A great filmmaker shows people what they need to see, even if it’s not what they want
to see — and Spike Lee has always strived for greatness.
Whether it’s by making movies or simply by speaking out, Spike Lee has a history of
standing up and making a stir.
Here’s the low-down on Hollywood’s favorite renegade.
Spike Lee is the oldest of six children, while his father, Bill, is a jazz musician, and
his late mother, Jacquelyn, taught art and African-American literature to high schoolers.
Lee's family has shaped his films on several levels.
For instance, Mo' Better Blues follows the struggles of a black jazz musician.
But Lee's father also composed scores for a number of his films, and his sister, Joie,
co-wrote Crooklyn, a semi-autobiographical account of Lee's Brooklyn upbringing.
According to the New Yorker, Joie acted in many of his films while some of Lee's other
siblings have handled the videography and photography.
In 1977, Lee's mother passed away from cancer.
Less than a year later his father tied the knot with a white woman.
Their marriage apparently upset Lee, who told CNN:
"The children, universally, don't get along with a stepmother, especially in the amount
of time that it happened."
He claimed that her race didn't bother him, but there have been people who wondered if
his film Jungle Fever — which paints a fairly bleak portrait of interracial relationships
— was somehow influenced by his own father's interracial marriage.
Lee put those rumors to rest in an interview, saying that his father's relationship had
nothing to do with the film.
At first blush, a movie named after a notorious serial killer doesn't seem like it would reveal
anything in particular about Spike Lee's personal experiences.
But Summer of Sam, an allusion to "Son of Sam" David Berkowitz, has themes of recklessness,
looming upheaval, and coping with death which might also be applied to Lee's life.
Set in a Bronx neighborhood in 1977, the movie explores how the Berkowitz murders impacted
residents in a period defined by unfettered hedonism, before the AIDS crisis and shifting
political attitudes redefined daily life.
As Lee explained in a 1999 interview, the film captures an important and transformative
chapter in New York City's history, and in his own history.
In 1977 Lee's mother passed away.
Still an undergrad back then, he lacked direction and was academically unmotivated.
Lee spent the summer of '77 in New York failing to find a job.
Eventually, however, he found his future career.
That year, a massive blackout plunged the city into chaos.
Rioters set hundreds of fires and looted thousands of stores.
Using a friend's Super 8 camera, Lee recorded the mayhem.
For him, filming New York's turmoil was "almost like an epiphany" and he soon knew what to
do with his life.
As he explained:
"The summer of '77 changed my life.
A lot of lives."
In the early 1980s, Lee attended NYU's film school.
There he met future director Ernest Dickerson, who also shot many of Lee's movies.
However, that fruitful union might never have happened if NYU had gone through with its
intention to expel Lee over a controversial project.
That project was a film called The Answer, and it was Lee's own answer to D.W.
Griffith's Civil War-era epic, Birth of a Nation.
Birth of a Nation was America's first bona fide blockbuster.
In it Griffith painstakingly depicts major events in American history such as Abraham
Lincoln's assassination and General Sherman's ferocious campaign to make Georgia's civilians
"feel the hard hand of war."
Unfortunately, he also glorifies the Ku Klux Klan.
The real-life KKK regained popularity and acquired new members as a result of the film’s
release.
President Woodrow Wilson likened Birth of a Nation to "writing history with lightning,"
which is accurate in that it's highly charged and strikingly racist.
Lee was struck by how the instructors at NYU often praised the movie's artistic merits
while overlooking its detrimental real-world impact.
"But let’s discuss it, let’s not say because you know, it can’t be seen, it can’t go
in a library.
I think that stuff is, is foolish."
So he highlighted the issue in The Answer, wherein a black filmmaker is tasked with remaking
Griffith's work.
Lee recalled in a 2016 interview with IndieWire:
"The faculty took it like I was attacking the father of cinema, so they kicked me out."
Luckily, he had already landed an assistantship for the next year, so he ended up staying.
Legendary film critic Roger Ebert once described Spike Lee's musical School Daze as "the first
movie in a long time where the black characters seem to be relating to one another, instead
of to a hypothetical white audience."
A comedic but meaningful look at undergraduate life at a historically black college, School
Daze was praised for its originality and raw honesty.
It addressed tensions that went unmentioned in most black films; namely hostilities between
light-skinned and dark-skinned black people and how black people in general are judged
by how natural their hair might be.
However, Lee's trademark boldness wasn't welcome at one black college.
Lee chose his own undergraduate stomping ground, Morehouse College, as one of the filming locations
for School Daze.
Though it was only his second feature film, he had already garnered a reputation as an
inflammatory filmmaker.
According to the Morning Call, his movie debut was accused of lewdness, and Morehouse administrators
worried Lee would cast "black colleges and black people as a whole" in an unfavorable
light.
The president demanded to see the script for School Daze, but Lee refused and continued
to shoot scenes until he was kicked off campus.
Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino have only worked together once in their careers.
That was on 1996's Girl 6, which Lee directed and in which both men acted.
Sadly, we can only imagine what profanity-laced, profound masterpiece they would create if
they agreed to co-direct a movie.
That’s because, in 2015, Tarantino said that he would never work with — in his words
— that "son of a b----" again.
"If you look at the film Girl 6 and it’s really a spoof on himself and I don’t think
he was smart enough to see it."
Their feud began when Lee called out Tarantino for his heavy use of the N-word.
For example, Jackie Brown, Tarantino's homage to Blaxploitation movies, uses the word 38
times.
Lee accused him of being "infatuated with the word" and suggested the director wanted
to be "an honorary black man."
Tarantino saw Lee's criticism as a racist attack on his artistic freedom.
In Django Unchained, he would freely use the N-word more than 100 times.
Lee deemed the film an insult to his ancestors and refused to see it.
DePaul University lecturer Kendall Marshall even decided to teach a course about the two
men's disagreement.
Interestingly, when Lee asked producer Harvey Weinstein — who was still working in Hollywood
at the time — whether he would greenlight a film that spewed anti-Jewish slurs as often
as Tarantino used the N-word, Weinstein refused.
When Florida resident George Zimmerman fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, everything
about the incident screamed "wrong."
Zimmerman had ignored a police dispatcher's order not to follow Martin, whom Zimmerman
didn't know but considered suspicious-looking.
He ultimately shot the unarmed Martin during a physical altercation and later claimed it
was self-defense.
Shoddy police work compromised the integrity of the investigation, and public opinion on
whether Zimmerman committed a crime was largely divided along racial lines.
In what was presumably a misguided attempt at vigilante justice, Spike Lee shared what
he thought was George Zimmerman's home address with his 240,000-plus Twitter followers.
In reality, Lee had given wrathful internet users the address of two strangers: David
and Elaine McClain.
They had no connection to Trayvon Martin's killer, but Elaine said her youngest son's
middle name was George, and his last name was Zimmerman.
Lee apologized to the McClains and paid them $10,000.
But that didn't stop the avalanche of anger and threats the couple faced, so they sued
for another $15,000.
A judge later dismissed the suit.
Lee was accused of anti-Semitism in 1990 with his film Mo Better Blues.
Partly inspired by his father's real-life ordeals, the movie revolves around a black
jazz musician who is heartlessly exploited by Jewish jazz club owners.
But the issue with the film wasn't just that they were Jewish.
According to the New York Times,
"The Flatbush brothers are so loaded with despicable traits typically used to disparage
Jews that they might have been invented by someone in the Racial Slur Montage."
Lee denied implying that those were stereotypically "Jewish" characteristics but undercut his
defense by arguing that Jews control Hollywood.
In a more thoughtful New York Times op-ed, he addressed his detractors.
Lee wrote:
"All Jewish club owners are not like this, that's true, but these two are.
[...] Not every black person is a pimp, murderer, prostitute, convict, rapist or drug addict,
but that hasn't stopped Hollywood from writing these roles for African-Americans.
Negative images of black people are presented on film and television every day and there
is no great uproar."
In 2011, Lee turned his fangs on Tyler Perry, the mind behind Madea.
Lee characterized a lot of current black films, Perry's work included, as silly caricatures.
He said of Perry's work in particular:
"I know it's making a lot of money and breaking records, but we can do better."
Perry responded by stating that Lee could "go to hell."
Clearly, this is a sensitive issue.
Perry's Madea character has been accused of echoing the racial caricature depicting female
slaves as, quote, "obese, coarse, maternal figure[s]."
Others besides Lee have also taken issue with the series for the same reason.
But those kinds of soundbite-worthy jabs may be overlooking something important about Madea
and what she represents.
As MSNBC contributor Goldie Taylor noted, Perry's Madea character isn't just played
for laughs.
She appears in films that feature domestic abuse, incest, and financial struggles.
The fact that Madea, a character you might not take seriously, is the hero in these serious
situations is arguably subversive in an empowering way.
Besides, as Spike Lee once wrote:
"For any artist, it would be emasculating to let others dictate his or her work."
Portraying serious real-world problems in an artistically interesting way is a tall
task.
The need to be entertaining often goes against the less entertaining realities of people
affected by the problem, and the pursuit of creativity can easily obscure the gravity
of the subject matter.
Spike Lee grappled with those concerns when making Chi-Raq, which focuses on the epidemic
of gun violence in Chicago.
In the movie, peace comes to Chicago as it does in the Greek play Lysistrata, with the
city’s women refusing to sleep with the men until they stop shooting each other.
Not too long after Lee began shooting Chi-Raq, protesters took to the streets of Chicago.
These were people who lost loved ones to stray bullets or were victims of gun violence themselves.
According to the Guardian, many felt the film would devalue their suffering or "glorify
violence."
Even then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel weighed in, because he thought the film's title — which is a
combination of "Chicago" and "Iraq" — wrongly characterized the city as little more than
a bullet-riddled hellscape.
"He was critical of the title and he said that the title film will hurt tourism and
economic development."
Critics' reactions to Chi-Raq were mixed.
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw described it as:
"A tactless, haranguing, original piece of work, a movie-musical rant about something
important."
A reviewer for RogerEbert.com, on the other hand, gave the movie top marks.
Perhaps the most meaningful response came from the Chicago Tribune's Dahleen Glanton,
who wrote:
"Chi-Raq fails to illuminate the lives of the many Chicagoans who go to bed with the
sound of gunfire outside their windows and wake up to the news of yet another murder."
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