Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  It was the American Black Film Festival’s first year in New York, and it had a lot riding on this screening, perhaps even more than Mr. Lee had. One of the country’s most venerable auteur brands, Spike Lee is the most famous African-American filmmaker the United States has yet produced. He doesn’t need the American Black Film Festival to survive, but the festival does need him. No one gives a shit about the American Black Film Festival. For most people, Spike Lee is American black film, and where he goes, critics will follow.

  Da Sweet Blood of Jesus was financed largely through a controversial Kickstarter campaign that Lee, who is reportedly worth $40 million, undertook the previous summer. His bankroll padded by $1,418,910 from more than six thousand contributors, Lee made the film quickly and without fanfare. He needed a comeback. His previous feature, a 2013 remake of Park Chan-wook’s elegant and hyperviolent Korean grindhouse hit Oldboy, skipped festivals altogether, probably because its distributors didn’t want it to be thought of as a “festival circuit” film. Lee seemed unhappy with the effort; he dropped the “Joint” branding at the end of his credit for the first time since his earliest films.

  Except for the commercial success of his first foray into pure genre filmmaking, 2006’s heist-and-hostage thriller Inside Man, Lee has not had a real hit since 1998’s He Got Game, which debuted at number one at the box office and grossed $21 million in theaters. Since then, returns, both financial and aesthetic, have been diminishing. Is Spike Lee still a major American artist? Was he ever? The self-satisfaction and intellectual malaise of his most recent works are troubling enough to warrant some skepticism and soul-searching, even among his fans.

  In the ’80s, Lee found his niche speaking for black middle-class audiences in pictures that seemed, given the climate of the industry, more or less impossible before his arrival. No one was making movies about middle-class black hipsters (She’s Gotta Have It, 1986), Greek life at historically black colleges (School Daze, 1988), or the causes of Brooklyn riots (Do the Right Thing, 1989). Displaying a black-American-centric sensibility absent from the indie sector and the studio world, these films signaled the dawn of a career unlike any American film had ever seen. Along with the Nike commercials he was making a fortune on, these films gave Lee an importance few directors achieve in a lifetime, much less after three features.

  His next three films, Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), and Malcolm X (1992), the last of which I saw on the big screen as a nine-year-old with my entire family, elevated Lee to the first rank of American auteurs. These films are not just lasting contributions to the cinema of the black diaspora, canonical works in that realm, but movies of lasting importance to American society as a whole—the ugly mythology that hangs over American miscegenation had never, before or since, seen a motion picture treatment as penetrating as Jungle Fever, while before Malcolm X no black revolutionary life had ever been the subject of a sprawling, and sympathetic, Oscar-bait movie produced and released by a major studio. His studio work to that point dwarfed that of any other black director who had ever worked in the system; not one had ever been able to make something even remotely like School Daze or Malcolm X with house money; indeed, James Baldwin’s first draft of a screenplay languished, unmade, for more than twenty years before Spike wrested the opportunity to make the film from Norman Jewison.

  Yet he was far from done; Lee continued with the lucrative side gigs, and continued to make movies of interest and quality—Clockers (1995), Get on the Bus (1996), He Got Game (1998), Summer of Sam (1999), Bamboozled (2000), and 25th Hour (2002), while not masterpieces, are all fantastic movies—until just after the towers fell. 25th Hour, about a convicted drug dealer (Edward Norton) making the rounds on his last day of freedom before serving a seven-year sentence, is shot through with disorientation, fear, and uncertainty. It remains one of the most evocative American films to grapple with the larger urban mood in the wake of September 11 and is perhaps Lee’s best movie not named Do the Right Thing.

  It is hard to overstate the importance of Lee’s career in the annals of American cinema. Had he never made another film, like so many other black directors who showed early promise, I might still think of Lee as the greatest black American director; his career is still assuredly the most far-reaching, the most groundbreaking. His run from 1986 to 2002 is rightfully legendary, a career for which black and brown and many white people the world over, regardless of how silly his hats are or how outlandish his public commentary, still revere him.

  Which makes what has come after seem so incongruous, and so consistently disappointing. Tragic, really.

  Inside Man, the last financial success and first deeply impersonal work of Lee’s career, was well made but slight, with purely commercial aspirations. The troika of Miracle at St. Anna (2008), Red Hook Summer (2012), and Oldboy (2013) have few partisans; meandering, overlong, and unfocused, they’re all hampered by a sensibility that feels wrong for the material. Miracle, Lee’s picture about black GIs, has scenes of great emotional weight, but its structural coherence is torpedoed by a silly present-day framing device that makes the film a Russian doll of flashbacks. It’s also overburdened by self-righteous writing (“We served our country too,” one character says, in one of the many speeches about racial injustice), and, in what’s since become a bad habit for Lee, excessive musical cues. Lee’s bombastic style—already straining against his material in She Hate Me, with its animated sperm shooting out of Anthony Mackie’s cock—overwhelms Miracle with sentimentality and smugness.

  In the ’90s, Lee was too big for festivals. Not anymore. In 2012, Red Hook Summer premiered to mixed notices at Sundance, a place Lee had never felt the need to take his narrative films before. It was the first Lee shot digitally without a name cinematographer, and his crew consisted largely of recent alums from his NYU graduate filmmaking class, not the union vets he was used to. He came to Sundance with something to sell, but no one wanted to buy it: Red Hook Summer was released through a service deal with a small start-up distributor called Variance Films, to whom Lee paid an undisclosed sum to distribute the film. There were subway ads, but no televised trailers, no billboards. The movie quietly disappeared from view in a way none of Lee’s narrative films had since the dawn of his career.

  Da Sweet Blood of Jesus might be just another dud if it weren’t also a remake of Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess (1973), a legendary film in certain cinephile circles, especially black ones—the mere fact of a remake represents a bold claim by Lee. Rumored to be the lover of several white-boy starlets of the ’50s, such as Montgomery Clift and James Dean, Bill Gunn was for a short while a darling of the New York theater world before he began his varied career as a novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Like so many fascinating black actors from the era, Gunn was never blessed with roles that spoke to his talents. Nor was his motion picture work granted the distribution and cultural platform it deserved. After adapting Kristin Hunter’s novel The Landlord for Hal Ashby to direct (resulting in one of the earliest narrative films to document the gentrification of Brooklyn), Gunn made his directorial debut with Stop (1970), which made him one of the first four African Americans to direct studio films, alongside Melvin Van Peebles, Ossie Davis, and Gordon Parks. That of those four filmmakers’ work only Gunn’s is now unavailable is no accident of history. Beloved in neither gay nor black circles, Stop has all but disappeared. It was pulled from theaters following a brief run in 1970 and never released on home video. It last screened in its original 35mm format in 1990, following Gunn’s death, at a Whitney Museum retrospective of his work curated by his publisher and collaborator Ishmael Reed.

  In retrospect, Gunn’s next feature, Ganja & Hess, should have made him America’s first broadly celebrated black auteur. The first film directed by a black American to screen at Cannes, the 1973 picture was, like Stop, vigorously suppressed before it could make an impression. Its backers anticipated a Blacula (1972) redux, a cheap vampire movie with brown faces to satisfy the grindhouse crowd. What Gunn deli
vered instead was a brooding and mysterious film built on erotic lyricism and the parochial aspects of black American life. At Cannes it was greeted by a standing ovation, but its backers at home were less enthusiastic. They angrily seized the film from Gunn, and it was recut several times into bastardized versions that later crept into B-movie cinemas and home video under lurid titles such as Blood Couples and Double Possession. Stop was rereleased in the late ’90s at the behest of Ganja & Hess’s producer Chiz Schultz, who spearheaded a reconstruction of the director’s cut from materials found in the attic of the film’s editor. By then the legend of Ganja & Hess had spread, though its stylings and concerns were still too baroque, and too Negro, for the sort who put the cult in “cult film” to latch on to completely.

  Like Gunn himself, Ganja & Hess is an unclassifiable piece of work. Gunn’s symbol-heavy narrative creates a world in which the word “vampire” is never used, and the usual tropes of the genre are discarded (daytime really ain’t no thang for Negro bloodsuckers). Shot in hazy Super 16, the opening sequences glide from frozen tableaux of neoclassical European sculpture to extended, documentary-like scenes of a Pentecostal church, replete with speaking in tongues and lustily belted spirituals. It’s a vampire movie that feels at once like a vaguely remembered daydream concerning Negro church life, post–civil rights black class consciousness, and lucid erotic nightmares. While Ganja & Hess focuses on a wealthy black man, and so raises questions about the travails and wages of black assimilation, its interests are opaque and only incidentally political. Bill Gunn, unlike the most prominent black American directors of his era or afterward, had no desire to make everybody’s protest movie.

  In the film, Duane Jones is memorably assertive and taciturn as Dr. Hess Green, an anthropologist living in a gothic Hudson Valley mansion and studying a long-vanished (and fictional) African civilization known as Myrthia. Hess reads as self-made, a man with one foot in and one foot out of the larger black community. Though he attends a black church where his chauffeur, played by the musician Sam Waymon (better known as the little brother of Nina Simone), is a pastor, he also has a self-consciously aristocratic mien and a son, expensively educated in private schools, who is most comfortable speaking to his father in French.

  Trouble begins when the local archaeological museum assigns him a new research assistant named George Meda, played by Gunn himself in a memorably animated and feline manner: his high-pitched voice and unruly shock of Negro hair make him come across like a haunted, less-Jheri-curled Lionel Richie. After spending an odd evening together getting acquainted, Hess discovers Meda sitting in a tree behind his home with a noose in his hand, threatening to hang himself. Convincing the man not to kill himself on his property is paramount to Hess. “Mr. Meda,” he pleads, “I am the only black man who lives in this neighborhood, so if another black washes up ashore I can assure you the authorities will drag me in for questioning.”

  The drunken Meda comes down from the tree and, after indulging Meda’s bizarre, self-revelatory conversation for a while, Hess goes to bed, crisis seemingly averted. In the middle of the night, however, the formerly suicidal Meda turns homicidal, bursting into Hess’s room and stabbing him with a Myrthian dagger. Meda follows his attack with a bath, after which he shoots himself in the chest. Hess wakes up following the attack unharmed, with a dead research assistant in his bathroom and a new thirst for blood, which he immediately whets by licking Meda’s off his bathroom floor. At first he robs blood banks to feed his thirst, but soon his cravings lead him to the seedier parts of New York City—the Negro night spaces in which so many blaxploitation fantasies were lived out—to seduce victims for his fix.

  When Meda’s wife, Ganja (Marlene Clark), a nouveau riche arriviste, comes looking for her husband, she falls swiftly in love with Hess and his haut-bourgeois lifestyle. “I’m very valuable,” is how she introduces herself to Hess, and when he asks her straightforwardly why she came to his estate, she replies, “Money.” They begin a torrid relationship, and even after she discovers her husband’s body, hung frozen in Hess’s cellar, she marries Hess in front of a small crowd of mostly white people. (One of them is the writer William Gaddis, a friend of Gunn’s.) In the midst of one of their sexual encounters, Hess makes Ganja into a vampire. They soon find themselves luring young men to their home to extract their blood.

  Hess comes to rue his lifestyle. It’s a lonely and morally degrading slog, killing for blood, not to mention the tedium of being physically cold all the time. Despite what might promise to be the eternal companionship of Ganja, he finds himself seeking redemption in the arms of the Christian God. Standing shirtless in his basement, in the shadow of a cross that hangs from the ceiling, he drops dead. Gunn, whose film treats both the teaching of black Protestantism and the myth of vampirism literally, saw the irony of casting the salvation of Christ as freedom from immortality as opposed to the doctrinaire Christian reading. Ganja, however, lives on, and the last image of the film is of a new young man rising, undead, to join her.

  The association of the vampire with the aristocrat is as old as Dracula, and has always implied the extraction of vital life forces by the wealthy. Ganja & Hess adds another layer by making its well-heeled vampire a serial perpetrator of black-on-black crime. In Gunn’s film, when Hess exclusively attacks poorer Negroes, images from pastiched African (“Myrthian”) rituals flood the screen, accompanied by an ominous, horror-movie drone of synth strings; it’s as if Hess’s vampirism were a way of forming a connection to an atavistic past, one he could only study at a cold distance as long as he was fully human. It is as strange a portrait of the black bourgeoisie as has ever been offered on film, and for his pains the film brought Gunn obscurity and neglect.

  No such fate will likely visit Spike Lee. It took a combination of luck, talent, and unyielding ambition for him to become the face of whatever we speak of when we speak of black cinema. Lee is now etched permanently in the national memory as a rabble-rousing cultural touchstone. As he has grown older and richer, his relevance as a media persona hasn’t waned as much as his reach as a filmmaker. Lee’s increasingly tone-deaf and heavy-handed narrative filmmaking is antithetical to Gunn’s mix of lyrical, moving camerawork and biting cynicism. A telling contrast lies in their use of music: where Ganja & Hess unfolds largely without a score, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is plagued by desperate underscoring through-music—a never-ending soundtrack of neo-soul and neo-Tropicália, crowdsourced through Twitter, that strains to save the movie from its jerky pacing.

  Things are similarly awry in the design and aesthetic of the film: what’s veiled or suggestively opaque in Gunn’s film is dialed up and garish in Lee’s. Lee’s overly crisp, wide-depth-of-field digital sheen replaces the gauzy Super 16 of Gunn’s gloomier telling. A modern beach house on the shores of Martha’s Vineyard—the island where Mr. Lee and many other members of the Negro elite, including the forty-fourth president, “summer” in the wispy confines of Oak Bluffs—stands in for the Hudson Valley mansion. The home becomes something to scrutinize (how much those curtains must have cost!), and the lush colors of the décor, lighting, and costumes—deep browns, reds, blues, and yellows—provide too much visual information, running counter to the mystery of the story. In Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Hess is played by the Broadway actor Stephen Tyrone Williams, and Ganja by the British-Iraqi actress Zaraah Abrahams, ten or so years younger than in Ganja & Hess, and much more flamboyant. They get married wrapped in kente cloth, ride in private jets, and put on designer clothes even to go to the bathroom. Where Hess in the original was ecumenical in his tastes, Lee’s version makes him out to be a high-class pan-Africanist only interested in collecting African art. Even the recondite “Myrthia” is transformed into the real—and therefore implausible—Ashanti.

  What Lee’s remake handles most clumsily is class. It is as if Lee’s own significant wealth has blinded him to its essential meaning. Lee’s need to underline everything with a thick political marker gets in the way of the point he appears to
be making. In the original, Hess’s wealth was shrouded in mystery; in the new version, it turns out that his family owned “the first black firm on Wall Street.” On his large estate, which Hess claims to measure “about forty acres,” he holds forth about the ills of contemporary society: “We do live in a blood society. The United States is the most violent country in the world.” But violence appears not to be the issue so much as “addiction”—as vague an idea as Lee has ever put on screen. “Change is impossible because we’re addicted to our society,” one white woman tells Hess at a party, “especially the upper middle class, because they’ve taken the damn thing in such large doses.” “What decides whether one is a criminal or not is which side of the law your fix is on,” says another. Lee has always been heavy-handed, but in the past he tempered his didacticism by threading through ambiguities and political impasses that made lessons hard to extract. It’s hard to view Da Sweet Blood of Jesus and remember the deeply felt paradoxes that made his best work so watchable.

  Lee’s sloppy approach to class issues ends up straining the plausibility of his film. In Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, as in Gunn’s Ganja & Hess, Hess seduces and kills ghetto women, but here all of them are light skinned and well dressed. The scenes of seduction and murder reach such queasy unreality that it’s clear Lee sees these events as simply fodder for an exploitation flick he can commit to only halfheartedly. Hess meets one victim, a crisply enunciating mother—she unspools dialogue like “You ask mad questions! Dang!” without a shard of credibility—minding her own business on a park bench outside the projects with a baby in her arms. Inexplicably, he convinces her with little difficulty to go upstairs with him so he can bleed her. It’s hard to believe a child-rearing, light-skinned, stately-looking black woman would be sitting on that park bench in the first place, let alone allow a total stranger into her home to fuck in the presence of her child. Nor does it seem plausible that Lee’s Hess, fed with silver spoons since childhood, would know the first thing about the Fort Greene projects where he scores his victims.