City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination

He Cuts Heads: Spike Lee and the New York Experience

137 He Cuts Heads spike lee and the new york experience david sterritt You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray, led amok. You’ve been bamboozled. —Malcolm X The title of the movie that put Spike Lee on the cinematic map in , Joe’s BedStuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, contains two clues to the shape of Lee’s career. For one, Lee cuts heads—not in the barbering sense but in the sense of working to expose and excise the received ideas, regressive fantasies, and unexamined prejudices we carry around within our minds. For the other, the only African American filmmaker to sustain a major career in modern cinema is a New York City filmmaker to his bones. After his sophomore year at a southern college he returned to Brooklyn without a summer job. “I had gotten a Super  camera,” he recalled later, “so I spent the whole summer just going around New York City and filming stuff. That was really when I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker.” After making this decision, he said, “I wanted to attempt to capture the richness of African American culture that I can see, just standing on the corner, or looking out my window every day” (Lindo ). Those corners and windows were in New York when Lee was growing up. They were still in that city when he went to graduate school at New York University and shot his first theatrical feature, She’s Gotta Have It, on Brooklyn locations in . He has traveled widely for several of his “joints,” but his heart clearly lies in the city where he came of age and will probably reside forever. The filmmaker who never slows down—few can match his prodigious output of features , documentaries, commercials, and more—feels nowhere more comfortable than in the city that never sleeps. Chap-09.qxd 1/12/07 12:18 PM Page 137 Spike Starts Out Shelton Jackson Lee, nicknamed Spike as an infant, was born far from that city— in Atlanta, Georgia, on March , , to Jacquelyn Lee, a schoolteacher, and Bill Lee, a musician. Lee’s father moved the family to the “jazz Mecca” of Chicago, then joined a migration of jazz musicians to New York in the late fifties. Settling in Brooklyn, the household lived first in Crown Heights, then in Cobble Hill— where the Lees were the first African Americans to arrive—and then in Fort Greene, a neighborhood seen by many outsiders as disreputable. Lee graduated in  from Brooklyn’s own John Dewey High School, then returned to Atlanta after being accepted by Morehouse College, which his grandfather and father (a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr. there) had attended. Tuition money came from his grandmother, a graduate of Spelman College, the all-female equivalent to Morehouse’s all-male campus. Lee’s mother also went to Spelman, and it was in the year of her death () that he started experimenting with film and shot Last Hustle in Brooklyn, his debut short. He graduated from Morehouse in  with a degree in mass communication, and that autumn he headed for the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, where he spent three years earning an MFA in film production. He then took an internship at Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles, but decided not to stay there because he didn’t know how to drive, he “didn’t have the resources [there] to make films,” and he simply “wanted to come home” (Lee ). Lee had a mixed experience at NYU, where teachers questioned his grasp of “film grammar,” and he sensed a tacit racial bias in their criticisms. “Any time a black person is in a white environment,” he has said, “and they are not always happy—smiling, eating cheese [—] then [others] say he’s a militant or has an attitude ” (Lee –). His first-year film, The Answer (), did nothing to reverse that impression. Discussing it with Nelson George, an African American critic, Lee described it as the story of “a black screenwriter hired to direct a fifty-milliondollar remake of Birth of a Nation. We included clips from Birth of a Nation. They didn’t like that thing at all. How dare I denigrate the father of cinema, D. W. Griffith?” George observed that The Answer indicts Birth as a “racist” work, and Lee replied, “Yeah. No shit, Sherlock.” George suggested that his film “offended” people, and Lee responded, “Yeah. I didn...