and the father were there and none of the children were on drugs or rapists or murderers, whatever. And despite the fact [that] there’s a lot of conflict amongst the siblings, there’s a great amount of love in this family for each other.
The black cultural commentator bell hooks might not like my précis of the narrative or my account of Lee’s accomplishment in this film. This is because I see Crooklyn as a moderately nuanced and thoughtful comedy-drama with reasonably well-developed characters and a variety of more or less revealing incidents relating to the joys and sorrows of African-American family life in a middle-class urban milieu. For hooks, however, the film’s raison d’être and meaning are completely tied up with one event – the death of Carolyn, an afflicted and underappreciated black woman – and the fatal flaw of the movie is Lee’s inability to take the death of a black woman with due seriousness. Making her case in a 1996 essay called “Crooklyn: The Denial of Death,” hooks herself has trouble making up her mind about the film, finding it a crypto-racist melodrama in some sentences, a paradigm-shattering breakthrough in others. She focuses attention on a key question, though: what degree of authenticity can we properly ascribe to the story, the characters, and Lee’s manner of presenting them? She also admonishes Crooklyn for indulging in such lazy inclinations as naïveté and sentimentality, and while other observers have done the same, I choose hooks to engage in dialogue with because she is among the most pointed in her criticisms, which she throws at the film from unusual and provocative angles. Her essay’s uneasy fusion of praise, reproach, lucidity, and orneriness captures the density and complexity of Crooklyn in ways she may not have anticipated.1
Assessing the picture as a whole, hooks finds a jumble of worthy and unworthy elements. On the plus side, Lee is “positively radical” in his willingness to see the world through a little black girl’s perceptions, “to enter the spaces of her emotional universe, the intimate world of family and friends that ground her being and give her life meaning.” The film also triumphs when it presents “fictive representations of black subjectivity rarely seen in mainstream cinema, images that both counter racist stereotypes [and] facile notions of positive images of ‘the black family’.” The parents in the story are “property-owning, artistic, progressive” as well as “not obsessed with upward mobility, with the material trappings of success.” They are unique and even countercultural, representing “a mixture of the nationalist movement for racial uplift and a bohemian artistic subculture.” They dwell comfortably in a multiethnic, multicultural world (36–7). In all of these particulars, hooks is right on target.
Within this seemingly progressive film about a seemingly progressive family, however, hooks detects the odor of patriarchy, misogyny, and white cultural hegemony. Lee looks at the Carmichaels through “rose-colored glasses,” but he can’t hide the fact that they are “seriously dysfunctional” in hooks’s eyes, afflicted by eating disorders, uncontainable rage, domestic violence, and Woody’s inability to hang onto money (40). Troy’s cuteness embodies “all the desirable elements of sexist-defined femininity,” except when she goes South and meets a light-skinned cousin, whereupon she assumes a “bitchified” persona rooted in stereotypes of evil dark-skinned females (41–2). Worst of all is Lee’s treatment of Carolyn’s death and Troy’s subsequent entry into a new stage of life. He portrays Carolyn as “a modern-day Sapphire with direct lineage to the Amos ’n’ Andy character,” and her death is “upstaged by the passing of the torch to Troy,” itself a manifestation of “patriarchal thinking that females are interchangeable [and] undifferentiated” (40, 43). Neither of these tragedies – Carolyn’s death, Troy’s loss of girlhood – is properly mourned by the other characters. Death and dying are merely a “diversionary ploy” in Crooklyn, providing “a passive emotional backdrop” for Lee’s vision of the black family – an “insidious anti-woman, anti-feminist vision” aligned with “the beliefs and values of white mainstream culture” (45).
It’s ridiculous to link Alfre Woodard’s multilayered Carolyn with the one-dimensional Sapphire on the bygone Amos ’n’ Andy comedy shows, but apart from this and hooks’s generally overheated tone, her critique raises issues worth considering.2 Crooklyn is certainly darker, moodier, and more psychologically intricate than many commentators have recognized; hooks goes after critic J. Hoberman at some length, saying he is mostly interested in the “comedic aspects” of the picture (37). And it is plausible, perhaps even defensible, to charge Lee with putting more emotional weight on such well-worn Bildungsroman tropes as “passing the torch” and “coming of age” than on the existential anguish of an adult woman, mother, wife, worker, friend, and community member who is annihilated by disease in the prime years of her life. As in the critique of She’s Gotta Have It that I discussed earlier, though, hooks is basically complaining that Lee made the movie he wanted to make, not the movie she wanted to see. She says the film’s most interesting aspects are those “rooted in Lee’s own life story,” and that the story loses its appeal “when he exploits those memories to create a counter worldview . . . that will advance patriarchal thinking” (45). I can’t speak as confidently as hooks about Lee’s uses of African-American cultural and social values, but I know enough about memory and about patriarchy to suggest that he doesn’t depict Woody’s “irresponsibility and misuse of resources” (43) just so he can extol that character’s “artistic sensibility” by excusing these failings as endearing idiosyncrasies; as we’ve seen, Spike was not so forgiving with his actual jazz-musician father. Nor does taking on heavier household responsibilities as a girl appear to have damaged Joie, who was fourteen years old when cancer killed their mother. My point is that Lee intends Crooklyn as a memory movie, not a manifesto or declaration of principles. Much other evidence within the film could be adduced to this effect.
In sum, Crooklyn is not a documentary or even an autobiography or auto-biopic. It is a memoir – composed in partnership with loved ones – in which facts, events, people, places, things, ideas, and feelings are not captured as records and representations but are glimpsed as mercurial impressions, filtered and altered by the haze of time and mutability that surrounds us throughout our days. I agree with hooks that Crooklyn works best when it seems most deeply, passionately rooted in the authentic recollections of Spike and his siblings, and in these moments, which comprise most of the film, the experiences and personalities we see and hear are not only African-American phenomena, they are American phenomena as well. In one of her more effective and evocative passages, hooks writes that Troy, taking the place of her dead mother, “is no longer adventurous. She no longer roams the streets, exploring, discovering. . . . Gone is the vulnerable, emotionally open girl who expressed a range of feelings. . . . [She] becomes a spectator, standing behind the gate looking out at life, a stern expression on her face” (43). I think hooks overstates her case again, but to the degree that this description rings true, Crooklyn transcends racial and ethnic boundaries to become an American family portrait in the fullest sense.
Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever done an adaptation of a novel. . . . What I did was a combination of three things: there is stuff that I liked in the book that wasn’t in the script; there is stuff that I changed in the script; and there is stuff that I added. – Spike Lee on Clockers. (Aftab, 188–9)
Change of Focus
Based on the eponymous 1992 novel by Richard Price, a specialist in narratives about urban life, Clockers was originally slated to be directed by Martin Scorsese, also an urban specialist, from Price’s own screenplay, with Robert De Niro playing a homicide cop investigating a drug-related murder. Since all of these artists are white, the screenplay would presumably have followed the novel in giving approximately equal attention to Rocco Klein, the white cop, and Strike Dunham, a black drug dealer who may have committed the slaying to which his straight-arrow brother has confessed. Scorsese and De Niro then decided to make their brilliant Casino (1995) instead, and Clockers flew onto Spike Lee’s radar screen. “I was leery of directing in this black gangsta, hip-hop, shoot-’em-up genre,” he later told a New York Times writer, who found Lee similarly wary of the white-male midlife-crisis angst that pervaded the story. The departure of white, middle-aged De Niro opened up new possibilities, however, which Lee quickly turned to his advantage. “No disrespect to De Niro,” he said, “but when he left, I was able to change the focus” (Bradley). While the screenplay written by Price and revised by Lee retained Rocco as an important character, Strike now became the movie’s main character.3 Scorsese produced the picture with Lee and Jon Kilik, who was then shoring up his status as Spike’s regular producer; but the finished film departs in many ways from the version Scorsese would likely have made.
In a major alteration straight from the Spike Lee playbook, Lee moves the story from the New Jersey town of the novel (loosely based on Jersey City) to a slummy district in Brooklyn, depicting his beloved borough with a grittiness and gloominess without precedent in his work. Ronald “Strike” Dunham (Mekhi Phifer) is a nineteen-year-old clocker, a street-level dealer in crack cocaine who peddles his product in front of the housing project where he lives. The local drug lord is Rodney Little (Delroy Lindo), a psychopathic criminal whose front, a neighborhood junk shop, well suits his personality, which hovers just a few pimped-up mannerisms above the gutter. Strike has a vulnerable streak – in fact, he has an ulcer, which explains the chocolate Moo he swigs – and Rodney protects him from the worst hazards of his trade, racking up implied IOUs from Strike in the process. The story kicks into gear when Rodney orders Strike to kill another young dealer, Darryl Adams (Steve White), who’s been stealing from the till. The latter’s corpse turns up soon after in the parking lot of a fast-food joint, ripped into by four bullets that have splashed his blood and brains upon the pavement where he lies. For most of the cops on the scene, the killing of a black crack peddler is a routine and even risible event.
It appears to be an uncomplicated case as well, since a young black man from the area – Victor Dunham (Isaiah Washington), who happens to be Strike’s big brother – promptly confesses, saying that he killed Darryl in self-defense. Victor is a very improbable suspect, however. He’s conspicuously clean and sober; he’s a solid family man; he’s never had trouble with the police; and he’s been reliably holding down two jobs, working like mad to earn enough money for a new home outside the projects. To the lead investigator on the case, Detective Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel), the confession is too fishy to take at face value. If it’s true that Victor fired the deadly bullets, he must have done it to protect his younger brother from Rodney’s psychotic wrath; and if he didn’t do the killing, he may be confessing to protect Strike from the law. Buying into the latter theory, Rocco puts relentless pressure on both brothers, hoping that the truth will eventually emerge. He turns out to be wrong, and the screenplay implicitly explains Victor’s violence with a kind of “black rage” theory, contending that the pressures of being a dutiful black man in a brutalizing urban environment caused Victor to accrue rising antisocial impulses that could not be kept under control forever.
Other characters in the story include Larry Malilli (John Turturro), the second detective on the case; Iris Jeeter (Regina Taylor), a rage-filled mother in the projects; her son Tyrone “Shorty” Jeeter (Pee Wee Love), who is Strike’s protégé and hanger-on; André the Giant (Keith David), a housing cop with a high regard for African-American history; and Thomas Jefferson Byrd (Tom Byrd, aka Errol Barnes), an addict with AIDS who wants everyone to know he caught the disease via needles, not gay sex. The editor was Sam Pollard, who had worked on Mo’ Better Blues and Jungle Fever, and has done five more Lee pictures to date. The cinematographer, by contrast, was a first-timer: Malik Hassan Sayeed, an electrician and gaffer (lighting assistant) getting his break into big-time camerawork from Lee, who took the gamble because the young man’s “uncontaminated” style appealed to him (Pizzello 102). The bet paid off, and Sayeed went on to photograph several more of Spike’s films. Their collaboration on Clockers produced colors that swing between eye-dazzling luxuriance and metallic harshness; lens choices that bring symbolic symmetry to scenes that might otherwise have seemed chaotic or confused; and eruptions of pure delirium from time to time, when deliberately contorted images conjure up an implicitly subjective tense intimating unrealized possibilities for the characters.
No element in Clockers is more essential than its setting: a housing project erected with public funds to provide theoretically secure and decent homes for families with incomes at or near the poverty line. Lee shot the picture at the Gowanus Houses, a complex in the Boerum Hill area of Brooklyn, renamed the Nelson Mandela Houses in the film – an artful moniker, since Mandela’s place in the history of modern South Africa represents both long-lasting captivity and ultimate empowerment. The drug-dealing heart of the place is a raised platform in the courtyard that film critic Amy Taubin likens to both a theatrical stage and a place of imprisonment, “an inversion of [philosopher Michel] Foucault’s panopticon” that holds Strike in an iron grip, keeping him “under constant surveillance, vulnerable to aggressors who enter from all sides” (G. Brown and Taubin 71).4 Building on this insight, Paula Massood asserts that the plaza and housing units amount to “a carceral city, where the surrounding buildings act as sentries . . . guarding the boundaries” (194). The sentries presumably keep people in, not out, since aggressors are evidently free to enter the place.
Although these are productive ideas, the setting of Clockers does not strike me as quite so carceral. We are introduced to the Mandela Houses in a shot marked by strong visual symmetry, suggesting not only the entrapping qualities of the complex but also a sense of solidity and safety that may be comforting for the solid citizens who live alongside the drug peddlers and their ilk. A number of Lee’s films open by ushering viewers into a New York neighborhood, and while Clockers does so more ambivalently than, say, Do the Right Thing or Crooklyn, it nonetheless implies that we are entering civilized terrain, however precarious the civilization may sometimes seem. The buildings do have a touch of the observation tower about them, and the clockers are aware of being visible to residents and police. Yet the buildings are people’s homes, after all, and if spying were indeed their main function, the criminals would have no hope of ever getting away with anything. We are in a “bad” section of Brooklyn, to be sure. Still, we are in Brooklyn, and for Lee that is never a fundamentally bad thing.
Sometimes it comes close, though, and this movie offers one of those occasions. Clockers is the appalling flip side of Crooklyn, and to underscore this dreadful inversion, Lee precedes the first encounter between Strike and Darryl with a tabloid headline saying “Crooklyn” in close-up. Clockers continues the earlier film’s interest in neighborhood personalities and local color, but here Lee replaces bittersweet memories with foul realities.
Power Relations
Anticipating the deservedly acclaimed HBO miniseries The Wire (2002–8), for which Price later wrote several scripts, Clockers vividly outlines the hierarchies and bureaucracies that organize power relations on both sides of the law. Rodney is an insanely evil man, but his drug operation is rigidly structured and controlled, with high-powered suppliers at the top and no-power dealers at the bottom. Strike is a hard worker with an active mind and personal habits that border on puritanical; in a more civilized milieu he could easily achieve the kind of success and respectability that Victor has been striving for in the period leading up to the story. But some incalculable combination of forces – social, cultural, psychological, even cosmic, for all we know – has snagged him in Rodney’s mercilessly effective web, where he isn’t a full-fledged criminal, just a miserable clocker, endlessly racing an imaginary two-minute clock as he services inner-city addicts and thrill-seeking suburbanites while dodging cops, turf-conscious rivals, and assorted predators and losers who dwell around him. The crack scene in Jungle Fever was harrowing enough to mark a turning point in Lee’s treatment of urban life, and seen on its own it’s a vision out of Dante, as I remarked earlier. But it’s more of a way station in purgatory when set alongside the all-consuming inferno seen here.
The journey into hell begins with the opening credits, which are accompanied by a montage of photographs showing young African-American men lying dead in pools of gore, foreshadowing Darryl’s death early in the story. After a second prologue, with five black teenagers commenting in hip-hop rhythms on life in the project where they live, Strike enters the picture and the plot gets under way. The decision to focalize the narrative entirely through Strike, rather than switching between Strike and Rocco, is one of three changes from the novel that are particularly important to the film’s meaning, as Paula Massood’s analysis persuasively shows. Seeing things from Strike’s perspective makes it easier for viewers to identify and sympathize with him, sensing his pangs of conscience (or at least twinges of doubt) over his line of work and gaining a bit of insight into the moment-to-moment thoughts and feelings that underlie and motivate his actions. Comparing him with characters in such contemporaneous African-American films as John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991), Ernest R. Dickerson’s Juice (1992), and Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993), Strike is “more three-dimensional . . . in the sense that he possesses a well-defined psychology,” manifested in behaviors colored by his youth and inexperience, such as his love for model trains and his defenselessness when threatened by authority (Massood 190–1).
In addition, the change of venue from New Jersey to New York resonates beyond the look and feel of the story’s locations. When he transplanted the tale to a Brooklyn setting, Lee said that cost, convenience, and efficiency were the only reasons for the move, since “projects are projects” (Bradley) wherever you go. In fact, however, the semiotics of the move are very rich. For one thing, the location inserted Clockers into the historiography of black Brooklyn that Lee had been developing, discontinuously but lucidly, since his earliest films. For another, low-income projects in the Gowanus Houses mold were a factor (along with real-estate speculators, apathetic authorities, and the like) in the growing ghettoization of the black community in New York and other big cities. Conducting research for his novel, Price had been amazed at how projects had gone in a relatively short time from “launching pads for working-class families to just terminals where generations are stacked up in the same apartment because there’s no place to go” (Werner 10). Related to this, Brooklyn has become a metaphorical end of the line for many black people – the last stop for the hopes and dreams of African-Americans who had left the segregated South, transitional cities such as Chicago and Memphis, and the declining purlieus of Harlem in a search for better things that breathed its last in the human warehouses Price describes. These are among the subtextual and extratextual matters that enter Clockers by way of its Brooklyn setting (Massood 193–4).
In a third salutary alteration to Price’s original story, Strike gets to have a hobby. Whereas the novel portrays him as a money-minded guy with no interest in sports, music, or even girls, the movie gives him a collection of model trains that means more to him than anything except selling his dope and keeping Rodney at bay. Trains are another signifier of the migration that has marked so much African-American history, and they are also an emblem of the oppression black Americans have endured. The rise of railroading across the continent played a powerful role in constructions of masculinity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; yet for blacks the railroads brought whole new kinds of second-class citizenship, symbolized by constricted employment opportunities – being a Pullman porter was the only realistic option – and the humiliations of Jim Crow segregation, now extended to the fresh arena of railway cars. Within the film, Strike’s trains subtly accentuate his status as a violator of boundaries forced into dangerous passage between lawmen on one side and lawbreakers on the other. Finally, the presence of the trains deepens the emotional tone of two other memorable moments in the film. One is André the Giant’s remark to Strike about the pathetic limitations of his world (Massood 199, 195). “There’s more than just these projects out there, you know?” the housing cop says to the hopelessly provincial young adult, pointing out that for all his love of trains, the only kind he’s actually ridden is the subway. “Don’t you want to go someplace you’ve never been before?”
The other moment is the end of the film. Forced to get out of town in a hurry, Strike doesn’t hop on a bus at Port Authority as in the novel; instead he heads for Penn Station and boards a train, taking a smooth ride to somewhere that can’t help being a step up, or at least an energizing step sideways, from the hellhole he’s escaping at long last. Some critics find this finale sentimental and false, but it rings true for those who understand the fundamentally optimistic vision that is nested within even the bleakest and unhappiest Spike Lee joints. The open-ended ending of Clockers anticipates that of 25th Hour, which again uses New York as the point of departure for a mythically tinged journey toward an unfamiliar corner of the American scene. Neither conclusion offers any certainty that problems will be solved or sorrows overcome, but both rank with Lee’s most invigorating scenes. And it’s fair to conjecture that the Clockers finale has special meaning for him, offering the possibility of new fulfillment for a character who almost shares his name. The equation is simple: Strike ≈ Spike.
I didn’t fully appreciate Clockers at first. My 1995 review applauded Sayeed for his stunning cinematography and Pollard for his energetic editing, and I praised Lee as one of the few current filmmakers who seek “not merely to represent but to reinterpret our contemporary world” through the lens of personal insight and experience. I criticized the film as well, however, finding deficiencies of narrative and style. In condensing the 600-odd pages of Price’s book into about two hours of screen time, I wrote, Lee omits subplots that flesh out and enrich the novel’s main concerns, disrupting the story’s flow and turning slow-building revelations into abrupt surprises or arbitrary twists. Noting that Clockers was the first Lee film devoted entirely to realistic depictions of underclass poverty, violence, and despair, I added that Lee’s artistic sensibilities had become so deeply ingrained that he couched even the most wrenching subjects in aesthetic as well as dramatic terms, allowing his cinematic style to call as much attention to itself as to the real-world problems at the center of the film. Clockers is a major work by a major artist, I concluded, but its achievements are diminished by shortcomings of story and psychology.
My opinion of Clockers has soared in subsequent years, thanks to deeper acquaintance with the film and further thought about the ways in which its style helps develop shades of narrative and thematic meaning that I undervalued on first viewing; in a 2007 essay I called it one of Lee’s most important New York City films. I see it now as the culmination of the first and finest period in Lee’s career, capping ten years of filmmaking that was frequently brilliant, invariably exciting, and inventive, provocative, and memorable even when it fell below his usual high level of accomplishment.
Among their other merits, Lee’s movies of this decade comprise a remarkably coherent vision of American life, centered on the city and filtered through an African-American’s eyes, ears, heart, and mind, but clearly meant to engage with Americans of every kind, hyphenated or not. Lee has been outspoken about the decisive role played by black identity in his personal life and professional practice, and his forthrightness about this has provided ammunition ( sometimes artificially souped up by distortion, exaggeration, misrepresentation, and selective quotation) for those who find his films insular, parochial, aggressive, argumentative, self-indulgent, self-regarding, or simply not their cup of tea or chocolate Moo, as the case may be. Look at the actual films, though, and as likely as not you’ll find a consciousness of race that fair-minded people will find hard to confuse with the quarrelsome, obsessive racism or racialism that tendentious viewers, critics, and (occasionally) scholars read into them.
The next chapter examines the films that Lee has directed since the end of his first decade as a feature filmmaker. His output has grown more diverse in subject, theme, and location – focusing more intently on women and white people, for instance – and it has grown less consistent in quality, popularity, and ambition. Its low points, found in unfortunate projects like Girl 6 in 1996 and She Hate Me in 2004, are major let-downs; its high points, found in stunningly original films like Bamboozled in 2000 and 25th Hour in 2002, stand with the finest achievements in twenty-first-century cinema. In sum, Spike’s second decade and a half has been as unpredictable as the years that preceded it, and its volatility makes it all the more fascinating to explore.