Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  After the ABFF screening, the baffled audience stuttered their questions. “What message are we supposed to take from this film, Spike? And my second . . .” one audience member said before he was cut off by the director, who exclaimed, “I don’t talk about the meaning of my films anymore, I haven’t for fifteen years, I stopped doing that.” Lee, with his trademark intimidation, stifled debate over his intentions before it even began. The director was willing, just barely, in the most canned responses, to allude to the film “being about addiction” in an ever more addiction-prone world. Perhaps these banalities hid a deeper problem—that the movie was an allegory of Lee’s own addiction to high society, his need to preserve himself above the black filmmakers whose work he wouldn’t abide. Or, perhaps, an allegory for the New York he helped turn into a luxury product he neither desires nor understands.

  The so-called New Black Cinema of the early ’90s didn’t yield many lasting directorial careers, save those of Lee and John Singleton. Where have you gone, Julie Dash? Leslie Harris? Matty Rich? Darnell Martin? These young black filmmakers made celebrated debuts in the late Bush or early Clinton years only to, for the most part, disappear.

  White studio execs were largely to blame. But black audiences were partly responsible, too; they didn’t show up for the best of these films. Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990), a masterpiece on par with his revelatory student film Killer of Sheep (1978), found audiences that were overwhelmingly small and white. Burnett, considered by many observers to be the greatest American black filmmaker, has had only one widely distributed feature since 1994’s The Glass Shield. A flawed but potent movie set in the immediate aftermath of the LA riots, it was taken away from him and recut at the behest of Harvey Weinstein, the head of Miramax Films at the time, likely to its detriment.

  Lee’s celebrity, which grew exponentially while he shucked and jived with Michael Jordan during his Mars Blackmon years, shielded him from such indignities. For much of his career in the studio system, Lee received final cut, giving him the authority to make his films as he wished. In an America that seems to prefer a single black arbiter of Negro feelings and beliefs, his career and public persona have eclipsed everyone else’s. His persona has also, somewhat dispiritingly, eclipsed his own filmmaking.

  In many ways, this state of affairs seems to suit Lee just fine. He, too, seems to prefer a single black arbiter. More than a few young filmmakers Lee has mentored at NYU, black and white, have offered casual anecdotes of his evasiveness and defensiveness when dealing with potential heirs. One ex-student of Lee’s once bemoaned at a party how his professor would read the scripts of students who were the sons of white billionaires but not of those like him, who’d grown up on the streets of black Bed-Stuy (unless they were gay and female, a baffling wrinkle). “A sucker move,” the student said. Another protégé, a documentary filmmaker, went so far as to say that his mentor was happy to help cinematographers, actors, and documentarians who were black, but male narrative directors were another story: he liked being the only iconic American film director among black males and wished, in his heart of hearts, to stay that way.

  The morning after the premiere, I took the subway from my apartment in the Bronx—where I’d settled since deciding Bed-Stuy had become too expensive—to the 40 Acres and a Mule offices in Fort Greene to interview Lee. A neighborhood long lost to most of the middle class through gentrification, Fort Greene is still home to poor folks who reside in the Whitman and Ingersoll Projects just north of Fort Greene Park, where Lee shot much of She’s Gotta Have It, and near where his father, a jazz musician, has lived since 1969.

  The original home of 40 Acres and a Mule, which relocated five years ago to 75 South Elliott Place, was in a former firehouse on the southwest corner of Fort Greene Park. In my early years in the city, as I would pass it while riding a bus down DeKalb Avenue, its imposing African-themed flag billowing above the street always seemed to me a beacon of hope, the shining star of black filmic achievement. The flag, which had been relocated, too, didn’t hold quite the same power in front of 75 South Elliott.

  Lee had caused a stir the previous February during a Black History Month–themed appearance at nearby Pratt Institute, where he was asked to address “the other side” of the gentrification debate. In blue Nikes and a hoodie emblazoned with the slogan “DEFEND BROOKLYN,” he said: “Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the South Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed-Stuy, in Crown Heights, for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn’t picked up every motherfuckin’ day when I was living in 165 Washington Park. . . . What about the people who are renting? They can’t afford it anymore! You can’t afford it. People want to live in Fort Greene. People want to live in Clinton Hill. The Lower East Side, they move to Williamsburg, they can’t even afford fuckin’, motherfuckin’ Williamsburg now, because of motherfuckin’ hipsters. What do they call Bushwick now? What’s the word?”

  “East Williamsburg,” someone called from the audience.

  I was ushered into Lee’s second-floor rehearsal space, which was serving as a staging area for journalists. I sat at a small table in the middle of a building-length room with wood flooring, its walls stocked with memorabilia: the pizza box Lee carries in and out of Sal’s Famous in Do the Right Thing, a gargantuan one-sheet from the Italian release of Scorsese’s Mean Streets, signed by Lee’s fellow NYU alum. The other journalists and I made small talk, scanned e-mail on our phones. I checked the early reviews. My pallid interlopers from the night before had mostly given it a pass. Richard Brody praised it on his Front Row blog for The New Yorker, saying, “Spike Lee has entered his Mannerist period, which, in movie terms, can be defined as making a film on the basis of images rather than experience.” No kidding. Scott Foundas from Variety had clearly found the film wanting, but he didn’t bring the knives out. It was too loaded for anyone outside the tribe to pour salt on the wound of a filmmaker who had so lost his way.

  When I arrived on the third floor, it was mostly silent except for Lee yelling at one of his staffers for leaving a stack of boxes unattended in a hallway. He spied me quickly, out of the corner of his eye, and immediately ceased his theatrics—the media was watching. I followed him into the editing room, its blue walls covered, floor to ceiling, with paintings and images of Michael Jackson. It was the single creepiest room I entered in 2014. I sat on a leather couch and produced my laptop, making small talk as I prepared to record the conversation. Mr. Lee’s legs were crossed, one orange-Nike-bearing foot perched not far from my computer. “What you got for me?” he asked.

  Although he spoke lovingly of Gunn, he spent the better part of the next thirty minutes bobbing and weaving around my questions like Floyd Mayweather. He wouldn’t address whether there was latent meaning in Hess’s newfound class status and youth, or in his preference for mulatto victims (“I’m just trying to cast the best people, I wasn’t trying to find the most light-skinneded actresses I could!”). He cared not to elaborate on how his methods have changed or evolved as he’s grown older; whether he enjoys the newfound freedom of not having financiers to answer to; if, indeed, he has any more original stories he’s dying to tell, themes he’s hankering to explore. He seemed, in many ways, resigned.

  It is odd to see Spike Lee, a filmmaker who came to prominence as someone with a bold and uncompromising voice, become, in his mid-fifties, something resembling a hack: a Jay-Z-and-Beyoncé-era rich black navel gazer. Here is an intelligent and remarkably accomplished man who seems to have little or nothing left to say in his films, and has abdicated control of their meaning. I was more than a little sad.

  After we mercifully concluded, he grew somewhat more magnanimous, for a second. He stood as I was putting away my computer. “Thanks for coming all this way,” he said.

  “I used to live down the street in Bed-Stuy until recently,” I replied. “Got rent-sabotaged out just last month.” He asked where I was currently living, and I told him the northern Bronx. Suddenly the wall of defensiveness he�
��d erected as soon as he stopped yelling at his employee fell away. His face softened. I watched him utter a brief but full-throated laugh. I couldn’t tell if it was schadenfreude or a jadedness that he normally kept to himself.

  “Just give it some time,” he said. “Pretty soon, you won’t be able to afford to live there either.”

  The final image of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq—an adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata that was released eight months after Da Sweet Blood of Jesus and named the best film of 2015 by venerated critics such as Amy Nicholson (formerly of LA Weekly) and The New Yorker’s Richard Brody—is a shot of the city of Chicago’s flag bearing the words “WAKE UP.” It’s unclear, though, what exactly we’re supposed to wake up from: our culture’s complacency concerning inner-city gun violence, or the illusion that such violence, often committed by African Americans against other African Americans, isn’t deeply connected to America’s racist legacy. Unfortunately, what one becomes most conscious of is the largely evasive way Lee portrays this ecosystem of denial and neglect. At a historical moment that requires more hard truths than soothing delusions, Chi-Raq and its author seem like preening tourists who—to paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron’s legendary verse about the NAACP director Roy Wilkins—stroll through black Chicago in a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit they’ve been saving for just the proper occasion.

  Chi-Raq is clearly meant to be fantasy, depicting a sex strike by the women of the South Side of Chicago that successfully ends a scourge of gun violence in the Second City and inspires corporations to rain down full employment on ghettos everywhere. But this is a dangerous fantasy, and a shameful one, too: it refuses to acknowledge the real stakes of its narrative, cheapening the cost of black sovereignty and dignity in the face of this country’s many failings. Unlike Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, which, in its postintermission flashback, makes clear that the disregard for black female life and property is at the root of its revisionist Reconstruction narrative, Chi-Raq withholds the violence against black female bodies that is at the heart of its outrage. Lacking the seriousness of intent to contain such verisimilitude, Lee’s film is too busy dreaming of a world that never was, one that simply makes a mockery of our own.

  Teyonah Parris, of Dear White People, plays Lysistrata as a gang leader’s mistreated girlfriend who masterminds the strike after holing up with a stern middle-aged neighbor played by Angela Bassett, a strident black intellectual with no TV, a wall full of books, and—like the movie as a whole—sanctimony to burn. Shortly after she becomes homeless and is almost murdered by gang members seeking to assassinate her boyfriend—the gang leader Chi-Raq, played by Nick Cannon—Parris’s Lysistrata realizes, in the movie’s blundering narrative logic, that she and her sisters can use their sexuality to change the world. Bassett’s character hips Lysistrata to Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian villager who in 2003 led a sex strike to bring attention to the violence that threatened her country. Of course, by the time Gbowee accepted the Nobel Prize, she owned up to the fact that the sex strike wasn’t effective politics, but simply a publicity stunt in support of effective politics. Lee refuses his characters the intelligence to make the distinction. Instead, Chi-Raq takes the act of a sex strike seriously as a political one, without ever examining the ramifications.

  While it’s clearly not a work of realism, Chi-Raq is nonetheless very firmly, from its first frame to its last, situated in the political and material present. Although Lee called the new film “heightened reality” on Charlie Rose in 2015, he was quick to disavow any serious consideration of his own film’s ideas, saying, “The whole sex strike thing is really a metaphor; in no way, shape, or form are we suggesting the way to stop gun violence in Chicago is to have a sex strike.” This isn’t fair play. Chi-Raq remains unsure of whether it wants to be a polemic or not, and remains coy about what more “realistic” politics its sex strike is intended to symbolize or stand in for. It suggests, very loudly, that it has something important to say, using Lee’s familiar Brechtian bag of tricks to do so. Just what that something is remains obscure to most observers, even its most ardent supporters. I simply did not encounter the “comprehensive view of the society-wide reforms surrounding guns and gun violence on which constructive local changes would depend” that Richard Brody claims to have found in the film. They aren’t there, nor should they be.

  Lee may have a special burden placed on him among many African Americans to get it right, to be a voice of reason in an American motion-picture world that has often marginalized the talents of African-American film artists and the reach of their films, but an equally troubling byproduct has come to the fore with his most recent releases, that the occasion of each new “joint” becomes a conduit for white critics to exercise their complete ignorance of African-American communities, and the people and psychologies within them, when trying to analyze Lee’s mid-to-late career follies. All that seemingly thoughtful Afrocentrism, all those beautiful black bodies gyrating through space in immaculately coiffed hair and costumes that seem like they may have come from a sequel to the Sun Ra freakout Space Is the Place, got the better of the pallid, workaday film reviewers. How cool it all is, this hell we’re living in.

  Working with a real budget and She Hate Me’s DP, Matthew Libatique, for the first time since 2006’s Inside Man, Lee gives Chi-Raq a seductive look and feel; from its opening overture of Nick Cannon rapping (“I don’t live in Chicago, I live in Chi-Raq”), the lyrics emblazoned on the screen before crescendoing over an American flag made up entirely from guns, one gets the sense the film is meant more for arousal than reflection. The movie isn’t in control of its tone, exposition, or much else, however, beyond its ability to titillate. The main characters have just been immersed in a bloody shootout at a South Side nightclub, one in which a member of Chi-Raq’s gang was killed, but both seem nonplussed or otherwise distracted from the desire for kinkily filmed bump and grind once they get home. The prurient, candy-colored tracking shots that follow Ms. Parris’s behind, as she sashays down graffiti-covered and tree-lined streets, are equally tone-deaf and cheaply salacious.

  Although the film tells us from the top that “This is a State of Emergency,” Mr. Lee has picked a false “emergency” to hip us to. As Jason Harrington pointed out recently while responding to the film in The New York Times, gangs are no longer the cause of much gun violence in the Chicago neighborhoods where Chi-Raq was shot. Personal beefs—often over the smallest of things, which loom larger when society has cast you into degradation and poverty—rule the day among the underemployed and greatly marginalized. Even as a purely narrative invention, the rivalry between the gangs at the film’s heart is drawn in the thinnest of ways; never does the movie seek to explain why the men, young and middle-aged, are shooting at one another. The idea of adapting Lysistrata to this environment proves to be a strained one from the conceptual stage alone.

  This confusion shouldn’t surprise us. Since around the time the Twin Towers fell, the universe of Spike Lee’s narrative movies has grown curious, one that requires the extended and uncomfortable suspension of disbelief. As his films have become increasingly untethered from reality, or an aesthetically satisfying or intellectually edifying departure from it, so have his opinions about how to better it. See, for example, his recent comments about campus rape: “What’s happening on college campuses today, you know, what happened at the University of Missouri where the football players got together and said unless the president resigned they weren’t going to play, I think that a sex strike could really work on college campuses where there’s an abundance of sexual harassment and date rape,” Lee told Stephen Colbert in the run-up to the film’s release, dressed head to toe in the black, green, and red Chi-Raq swag he’s been peddling on Twitter. One gets the sense that this “State of Emergency” is as much a call to help out Lee’s flailing box-office returns or merchandise sell-off as it is to end the violence.

  One misses the Spike Lee who once peddled Malcolm X hats and Nikes—the director has alwa
ys been a savvy self-marketer. It’s no small irony, then, that the costumes Lysistrata’s militant sex strikers wear—black-and-gray tankinis, boots, and pants, with dark berets—recall the uniforms of the Black Panther Party, which advocated for greater armament in the black community, if not outright insurrection against its oppressors.

  Chi-Raq’s ideas about what in fact should be done about gun violence remain opaque throughout. Lee punctuates his Chicago gangland sex comedy with overlong scenes of sanctimonious direct address from Samuel L. Jackson’s snappily dressed Dolmedes, the film’s Greek chorus (and a subtle nod to Rudy Ray Moore’s blaxploitation character Dolemite). His haphazard commentary on life in a dangerous ghetto, where neither your neighbors nor the police are to be trusted, is like that of every other underrealized character in Lee’s dangerous fable, essentially a mouthpiece for the director. Yet Jackson doesn’t offer any perspective that, as a Greek chorus should, allows the tale to resonate from the merely provincial to the universal, nor does it clarify the film’s themes—other than suggesting that living without sex, or amid gun violence, is hard.

  The structuring absences that allow this to pass are gaps you could drive a Buick through. Where are the scenes of organizing prostitutes, housewives, baby mommas? We get a quick scene of negotiation between female members of the rival gangs, the purple-hued Spartans and orange-tinted Trojans, that begins with a call for “peace and hair grease.” A club of “respectable” black ladies, led by Bassett, does eventually take part in the strike too, but Lee never shows us how that affects the rhythm of daily life or the tenor of their relationships. All we get are a couple of intercut scenes of Parris and her Trojan counterpart jilting their gang-member boyfriends. What of the women who would surely be beaten and brutalized due to such a campaign? Would solidarity hold? Would the violence really stop? Would women all over the world, in places with no apparent gun violence such as Copenhagen and Tokyo, also join the sex strike?