The Unfortunately Timeless Relevancy of Spike Lee

Spike Lee strikes again this year with another stunningly relevant film in a filmography that never ceases to speak to our times. Lee joins auteurs like Martin Scorsese, The Coen Brothers, Jong Boon Ho, Alfonso Cuaron, and Noah Baumback to turn to the streaming giant Netflix to release his new film. His acceptance of new technologies to produce his work is not all that makes him one of the most ‘with-it’ directors despite his age of 63. He is the most influential African American director in the history of cinema, and since his debut film of She’s Gotta Have It in 1986 he has made films which deal with black characters and storylines that complicate and critique their traditional representation in world (specifically American) cinema and directly illustrate the contemporary issues still affecting blacks in the USA.

Lee’s films often create a link between the stories he depicts on screen and documentary footage he edits together. He does this with particular success at the end of his films to throw a final knockout punch. In 1992 Malcolm X’s epilogue mixed in clips of apparthied and Nelson Mandela, in 2018 the filming of Lee’s BlacKkKlansman coincided with the white supremicist marches in South Carolina which were added to the film’s finale, and in 2020’s Da 5 Bloods, the Black Lives Matter footage at the end of the film caps off a Vietnam treasure hunt caper connecting it’s fictional events to the protests now rocking the United States against the seemingly endless police killings of black men and women like Michael Brown.

Lee is a fascinating filmmaker with a divisive public persona. Like his films, the man is never afraid to stir controversy or back down from his beliefs. He famously has gotten into public spats with Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino, and his films delve into subject matter that few directors touch, either because they feel unable to adequately bring the events to the screen, because of disinterest, or because of studio’s lack of funding. Lee had become so famous in his own right that his ‘A Spike Lee Joint’ that precedes all his films is now something of a trade mark. His status has allowed him to explore several genres including his promising early independent work like She’s Gotta Have It, autobiographies like Malcolm X, A-list think pieces like 25th Hour, Hollywood crime capers like Inside Man, war films like Miracle at St. Anna, and his one true masterpiece Do the Right Thing.

One common critique of Lee’s films is that they are all over the place, mixing genres and tones in a way that can be dizzyingly off putting at times and inexplicably effective at others. Perhaps the greatest example of this is 2000’s Bamboozled, a black comedy about the only black tv writer for a channel who decides to recreate a black face variety show. Damon Wayans plays the writer who makes a show so horrifyingly offensive as to pummel the American public and the television industry with over exaggerated, disgusting recreations of the types of roles blacks used to portray on screen. However, to his surprise and dismay, instead of making the audience outraged or uncomfortable, the show is an instant hit among audiences and critics. His gruesome Frankenstein monster of a program backfires and instead of revealing the ugly racist side of American television, the American television industry applauds it, and American families welcome it into their homes, unashamed or unconscious of the loathsome content depicted on their screens. 

Lee takes a direct look at the history of blacks in film and television, with special attention reserved for D.W. Griffith’s ‘masterpiece’ The Birth of a Nation, a film that was famously screened at the white house by then president Woodrow Wilson who claimed it to be a masterpiece despite the fact, or perhaps because, it villanizes black slaves as criminals and rapists and glorifies the KKK as heroes. Bamboozled is an unabashed, fearless critique that shows the problem America has with telling black stories. Hollywood and the mass media in general is so used to creating and promoting stereotypes that it becomes difficult for producers and filmmakers to escape the racist tropes that are so ingrained in the industry. The fictional show created in the film is so obviously offensive that it can be hard to watch as an audience. At times one feels a sense of guilt for not turning it off. It is fair to ask if Lee himself jumped too far down the rabbit’s hole, having black actors put on black face and red lipstick and march around like country bumpkins and smile and wave their hands in the search for fried chicken. However, the experience of watching these scenes is so repulsive that the satire really creates a sense of unease that makes you question your own role as a spectator. 

Like many of Lee’s films, Bamboozled is all over the place. It does not also feature the repulsive variety show, but also a Dave Chappelle skit like performance by Wayans, an n-word loving tv producer who seems to be based on Quentin Tarantino, and a finale that suddenly turns serious and, unexpectedly, excessively violent. It is an overwhelming experience watching the film, and by the end one feels almost numb from overexposure to something so outlandish, unpredictable, offensive, and messy. Yet is it one of Lee’s most intriguing films, and a testament to his ability to disrupt an audience's sense of comfort and make them question themselves and their own reactions to what happens on screen.

Lee’s new film Da 5 Bloods is equally messy, but in a more mainstream big budget way that makes it less effective than Bamboozled. Just explaining the film's plot is a bit of a feat. It is about 4 aging black Vietnam veterans who return to the country to find the remains of their deceased squad leader. However, the reunion is more than it seems. Not only do they look for the body of their dead idol, but also for a cargo of gold that was buried with him. The film turns what looks like is going to be a buddy film that looks back on the African American experience in the armed forces in general and in Vietnam in particular to an explosive action filled search for gold inspired by John Houston’s classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Delroy Lindo spectacularly stepping into Humphrey Bogart’s shoes, bringing the character into the 21st century with a MAGA hat.

The mixture of drama, comedy, and action is a lot to handle and it does not really come together to make a coherent film. It tries to comment on Blacks in Vietnam, American French and Imperialism, Donald Trump, and Black Lives Matter, all while mines, grenades, and machine guns blow bodies apart. Juggling all this at the same time does not allow the film to make any successful argument concerning any of its serious themes. As previously mentioned, the documentary footage of the Black Lives Matter to finish the film is a stylistic staple that Lee has mastered and is the most moving part of the movie.

Of course Lee deserves kudos for mentioning these themes at all in a big budget film, and none of his films are uninteresting. He makes one especially fascinating decision to use the aged actors as they are in the flashback scenes. While Netflix released Scorsese’s gangster epic The Irishman last year with its so called ‘revolutionary’ deaging technology, Lee went in a more creative direction. In the flashbacks the four men appear dressed in their war gear, but just as they are in the present day, wrinkled, overweight, and world weary, the only one still young being Chadwick Boseman as their deceased leader. It is a beautiful representation on how youth is preserved by death, and how memory is tainted by the passing of time. Instead of seeing themselves and their comrades as they were in the war, they see them as they are now. They are unable to separate their images of themselves and their friends of present from the past. Given Boseman’s tragic death, the film becomes even more poignant as he, like his character, will remain young and beautiful forever, not given the chance to grow old and continue lending his talents to the silver screen.

While Lee’s films can feel too unconcentrated, there is one case where his playfulness and changing of tones works to perfection, and that is in his masterpiece, Do the Right Thing, probably the greatest American film made on race relations, and one of the greatest films made of all time. Released in 1989, Do the Right Thing was an instant success, and controversy, when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. It takes place during one extremely hot summer day on a street in Brooklyn, and is a hilarious, loving, tragic, and eye opening look into the lives of the eclectic characters that make up the neighborhood. The film moves along with a confident pace and rhythm, juggling an ensemble of characters’ interactions that will culminate in a final explosion of emotion and violence at Sal’s Pizzeria, an Italian restaurant owned by a white Italian man in a dominantly black neighborhood. Lee’s hip dialogue, lively camera work, bright color scheme, and constant soundtrack give the film a non stop entertaining energy that brings us the final confrontation.

The riot started at Sal’s is a complete 180 degree for the film to take. Yes there is conflict throughout the film, but it always simmers out before anything serious happens, and the incredible dialogue makes each of these arguments so enjoyable that the danger never feels too frightening. The end of the film changes all of that. A fight breaks out, and, just like in real life year after year, month after month even, the police arrive and make things worse. Instead of protecting their citizens from harm, they kill them, and the citizens they kill are unproportionally black. The film poses a situation where initially neither Sal or Radio Raheem, the two characters involved, are either good or evil, right or wrong. They are two characters, one black, and one white, who explode. The only bad guy is the police, yet Lee creates a situation that feels very realistic, where the audience feels the need to answer why this happened and to lay the blame on someone. The question as to whose fault it all is and if the destruction of property is warranted is forced upon the audience without Lee preaching to us. He presents the situation and leaves it up to the audience’s discussion. Lee trusts us, and just as we feel like he is giving us the answer in the end of the film with a quote from Martin Luther King against violence, a second quote appears, this one by Malcolm X condoning violence. Finally a picture of the two of them smiling finishes off the film. Lee gives us no easy answer. He gives us the difficult reality of a systematically racist world where we are still struggling to find the way to improve it without making the situation worse or giving in to oppressive powers.

It is absolutely incredible how after 31 years, Do the Right Thing is still so essential to understanding our times. Black men are still being murdered by choke holds by the very people who are supposed to ‘serve and protect’ them more than three decades after Lee depicted Radio Raheem's horrific death. It is wonderful that we have Lee to continue to speak up about these issues, but it is depressing that his films' subject matter are no longer depicting a part of our past that we have overcome, but events that continue to relentlessly occur. It is a travesty that every Spike Lee film comes out and is deemed relevant because of another contemporary real world occurrence. It is also disconcerting that he is one of the few black directors working who is given the freedom to make films about these subjects on a regular basis, but hopefully that is slowly changing. We can learn so much from Spike Lee’s Joints. Let’s hope that one day we will see that they depict a time that has come and gone instead of something that captured an unfortunate fact of life that is with us to stay.