Writing about Spike Lee presented itself as an idea long ago, as a
reaction to seeing the work and the ideas it carries. In this case, like many
public people, his work is often linked to his public personality. Analysis
would be less honest if both of those factors were not weighed, but usually
one does confirm the other, except for those whose works are a mere
reference for their personality.
Spike came on the scene as the bearer supposedly of the "experimental"
and the innovative-not only the New York University film school, but
more positively as a self-produced independent who reignited that ideal
of a truly independent Black film presence, as has been struggled for by
Greaves, Bourne, Gerima, Harris, and many others since Oscar Micheaux.
From the beginning it was clear that Spike meant to do this even while
utilizing the "major league" producers and distributors. (A few others have
had limited or one shot deals with the majors, for instance, Ivan Dixon,
Harry Belafonte, perhaps even recently, Eddie Murphy with his two fine
films Coming to America and Harlem Nights.)
The general concept of an independent Black film practice coming
out of an independent Black film movement leading to, hopefully, an
independent Black film industry, has been, since Micheaux, the object of
many tons of rhetoric and even a few tons of important work. What that
would mean, finally, would be to have a completely independent (or selfdetermining)
African-American film movement/industry.
"The problem of the 20th Century is the Color Line," said DuBois. This
is a century which is, he also pointed out, the age of propaganda. It is part
of the fundamental requirement for a Black democracy to have a broad
and effective communication front: art, culture, media, journalism, film,
and so on, expressing with maximum force and skill the beautiful (albeit
145
146 I Spike Lee at the Movies
tragic) and politically revolutionary (even though drenched in backwardness)
lives, history, and culture of the African-American people.
It is Art that strives to reflect life. What is, is always what's "heaviest."
So that reality, its impact on us as truth, as stunning actuality, is delivered
by art in varied ways: styles and forms. Art is the statement, the content,
as a total expression of what is true, objective, no matter how fictional it
may seem.
What exists is a statement. Its being can be counted and spelled. But
unreality is also an actually existing category of being. That is, as an
expression, even unreality becomes "a landscape" of its creator's world,
as an idea, or a film. Wars are based on delusion.
The real lives we live are countable and spellable as well. And what we
do, how we live, who we are, produce our ideas. What we create expresses
objectively who we are as much as what we think. Also, in a class society,
where and when we exist in terms of the ideology, the views we express,
coincides with the dialectical objective world, or not, as an elaboration of
real social life.
We do not exist singly, not even in our head. So we are part of many
like lives, feelings, ideas, creations, and so on, existing elsewhere. We are
voices speaking for the particularity of our registrations, but also products
of particular classes. A class is as precise an indicator of a society and its
social relations as it is of ourselves (specific to general).
Spike Lee expresses for me a recognizable type and trend in American
society. He is the quintessential buppie, almost the spirit of the young,
upwardly mobile, Black, petit bourgeois professional. Broadened, he is an
American trend. Emerging as an indication of social and class motion, his
development is expressed as a political economy, culture, and history.
But Spike has said he did not want to be concerned with history. So, in
effect, what he claims as his art is confined to the contemporary moment.
Yet who will deny the crushing immediacy as art and social expression of
films made on the Middle Passage or Equiano or Douglass or Harriet
Tubman? ls there anything "further removed" than Nat Turner's Confession?
What we locate as "new" is an expression of how much we knew
at the time!
The history of Black life in America is reflected as a jagged forward
and backward, upward and downward, yet on further reflection, forward
up in spite. After each revolutionary leap forward: the Black antislavery
movement of the nineteenth century leading to the Civil War; the early
twentieth century movement against lingering slavery and colonialism
which brought Garvey, DuBois, Hughes, Hurston, McKay, The Harlem
Renaissance; The 1950s to 1970s Ci vii Rights and Black Liberation Movement
and Malcolm, Dr. King, the Panthers, Baldwin and Hansberry, Trane,
Ornette, Cecil, and so on.
Amiri Baraka I 147
After each move upward there is a reaction, the most negative from the
corrupt imperialist state and those institutions that were pushed in the
superstructure (ideas and art as well as institutions are produced by an
economic system fighting to survive).
So, daily, the revolutionary 1960s are attacked, belittled, covered, lied
about as an institutional expression of the superstructure! The irony is that
often the middle class who most directly benefited from the militant sixties,
as far as the ending of legal American apartheid and the increased access
to middle-management resources are concerned, not only take it for granted
because they have not struggled for this advance, but believe it is Black
people's fault that we have not made more progress.
There is a retrograde trend, to paraphrase Lenin after the failure of the
1905 revolution, describing "The Economists," which dismissed political
struggle and declared instead that the economic struggle was principal.
There is a whole successful school of Negro theater and film personalities
whose fundamental identity is as caricaturists of the Black revolutionary
politics and art of the I 960s, as if Black consciousness and political
activism, and even the most historic and spontaneously creative aspects
of the African and African-American culture, are merely Mantan Moreland
cartoons.
In some ways I connect Spike with this school. Like Ellison and Ishmael
Reed before him, they feel that only the Black middle class, including the
"crafty" house slave, is dignified. We can, as Mao said, identify in art a
class stand, an audience (for whom?), and also those whom the artist
implicitly praises and condemns: what he has studied and what he does.
Literature, Mao said, was an ideological reflection of real Life.
She's Gotta Have It was tied to an ingenuous bourgeois feminism (its
best "defense"). The reversal Nola practices, as an assertion of equality,
is still not "correct," revenge, perhaps, but offered up in the film as an
entitlement of her philosophical "freedom." Womanizing among men is
negative and needs to be opposed. But manizing by "free" women is also
normal conduct in bourgeois society.
And then there are the three men who revolved around Nola-Spike as
the "chilly home boy" and young street blood, for whom Life is apparently
simply a style. Mars is not serious, for his "irresponsibility" is the character's
essence: comic relief. The narcissistic actor Negro was a caricature
in most ways, particularly the show window self-lust sex. Likewise, he is
not a serious presence, class specific, not a person who escapes generic
type. The worker who stages the balletic picnic for Nola and seems most
nearly to touch on the concerns of real life cannot "hang," and in the end
even rapes Nola as a chauvinistic monster. (The idea, " ... serves her
right! ... "has already been spread through the film copiously. Even other
women hated Nola, except the lesbian.)
..-..-....... . ~ ..... . ,., ......
148 I Spike Lee at the Movies
My concern about the film turns upon the total statements the film
makes. The three brothers squatting around a frantic bohemian Negress
are who? Part of the chauvinism of most Black men is that they would not
sit still for such. So what is the specific function of these guys?
Ironically, the sexually freewheeling Black woman is not new; in fact,
this echoes the basic slavemaster propaganda. So what are we left with?
What is being said about Black women and Black men and the time and
place where we live? What is being said is neither new nor progressive.
School Daze continues the "pop" cartoon approach to one segment of
Black life. Nothing in the film lives, that is, proceeds from the actual
connections the statements have to nature and real life. The film seems
simply a construction, a composite of scenes to make something like a
story, limiting the focus to effects so that the characters can remain
anonymous and "remarked upon," rather than breathe and assert themselves.
The Mars character continues as much the same figure, now torn by
class ambition and family loyalty, belonging to neither of the main social
groups on campus, and giving an account of each that distorts and belittles
both. The Militant is militant because he "hates light-skinned people." His
girl secretly pines to be a "wannabe." In other words the "wannabes"
wanna be White, the "Jigaboos" wanna be "wannabes"! So not only don't
nobody wanna be Black, the Black communfry itself is alienated, even
threatening to others. (The students only come in contact with the Black
community in Kentucky Fried Chicken joints!) The light-skinned/darkskinned
conflict eschews actual class analysis. It is dealt with as "a
number," a bit of music, ahistorical and cartoonish, reduced to the beat of
a sorority competition.
Though both character development and theme are superficial, we see
Mars (later, Mookie, then Giant) awarded this film's "Nola" as a ritual of
his entrance into the middle class. Abruptly, the film ends abstractly calling
for us to "Wake Up!" in what passes as a "militant" tag, intended to justify
the author's confusion by attributing it to the audience (the people). But
it's not a real wake-up; it's buppie on the way up.
In the same way, the film presents the Black college as a hipper (?),
Blacker Animal House (R&B & copulation) while the Black community
is shown as a set for Hill Street Blues, all animated with the vibes of NY
pop art, NYU film school chic.
The drama in this worn-out genre comes through the recognition of
topicality a la mode with character types confirming the conclusions of
the superstructure, contending only for their place in the superstructure,
carrying forward that special bourgeois nationalism that the petit bourgeois
use for militance!
In Do the Right Thing, Mars has become Mookie, the name of a popular
Amiri Baraka I 149
Black ballplayer formerly with the NY Mets. The college student has
become a messenger employed by the bourgeoisie, and thereby becomes
seemingly the only active worker in the community. We know the artist
also is a messenger, here for a "White institution," to convey the people's
demand for democracy, belittled as it is by its representation as pictures
in a pizza parlor. You have to have your own (pizza parlor?) to have
democracy, is the message, confirming that only the owners, the bourgeoisie,
can have democracy.
The militant is "bugged out," and the Black scholar is a spastic who
annoys people by trying to sell photos of Malcolm and Dr. King. The
mainstream political figure Da Mayor is a disillusioned alcoholic unable
to understand or accept responsibility. His counsel to Mookie is, "Do the
Right Thing." Its source seems to describe its seriousness.
We were told that the film would relate to the Howard Beach lynching.
Yet nothing in the film bears witness to this except the rawest opportunism.
The youth, Rahim, is murdered and the "riot" initiated because he is
playing his radio too loud. But why, since this is not the cause of most
poor, Black and Latino youths who are killed by the police? To depict the
riot in this way is to assume the stance of the murderers, the State. Like
Clifford Glover, Philip Patel, Yusef Hawkins, Emmett Till, and so on,
who were murdered for playing their radips too loud. Like Malcolm and
Dr. King-For playing their radios too loud!
Rahim is the lone Muslim name (described by Spike in some text as a
"Knucklehead," bugged out too!). And Mookie chooses Jessie J. over
Farrakhan. His sister warns against a relationship (?) with the White
pizza parlor owner, evoking the name of Tawana Brawley, yet Nola is a
description of what the State said about Tawana Brawley. The White pizza
parlor owners have the only interior lives expressed. The rest are flat pop
prototypes.
The killing of Rahim, attributed to the loud radio, trivializes the Black
Liberation Movement in the same way that the bugged out movement for
Black photos in the pizza parlor does.
Mookie's entrance into the struggle, with the brick, elaborates Spike's
class stand with excruciating clarity !-Joining the struggle late and
uncommitted yet becoming, de facto, its leader, its most militant force,
yet alienated from the Black masses and acting "independently" of them,
as some kind of petit bourgeois "leadership"!
Spike's repeated response is that he had no answers to state, that art
was, by his definition, vague, general and noncommittal yet could utilize
the saleable aspects of Black consciousness as an umbilical cord of social
"relevance."
Mo' Better Blues is disappointing because of what it proposes to be
about. Alice Coltrane stopped Spike from calling the film A Love Supreme,
150 I Spike Lee at the Movies
for it is not just about curse words. Alice knows that the music is still a
live communicating being, that the world of its creators is a historical and
fundamental subtext of Black life, American life, of history and struggle.
The past become present-what is.
The music is not background. It is "God" as much as anything else! It
is being beings in worlds, testing the cosmic, motion as emotion! It is the
record of every where and thing it has been. Black Music is the griot' stale,
Pres' "story," learning the lyrics of the song, a specific "humanization"!
Like the failure to make the Howard Beach film, the refusal to make A
Love Supreme as a living expansion of the music is likewise a decision to
tum away from real history. Even some attention to the form of Black
music would have provided the audience multiple avenues to the film.
Spike's scenes are ponderous and anecdotal. The camera is too passive
as a narrative voice and entirely serial and blocked. To do A Love Supreme,
the philosophy of Trane' s music, and himself in relationship to it, would
have to be the premise. The emotion in Trane's music is sperm and
memory. Love is the highest emotion because it points to the evolving
unity of the consciousness, from the base of that which it is the expression
of. What is intellectual in Trane is the stance of openness to image and
motion as an immediacy, feeling. Spike closes down Trane.
The worlds we carry, our creations, are advertisements of our real lives.
Dumas, Angelou, Baldwin, Hughes, Neal create a literature that uses the
music as a probe of history and feeling. Consider the music's "information"
alone, from all the different feelings expressed to the social life and history
depicted. Consider the spectrum of the "where you at" of a song, its
effective life, who and why it was sung, its ideas, the culture that created
it, and what it keeps meaning, everyday.
Trane is so important because he carries us beyond "the given." The
ideas in his music sear into us as rhythm-made emotion. The feelings are
ideas, images, histories. The music itself is a world that must be paralleled
both in the form and content of the film! Spike has tacked an anecdotal
cautionary tale around the idea (not the spirit) of the music. The music is
separate from the people. It is finally merely part of the "environment" of
their melodrama, not itself the griot and creator.
The life of John Coltrane, in the simplest meaning of that, is more
profound than "Bleek's." (Bleek? Wow! The name itself makes you
wonder . . . is the life of music that grim to Spike L., or is it the street in
the village that he makes reference to?) The fictional aspect of the film
permits no overarching analogies, generalizations. It speaks only of the
selfishness and ineffectuality of the artist and his art. The exploiter as
nightclub owner, the chastisement as messing up the artist's lip.
The artist abandons his art for the Black woman ... in case you miss
Amiri Baraka I 151
it, her name is Indigo, and that means we know Spike L. also digs (?) at
least Duke's titles (the light-skinned woman she just keeps on being
high Art, even her name ain't stereo-black). The abandoning of a style,
personified as "doing the right thing," exposes its superficial relationship
to real life, Black love, and art, by forcing the artist to abandon his art for
family. As if the two (and Spike L. has made some like comments) cannot
coexist. A bourgeois calumny, but why does Spike push it? The music is
made into a cloak for a bourgeois distortion of what art, what life is. Even
the relationships are skewed in the same way. Spike puts Miles Davis's
criticisms of Trane (that he played too long) in Bleek's mouth about
Shadow, but then he uses Shadow as the mouthpiece of ignorance, putting
Bleek (who is in no stretch of anyone's imagination a Trane-like figure)
down for being too inaccessible to the masses.
Does Spike think that Trane was inaccessible to the masses? Is that why
the most famous piece of music to come out of one of Spike L.' s Joints
is Da Butt? Is this why My Favorite Things was on the hit parade? What
was inaccessible to the masses was the high-priced nightclubs ( owned by
the "Hackensacks" and the PaterSonnis) that the musicians are forced to
play in, usually in "White neighborhoods."
Trane was an innovator, pursuing one of the revolutionary modes of
struggle to transform society. Class struggle, the struggle for production, is
like a scientific experiment. Not all scientific experiments are immediately
understandable to the masses, even though what comes out of them might
be critically needed by them.
Trane was prying our music the rest of the way away from its Tin Pan
Alley lock-up. He was expressing that part of our Black-ass selves that is
not locked up and enslaved. That's why he generated such tremendous
controversy and power. But to drop, nay droop slyly the "inaccessible to
the masses" tip on Trane as an excuse for commerce and stale hops is jive.
I think this is one reason why the music is not taken on straight ahead,
and the great classics of African-American musical statement are used so
sparsely. The discography cited by the musicians playing in the film is
particularly chilling because it is so limited and parochial and "contemporary"
in the sense of its temporal structure. Max Roach in the same
publication, of course, gives some sense of the entire classical scope of
the music.
That some commentators raised "anti-Semitism" because the aggressively
negative club owners were Jewish is humorous and irritating. Now
Spike joins Farrakhan, Jesse J. and Mandela as enemies of humanity and
supporters of the Holocaust! It is an indication of the utter ruthlessness of
imperialism that it accuses its victims of being it!
What Mo' Better suffers from is a failure to understand the expression
152 I Spike lee at the Movies
of the social that art is, and the emotional depth of real life. Tell the Love
Supreme story in the context of "The Great Satan"! Tell how it is connected,
yet objectively descriptive.
The essential centers of Spike's films are always in contradiction to the
metaphor of his announced themes. Mo' Better tells us domestic life defies
art and the music is an expendable environmental phenomenon-not the
song of human history!
Mo' Better avoids open caricature, at least for the central characters
forming the triangle (though the band is still cartoonish, ditto Spike's own
returning trademark nigger nebbish ... Giant? no shit ... as in Giant
Steps?), but uses a superficial narrative melodrama to disconnect art
from human necessity. The musicians are a performance motif, abstract
paradigms, who can be analyzed without understanding what they use
their lives to create!
Bleek, as the flip side of Nola, says that his male chauvinism is "a dick
thing." You can hear Nola saying that her chauvinism is "a pussy thing."
But even that would have sounded like heavy theory in She 's Gotta Have
It! The conversation Bleek has with his father about sex and about fatherand-
son relationships is stunning, it is so sick. "Who taught you how to
satisfy a woman?" says Pops, then later "who taught you to suck a sweet
lucious juicy tender nipple ... ? "
All the social relationships, if stitched together in paraphrase, are neurotic.
And who is the nigger nebbish who returns and returns, this time as
a pitiful excuse for those who think they need one for using White agents
and business managers? "Giant" is another baleful comment on Black
self-determination, as irresponsible as Mars and School Daze Dog; as
mock important, yet alienated as Mookie (he is not an artist, he is the
Negro version of the Hackensacks).
The opening and closing statements of the film (a little boy wanting to
go out and play but forced to practice the horn) are Frank Capra-type
cliches that draw immediate attention to the pedestrian "story" Spike
drapes in front of the music. But what and whose story is Spike telling?
Even the real "giant" whose hype had inspired (?) the film could not even
remotely be the model, nor Diz, nor Monk, nor Duke, not even Miles or
Bud.
There is some homage paid to the artist's "selfishness" once Bleek's
lip is smashed and the light-skinned artist lady leaves for Shadow(!) who,
Spike tells us, is more mass-oriented than Bleek, and so Bleek is forced
to return to Indigo. So Shadow and the light-skinned lady get the art
(together). Giant gets to be Moe and Joe Flatbush's doorman (the fate of
Black enterprise?), and Bleek and Indigo have a baby Bleek all over again,
rolling out with the Capra rerun.
So my continuing disappointment is that Spike has not appropriated the
Amiri Baraka I 153
living anima of his "subjects." They are not "themes" because they do not
reproduce themselves as ubiquitous summations of action. At best, Spike's
films restate, often inaccurately, the place of our present. But Spike has
never offered any new registrations or heightened understanding. It is
all a simple acknowledgment of common popular reference, sometimes
without the slightest penetration of the class disposition it reinforces.
The reason Sal gives Mookie his bread after the riot is because Mookie
appears to confirm the injustice and the hurt done to Sal.
Racism is left as accident and misunderstanding. And who gives it
succor, even as an object of benign sympathy, hides its reality, and
conforms to its demands? Mookie is "classed off' from the rest of the
wild, destructive, unemployed bloods, so he can return and explain the
madness to Sal and the rest of us and even get paid for his concern. It is
enough that we can dismiss it as a heat wave or the reaction of a hostile
Black youth, his hands tatooed ("love and hate") like the murdering
preacher Robert Mitchum plays in The Night of the Hunter. The dichotomy
of Bleek's relationship with Indigo and Clarke is instructive. Clarke (male
name, non-Afro name, light-skinned) is the artist, the independent; Indigo
carries only her stylized Blackness as a lure to drag the Black artist away
from his art, creating a polarity between her art and life as simple-minded
as any bourgeois delusion.
We are always responsible for our own failure.