Even though JOE QUEENAN is annoyed by Spike Lee, he thinks that, with the release of Get on the Bus, it’s time to show respect
I DON’T know any white people who like Spike Lee. I know white people who used to like Spike Lee, but that was before his anti-white tirades, his going to bat publicly for Mike Tyson and his perceived ubiquitousness wore out his welcome with the race that runs the United States.
From the moment his career took off, Lee has been dogged by paradoxes. He has become the champion of an underclass to which he does not actually belong. Once the media discovered that he was not an oppressed innercity youth but the product of a thoroughly middle-class background, many decided he was a fake.
Nor did Lee’s masquerading as a pop revolutionary win many plaudits: real revolutionaries do not do Nike commercials, hang out with Michael Jordan or have courtside seats at Madison Square Garden. In the eyes of most whites, nobody with courtside seats there has the right to criticise American society. People in the cheap seats can criticise American society all they want. You Woody Allens better keep your damn mouths shut. You too, Spike.
All this notwithstanding, I would like to say a couple of things in Spike Lee’s defence. In portraying the misfortunes of a class to which he does not belong, he has done nothing that has not been done a thousand times. Do you think Bruce Springsteen actually worked in a factory?
More pertinently, Lee deserves credit for not going Hollywood like Eddie Murphy or Whoopi Goldberg. Unlike many African- American artists who are black when it’s convenient, Spike Lee is black 24 hours a day. Had he chosen the obvious path after his college film School Daze, he would now be churning out formulaic $45-million comedies about the misadventures of lovable black suburbanites instead of making his $2,8-million film Get on the Bus, about black men riding to the Million Man March in Washington.
Lee has continued to make complex, thought- provoking films. When white directors shun Hollywood and persist in making complex, thought-provoking films, they get academy awards. When Spike Lee does it, he gets dissed.
That pretty much constitutes my defence of Spike Lee the man. The Spike Lee who pauses in the middle of an interview to tell me how glad he is that sex offender/basketball star Richie Parker got a second chance, is either a complete enigma or a complete … well, let’s not get personal.
Look at it this way: either he has devised some idiosyncratic philosophy whereby all these contradictions cohere, or he does this stuff because he knows it really annoys people. Having just interviewed him, I think that he does it because he knows it really annoys people. He’s not mean or vulgar or belligerent or unfriendly. Just annoying.
I don’t think he’s simply a “world-class hustler”, to use one critic’s dismissive term, a calculating huckster who says annoying things because he thinks it will sell more movie tickets. I think Lee honestly believes artists have a sacred obligation to get under the public’s skin, rock the boat, boldly don the mantle of annoyingness. It is a mantle he wears quite well.
Unfortunately, Spike Lee the man has drawn so much attention to himself that he’s diverted attention away from Spike Lee the film-maker. Looking at Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever or Malcolm X, you have to wonder exactly what all the fuss about Lee’s racial attitudes is about. Spike Lee the director makes films that are nuanced, sensitive and remarkably free of political cant. In a society where white people get all bent out of shape about the way they’re depicted in his films – most of which they have never seen – it is his treatment of black people, particularly black men, that should be the most controversial subject.
From the crackhead thug in Jungle Fever to the one-dimensional pussy hound in She’s Gotta Have It, Lee has not hesitated to portray members of the black community as unappealing figures. Certain white critics are hot and bothered about the alleged anti-Semitic portrayals in Mo’ Better Blues, but few notice how regularly, and mischievously, Lee has used his films to satirise his own ethnic group.
And one of the things most remarkable about his films is how accurately he portrays whites. Name a film where a yuppie schmuck has been brought to life with more precision than Tim Robbins in Jungle Fever. The same can hardly be said of major white directors’ depictions of real black lives. “What people don’t realise is that when you’re a minority you know everything about the majority culture, because you’re bombarded with that every single day,” Lee patiently explains to me. “Hispanics, Asians and African-Americans know about white culture, because that’s all we see. That’s always on television, radio and in the newspapers. The reverse is not the same.”
His difficulty raising cash for a long- planned Jackie Robinson biopic in the wake of the cost over-runs on Malcolm X and the far-from-thrilling response to Crooklyn, Clockers and Girl 6 is no doubt one reason why he’s just finished making a quickie for $2,8-million. Get on the Bus is funded by African-American men such as Wesley Snipes and Danny Glover, and stars Ossie Davis, Isaiah Washington and other fine performers, all of whom worked for a cut of the profits. The characters include a gay couple, a cop, an elder statesman, and a father and son shackled together by court order.
The obvious question is: what kind of movie can you make for $2.8 million? “A very good one,” Lee says. “You just don’t have a lot of the toys. You don’t stay at the best hotels.” Although at first glance it might seem like a “typical” Lee project, and yes, over and over he uses the same techniques, the same cadre of actors, and yes, he lets them drone on and on, thematically no two of his movies are alike.
Speaking to this man of few, and carefully chosen, words, you would never guess his films are long and talky. But in some of his films, the cameraman seems to wander off for long naps, leaving his equipment on autopilot.
The director Lee most resembles is not Woody Allen – another short, bespectacled narcissist with courtside seats whose acting leaves something to be desired – but Eric Rohmer, the French master of film-as- meandering-conversation. A noticeable features of Lee’s films is his affection for the arty techniques, weird setups, characters talking directly into the camera. On the negative side, his heavy- handed sermonising, his gnawing fear the audience still hasn’t got the point, has led to interminable finales. A friend of mine says Lee needs to go to Film-Ending School.
As a mildly pretentious, wishy-washy, white suburbanite, I can say that nothing Lee has ever said about white people has offended me, not even his request to be interviewed by black journalists because he is weary of being subjected to hatchet jobs by mean- spirited white people like me. But his inability to wrap up his films really gets on my nerves.
When I bring up this problem in the context of Mo’ Better Blues, he insists the film cannot end on a downbeat note, with Denzel Washington staggering out into the rain. It must end with the older musician teaching his son how to play the trumpet, but allowing him to cut his lesson short and go out and play football. This shows the character has grown emotionally.
I drop the subject by noting that anyone who’d force his child to play the trumpet is by definition a monster incapable of personal growth. Lee seems amused. I ask if he pays attention to criticism of his work. “It depends who’s giving the criticism,” he says. Fellini once said that his idea of the perfect vacation was to make a movie. Does Lee share this attitude? He does not. “To me, making movies – which I love – is still hard work. It’s not a vacation. But giving interviews is even harder.”
Get on the Bus opens in South Africa on May 9