The Spike Lee Reader (review)

Few American film directors can make claims to working primarily as an auteur, that is, as the author, artist, and director of a film, but this term applies to Spike Lee's career in film and the cinema. In his early career, Lee authored, directed, and acted in approximately one film every one-to-two years since his directorial debut She's Gotta Have It in 1986. A graduate of New York University film school, the industry and moviegoers know Lee for his provocative narratives about African American culture and life. A few critical anthologies exist on the director's work, and Lee has co-authored, with Village Voice writer Lisa Jones, production-oriented books published simultaneously with his earlier films. However, as Lee's film repertoire grows, there remains much to say about the meanings and impact of his body of work. Paula Massood's The Spike Lee Reader accomplishes this task.

The Spike Lee Reader includes new and several well-known pieces previously published about Lee's work. The previously published pieces work seamlessly with the newer additions. These pieces provide a foundation to remind readers of the discourse established in response to the first decade of his career concerning representations of gender, sexuality, and class. The remainder of the edited collection includes analyses of Lee's more recent films that are lesser examined in critical scholarship. Essays on Lee's documentary work Four Little Girls (1997) and lesser acknowledged films such as the basketball film He Got Game (1998), the half-thriller half-comedy Summer of Sam (1999), the minstrel parody Bamboozled (2000), and the refreshingly complex bank heist adventure Inside Man (2006), for example, present interdisciplinary methods for looking at Lee's cinematic and narrative accomplishments. Authors in this anthology draw from music, performance, television, material culture, and literature to address a broad range of issues concerning Lee's work, including film as an aspect of historical discourse, racial performance, and audience reception. In her overall assessment of Lee's work over the past three decades, Massood situates Spike Lee as a director who creates "textual systems employing … allusion, and homage [which] explore[s] the shared national trauma of racism and its continuing social, economic, and political affects" (xxiii). It is this characterization of Lee's work as being relevant in terms of representational politics and race relations that has come to define the canon of his work for audiences and critics.

The collection begins with feminist interpretations of films She's Gotta Have It, School Daze (1988), and Do The Right Thing (1989), by cultural critics bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, and Wahneema Lubiano, respectively. The latter writings gave birth to some of the most quoted and critical ideas about Lee's work. hooks' presents the persuasive argument that She's Gotta Have It does not constitute a feminist narrative because the lead protagonist does not own her sexuality. Wallace exposes Lee's pattern to use Black female humiliation as plot resolution. Lubiano includes a keen observation concerning Lee's rigid and essentialist Black cultural politics in Do The Right Thing and School Daze. Taken together, hooks, Wallace, and Lubiano remind readers of the representative fallout from Lee's quest to rebuild the image of African American life on screen through a masculinist and neo-nationalist lens. Anna Everett in "Spike, Don't Mess Malcolm Up," recognizes this problem in the film Malcolm X (1992), where she notes that the various stages of X's life are depicted with visual complexity and nuance in the film, while Black women remain couched within a troubling discourse of inadequacy.

Comparatively, Craig S. Watkins' "Reel Men," which focuses on Lee's Get On the Bus, illustrates the director's ability to attend to the diversity of gender representation when Lee is representing African American men. Get On the Bus, which is a fictional depiction of a group of diverse Black men who decide to attend the historic Million Man March, was a box office failure, but its mixture of documentary style filmmaking and stylized...