Our intrepid reporter goes mano a mano with the notoriously slippery filmmaker, and comes away with--of all things--a new respect for his work.
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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 publicly going to bat for the likes of Mike Tyson and Albert Belle, and his perceived ubiquitousness caused him to wear out his welcome with the race that, let's face it, runs this country. In saying this, I am aware that I cannot speak for all white Americans, just as Lee cannot speak for all black Americans. But I can speak for a lot of them.
From the moment his career took off, Spike Lee has been dogged by two irksome paradoxes. On the one hand, he has become the champion of an underclass to which he does not actually belong. This got some members of the media on his case, because once they discovered that Lee was not an oppressed inner-city youth but the product of a thoroughly middle-class background, many journalists decided that the irascible filmmaker was a bit of a fake, a conclusion their white readers no doubt wholeheartedly endorsed.
Nor did Lee's public masquerade as a pop revolutionary win many plaudits from the press gallery, if only because real revolutionaries do not do Nike commercials, do not direct videos shown on MTV, do not hang out with Michael Jordan, and do not have courtside seats at Madison Square Garden. In the eyes of many, perhaps most, whites, nobody with court-side seats at Madison Square Garden has the right to criticize American society. People sitting up in the cheap seats can criticize American society all they want. You Woody Allens and John McEnroes and Alec Baldwins 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 defense. In portraying the misfortunes of a class (the poor) to which he does not actually belong, Lee has done nothing that has not been done a thousand times over by novelists, painters, playwrights, rock stars. What, you think Springsteen actually worked in a factory?
More pertinently, Lee deserves credit for not going Hollywood like Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg and Michael Jackson. Unlike many African-American artists who are black when it is convenient to be black, but then retreat into the amorphous race that all superstars belong to. Spike Lee is black 24 hours a day. Had he chosen the obvious career path after his brilliant and hilarious (though not wildly popular) School Daze was released, Lee would now be churning out formulaic $45 million comedies about the misadventures of lovable African-American suburbanites (Home, Black and Alone II), instead of making, say, his $2.8 million film Get On The Bus, about 15 black men riding on a bus to the Million Man March in Washington last fall. Instead of becoming a dark-skinned Chris Columbus or the African-American Joe Dante, Lee has continued to make interesting, complex, thought-provoking films. When white directors shun Hollywood and persist in making interesting, complex, thought-provoking films, they get good seats at Elaine's and totally undeserved Academy Awards. When Spike Lee does it, he gets dissed.
That pretty much constitutes my entire defense of Spike Lee the Man. The Spike Lee who pillories white America and then shills for Nike, the Spike Lee who signs on to make an HBO feature about the slugging dickhead Albert Belle, the Spike Lee who pauses in the middle of an interview conducted at his 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks in Brooklyn's Fort Greene to tell me how glad he is that the sex offender/college hoops 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 Spike Lee has devised some idiosyncratic philosophy whereby all these contradictions cohere in some otherwise unintelligible fashion, or he just does this stuff because he knows that it really annoys people. Personally, having just interviewed him, I now think that lie does it because he knows that it really annoys people. At no time during our tête-à-tête in the gorgeous converted firehouse that is the base of his operations do I get the sense that Spike Lee cares about annoying people. He's not mean or coarse or vulgar or belligerent or even unfriendly. He's just annoying.
The tradition of annoyingness from which Spike Lee derives a large part of his personality may well be a European rather than a Brooklyn one. Generations ago, the French developed the concept of épater le bourgeois, which, loosely translated, means; "Do everything humanly possible to get on middle-class people's nerves." The Dadaists did it, the Surrealists did it, the Absurdists like Ionesco and Genet did it all the time. Tellingly, one of the things that the bourgeoisie always found so annoying about this was that the offending artists depended for their livelihood on the very people they were annoying. The artists didn't care. And that just made them more annoying.
I think that Spike Lee falls squarely into this group. I do not think that Lee is simply a "world-class hustler," to use one critic's dismissive term, a calculating huckster who does and says annoying things because he thinks it will sell more tickets to his films. I think that Lee honestly believes that artists have a sacred obligation to get under the public's skin, to constantly rock the boat, to 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 has diverted attention away from Spike Lee the Filmmaker. So much has been made of Lee's hot-blooded rhetoric that almost no one has noticed how thoroughly intelligent, thoughtful, innovative and evenhanded most of his films are. Looking at Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and Clockers, you really have to wonder what all this fuss about Spike Lee's racial attitudes is about. As opposed to Spike Lee the Public Figure, Spike Lee the Director makes films that are nuanced sensitive and remarkably free of political cant. Indeed, in a society where white people get all bent out of shape about the way Caucasians are depicted in his films--most of which they have never seen--it is Lee's treatment of black people, and particularly of black men, that should be the most controversial subject.
Ranging from Samuel L. Jackson's crackhead thug in Jungle Fever to Delroy Lindo's malefic drug dealer in dockers, Lee has not hesitated to portray certain members of the black community as mesmerizingly unappealing figures. And when they have not been villains, they have often been clowns (the preposterous black fraternity members in School Daze, the boom box-toting lunkhead in Do the Right Thing, Wesley Snipes's cheating spouse in Jungle Fever, Lee's one-dimensional pussy hound in She's Gotta Have It). While certain white critics have gotten all hot and bothered about the alleged anti-Semitic portrayals of the jazz club owners in Mo' Better Blues, hardly anyone has noticed how regularly, and mischievously, Lee has used his films to criticize or at least satirize members of his own ethnic group. It's as if white America has said: it's OK to cast your fellow African-Americans in an unflattering light, because you're black and that's your turf, but for God's sake, leave our ethnic groups alone. In other words, only us drunken Micks can make films about us drunken Micks: only us racist Italians can make movies about us racist Italians.
As a matter of fact, one of the things that is most remarkable about Lee's films is how accurately he portrays white people. Name a film where a yuppie schmuck has been brought to life with more precision than Tim Robbins in Jungle Fever. Tell me that Nicholas Turturro and his candy shop henchmen in that film aren't the spitting images of the boys from Bensonhurst. Or that Danny Aiello and Harvey Keitel don't fit the bill as the Racists with Hearts of Gold in Do the Right Thing _and _Clockers, respectively. For a clearer idea of Lee's achievement, try to imagine a major white director making a movie about people from Bedford-Stuyvesant and coming within 10 miles of the target. Jim Jarmusch? Oliver Stone? Brian De Palma? The Woodman?
"What people don't realize 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 while looking out the window at Brooklyn Hospital, "So I think that Hispanics, Asians and African-Americans know everything 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."
Since he's so good at it, I ask Lee if he could make an entire movie about white people. I suggest that after the less-than-blockbuster box office take for Crooklyn, Clockers and Girl 6, it might be a good idea to pull a The Age of Innocence and make a movie completely outside the range of his normal experience.
But Lee doesn't take the suggestion in the spirit it was intended.
"It would have to be a good story," he snaps. "But I'm not going to do that to validate myself to show that I'm not a racist. I get asked that all the time: 'When are you going to do a film with white people in it?'"
It just so happens that Spike has had plans to make one. The project, Reliable Sources, postponed for now, features a script by Joe Eszterhas and deals with a reporter involved in a hostage situation.
"I think the majority of those characters are white," says Lee.
Lee's problems raising cash for his long-planned Jackie Robinson biopic in the wake of the cost overruns on Malcolm X. and the far-from-thrilling response to Crooklyn, dockers and Girl 6 are no doubt a big part of why he has just finished making a quickie film for $2.8 million. Get On the Bus deals with 15 black men who trek from Los Angeles to Washington in October 1995 to attend the Million Man March. Funded by African-American men such as Wesley Snipes and Danny Glover, it stars Ossie Davis, Isaiah Washington, Richard Belzer, Charles Dutton and a host of other fine per-formers, all of whom worked for scale. The characters include a gay couple, a policeman, an elder states-man, and a father and son who are shackled together by court order. The obvious question: what kind of movie can you make for $2.8 million?
"A very good one," Lee explains. "You just don't have a lot of the toys. You know, you don't stay at the best hotels--all that stuff that really has nothing to do with filmmaking. All the money has to be on screen."
Although at first glance Get On the Bus might seem like a "typical" Spike Lee project, it actually bears little relation to his other films. Yes, Lee uses the same directing techniques over and over, and yes, he relies on the same cadre of performers, and yes, he lets them drone on and on till both you and they are blue in the face, but thematically-- and in terms of overall mood--no two of his movies are alike. More important still, in his determination to show that African-American society is not a monolith. Lee makes some films about poor people, some films about middle-class people, some films about the famous and successful. Yet somehow, nobody seems to notice the rich variety of his work. I ask Lee if it bothers him that his nine very different films are generally thought of as nine variations on the same theme.
"It doesn't bother me." Lee claims. "I know that people try to pigeonhole artists because of films like Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X and Jungle Fever. There are some people who think my number-one interest in doing films is dealing with racial issues in this country. That's very important to me, but I don't really think I make any one type of film."
Noting that Quentin Tarantino appears briefly in Girl 6, I ask Lee if he envies Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez the cultural canonization they have earned while making movies that are basically about how much they like other movies. By this I mean: if Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, El Mariachi, Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn have a message, it went over my head. But again, Lee senses a trap.
"Who says that I only like message films?" he asks. "Why do you even ask me that question? Because I like a film and it's not a message movie, and that's something to note? I went to see The Rock and enjoyed it. Yes, I do like movies that don't necessarily have a message to them. Spike Lee goes to the movies sometimes just for entertainment. I've never said that every film has to have a message in it."
That's good, because now we can segue into a chat about a form of pure entertainment that happens to be one of Lee's passions: basketball. Spike Lee has made eight films since his professional debut in 1986, and yet to date this self-confessed hoops addict has never made a film about basketball. Would he like to make a film about the subject?
"I would love to."
"And what would it be?" I ask.
"Hey, it'd be better than Eddie" Lee says, cracking a smile for the first time. "It'd be better than Celtic Pride."
Well, yes, that's a given, but couldn't he be a bit more specific?
"I don't know, because I don't have the story yet."
"Could you make a movie about Dennis Rodman? Has it crossed your mind?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because it's not interesting to do a movie about Dennis Rodman."
"Why not?" I ask. "He's an interesting man."
"Many people are interesting." Lee replies. "But that doesn't warrant a movie."
"He's a very interesting man," I press on, but Lee has deep-sixed this subject. "Dennis Rodman you could do a five-minute feature on," he says.
You would never, ever guess from talking to this man of few, and carefully chosen, words that his films are long and talky. Indeed, Lee has a hard time advancing his plots with images; everything is done through humongous gabfests. In some of his films, the cameraman seems to wander off for long naps, leaving his equipment running on automatic pilot. In this sense, the director Lee most resembles is not Woody Allen--another short, bespectacled, narcissistic New Yorker with Knicks courtside seats whose acting leaves something to be desired--but French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, the master of film as one meandering conversation. Indeed, one of the most noticeable features of Lee's films is his affection for the kinds of any techniques, blackouts, weird setups, and characters talking, talking, talking directly into the camera that French people love. He has probably done as much as any American director to make Godardian techniques part of the filmmaking mainstream. Which is probably his single greatest crime against humanity.
There are a few things that rescue Lee's films from their pacing problems and almost hysterical garrulousness. For one, he has the ability to coax great, great performances out of his casts. Another is that he gives his actors terrific dialogue. And he almost always includes one or two electrifyingly funny scenes: the ghetto-blaster duel in Do the Right Thing, the string of black pickup lines in She's Gotta Have It, the "Zulu dick" conversation in Jungle Fever, and just about the entire script of School Daze.
Back on the negative side. Lee's heavy-handed sermonizing, his gnawing fear that the audience still hasn't gotten the point, has led to interminable finales in Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Jungle Fever, Mo' Better Blues and School Daze. A friend of mine says she heard that the Hughes brothers once suggested that Spike Lee needs to go to Film Ending School. I could not agree more. Speaking as a mildly pretentious, wishy-washy. Caucasian suburbanite, I can say that nothing Lee has ever said about white people has offended me in the least, 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. Frankly, I can see no difference between Lee's attempts to handpick sympathetic African-American journalists and white movie stars' insistence that Vanity Fair and Premiere dispatch the usual blow-job brigade. But his inability to wrap up his films really gets on my nerves. In late-20th-century America, these, not allegations of covert racism, are the things that bother white people like me. What a society.
But when I bring up this finale problem in the context of Mo' Better Blues. Lee insists that the film cannot end on a downbeat note, with Denzel Washington's washed-up trumpet player staggering out into the rain. Instead, he feels the film must end with the older, wiser musician teaching his son how to play the instrument, but then allowing him to cut his lesson short and go out and play football. In Lee's view, this shows that the character has grown emotionally. Glumly, I realize that I'm not going to get anywhere by suggesting that Lee's finales leave something to be desired. So I simply drop the subject by noting that anyone who would force his child to play the trumpet is by definition a monster incapable of personal growth. Lee seems amused. I seize the opportunity to ask if he ever pays attention to outside criticism of his work.
"It depends who's giving the criticism," he replies. "There are people I respect, and I listen to them; other people I don't listen to. I have an inner circle of friends, people who are very honest with me, people who I respect who are filmmakers. If something doesn't work, and they tell me it's not working, then I better check it out, because there might be something to that."
Federico Fellini once said that his idea of the perfect vacation was to make a movie. For him, all the fund-raising and promotional rigamarole was drudgery, while the actual process of filmmaking was fun. I ask Lee if he shares Fellini's attitude. He does not.
"To me, making movies--which I love--is still hard work," Lee remarks. "It's not a vacation."
"Is it harder work than stuff like, say, giving this interview?"
"Giving interviews is harder," Lee says. "Especially press junkets where you do 50 interviews a day and everybody's asking the same question."
"Did you ever interview yourself?" I ask.
"No."
"Can you think of a question you'd like to be asked?"
"No."
"So you can see how hard it is."
"It's not hard. It's just that people are lazy. They don't take time to do their research, and they just ask the same questions."
I now wind up our little chat by asking Spike Lee a whole series of questions I am sure he has not been asked. I really want to prove that I am not a lazy reporter, and have actually done my research. So I ask him if he would give Mickey Rourke, the man who, at least indirectly, blamed him for the Los Angeles riots, a job.
"He was great in Diner, but that was a long time ago." Lee says. "But if there was a pan for him, I wouldn't hold that against him."
But what about those nasty accusations?
"Mickey Rourke is not a social scientist," Lee answers. "You have to consider the source."
We proceed. In answer to my wildly assorted, thematically incongruous questions. Lee will not be making a film about '60s activist H. Rap Brown, he will not be making a film about Richie Parker, he will not be making a film about how awful Peter, Paul and Mary were. In answer to the question, "Has the idea of making a movie about Sammy Davis, Jr. ever crossed your mind?" Lee gets a bit peeved.
''Why do you keep asking me questions about what movie to make? Why do you keep suggesting films for me to make?"
"Because they're movies that I would like to see you make," I reply. "That's all."
Sadly, however, Lee has no interest in making them. He thinks that H. Rap Brown would make a good film subject, but has no interest in making it himself. He feels the same way about Sammy Davis, Jr. In other words: yes, I can, but no. I won't.
"Would you like to do an action film?" I ask.
"It would have to be a good script," he answers. "It would have to have substance. It couldn't just be car crashes and special effects."
"So you're never going to gel to the point like some of these guys who start out making great films and then they just go and work for the studios putting out product?"
"I hope not," he says, clearly tired of this interview.
I hope not, too.
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Joe Queenan wrote about Irish cinema for the August issue of Movieline.