SPIKE LEE’S ROUTINE interest in provocative subjects—promiscuity (She’s Gotta Have It), colorism (School Daze), miscegenation (Jungle Fever), urban racism (Do the Right Thing), Northern prejudice (Crooklyn), police indifference (Clockers) and sexual addiction (Girl 6)—makes his unentertaining films marketable. But by trafficking in superficial political controversy, Lee obscures his real ambition. Fact is, until his new movie Passing Strange, Lee has never made a film that concentrated on the central issue of his career: class.
By latching on to Broadway’s Passing Strange, a semi-autobiographical theatrical event conceived and performed by West Coast musician Stew (and composer Heidi Rodewald), Lee deals with social advancement issues and the problems of racial and cultural identity that regularly confuse him and have always perplexed the nation. Passing Strange’s rites-of-passage saga tells how Stew (born Mark Stewart) went from his middle-class Black Los Angeles origins to pursue bohemian lifestyles in Europe. It captures the quintessential conflicts of African-American progress in the post-Civil Rights Era. Through this tale, Lee not only reveals himself, he cracks the mystique of the Obama ascendency—a symbol for all recent ethnic advances.
Passing Strange’s 2006 theatrical premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre predates Obama’s presidential election, but Lee’s film uncannily mixes theatrical documentary with the trickster conceit of self-conscious political performance art. It realizes a strong connection to Obama’s class and race escape act. Although Lee had been a highly vocal supporter of Obama’s presidential campaign—without articulating the reasons for his enthusiasm beyond obvious racial camaraderie—the self-revealing ethical confrontations of Stew’s play gets to the motivation inside that campaign rhetoric.
Lee has said in interviews that he strongly related to Passing Strange’s story. That means he recognized the truth in Stew’s unorthodox view of black-American experience. Stew’s sojourn becomes a Pilgrim’s Progress for Black Urban Professionals—a Buppie Boogaloo that uses guitar-based hard rock rather than the R&B and hip-hop generally favored by Stew and Lee’s generation. Although this movie isn’t a true collaboration where Lee and Stew reconceived Passing Strange as a cinematic venture, their sensibilities do converge. Lee’s film enshrines the desires of black upward mobility by documenting/ mythologizing Stew’s leap out of the symbolic ghetto (he was born into a middle-class black family with a hardworking, class-conscious mother similar to Obama and solicits the same affection and significance some people project onto Obama).
Replacing Porgy and Bess’ Catfish Row setting with a globetrotting equivalent of Harlem’s famed Striver’s Row, Lee deals with the nearly obscure objectives that were fundamental to Stew’s career and Lee’s own—such as those of the 1980s-’90s Black Rock Coalition, begun by young black artists who aspired to the freedom and sense of power in the multiracial, democratic pop art they enjoyed but felt outside of. Just as Lee’s alwayscontentious characters—from Do the Right Thing’s hoi polloi to the disloyal friends of Mo’ Better Blues and bickering band of brothers in Get On the Bus—demonstrate his fractious vision of America, they’re essentially looking to define their individuality within a screwed-up communal context. That’s the problem that Stew’s pop songs and soliloquies lament: “At war with Negro mores and ghetto norms.”
Few mainstream black artists have stated this self-conscious tension so succinctly. Stew’s musical thesis (“Just trust the song, I’ll set the scene/ A big two-story black middle-class scheme”) gives Lee his best, most coherent material in years: Stew escapes the little-pond tenants of L.A. gospel (“Who can handle the pressure of a Baptist fashion show?”) for the permissiveness of Amsterdam followed by the facile rebellion of West Germany. His introduction to drugs and androgyny (“I love how they’re so nonchalant about the only thing I want”) reveals global contradictions of growing-up and self-actualization. It’s richer than the chaotic competitiveness Lee showed in Bamboozled’s media satire or the horrid sexual antagonism of both the creepy Girl 6 and repugnant She Hate Me.
Stew’s cosmopolitan embrace even shows Lee how to depict interpersonal trajectories in the white world.As Stew narrates his story, guitar strapped over his shoulder, a younger alter-ego (played by Daniel Breaker) acts out his memories—family squabbles, love affairs and band disputes—that convey more feeling between people than the solipsistic, white folks’ treacheries of Lee’s The 25th Hour. Stew’s insights are genuine and hardwon, but the show evokes the spiritual assist of his forebears: “Chester Himes says it’s alright! Josephine Baker says it’s alright!”
In the past, Lee has name-dropped to show Buppie elitism: That confounding doublequote of King and Malcolm that caps Do the Right Thing is the ultimate sign of cultural intimidation practiced by hiphop-era Black intellectuals. (It’s no surprise that Obama and Michelle brag that their first date was seeing Do the Right Thing; it was a “black” power couple’s field trip in Summer of ’89 to observe the exploitation of race politics.) But Stew understands his antecedents, when prefacing his European soul-searching “You got to go to Another Country to get to Giovanni’s Room,” he salutes James Baldwin’s personal/social revolution. (Remember it was Lee who scuttled Baldwin’s original Malcolm X screenplay adaptation.)
Baldwin’s perceptions (humanitarian, aesthetic, gay) become Passing Strange’s subtext, informing its extension of black spiritual/cultural tradition.When Stew tells his mother, “I can’t hear the difference between [sacred and profane] music,” it surpasses the clever, trendy thinking of typical black intellectual discourse. His self-critical “Nobody in this place knows what it’s like to hustle for dimes on the mean streets of South Central,” clarifies the political platitude-attitude of so much “post-racial” Obama-think. This story of how Stew developed his voice—his own rock ’n’ roll howl—examines class realities that are crucial to American identity but rarely admitted, especially by black public figures, particularly by politicians who constantly promote the illusory “middle class.”
Lee high-fives Stew’s observations but adds little. His video imagery offers no graphic appreciation of stage sweat; he misses the existential excitement that Altman captured in his spectacular TV-adaptation of the 1996 Broadway Negritude musical, Black and Blue. Stew’s central subject is his personal existential trap: mortality, relationships, social identity. Both philosopher and minstrel, Stew’s Stubby Kaye body, Burl Ives’ goatee and porkpie hat offer amusement and meditation. That’s deeper than Lee’s hipster b-boy persona has ever gone before—but it’s also where Prince’s Minneapolis counterculture and the vaunted demimondes of Lou Reed’s Berlin and Bowie’s Heroes have already ventured. Not to forget Prince’s great 1987 film Sign O the Times—the definitively cinematic black existential stageshow.
Passing Strange isn’t radical or new, but by dealing with class it gets past Lee’s usual race distraction to the politicallybased longings and imaginings that drive him. Class is a central, if elusive concern to Stew’s struggle with black identity and to this era when America’s first openly biracial president is never considered white.
Stew’s bio-musical challenges that ideological trap. Too bad Lee never tried a cinematic coup—like morphing Stew’s visage into his own and then Obama’s. Yet, through Stew, Spike Lee addresses the thrill, frustration—and the political joke— of passing for black. Perhaps that’s Lee’s ultimate Obama-era controversy.
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