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HE’S GOTTA HAVE IT ALL: THE COMMERCIAL IMPULSE IN THE 21ST-CENTURY SPIKE LEE JOINT by Jesse Williams, Jr. A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Faculty of the Graduate School at Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University 2013 Dissertation Committee Dr. Laura Dubek, Chair Dr. Will Brantley Dr. Robert Holtzclaw For Roger Ebert, who “saw it all.” ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I extend my heartfelt gratitude to my parents for not raising a quitter. As a result, entering the academic profession will ensure that I will not quit digging in their pockets. Likewise, thank you to the College of Graduate Studies for the Provost’s Writing Fellowship and the Department of English for the Peck Award: the stipends were much appreciated. Thank you to Dr. Philip Phillips for his graduate seminar, in which this project originated, and for his enthusiasm and encouragement. Finally, to my dissertation committee, especially the chair: I salute you. Your patience knows no bounds. iii ABSTRACT The 2008 publication of Paula J. Massood’s The Spike Lee Reader by Temple University Press legitimized Spike Lee as a focus for academic study. A writer, director, and actor, Lee produced the first of his twenty-eight feature films, She’s Gotta Have It, in 1986, and in the last twenty-seven years, countless interviews, movie reviews, children’s books, and unauthorized biographies about the filmmaker have entered the marketplace. Although there are several book-length studies on the Spike Lee Joint, Massood’s is the first to contextualize the filmmaker’s entire oeuvre within the framework of cinema studies. My study builds on Massood’s work by naming the documentary, teaching, and American strains in the Spike Lee joint “impulses,” putting them in tension with what I am calling the Spike Lee persona1, and arguing that a fourth impulse emerges in the 21st- century Spike Lee Joints—the commercial impulse. In Part I, Chapters 1 through 4, I outline four stages of Lee’s career: She’s Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze to Malcolm X (1988—1992), Crooklyn to He Got Game (1994—1998), and Summer of Sam to Miracle at St. Anna (1999—2008). I argue that the critical reception of his films has largely been determined by personal responses to the often in-your-face politics of the Spike Lee persona as well as to the ubiquity of that persona in American popular culture. I criticize the critical misidentification and mischaracterization of Lee—based on its failure to discern the Spike Lee persona as such and to separate that persona from the Spike Lee joint—and argue that it results in the marginalization of his films. In Part II, Chapters 5 through 8, I focus my attention on four of Lee’s 21st-century joints: Summer iv of Sam, 25th Hour, Inside Man, and Miracle at St. Anna. I argue that beginning in Summer of Sam, the influence of the documentary and teaching impulses remains the same while the American impulse intensifies. The intensifying American impulse then results in the emergence of the commercial impulse manifest as an intense critical focus on sexuality, class, and capitalism. Ultimately, I am calling for more nuanced readings of all the Spike Lee joints, thereby establishing Lee not simply as the most accomplished African American filmmaker to date, but as one of the most preeminent American filmmakers. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: WHAT’S THE “IT” EVERYBODY’S GOTTA HAVE?................ vii PART I: WILL THE REAL SPIKE LEE PLEASE STAND UP?............................... 1 CHAPTER 1: DOIN’ THE SPIKE THING: 1986-1987………………………… 1 CHAPTER 2: THEY HATE HIM: 1988 – 1992……………………………….. 30 CHAPTER 3: HE HAD GAME: 1994 – 1998…………………………………. 54 CHAPTER 4: 21st-CENTURY INSIDE MAN: 1999 – 2008.…………………. 78 PART II: HE GOTS TA’ GET PAID………………………………………………. 100 CHAPTER 5: “ONCE YOU’RE DEVIATED, YOU CAN’T GO BACK”: SUBVERTING SEXUALITY IN SUMMER OF SAM.………………………. 100 CHAPTER 6: “IT’S ALL ABOUT TOMORROW”: 25th HOUR, A MEDITATION ON MOVING ON IN A POST-9/11 WORLD.…………….. 133 CHAPTER 7: “THINGS AIN’T ALL THEY APPEAR TO BE”: INSIDE MAN’S RENGAGING POST-9/11 NEW YORK BY REVISING THE BANK HEIST GENRE……………………………………………………………………….. 189 CHAPTER 8: “I’M HERE FOR MY CHILDREN AND FUTURE GRANDCHILDREN”: MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA, A LEGACY OF PROGRESS…………………………………………………………………… 217 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………. 243 vi Introduction: What’s the “It” Everybody’s Gotta Have? Upon the release of the first-ever Spike Lee Joint, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), numerous articles profiling the young director played on the title of the movie. An October 1986 Associated Press item was titled “Spike Lee’s Gotta Have Honest, Independent Film”; a New York Times article called “Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It” appeared in August of 1987; a May 1988 Black Enterprise report on the box-office performance of the second Spike Lee Joint, School Daze (1988), proclaimed “‘School Daze’ Didn’t Have It”; and Time magazine published an article entitled “He’s Got to Have It His Way” in July 1989. She’s Gotta Have It centers on a young, professional, independent, and sexually-liberated woman and her unapologetic juggling of three lovers, each of whom she informs about the others while refusing to commit to any of them. The “it,” then, in She’s Gotta Have It is sex; however, each of the aforementioned items only intimates what the “it” is according to Spike Lee. The most informative source is not even among them; this distinction belongs to Lee himself, whose journal, Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It: Inside Guerilla Filmmaking—a meticulous chronicle of his She’s Gotta Have It experience from script to production to screen—“became a best-selling handbook on independent filmmaking” (Aftab 28).2 An examination of the early career of Spike Lee, however, yields the it he’s gotta have. Arising out of his displeasure with the African American image projected by Hollywood, it refers to an increase of cinematic portrayals of black identity and the various ways of black folk. In order to achieve such diversity, Lee himself felt as though African Americans would have to attain the power to tell their own stories; therefore, vii another it he’s gotta have is a filmmaking career. Unfortunately for the young director, Hollywood in the mid-1980s was only interested in black-themed stories that did not challenge racial/racist stereotypes of blackness and the black experience. Lee devised a two-pronged response to circumvent the Hollywood establishment. First, he developed an aesthetic that merges his perception of the diversity of African American experience with cinematic high art in order to gain a foothold with a cinephilic audience. She’s Gotta Have It is the result. Second, to ensure that his debut feature would reach a mass audience, Lee created a persona which chastised Hollywood’s entrusting and empowering of nonblacks to tell African American stories. This persona, then, would become another it he’s gotta have. The critical and commercial success of the three its in shepherding She’s Gotta Have It to commercial success begat yet another it for the young filmmaker: power. Coming in the form of creative freedom, this power enabled Lee to further engage the first two its, resulting in his building a catalog of films, each of which investigates varied aspects of the black experience. In “We’ve Gotta Have It,” the introduction to her edited collection The Spike Lee Reader (2008), Paula J. Massood tells us in her subtitle what it is. To her, it is “Spike Lee, African American Film, and Cinema Studies.” By naming Spike Lee and it we’ve gotta have, Massood actually claims that we need his career, without which, one could argue, African American film would not exist. At least not as we know it. Therefore, Spike Lee and African American film are two inexorably-linked its. I submit that the third it, cinema studies, represents Massood’s proclamation of Lee’s earning—through his career and its initiation of African American film as a genre in itself—a seat at the viii table of influential American filmmakers whose catalog is worthy of academic study.3 Massood does so by identifying three paradigms for interpreting the films of Spike Lee, simultaneously revealing who the “we” in “we’ve gotta have it” is—Massood and her colleagues in the academe. Published by Temple University Press, The Spike Lee Reader combines foundational essays on the Spike Lee Joint with current critical perspectives to produce the first academic work to fully contextualize and analyze the Spike Lee Joint from its inception to its present incarnation. Massood’s introduction of the analysis of Spike Lee’s entire filmography to the academe yielded two other academic readers which explore the breadth of Spike Lee’s films: Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader (2009), edited by Janice D. Hamlet & Robin R. Means Coleman for Peter Lang, and The Philosophy of Spike Lee (2011), edited by Mark T. Conard for the University of Kentucky Press. Spike Lee’s execution of the three impulses Paula Massood identifies, coupled with his maintaining the four its, resulted in the young filmmaker’s status as an influential figure in both American cinema and popular culture. My study builds on Massood’s work. In Part I, “Will the Real Spike Lee Please Stand Up?” I chronicle the filmmaker’s career and critical reception. Chapter 1, “Doin’ the Spike Thing,” further examines the its he’s gotta have by focusing on his debut feature, She’s Gotta Have It (1986). Chapter 2, “They Hate Him,” discusses the films from 1988 to 1992 and introduces additional its, one of which is most likely indicative of his actual self: not only does Lee gotta have a filmmaking career, but he also has to have other African Americans with careers in the motion picture industry.

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