Lee Spike - Spike Lees America

SPIKE LEES AMERICA

America Through the Lens

Martin Scorseses America Ellis Cashmore

Alfred Hitchcocks America Murray Pomerance

Spike Lees America David Sterritt

Steven Spielbergs America Frederick Wasser

SPIKE LEES AMERICA

DAVID STERRITT

polity

Copyright David Sterritt 2013

The right of David Sterritt to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-6347-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:

www.politybooks.com

For Mikita

and Craig

and Jeremy and Tanya

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have benefited from the insights of so many gifted friends and colleagues that naming them all would be impossible. Among the most valued in recent years have been my academic colleagues at Columbia University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation; my movie-reviewing and essay-writing colleagues in the National Society of Film Critics; and more terrific friends than anyone could deserve. Andrea Drugan, my editor at Polity, encouraged this project at the outset and has been perceptive, supportive, and patient ever since. My son Craig, who lived in the heart of Bed-Stuy when I started this book, was a Brooklyn loyalist when the rest of us lived in Manhattan and embodies the best spirit of both boroughs. Like him, my son Jeremy and my daughter-in-law Tanya Van Sant have brought immeasurable amounts of humor, inspiration, and street smarts into my life. Finally, my gratitude to Mikita Brottman knows no bounds. Without her and The Great Grisby my bamboozlement would be even greater than it is.

INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGING

QUESTIONS, NO EASY ANSWERS

Barack Obama doesnt mention it often, but his relationship with Spike Lees cinema has a personal side. Our first movie was Do the Right Thing, which had just come out, Michelle Obama told a CNN reporter shortly before her husbands inauguration. That was his cultural side... he was pulling out all the stops. Beyond this folksy first-date scenario, an old Obama friend called the film a lasting favorite of the president. Why does Obama rarely talk about it, then? In a contribution to The Root, an African-American website of politics and culture, commentator Dayo Olopade hypothesized that the tough-minded, sometimes abrasive politics embraced by Lee in the late 1980s are awkwardly matched to the presidents smooth, carefully cultivated centrism and nonthreatening demeanor, adding that the first couples professed distaste for dwelling too much on race might also be at work.

There appears to be a paradox here: the movie that a politician feels the need to shy away from is the most widely respected movie its director has ever made, and easily the most popular as well. But there is really no paradox at all. First released in 1989 to a chorus of cheers, boos, celebrations, and anxieties, Do the Right Thing speaks to wide and diverse audiences today for the same reason it disturbs professional centrists and compromisers because it raises and examines intractable American problems but refuses to offer facile solutions or to wish them away in the feel-good manner that comes so easily to Hollywood cinema. In short, its an anomaly in American film a genuinely thoughtful, profoundly dialectical, aesthetically groundbreaking art picture that poses difficult, squirm-inducing sociopolitical questions in terms that are instantly understandable by people along the entire spectrum of American racial and ethnic identity.

films made by black directors or geared toward black audiences fared well at the box office both before and after Shes Gotta Have It made its big splash in 1986:

Lees intervention in contemporary cinema has been tremendously important, but it has not always been excellent in quality or even effective in reaching its target audience. In this book I look at his failures some just disappointing, a few positively dismal as well as his successes.

The key point is that most of Lees movies set forth pointed challenges to conventional ideas of what roles filmmaking, popular culture, and racial discourse are supposed to play in American society. Lees very career amounts to such a challenge, for that matter he is the only black filmmaker in history to sustain a major presence in American film over a period of decades, and his output during that time has been both varied and profuse, comprising almost fifty theatrical features, short films, and TV movies and episodes as director, almost as many as producer, and more than a dozen each as screenwriter and actor. His music videos have been commissioned by everyone from Public Enemy and Michael Jackson to Tracy Chapman and Chaka Khan, and he has directed commercials for Nike Air Jordans and American Express, among other clients. He has received two Academy Award nominations for the original screenplay of Do the Right Thing and for the 1997 feature documentary 4 Little Girls, shared with Sam Pollard, who coproduced it with him. He won an Emmy Award nomination for coproducing 4 Little Girls and received two Emmys for directing and coproducing the 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. He has won prizes, honors, and nominations at the Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, and Valladolid film festivals, among others; awards from critics organizations in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas; an honorary Csar Award in France and a special BAFTA award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in the United Kingdom; similar honors from the Independent Spirit, Gotham, and Image Awards; two Golden Globe nominations for