5
WOMEN AND MEN, BLACKS AND WHITES
The respect he has earned from female critics such as Amy Taubin and Georgia Brown notwithstanding, Spike Lee has never excelled at creating female characters. In the ten years after She’s Gotta Have It launched his feature-filmmaking career, he created only one – the ten-year-old Troy in Crooklyn – who could rival Nola Darling as a fully developed three-dimensional figure. Perhaps to rectify this insufficiency, he embarked on Girl 6, the first movie he directed from a screenplay he had not written or cowritten himself. The script was by Suzan-Lori Parks, a young African-American dramatist whose first full-length play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, staged by the Brooklyn Arts and Culture Association in 1989, had won an Obie Award for best new work. Girl 6 is her only screenplay to date, and the failings of the completed film are attributable to the script as well as to Lee’s handling of it. It is neither a popular movie nor an artistically successful one.
Judy (Theresa Randle) is an African-American actress with a shoplifter (Isaiah Washington) for an exhusband and a sponger (Lee) for a neighbor and friend. The acting career she dreams of grows more improbable than ever when her chronic lack of money and a bungled audition for a movie part – the director (Quentin Tarantino) says he needs to see her breasts, and she grows visibly upset while acceding to the request – induces her white agent (John Turturro) and her black acting coach (Susan Batson) to part company with her. After faring just as badly in some ordinary low-wage jobs (passing out handbills, checking coats), she starts looking for work on the phone-sex circuit. This means more auditions, but the standards are less than exacting, and she even turns down a couple of opportunities that seem too sleazy for comfort. Then she agrees to be Girl 6 for a phone-sex operation headed by Boss 1, also known as Lil (Jenifer Lewis). Judy doesn’t have the right instincts for this line of work, though. It’s hard for her to tell when a client is lying, and racism manages to rear its head even in a profession where anonymity is supposedly the rule. She finally calls it quits when a caller turns into a stalker. Making up with her exhusband, she moves to Los Angeles for another try at acting. There she learns that West Coast auditions are as bad as East Coast auditions, but at least she’s a little older, wiser, and more savvy about the countless ways modern society has devised to exploit the bodies and images of women.
Lee wasn’t particularly savvy about that very subject, much to the film’s disadvantage. It doesn’t take a sociologist or a semiotician to see how the movie’s entire conceptual scheme is sabotaged by the disastrously ill-wrought audition scene at the beginning: Judy is objectified, demeaned, and humiliated by the director’s demand to see her breasts, and Lee shows his sympathy for the mortified actress by – showing her breasts! On top of this, the dialogue Judy reads in the audition comes from She’s Gotta Have It, which showed Tracy Camilla Johns’s breasts! It is just barely possible that Lee thinks he is exposing the patriarchy of American popular culture by owning up to the same sexist impulses and male-chauvinist practices that motivate Quentin Tarantino and his ilk, but this already far-fetched explanation falls apart when one imagines a version of the scene where Judy feels the same distress but doesn’t actually bare her breasts, or where Lee’s camera stays on her expressive face without filming her below the shoulders.
This is Movie Directing 101, and it’s amazing that Lee either didn’t think this episode through or thought it through with a carelessness that is not characteristic of his work; either way, it fouls the atmosphere for everything that follows. He certainly thought about other aspects of the film, but the results aren’t much more satisfactory. In a stab at feminist aesthetics, for instance, he photographed the sex-line callers in hi-def video and shot the women on proper 35mm film, theorizing that the video image diminishes the “power” of the men while “the 35-mm. look and texture heightens [the] strength” of the female characters (cited in Ebert 1996). Nice try.
Roger Ebert, one of Lee’s most articulate supporters, faulted the film on several grounds, including its unsuccessful effort to suggest that a female phone-sex worker might easily get attached or even addicted to her job – a development that has no doubt come to pass, but surely does not happen often enoughto sustain a pro-woman, anti-exploitation fable. Girl 6 is indeed a fable, or perhaps an allegory, attaching labels rather than names to most of the characters – Madonna plays Boss #3, Michael Imperioli plays Caller #30, Naomi Campbell plays Girl #75, etc. – in the manner of a medieval morality play. This further contributes to the film’s shallow, chilly feel. Critics panned it, and its grosses have never reached the $5 million mark. Ebert sees the picture just the way I do, and he deserves the last word. “Spike Lee is a great director,” he wrote in 1996, “but his strong point is not leading expeditions into the secret corners of the female psyche.” We’re back on Nola Darling’s dark continent, and it’s dismaying to find that our intrepid guide has less of a grasp on its geography in 1996 than he did as a neophyte directing his first feature film.
We can’t bring our families to the movies because the American people have an appetite like a swine. And you are feeding the swine with the filth of degenerate culture. We got to stop it. – Louis Farrakhan (1995)
The Million Man March
By design or by happenstance, Lee turned next to a story populated almost exclusively by men. Get on the Bus was his tenth feature in ten years, and his third release in thirteen months: the admirable Clockers arrived in September 1995, followed by the unfortunate Girl 6 in March 1996, and the surprisingly engaging Get on the Bus debuted in October 1996. Moviegoers with no special interest in the Nation of Islam, the controversial leader Louis Farrakhan, or the Million Man March on Washington, DC, expected little from a film about what seemed a parochial topic; but Get on the Bus proved to be a lively and intelligent visit with a group of men who represent an array of masculine personality types without resembling (like the Girl 6 women) tokens in a sociopolitical board game. Once again Lee worked with a script by another writer, Reggie Rock Bythewood, and once again the budget (a little less than $2.5 million) was very low. But this time the situations, characters, and dialogue ring true.
Almost all of the action takes place on a chartered bus carrying its passengers to the Million Man March, a massive rally of citizens, activists, and social, cultural, and political leaders that took place on October 16, 1995.1 Although it was organized by Benjamin Chavis, a former executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a committee representing a number of African-American religious and civil-rights groups, the event was closely associated with Nation of Islam chief Louis Farrakhan, its keynote speaker, de facto leader, and most fervent proponent. Farrakhan’s prominence in connection with the event “raised fears that the huge numbers at the march would propel [him] to the status of a central figure in American politics,” Lee’s biographer writes; but as things turned out, the march may better be seen as “the apex of Farrakhan’s career, before a speedy fall back from the mainstream toward the margins” (Aftab 221).
Although celebrities as different as Bill Cosby and Jesse Jackson endorsed the march, Lee did not personally attend it. “I had just had a knee operation, arthroscopic surgery, so I couldn’t go,” he explained. The idea for Get on the Bus came from movie producer Reuben Cannon and his colleagues. Lee liked the idea and suggested that they fund the picture with “black seed-investment for a black business,” using “strictly African-American finance” in keeping withthe race-based principles of the march itself. Choosing not to approach the same people who had donated to Malcolm X, and insisting that backers would be making “an investment – not a gift, like X was,” Lee raised $2.5 million from a fresh list of participants including actors Danny Glover and Wesley Snipes, screenwriter Bythewood, and Johnnie Cochran, then famous as the lawyer who got O.J. Simpson acquitted on his murder charges. The budget was tiny and the schedule was correspondingly tight, but Lee and company managed to complete it just in time for release on the first anniversary of the march. “It was [shot] in eighteen days,” recalled Roger Guenveur Smith, who plays Gary in the film, “and I think that was perfect – because these were characters who really didn’t know each other.” Photography took place in four different states at a rate of ten to eleven pages of script per day (Aftab 217, 218). The production process was fast, cheap, and firmly controlled by a director, cast, and crew well suited to guerrilla filmmaking.
Get on the Bus is a fully character-driven film, providing only the ghost of a storyline – the passengers go from Los Angeles to Washington, the first bus breaks down and another one continues the voyage, a white driver is replaced by a black driver, an elderly passenger dies while en route – on which to hang the personalities, ideas, and feelings that are its real interests. Each passenger is going to the march for his own reasons.
Jeremiah (Ossie Davis), the old man of the group, is a former alcoholic who hopes the event will give his weary spirit a jolt of hope and inspiration. Jamal (Gabriel Casseus), a reformed gangbanger, is now a devout Muslim who works with at-risk children. Xavier (Hill Harper) is a UCLA film-school student documenting the trip on video. George (Charles S. Dutton) is the organizer of the journey. Wendell (Wendell Pierce), who joins the group along the way, is a car salesman eager to peddle his wares among the marchers. Gary (Roger Guenveur Smith) is a mixed-race LA police officer whose black father, also a cop, was killed by a black gang member. Evan Thomas Sr. (Thomas Jefferson Boyd) is a well-meaning father and Evan Jr. (De’aundre Bonds) is his troublesome son. Flip (Andre Braugher) is an actor with an exceedingly high opinion of his talents, although they haven’t gotten him far in his profession. Kyle (Isaiah Washington) is a veteran of the Persian Gulf War who was hounded and harassed in the service for being gay, and Randall (Harry J. Lennix) is his about-to-be-ex-lover. Also present is a Nation of Islam member (judging by his clothes) who never speaks or identifies himself, keeping his own counsel throughout the film.
Like the march, which Farrakhan described as a call for “a million sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, inspired black men to meet in Washington on a day of atonement,” the film is a single-sex affair. Women appear briefly in a handful of scenes, but they are two-dimensional tokens, not three-dimensional persons. This limits the movie’s scope and lends still more ammunition to those who correctly fault Lee for an inability to develop female characters. I will add, however, that since men (of all races and ethnicities) are primarily responsible for the wars, violence, crimes, and other ills in the world, it makes sense to single them out for special scrutiny from time to time.
Except for the women and the mute Muslim, we learn a good deal about the characters by listening to their conversations, by hearing their answers to questions posed by Xavier behind his video camera – someone calls him “Spike Lee Junior” in an amusing dig – and by following the alliances and quarrels that develop among them during the journey. Flip derides Kyle for being “a gay black Republican” and mocks Randall for his demeanor. The reformed gangbanger Jamal has an intimate conversion with Gary the cop, candidly expressing his remorse for the killings he committed when he was a member of the Crips, one of LA’s most notorious gangs; one might expect Gary to honor the trust Jamal places in him when he confides this secret and reveals the profound shame he feels about his past, but instead Gary tells Jamal that he will arrest him for murder as soon as they reach LA and step out of the bus. In a more short-lived subplot, the Lexus dealer Wendell proves to be not only a Republican but a loud-mouthed conservative and blustering capitalist who takes obnoxious pleasure in chanting the word “nigger.” The others get fed up and literally fling him out the door, producing the film’s punchiest comic moment.
Get on the Bus gains much of its sociological heft from Lee’s usual practice of setting forth moral dilemmas as food for thought and reflection rather than conventional dramatic situations to be resolved in artificially satisfying ways. We never learn, for example, whether Gary follows through on his pledge to arrest Jamal when they return to their home city. Lee also treats the story’s racial politics with the dialectical complexity that is one of his trademarks. The driver of the replacement bus is a Jewish man named Rick (Richard Belzer) who grows increasingly uncomfortable with the passengers, less for reasons of generalized racism than from unhappiness about indirectly helping a project headed by Farrakhan, who was perceived by a good many observers as an anti-Semitic ideologue.2 Deciding to walk away from the job during a stop in Nashville, Tennessee, he asks George to take over the driving and cover for his absence, prompting a lengthy exchange between the two that goes in part like this:
Each guy gives as good as he gets, and if George seems more fair, reasoned, and articulate than his interlocutor, it’s partly because Rick is repeating commonplaces – affirmative action isn’t fair, O.J. Simpson was guilty, the march is comparable to a Klan rally, and so on – rather than looking more deeply into his “little bit prejudiced” mind and heart. The end of the scene leaves George and Rick neither friends nor enemies, recalling the final encounter between Mookie and Sal in Do the Right Thing.
In a later scene that complements this one, the passengers enter a restaurant and bar in a Southern locale, where they are surrounded by whites who seem ominously interested in the dark-skinned strangers. Lee allows just enough of a foreboding mood to develop before letting the locals reveal themselves as a perfectly nice bunch of folks, curious about the travelers because they’re travelers, not because they’re black. This is Lee at his even-handed best; yet in another scene that complements this one, a pair of clearly antagonistic state troopers board the bus with police dogs near Knoxville, Tennessee, in search of drugs, weapons, or other contraband, brushing away Gary’s effort to intercede as a fellow cop. The bus comes up clean and the troopers depart, but the atmosphere they leave behind positively stinks of unspoken racist animosity. The interplay of these and related moments throughout the film weaves the kind of intricate social-psychological dialectic that Lee creates and manages so expertly. Other questions also generate provocative dialectics in the film. Is a males-only event like the Million Man March a healthy spur to black self-improvement, or yet another way of keeping women out of the public arena? Is discrimination against homosexuals rooted in legitimate moral principles, or does it echo other forms of bigotry that blacks should be the first to recognize and deplore?
Two of the passengers in Get on the Bus are Evan Thomas Sr. (Thomas Jefferson Byrd) and his son Junior, aka Smooth (De’aundre Bonds), who has been in trouble withthe law and is chained to his father by a judge’s order – a potent symbol of race-based justice and intergenerational tension.
Get on the Bus also presents one of Lee’s most forthright treatments of the father–son dynamics that play important roles in a number of his films, as we have seen. Evan Jr., who prefers to be called by his nickname, Smooth – or rather Smoove, as he pronounces it – was arrested for a petty crime shortly before Evan Sr. was due to get on the bus for Washington, and the judge in Junior’s case ordered that he be shackled to Senior for seventy-two hours in lieu of jail time. So the son is literally chained to the father, and vice versa, enacting a pitch-dark parody of the ties that bind. The ordeal does not appear to wreak further havoc on what was already a very strained relationship, but it does not bring much in the way of better mutual understanding, either, apart from Senior’s realization that Junior’s misbehavior has been an inchoate plea for more parental attention, which should have been obvious all along. A greater question is whether a court-ordered spectacle like this calls useful attention to the need for fathers to be better role models, or simply spews an offensive reminder of black slavery and oppression into the public sphere.
A more complicated and resonant variant on the father–son motif centers on Jeremiah, a veteran of the civil-rights glory days whose own glory days have long been over. Failures and frustrations drove him to drink, and alcohol fueled further distress, causing his family to flee and leave him permanently on the skids. He sees this trip as a last chance to make up for missing Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic march on Washington three decades earlier, and he hopes it will somehow revive his enthusiasm for life. He represents the race-relations equivalent of the so-called “Greatest Generation” that fought World War II, and while younger African-Americans respect what their elders accomplished in the 1950s and 1960s, their imaginations may give those long-ago deeds an abstract, not-quite-real quality that smacks more of myth and legend than of actual flesh-and-blood experience. (This is a trans-racial phenomenon, of course; yesterday’s heroic exploits tend to become today’s boring stories that grandpa won’t stop telling.) One senses that Jeremiah is perturbed by the shortage of appreciation expressed by the bus’s younger passengers (i.e., all of them) toward the kind of person he fancies himself to be, a living reminder of a brave and militant past. It is fascinating to observe that Ossie Davis, who plays Jeremiah, felt as lukewarm about Louis Farrakhan in real life as the youngsters on the bus feel about Jeremiah in the film. Davis was a no-nonsense thinker whose eulogy at Malcolm X’s funeral was eloquent enough to be memorialized in Alex Haley’s epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X; in another contribution to that volume, an afterword simply titled “On Malcolm X,” he wrote that the great leader was
Get on the Bus features Ossie Davis as Jeremiah, an over-the-hill activist with fond memories of the civil-rights era – a fitting role, since Davis delivered a eulogy at Malcolm X’s funeral in 1965.
refreshing excitement; he scared hell out of the rest of us, bred as we are to caution, to hypocrisy in the presence of white folks, to the smile that never fades. Malcolm knew that every white man in America profits directly or indirectly from his position vis-à-vis Negroes, profits from racism even though he does not practice it or believe in it. He also knew that every Negro who did not challenge on the spot every instance of racism, overt or covert, committed against him and his people, who chose instead to swallow his spit and go on smiling, was an Uncle Tom and a traitor. (X and Haley 494, 498)
For his part, Malcolm had called Davis “one of the finest black men” (X and Haley 438).
Davis did not feel so warmly toward Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, however. “I think that the march was an acknowledgment that the world had changed,” he explained, in remarks that might echo Jeremiah’s feelings in Get on the Bus. “A world that was created to some degree by Malcolm was now being overtaken by another figure.” Davis went on to say that his own attachment to Malcolm’s memory and achievements prevented him from being “fair and logical with those who, in some sense, are detractors.” Since he understood “the pain and anguish that Malcolm felt when he looked upon the behavior of Elijah Muhammad,” he continued, he could not “say with Louis Farrakhan that Elijah Muhammad is the great moralist, the great spiritual leader, the great son of Allah and all that.” Davis recognized that Farrakhan had exerted “a positive effect on the life of the black community,” and he had sent money (with Ruby Dee, his wife) to fund a bus carrying people to the march. But he could not whole-heartedly support the event. If they had gone about building “a first-class university or a first-class hospital,” he said, “where all the qualities of which they thought so highly were put into practice, then I would have been prepared to drop all my differences and climb aboard. But I don’t believe that will happen as a result of the Million Man March,” because it was not a venture that “spoke eloquently to the community” in a lasting way.
Why, then, did Davis agree to act in Get on the Bus? For three reasons: because Lee asked him, because he loved the character of Jeremiah, and because Lee let him write some of his own material. As Davis remarked, “It was what Jeremiah was trying to say when he was beating on the drums about the power and the necessity of African people of the world to be proud of who they are and to accept some responsibility.” The character, he felt, “could help explain the movement and the purpose [of the film] to the general African-American audiences and to the white audience too. Jeremiah could give it depth and perspective” (Aftab 216, 218). In the end, however, Lee belongs to a generation considerably younger than Davis’s, and as often happens in a Spike Lee joint, the father figure must flare out or fade out so youth can shine more brightly. Not only does Jeremiah succumb to a heart attack on the bus, he does so at a very inconvenient moment, causing several fellow passengers to miss the march they’ve come so far to experience because they choose to mount a vigil at the hospital where he lies dying. This provides a grimly ironic climax for what is, beneath its entertaining repartee, an earnest and serious-minded film.
Lee turned to another masculine milieu in He Got Game, his most ambitious film since Malcolm X six years earlier. The title comes from an eponymous Public Enemy song that advises one to “fuck the game if it ain’t sayin nuttin.” The main focus is sports, but no film better illustrates why even critics who admire Lee have likened his movies to overloaded trucks careening down narrow streets with hairpin turns, steered by drivers who don’t mind leaving a mess in their wake as long as they reach the destination, or someplace near it, in the end. Its overstuffed story is matched by experimental stylistic touches, such as out-of-sequence montage and unmotivated flashes of light.
The protagonist is Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington), a basically decent man serving a prison stretch in Attica after inadvertently causing the death of his wife, Martha (Lonette McKee), during a bout of domestic violence. The warden, Wyatt (Ned Beatty), approaches him with an unexpected offer: Jake can drastically reduce his sentence if he can persuade his own son Jesus (NBA star Ray Allen), a nationally renowned basketball player now finishing high school in Coney Island, to join the team of the college that the governor attended, Big State, instead of signing with a more important school or turning pro. Jake is willing to try – it was his relentless coaching that helped mold Jesus into an athletic marvel – but Jesus has never forgiven him for bringing about his mother’s tragic death and will barely speak to him, much less follow his wishes. Jake has a week to get a signed letter from Jesus pledging to enroll at Big State; otherwise he goes back in the slammer. Returning to the city under guard, Jake reestablishes contact with his shattered family and discovers that Jesus is being bombarded with offers from a bewildering number of sports promoters with very questionable motives. The young man’s fans are largely black; the power brokers courting him are largely white. The climax of the story is a one-on-one basketball game between father and son, proposed by Jake and carrying high stakes: if Jake wins, Jesus will sign the letter of intent; if Jesus wins, Jake will never interfere in his life again. Jesus wins and Jake lands back in prison. Right afterward, Jesus holds a press conference to announce that he’ll attend Big State after all; but Warden Wyatt points out to Jake that Jesus didn’t sign the letter of intent, and therefore the governor isn’t obligated to give him early parole according to their deal.
On one level, He Got Game is a realistic drama centering on (once again) a complex father–son relationship. In terms of family relationships more broadly, the spirit of the deceased wife and mother hovers invisibly over the story, via memories and letters that Jesus cherishes, and Jake takes time out from engineering his son’s future to have a fling with Dakota Burns (Milla Jovovich), a prostitute who lives in the miserable Coney Island motel where he stays during his leave from prison. On another level, the film has elements of religious allegory. Naming the young athlete Jesus was hardly a random choice on Lee’s part: the offers pushed at Jesus by greedy basketball teams – many laced with enticements of sex, money, and fame – are portrayed as devilish temptations in the urban wilderness; and the worship he receives from his admirers, who chant “Jesus saves” in his presence, scornfully reflects people’s tendency to seek “salvation” by appealing to physical activities, human personalities, and other unspiritual sources. The film even has a Tech U basketball coach named Billy Sunday (John Turturro) as a character – his moniker is taken from a late-nineteenthcentury baseball player who became a famous evangelist in the early years of the twentieth century – and video shown at the Tech U gym includes snippets from George Stevens’s biopic about Jesus of Nazareth, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). All of this said, however, He Got Game treats its religious elements in Lee’s familiar dialectical manner. It turns out that Jesus’s parents named him not after the Son of God but after the New York Knicks star Earl Monroe, who was nicknamed Black Jesus, which fans then shortened to Jesus, during the earlier Philadelphia phase of his career. The religion favored by this movie isn’t Christianity, it’s basketball.
On what may be its broadest and deepest level, He Got Game is an energetic attempt to create a new American mythology. The key to this is Lee’s remarkable choice of music: a blend of rap songs by Public Enemy and, much more surprising, renditions of well-known pieces by Aaron Copland, one of America’s most emphatically American composers. It first swells up during the opening montage, displaying young folks of different races, ethnicities, and genders playing basketball across America in all manner of settings and environments. You needn’t be a sports fan to be stirred by this invigorating sight, and you needn’t be a Copland fan to find his musical Americana an inspired score for the occasion. So imaginatively are Copland and Public Enemy woven into the soundtrack that they usually seem more like partners than competitors, which is quite a feat even for a filmmaker with Lee’s strong musical sense.3
In his insightful review for The Nation, critic Stuart Klawans suggests that He Got Game is a closet remake of Hoop Dreams, the well-respected 1994 documentary by Steve James in which an “unscripted and real . . . basketball-playing father came back from prison and tried to go one-on-one with his disaffected son.” In addition to its general plot outline, Klawans observes, Lee’s movie gives Washington “the raggedy hair of the original model, as well as the man’s newfound fluency in Scripture” (1998, 35). It is likely that Hoop Dreams was indeed an influence on He Got Game, but Lee didn’t need reminders about the centrality of athletics, and of basketball in particular, to the American ethos. “When ilisten to [Copland’s] music,” he wrote in his liner notes for the 1998 soundtrack album, “I hear America, and basketball is America. It’s played on the sides of barns in Indiana [and] wheat fields in Kansas. Hoops is played on the asphalt courts of Philly, Chicago and also Brooklyn.” Like the filmmaker, the composer came from Brooklyn and created art that reached out to all America and to every place American culture is known. It was Lee’s special brilliance to realize how marvelously well Copland’s music – much of it taken from ballet scores and designed from the beginning to accompany human bodies in fluid, graceful motion – would suit the movie that best reflects his own hoop dreams, reveries, and nightmares, and those of America as a whole.
Spike bid farewell to the twentieth century with one of his most pessimistic forays into urban life, rivaling Jungle Fever and Clockers for dystopian gloom. Like such other 1999 releases as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, and Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road, it journeys into the heart of American darkness to convey a morally conservative message about the ill consequences of lust, paranoia, and hypocrisy. Perhaps to reduce the boomerang effect of the film’s pessimistic vision, Lee locates the story in the Bronx rather than Brooklyn and makes his main characters Italian-American louts rather than African-American louts. This notwithstanding, Summer of Sam is a very recognizable Spike Lee joint – the caustic flip side of Do the Right Thing in some respects, again set in the middle of a heat wave and again culminating in deadly violence. Coincidentally but appropriately, it had its world premiere at the Cannes film festival about a month after the infamous student massacre at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, Colorado, and a school shooting in Conyers, Georgia, happened on the very day of its Cannes debut.
The story takes place in 1977, and, as usual in Lee’s pictures, the key characters are guys. Vinny (John Leguizamo) is a hairdresser married to Dionna (Mira Sorvino), a waitress; to avoid downgrading her from Madonna to whore, Vinny turns to other women for the blowjobs and suchlike that he craves. Ritchie (Adrien Brody) is a neighborhood oddball who has taken to fancying himself as a Sex Pistols-style punk, sporting spiky hair and a dog collar around his neck; he spends his off-hours dancing and turning tricks at a Times Square club called Male World, and grim would be his fate if his friends – already wary of his freaky hairdo and guitar-playing ambitions – got wind of this. Others on the screen include Luigi (Ben Gazzara), a mob boss who looks after the locals; two detectives (Roger Guenveur Smith, Anthony LaPaglia) working on the Son of Sam case; John Jeffries (Lee), a TV reporter; and the unfortunately nicknamed Ruby the Skank (Jennifer Esposito), a woman more on Ritchie’s wavelength than anyone except Vinny, who likes Ritchie because it’s good to have a friend as weird on the outside as he himself feels on the inside. And of course there is the semi-eponymous Son of Sam (Michael Badalucca), based on the real-life serial murderer (born in Brooklyn, as it happens) who thrilled and terrorized New York with a string of shootings that killed six people and wounded seven in Queens and the Bronx between July 1976 and August 1977, when he was arrested.4 The murderer, whose real name was David Berkowitz, gained his sobriquet from his claim that he received orders to kill from a demon inhabiting a neighbor’s dog. His other famous nickname, the .44 Caliber Killer, related to his choice of weapon.
Summer of Sam reached the screen more than twenty years after Son of Sam was in the headlines, and one might reasonably wonder why Lee chose that particular summer and criminal case as the backdrop for his otherwise fictional story. One likely reason is that it was a dramatic summer in more ways than one. Another actual event portrayed by the film is an electrical blackout (caused by lightning) that darkened most of New York City for up to twenty-five hours in July, bringing episodes of looting and arson that had not occurred during the shorter blackout (about fifteen hours) that hit much of northeastern America in 1965. Spike was twenty in 1977, a time when New York was under great stress from crime, poverty, financial deficits, and other burdens. Bushwick and Crown Heights, both in Brooklyn, were among the neighborhoods most affected by destruction and violence during the blackout, and across the city more than 3,700 people were arrested (Hut). The block party put on by Luigi in Summer of Sam, meant to keep the neighborhood calm and orderly during the blackout, reflects the better angels of urban life that Lee doesn’t entirely lose sight of in even his harshest stories. But the harshness is almost always present in this picture: when Vinny’s friend Joey T (Michael Rispoli) puts together a militia to police the borders, for instance, viewers might well think of Michael Griffith, one of the urban martyrs to whom Lee dedicated Do the Right Thing, dying in 1986 while he and his friends were being chased out of a white neighborhood by white men with baseball bats.
To underscore the factual background of Summer of Sam, Lee enlisted the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin to provide a bit of brief narration. Breslin was a player in the Son of Sam saga: he was writing about the ongoing string of shootings for New York’s widely read Daily News when a hand-written letter arrived on his desk, postmarked in Englewood, New Jersey, on May 30 and purporting to be from the killer. It began, “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood,” and it ended, “Upon my capture I promise to buy all the guys working the case a new pair of shoes if I can get up the money. Son of Sam.” Authorities had divided opinions about the letter’s authenticity, but it caused a sensation in New York and brought in thousands of false leads and useless tips when Breslin’s tabloid published part of it with permission from the police.
Summer of Sam shows Berkowitz howling at the demonic dog and the dog uttering “Kill!” to him, but he’s a very minor character in the film. The main engines of the story are Vinny’s affair with glorious Gloria (Bebe Neuwirth), a beauty-salon colleague; his discovery of two victims of the .44 Caliber Killer, which makes him think death is breathing down his neck as punishment for those blowjobs; and the attempt by Joey T to police the neighborhood’s borders with a sort of homegrown militia. Atop these and a few other pivotal ingredients, Lee has stacked a daunting array of personalities, incidents, details, and what can only be called free associations – someone thinks the killer is baseball star Reggie Jackson, because the number on his New York Yankees uniform is 44 – that just barely cohere as a single narrative. The story’s dominating emotional current is the tide of xenophobic dread that surges through the area as the murders continue. Ritchie becomes the community’s suspect of choice for the obvious reason that he is different, and everyone knows that different people can never be trusted. In the end he is beaten almost to death before the eyes of his friend Vinny, escaping with his life only because word arrives that the killer has been arrested just outside the city. Lee has never given a more scathing depiction of the havoc wrought by hatred, intolerance, and tribalism among members of a community who share the same color, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and fiercely defended ignorance of whatever fails to gibe with their insular, dogmatic worldview.
The film’s other overarching element is the uproariously insane morality that prevailed in New York City – and in much of America, for that matter – in the second half of the 1970s, when the exciting cultural upheavals of the 1960s had spawned an army of grating, grubby offspring. In place of spirited challenges to outworn tradition, Lee now sees aimless confusion and unruliness; in place of a hopelessly naïve peace generation he now sees a hopelessly stupid status-quo generation; in place of ideals of free love he now sees spasms of brainless fucking; and on it goes, one squalid symptom of social pathology after another. The villains in Summer of Sam are not only the .44 Caliber Killer and the witch hunters who stomp Ritchie; they are also the sensationalistic mass media that whip up fears to boost their profits, the kings of commerce who peddle cheap sex and porn, the looters who pillage Brooklyn and Harlem during the blackout, and the entire moral climate of the age, which Lee pictures as a virtually anarchic bedlam that encourages everything from the money-fueled licentiousness of a Manhattan sex club to the belligerently sexist behavior of pretty much every male character. No wonder the movie has to scurry so frenetically from Plato’s Retreat to CBGB, from Brooklyn beauty parlor to seedy waterfront, from Martin Scorsese-style ethnology to lurid B-movie shockeroo, from quasi-documentary reportage to the eye-jolting punches of Ellen Kuras’s hugely inventive cinematography.
By exposing the paranoid aggressiveness bred by the characters’ sadly limited lives, and the way their self-serving ideas are reinforced by contemporary culture as a whole, Lee suggests deep links between the public and private aspects of ethical decay. He also paints a scathing portrait of a male-defined double standard that produces weird combinations of promiscuity and puritanism, with women always on the losing side of the equation. Summer of Sam pulls no punches in displaying the dysfunction it attacks, and therein lies its enduring power as high-octane pulp fiction, as genre-bending cinema, and as blistering critique of an America staggering through one of the least admirable periods in its recent history.
BAMBOOZLED
You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray, led amok. You’ve been bamboozled. – Malcolm X
Lee ushered in the new millennium with Bamboozled, a desperately comic treatment of a desperately serious topic. Teeming with ideas, abounding with commentary, and swarming with details, it makes Summer of Sam look almost well behaved by comparison. But overstuffed, overambitious jumble that it is, it sets forth more pungent themes, and takes more cinematic risks, than almost any other movie of its day.
The protagonist, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), is an African-American writer bent on turning his Ivy League degree and creative talent into a successful media career. Taking a job at a cable TV network with perilously low ratings, he scrambles to create a bold new programming concept that will reverse the company’s slide. Two options present themselves. He can go to his bosses with the wildest idea he can dream up, on the theory that only an aggressive gamble can save the rapidly sinking ship. Or he can make the ship sink even faster, saving his own skin by getting fired before it goes down for good, thus outfoxing his contract, which doesn’t allow him to resign, and humiliating his white boss, Thomas Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), who considers himself a “soul brother” because his wife is black and he collects African art. Putting both plans into operation, Pierre designs a show so outrageously awful that the network will self-destruct, planning to watch the disaster from the safety of his next job.
The concept Pierre pitches is what makes Bamboozled such an audacious satire. The entertainment industry, he reasons, has made a fortune by exploiting African-Americans through demeaning images. So he’ll thrust his own fists into that long, scurrilous heritage and steal its most shameless tricks. First he hires two black performers, Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson), off the street. Then he changes their names to Mantan and Sleep’n’eat, makes them conspicuously blacker with splotches of burnt-cork makeup, and christens their act “The New Millennium Minstrel Show,” surrounding them with every degrading racial cliché he can find. The characters shuffle, strut, smile, and sing in the manner of stereotypes cut from cardboard; the backup dancers are called the Pickaninnies, the band is called the Alabama Porch Monkeys, and everyone lives in a watermelon patch. Surely this offensive travesty will crash in the ratings, plunging the network into oblivion and allowing Pierre to get on with his career in some setting better suited to his talents. But of course the opposite happens: Dunwitty loves it, audiences love it, and racist images and epithets become the hottest thing in entertainment. Turning on a dime, Pierre basks in the applause, acclaim, and awards that quickly come his way.
Complications ensue, however. Pierre’s personal assistant, Sloan Hopkins (Jada Pinkett-Smith), is appalled by these developments, and so are the Mau Maus, a radical rap group led by Sloan’s militant brother, Julius Hopkins, aka Big Blak Afrika (Mos Def). Sloan tries to stir Pierre’s conscience by assembling a jarring video montage of racist imagery, to no avail. Manray finally rebels against the show – seeing that studio audiences have taken to wearing blackface, he starts refusing to do so – but is kidnapped and killed by the Mau Maus, who show his execution in a live internet feed. Pierre, driven mad by the things he has been through, now broods in his office, wearing blackface and surrounded by the collection of racist toys and artifacts that he has amassed. Fatally wounded by a shot that Sloan has inadvertently fired from Julius’s gun, he dies while watching her video montage, which constitutes a guided tour through the racist imagery manufactured, circulated, and savored by generations of white American society, ranging from caricatured “coon” artifacts to movie and TV clips that reflect (and have crucially shaped) the country’s racial unconscious. The sequence does not just preach but actually proves the culpability of mainstream culture in an interminable process of spiritual and psychological genocide, inflicted on minority citizens by hegemonic media shot through with greed, complacency, and irresponsibility.
Lee said that Bamboozled was inspired by Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), both classics of media-related cinema. He must also have thought of Mel Brooks’s boisterous farce The Producers (1968), about two Jewish con artists who stage an impossibly absurd show called “Springtime for Hitler,” which presents a historically unhinged portrait of the Führer as a benevolent leader with a smile on his face and a song in his heart; the producers plan to abscond with the money they’ve collected from investors when the show inevitably closes on opening night, but as in Bamboozled, the audience finds it hilarious, stopping the swindle in its tracks. I find The Producers as insufferable as “Springtime for Hitler” is supposed to be, and Susan Stroman’s musical remake (2005) is even worse. Its premise is a good one, though, and Lee works enough changes and variations on it to make it feel fresh. More important, he outdoes all precedents in the lengths to which he pushes his satire, going far beyond ordinary limits of taste. Scene after scene mixes in-your-face comedy with over-thetop plot twists and outspoken, often bitter social commentary, culminating in the barrage of blatantly racist film clips and pop-culture artifacts that are as disturbing to see as they are impossible to dismiss.
Bamboozled was and is a controversial film. Leaving aside its mixed reception on ordinary movie-review grounds – critical opinions were divided about the acting, scripting, and so forth – it has struck many commentators as a stinging revelation of and rebuke to the racial bigotry woven through American life, and it has struck many others as a self-indulgent replication of cultural sins that are better contemplated in educational and political settings than in the malls and multiplexes where Hollywood movies are consumed. The film clips in the concluding montage are culled from a broad array of movies, newsreels, cartoons, and TV programs, with legendary performers like Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, and Mickey Rooney smearing blackface makeup on their features. Displaced from their usual mainstream venues and slotted into this film’s context, black-oriented entertainments as seemingly innocuous as The Jeffersons (CBS, 1975–85) and The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–92) take on dubious overtones not normally associated with them. The militant Mau Maus are a grim parody of gangsta rappers, whom Lee attacks in his DVD commentary track for Bamboozled, calling their acts “the twenty-first century minstrel show.” (He points to Mos Def, who plays Julian in the film, as an example of the constructive rappers who are trying to extricate hip-hop lyrics from their own swamp of stereotyping.) Commercials seen on “The New Millennium Minstrel Show” lampoon the mass marketing of products made by whites to customers who are black: African-Americans chug forty-ounce bottles of The Bomb Malt Liquor, and Timmy Hillnigger promotes clothing that is “so authentic, we include the bullet holes.” The film references such other faddish items as the hula hoop, the yo-yo, and the Pokemon franchise, using their popularity to suggest, as critic Marcus Gilmer notes, that it may not actually be impossible for something as idiotic as blackface to become a trend.
Along with its moving-image clips and parodies, Bamboozled incorporates an ongoing critique of racist Americana by way of objects, specifically the objects that “are generally designated Sambo art, negro memorabilia, or black collectibles: the Aunt Jemima cookie jars, the Jocko hitching posts, the canisters and salt and pepper shakers, the hot pad holders, most infamously the Jolly Nigger bank,” as Bill Brown, the leading scholar of thing theory, summarizes them. Whereas the minstrel show animates the “plantation darky” stereotype, Brown observes, “these objects might be said to deanimate it, to arrest the stereotype, to render it in three-dimensional stasis, to fix a demeaning and/or romanticizing racism with the fortitude of solid form.” Significantly, the sardonic present that Sloan gives to Pierre is a “Jolly Nigger Bank,” and not a “repro” but the genuine “circa turn-of-century” item. She loves those black collectibles, she adds, because they recall “a time of our history in this country when we were considered inferior, subhuman, and should never forget.” Hoping the gift will open Pierre’s eyes to the enormity his show is inflicting on black America, she has selected the most widely manufactured and purchased variety of iron-bust bank. But this only feeds Pierre’s enthusiasm for gathering more such things, imitating the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Magic Johnson, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., who famously keep collections of this kind (B. Brown 183–4, 185, 188, 194).
Late in the film, Pierre’s madness first registers as a vision of the bank taking on its own life: in voiceover he says, “When I thought or imagined that my favorite Jolly Nigger bank, an inanimate object, a piece of cold cast iron, was moving by itself, I knew I was getting paranoid.” Now the kind of manufactured object that freezes and deanimates the racial stereotype is itself becoming animated, and the process goes into overdrive when the march of the toys concludes the film. Lee meant the spectacle to unveil the “hatred of the minds that made this stuff,” but, as Brown astutely notes, the sequence manifests much more than this. Animated several times over by their machinery, by the camera, and by the music, he writes, “each figure, whether gorgeous or grotesque, seems caught, frantically dancing or fiddling, bouncing or swinging, swallowing pitched balls, grinning and smiling, unable to stop. No longer part of that mute chorus witnessing the repetition of history, the individuated objects bespeak a life of things that is no social life, only the hyperactive persistence of the past” (195, 207)
This is powerful magic, open to many interpretations, and it is not surprising that critics have hailed it and condemned it in about equal measures.5 Bamboozled is so far over the top, Roger Ebert (2000) wrote, that “people’s feelings run too strongly and deeply for any satirical use to be effective. The power of the racist image tramples over the material and asserts only itself. By contrast, Stuart Klawans (2000) found that Lee had “applied his erudition to this American tradition and discovered not just how it wounds but also how it entertains. With the intellectual acuity of the Menippean satirist, he’s shown that the entertainment is the wound – the louder the laughter, the worse the damage.” As so often with a Spike Lee joint, the intricacy of the work flummoxes consensus, and that is all to the good. Bamboozled marked the end of another stage in Spike’s career, characterized by an intense focus on the complexities of African-American experience – and of white American experience in Summer of Sam – viewed through the lenses of various and sundry genres.
A DOCUMENTARY JOINT
In addition to producing such major works as He Got Game and Summer of Sam, the late 1990s marked Lee’s emergence as a nonfiction filmmaker to be reckoned with. Leaving aside his minute-long contribution to the omnibus film Lumière and Company made by forty-one directors in 1995, his first foray into documentary was 4 Little Girls, funded by 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks and HBO for both theatrical and TV exhibition. Coproduced by Lee and Sam Pollard, then his regular film editor, the 1997 release gives a meticulous account of the racist bombing that destroyed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, while a Sunday school session was in progress. The blast killed four young girls – three were fourteen, one was eleven – and injured many other churchgoers, stunning African-Americans and decent non-black people across the country. This was far from the first outbreak of virulent racial hatred in the city, where the infamously bigoted Eugene “Bull” Connor was chief of police and the Ku Klux Klan was a flourishing enterprise. No one was arrested or charged with the crime until 1977, and in 1980 the United States Department of Justice issued a report indicating that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation until his death in 1972, had blocked evidence that would have been invaluable to investigators and prosecutors.
This project had roots in Lee’s film-student days, when he realized the enormity of the crime and started giving it serious thought, contacting the father of the youngest victim and suggesting a film about the tragedy. The idea came to fruition years later, when Lee went to Birmingham with Pollard and cinematographer Ellen Kuras to do research and begin filming. The film goes considerably beyond the church bombing itself, drawing out longtime Birmingham residents on what it was like to live there under segregation, and what it was like to initiate children into the awful fact that a majority of their fellow citizens regarded them as less than fully human. Seeing morgue photographs of the little girls in an Alabama public library, Lee was jolted despite his familiarity with the case. “You can imagine what twenty sticks of dynamite can do,” he said later. After debating whether to display the dreadful photos in his film, he decided to show them in quick, fleeting shots, to “reinforce the horror” of the crime (Judell 143). 4 Little Girls is very conventional in style, but the story it tells remains an urgent one in an America that bears heavy scars from race-based evils of the past and present.
The late 1990s and early 2000s brought Lee’s first ventures into filmed theater. He and John Leguizamo had not yet collaborated on Summer of Sam when Leguizamo opened his solo comedy-drama Freak at the Cort Theatre on Broadway in February 1998. The show played for 144 performances before the curtain went down on the Fourth of July, earning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo/One-Person Show as well as Tony Award nominations for best actor and best play. Lee liked the show, which presents a frenetic string of faux-autobiographical scenes involving funky friends and dysfunctional family members, and felt that documenting it on film might further his ambition of moving 40 Acres & A Mule into TV production, a potentially profitable field of operation.6 His game plan was modest, seeking only “to show [Leguizamo’s] talent and try to transfer that to the tape” without hindering the performance in any way. The show was recorded twice before live audiences, and Lee’s frequent film editor, Barry Alexander Brown, cut the tape so as to show each of Leguizamo’s personas from a different perspective (Aftab 243). The result has pleased many viewers who find Leguizamo’s in-your-face performing style and rude-and-crude humor more endearing than I do. Looking at the larger picture, intense involvement withthis energetic Latino celebrity – Leguizamo hails from Bogotá, Columbia, although his family migrated to the United States when he was four – surely deepened Lee’s exposure to a facet of American ethnicity that overlaps to some extent with his African-American background.
The Original Kings of Comedy, a 2000 release coproduced by 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks and MTV Films for theatrical distribution by Paramount Pictures, was a more ambitious filmed-theater project. It documents a show featuring four black standup comedians – D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey, and Bernie Mac – that had been playing all around America for three years, becoming what Harvey described as “the highest-grossing comedy tour ever.” Paramount was edgy about entering such unfamiliar territory, but the comics were confident that Lee would show them off perfectly without asking them to change their styles or material. Harvey told Lee’s biographer that the show was important in cultural as well as commercial terms, calling it “an inside peek, for those who are not in the urban culture, at a lot of the ways we as a community view situations. And never before had there been such a diversified viewpoint of our culture.” Lee again shot two performances, using fifteen cameras and dedicating some of them to shots of the audience, with the stipulation that if a cutaway showed someone laughing, the laugh had to be in response to the joke actually happening at that moment. The movie cost about $3 million to make and earned almost $40 million in American theaters (Aftab 257). That’s entertainment!
These projects notwithstanding, Lee’s heart remained primarily in the world of theatrical narrative films. The next chapter looks at his most recent phase, which brought a larger number of stories dealing entirely or mostly with white characters. In an ironic twist, this period gave birth to his most phenomenal hit and his most phenomenal flop, followed by the worst impasse in feature-film financing he had ever faced.
