Just finished I’m A Virgo - which was awesome - and couldn’t help but think of Spike Lee’s seemingly incoherent ideology and how, while Boots continues to release bangers, Spike shills crypto.
Admittedly, I have only seen two of Spike Lee’s “social” movies, Do The Right Thing (which I really didn’t “get” - please chime in if you can clarify) and Bamboozled (which I thought was poignant but a bit heavy handed and nihilistic). It appears to me that Spike Lee grasps the racial inequities in American society, but doesn’t grasp the greater dimensions - he’s trapped in, or has fallen into the trap of, detached liberalism.
I could be way off base here, so I hope y’all can offer some illumination - it seems like the crucial difference between Spike and Lee is that Boots has read theory.
Thoughts?
Yeah Spike totally lost it when he did the film (Black Klansman) about the black cop that infiltrated the Klan but he left out that the cop also worked against black radicals.
That movie ends with the main character explaining to his activist girlfriend that he can do more good by being a cop than an activist
When Spike Lee did his interview trail for Chiraq, he actually believed that a sex strike could create substantial change on a large scale.
On one hand king
On the other hand
That matches up with my perception of his work: he has no underlying theory. He grasps outlines of inequity, but appears unable to tie it together: he presents powerful scenes, but subsequently undermines the impact of those scenes with incoherent resolutions.
Just standard “we can fight white supremacist capitalism with black capitalism” stuff imo.
Yeah, RIP to Killer Mike for falling into that trap too. But as opposed to his crypto shilling, Lee’s message in Do The Right Thing also confused me because it seemed to be ripe for a message of working class solidarity but then it was about, uhhh, the function of riots as expression? And I guess the pizza shop owner was petite bourgeoisie? It’s been so long since I’ve seen it.
I’ll be real with you. I kept confusing Spike Lee with Stan Lee and I kept wondering ‘since when were you nerds marvel fans’
That’s funny, because I’m A Virgo really addresses US obsession with comic-book narratives. But similarly I think, Stan Lee made (or stole) characters that presented critiques of US culture, but always in a lib-brained restricted way.
Spike Lee used to have better politics he’s just gotten too rich and it pickled his brain in liberalism
