Spike Lee's Joints

Revisiting the theme of masculinity and the interrogative, I here trace the allusions to slavery in Get On The Bus and how it outlines, along with his treatment of Jeremiah (the film's elder), Lee's commitment to cinema as question-asking and the horizon of the unprecedented. Jeremiah's damaged life contains an ethical imperative: center identity on an expansive, strong sense of blackness. But it also opens up only possibility: his life was not one to emulate, nor is any from the past. Rather, the unprecedented questions asked in Get On The Bus ask each subject in the film (and also us as viewers) to begin again, to make relationships to self, others, and community for the first time.

A first comment on Spike Lee's 1996 film Get On The Bus, discussing it as a self-reckoning by Lee concerned with his previous explorations of masculine identity formation. Lee sees the limits and even harm of previous accounts of masculinity, placing the questions he has for himself, but also Black men more broadly, inside the spatially constrained yet affectively expansive and expanding frame of the bus.

A further exploration of the meaning of childhood in Spike Lee's Crooklyn, with particular attention to how childhood and adulthood sit in an ambiguous relation and produce both constriction and possibility. I'm interested in how the song "Ooh Child" by Five Stairsteps expresses the moral and ethical message of the film, namely, that whatever the abject conditions and sense of fate for Black people in an anti-Black world, that suffering is also and always accompanied by great beauty and sense of possibility - here, portrayed in the child-life of Troy. This portrait offers a complex vision of Black girlhood and women's work, appreciating joy and resistance alongside the pathos of everyday life, but also, I think, a broader claim about Black life in a world saturated with antiblackness.

A discussion of the relationship between girlhood, childhood, Black life, and women's work in Spike Lee's 1994 film Crooklyn. In this reflection, I read Lee's film - a collaboration with his siblings, especially his sister Joie Lee - as an exercise in portraiture. That is, Lee is not prescribing how Black girls should live, how life should unfold for them, or what sorts of work fall as the responsibility of women, but he is instead describing how in this kind of place girls, children, and women live their age and positioning in the world. Lee brings us the complex space of Black childhood that is either a fiction or a severely compromised reality: saturated with sadness, but also beauty. Insistent on beauty, Lee refuses to see the difficulties of Black life as merely abject.

A sketch of the politics of the film, as well as the life of the person, Malcolm X - and, by extension, the politics of Spike Lee's early cinema. In particular, I am concerned with how Lee continues his reflections on the meaning and possibilities for Black life outside the white gaze, formed between Black people and guided by the open horizon(s) of self-invention and reinvention. This sense of a politics of self-invention and reinvention is set alongside the persistent representations of sociogenic conditions of antiblackness. Lee is not content to point out systematic issues and remain at that level, concluding with that imperative alone. Like Malcolm X, he is also committed to the question of how to live political in the midst of systemic antiblackness and how to make meaningful, transformative life and lives outside the white gaze.

An exploration of themes of masculinity in Malcolm X, linking Lee's 1992 film to his previous reflections of masculinity and masculine identity formation. I am particularly interested in how the film tracks self-invention across Malcolm X's life, and how the concluding sequence of declarations "I am Malcolm X" suggests a broader horizon for Black identity formation that is so intimately bound, yet not wholly limited by, formation in an anti-Black world.

Discussion of Mo' Better Blues, with emphasis on the place of children, childhood, motherhood, and women's work in the formation of masculine identity. In particular, I'm interested in how pleasure and play open up new horizons not just for masculine identity formation, but for the relationships between men and for relationships between men and women that are not repetition-sites of phallic struggle.

A discussion of the theme of masculinity and the phallus in Spike Lee's 1990 film Mo' Better Blues, with particular emphasis on the psychic and material dimensions of phallic struggle between Bleek and Shadow. I am interested in how the psychic life of the stage is deployed in the struggle between Bleek and Shadow offstage to possess, in whatever register, their mutual sexual interest - Clark. And also how in the film's title song - "Mo' Better Blues" - is performed outside the phallic economy, articulating different masculine possibilities that are, in the film, otherwise only explored in the domestic life of Bleek and Indigo that closes the film. 

A discussion of three under theorized themes in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, but which get further treatment across his cinema: women's work, the role of children and childhood on the screen, and the presence of the police in an antiblack world.

Discussion of the theme of "right" in Do the Right Thing, with particular focus on the neighborhood complexities of race, color, nation, and age. Beginning with a brief bit about the aesthetic innovations of the film - putting Black bodies on the screen - in relation to School Daze and She's Gotta Have It, I spend most of the piece exploring the relation between love, hate, and the notion of rightness. How do we measure rightness in the ambivalent, undecidable space of love mixed with hate, hate mixed with love? A response, perhaps an answer of sorts, lies in Mother Sister's two utterances in the penultimate scene, the climax of the film: stop stop and burn it all down.