Spike's Joint
Your grandparents think 'The Kid from Brooklyn" is comedian Danny Kaye (who played a prizefighting milkman in the 1946 movie of that title). But for your parents, it's Spike Lee. During the 1980s, Lee almost single-handedly wrestled Brooklyn mythology from the stingy clutches of white-ethnic public figures like Pete Hamill, Jackie Mason and Rocky Graziano. And, like Kaye, he did it through the movies.
Lee's 1986 feature film debut, She's Gotta Have It, didn't exactly put Brooklyn on the map (that had been done as far back as the silent era, and the mainland linkage of the Brooklyn Bridge), but it did put Black Brooklyn on the big screen. In a sense, the big screen is where American social identity thrives and matters most. If it didn't, there'd be no other reason to remember that movie or Lee himself. (Who can forget the cringe-inducing folly of Lee's Wizard of Oz homagea color insert in a black and white movieat Grand Army Plaza?)
She's Gotta Have It laid a place for the lives of black Americans in the popular imagination which, before that, had only gotten its information about America's cultural census from the life habits and fond recall of white-ethnic performers. (The peak of working-class Brooklyn identification may have been The Honeymooners.) Hollywood traditionally depicted Brooklyn as a melting pot, the fantasy utopia of America's multi-ethnic bonhomiecomic Jews, Irish, Italians, Russians and Germansbut rarely as a home to blacks.
Lee's debut appeared on the heels of hip-hop music's ascension. So it also wrestled with what was largely a Bronx phenomenon of public consciousness and connected it to the borough of migration-proud West Indians and Southern blacksa social development that began to show itself in the career aspirations of the children of the civil rights movement. Lee challenged the Bronx and Harlem for Black-Is-Back supremacy; his movie expressed the moment that young black upstarts let the world know of their presence. Lee matched image to sound, close-ups to break-beats. And by the time Lee released the movie he was born to make (1989's Do the Right Thing, set in Bedford-Stuyvesant), the brave new black social identity was thrilling.
Do the Right Thing didn't just sum up frustration with Ed Koch's legacy of neglect and implicit disdain, it did groundwork for the upcoming David Dinkins term and strengthened what little resistance there would be to the hostility of the upcoming Rudy Giuliani putsch. And all of it was paced to the hectic, swervy rhythm of Public Enemy's Fight the Power. This same period also produced the Brooklyn-based newspaper The City Sun, the great journalistic witness of New York's social circus (and my personal incubator). The heady mix of music, movies and journalism was often controversial proof of how autonomous and controversial a Black Brooklyn identity could be.
So what went wrong? Well, Fight the Power, marvelous as it was, amounted to little more than a four-minute pep rally. (Recall Lee's music video for the song, which faked a protest march complete with Flavor Flav wearing a dangling clock and top hat, placards and the unexpected presenceand bold embraceof Tawana Brawley.) For Lee, power wasn't really a matter of social revolution. His raceman-cum-prizefighter stance was primarily dedicated toward achieving financial security, industry privilege and cultural autonomy. After all, his rise did take place during the Reagan administration, and Lee's advance was as much a phenom of that moment as Tina Brown's. And that should tell you what went wrongor at least, what didn't go revolutionary.
By putting Black Brooklyn on the big screen, Lee followed the footsteps of preceding borough ambassadors who won prominence without instituting change. (Since The City Sun folded in 1996, Black Brooklynand all of New Yorkhas been bereft of a comparable alternative.) It's now apparent that as early as 1986, She's Gotta Have It recorded the earliest outcroppings of Buppies, the new Black Upwardly-mobile Professionals who would turn Fort Greene into a middle-class enclave (more money, more problems) and initiate the white-yuppie franchise that is Park Slope (even more money, thus more power).
Hip-hop home pride was soon complicated by a mix of rage and resentment in such Lee films as Jungle Fever, Mo' Better Blues and Crooklyna title that compressed Lee's affectionate derision: New York toughness made solipsistic. Both for better and worse, Lee's films rapidly communicated personal New York experience through the latest hip-hop rhythm, slang and attitude.
Yet Lee was disengaging from those grass rootsmoving on upby the time he made Clockers, the first of his corrosive New York-set movies, in 1995. Lee had already retired his merchant's shingle (the memorabilia emporium Spike's Joint) and was eyeing a move to his current residency on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Success had changed the new kid from Brooklyn, but not for the better.
Perhaps Lee cannot be blamed for the scabrous Brooklyn image so flashily exhibited in bad-taste spectaculars like Clockers, He Got Game and She Hate Me. After the folkoric agit-prop of Do The Right Thing, where Bed-Stuy was shown as a hip-hop version of Gershwin's Catfish Row, Lee began to sketch Brooklyn as hell because, well, it was. Yet, while there's much truth in the racial tension and ghetto mentality he dramatized post-Do The Right Thing, it's not far from the shameless and rabble-rousing truth of New York Post editorials. Borough boosters may excuse Lee's gloomy vision as less dubious than the glamorized debauchery that the Detroit-raised Hughes Brothers fabricated about Los Angeles in Menace II Society and New York in Dead Presidents. But despite Lee's credible sense of New York's ills, his big-screen projection of Brooklyn still looks pretty awful.
In 1995, The City Sun gave Lee a front-page beatdown in response to his outrageous film Clockers. It seemed Lee had capitalized on his black independent filmmaker image by turning Clockers into Hollywood's latest tribute to the sanctity of the police and the treachery of the ghetto. After strugging to get a foothold in Hollywood, Lee's suddenly secure middle-class arrogance presented urban and black problems in simple terms of division, just like the unscrupulous Brooklyn-based race comedian Chris Rock. The City Sun was the perfect place for me as the critic to address this betrayal because it had become the beleaguered voice of New York's black population. Almost ten years before Clockers, The City Sun proudly printed a cover story on the release of She's Gotta Have It. That paper, as much a defender of Black Brooklyn identity as any, had earned chastising rights.
Clockers gave offense by portraying the police as the bearers of moralitya proposition that contradicts urban mythology and street sense at least as far back as the 1862 draft riots (which Lee's idol Martin Scorsese, producer of Clockers, falsified in Gangs of New York). Clockers' black folk, meanwhile, were shown to be the problem and depicted with very little insight. The white press loved this, seemingly because it appealed to their own limited sense of social conflict. Lee's boisterous panoply of ghetto chaos doesn't instruct them on urban racial divisons; instead, it is literally a horror show. Clockers' credit sequence is a Madison Ave. tour de force featuring blood-drenched corpses and succinct images of social miasma. In making the white cop Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel) Brooklyn's only man of heart, Lee pandered to dominant-race prejudices. He played the mainstream's game of equal-time sentimentality, in which racist cops are not the products of bigoted indoctrinationthey're just helplessly coarsened by their jungle/workplace.
The Black Brooklyn of Lee's cinematic imagination and recollection is sodden with the undeniable experience of deprivation, ethnic stress and inculcated venality. His affectionate derision is not the same as the righteous vulgarity formerly celebrated by Brooklyn's other ethnic commentators. Lee's new vision of the borough was forged and replicated at a price. (Like the Richard Price novel it was based on, Lee's film Clockers unfortunately derives its grim vision and tongue-clucking cynicism from the ethos of crime and hard-ass living propagated in hip-hop.) Both Crooklyn and Clockers demonstrate that Leea hip-hop kidequates shock with nostalgia, fondness with anger. These movies challenge the old guard Brooklyn patriotism of smothering mothers and tough-guy, half-shady fathers. Against those sentiments, Lee creates a cinematic home for distress, which may also be a Brooklyn truth.
But so far no Spike Lee movie shows the sustenance and joy of creativity that arises from Brooklyn's pot-hole pavementsno West Indian Day Parade montage, not a single close-up of a defiantly upreaching, shade-providing Brooklyn tree. No way up but his own.
Consider that Woody Allen's films (celebrating his own self-interested exodus from Brooklyn to Manhattan) were effusively equated by the New York Times with Balzac's Paris. So far, no one's equated Lee's movies with Langston Hughes or James Baldwin. They couldn't. Our contemporary kid from Brooklyn has capitalized on being a kid without hope by capitalizing on the dread of Brooklyn existence. This is the statement he apparently wrestled to makenot psychological complexity and clarity about black male ego evinced in a good rap record or Baldwin's short story Exodus. Lee's filmography reflects the change in the American dreamfrom optimism to nightmare.
Lee's immaturity shares the hip-hop adolescent's new sentimentalitythe comfortable, cynical certainty that a tree does not grow in Brooklyn anymore. If he's right, future kids from Brooklyn will be hard-luck kids indeed.