Spike Lee

Confronted with Too Much

Confronted with Too Much Spike Lee is a filmmaker of excess. Excess characterizes each of his films—through unconventional shots, extreme characters, improbable scenes, and many other ways. Lee’s films employ these types of excess to intervene in critical issues that trouble the contemporary world—the question of the subject’s singularity, the role that fantasy plays in structuring our reality, the political impact of passion, the power of paranoia in shaping social relations, the damage that the insistence on community inflicts, the problem of transcendence, and the struggles of the spectator. Above all, Lee is known for being a political filmmaker, and I contend that the concept of excess holds the key to understanding the politics of his films. The different sections of the book will explore how excess has enabled Lee to create a varied corpus of films that treat a broad spectrum of fundamental social and political problems. Within the study of film, excess has a precise definition. It is what goes beyond the narrative requirements of a film and thereby draws the spectator’s attention to form. But excess is also operative throughout the social order, as many thinkers have recognized. It disrupts the smooth functioning of society and makes evident the failure of all elements to fit together. The social order suffers from the disturbance of excess because it never forms a consistent and coherent whole. In this sense, excess is Sigmund Freud’s unconscious, Karl Marx’s class struggle, Simone de Beauvoir’s sexual difference, Frantz Fanon’s violence, and many related theoretical formulations of the incompleteness of society. The exploration of excess in Spike Lee’s films shows his position among these thinkers and reveals the breadth of his filmic contribution not only to the history of cinema but also to the most pressing questions of our time. Lee’s films show that, as subjects, we are defined by what exceeds our social identity, and they also make evident that what exceeds our typical frame of reference is identical to the passion that animates us. This is the fundamental contention of psychoanalysis and what separates it from recent theorizing about the problem of affect within communal life. Psychoanalytic thought defines the subject as a singular excess irreducible to any individual identity or social group. Our passion or mode of enjoyment is excessive in relation to the social structure and even to our sense of who we are. In short, every passion is an excessive passion. It is not simply an affect that we have—one among many—but rather what constitutes us as subjects. A subject doesn’t simply occupy an individual or group identity but relates to this identity through a passionate response (most often either embrace or rejection, but sometimes indifference). Passion exists in the distance that separates subjects from the identities that they inhabit. The social order can use this passion to mobilize subjects, and in this process, passion becomes a source of homogeneity rather than singularity. When passion functions as a source of social identification, it homogenizes subjects by focusing each subject on the same object. But this mobilization of passion is always a fraught enterprise. Passion necessarily exceeds the limits that the social order would place on it, which often leads it to disrupt the social order employing it. Passion doesn’t fit within the narratives that we use to understand ourselves and our actions, and yet it is, in the last instance, determinative. We act, as Lee reveals, on the basis of this passion. This is why Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), the heroine of Lee’s first feature, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), cannot abandon her passion to have multiple 2 | Spike Lee sexual partners despite her recognition of the difficulties that this excess creates. Nola Darling’s passion separates her from the possibility of a monogamous relationship, just as passion in other Lee films estranges characters from their community. When critics like Douglas Kellner or Sharon Willis note Lee’s inability to depict successful communities, they miss the political possibilities of his anticommunitarian focus on excess. By isolating our various forms of disturbing passion, Lee forces spectators to confront their unconscious investment in what they consciously declaim—violence, paranoia, racism, sexism, oppression, and so on. As a result, the films move spectators from their usual viewing positions. It is impossible to watch a Spike Lee film in the way that one...