Spike Lee's Joints

In this piece, I explore the relationship between masculinity and misogyny in School Daze, arguing that Lee links the two and sees the formation of masculine identity as inseparable from the subjugation of women. What is the path out? This is not resolved in the film, but the stakes could not be higher: Lee links the question to slavery and emancipation. Again, the resolution, such that it is, is located in the interrogative. What would masculinity mean if it emerged out of an intimacy between men and the intimacy of the masculine self with itself?

A reflection on the opening credits to School Daze, and the sound and image that makes it work as the moral horizon of the film. In setting a series of images in relation to a Spiritual, Lee stages the stakes of the body of the film - what it means to live, act, and inhabit the horizon of Black righteousness with moral and political responsibility.

In a second discussion of Bamboozled, I continue a discussion of the film's pessimism and elements, small and suggestive only, that direct us towards paths of exit. I focus in particular on how minstrelsy haunts the film, our culture, and the possibilities of expressive life in an antiblack world - with specific reference to the scene in which the minstrel coin bank begins working on its own, without Delacroix's hand. The ghostly character of minstrelsy articulates how the past forms cultural production in the present, leaving us with an arc of nihilism. Are there paths out of that nihilism? I suggest at the end that Junebug, played by Paul Mooney, shows us a path out: Black humor dedicated to articulating the fallible elements, the humor, of Black humanity, and performed for Black audiences. But Junebug is no liberated character. He drinks to forget. He's fading with exhaustion.

In this discussion, I explore the pessimism of Spike Lee's Bamboozled, a 2000 film that offers a thought experiment: what would happen if television broadcast a minstrel series? What are the theoretical foundations of the claims coming out of this experiment? Lee, I claim, is drawing on the key insights of afropessimism, in particular the claim that antiblackness is an ontology of our world - the origin of our personal, collective, and shared world being - and therefore saturates all forms of representation, feeling, performance, and judgement. This allows us to see how the film is melancholic, pessimistic, and largely without hope. The white gaze, the Black gaze, and the interracial space of spectatorship are all generated from the same antiblack structure of being. Minstrelsy generated in this ontology, and its social, cultural, and political productions, registers as humor and pleasure - often despite our most resolute political commitments.

A discussion of Robert Townsend's 1987 film Hollywood Shuffle and how it both articulates and addresses a sense of crisis in making films with and about Black people. I am particularly concerned with how Townsend engages two senses of crisis. One, registering a sense of enduring violence against Black bodies, people, and life in the history of American cinema. Two, understanding crisis as the intersection of limit and possibility, in which historical violence meets closure in Hollywood Shuffle and, inside the film, through irony and hyperbole, opens up new senses of cinematic possibility.

As a way of preparing for analysis of Spike Lee's cinema, I reflect here on how Robert Townsend's 1987 film Hollywood Shuffle poses a series of challenges to filmmaking and the representation of Black people and Black life on the screen. In particular, I am interested in his critique of Hollywood's racial history - a critique made by plain reportage - and how he uses humor to double our relationship to the film and also how he negotiates the precarious cultural politics of the white gaze, the Black gaze, and the interracial space of cinematic viewership. Townsend takes risks and sets a template for challenging historical representation, while also understanding the immense gravity of antiblackness in cinematic spectacle, composition, and audience engagement - something that is perhaps inescapable.

In this opening episode, I describe my interpretative frame for Spike Lee's cinema, focusing on the terms and imperatives Lee brings to cinematic practice - the burden and beauty of representing Black bodies, Black people, and Black life - and how that forms what I call a Black Studies approach to film. My interpretative frame, then, follows Lee's leading clues, but embellishes them with the African American intellectual tradition and its combination of aesthetics, ethics, and politics.