Director in Focus: Spike Lee, "She's Gotta Have It" (1986)

Kicking off a new series focusing on the films of Spike Lee.

Is there another celebrity director as poorly understood as Spike Lee? Few American filmmakers are as visible in the public eye; you’ve probably seen him on Capital One commercials or, if you’re a basketball fan, sitting courtside at Knicks games. He’s not shy about expressing his opinions on culture and cinema, whether he’s beefing with Quentin Tarantino or trying to storm out the Dolby Theatre when Green Book won Best Picture in 2019. Personally, I love his presence as a public figure—he recalls a time when filmmakers could be cause célèbres instead of just creators of “content.”

At the same time, I don’t think there have been many thoughtful attempts to consider his filmography as a whole, parsing it out for its thematic and aesthetic elements. Sure, the broad traits of a Spike Lee joint are familiar to most moviegoers: a brash aesthetic filled with visual flourishes, emphatic montages, didactic dialogue, and a sense of fiery satire. But I can’t think of many thorough examinations of his entire body of work as the product of a singular auteur. His movies don’t seem to receive the amount of critical attention that’s paid to Paul Thomas Anderson or Martin Scorsese (to name two of Lee’s most celebrated peers).

This post is the first in a series that aims to correct that by analyzing Lee’s movies chronologically, one-by-one. This will be a challenge simply because Lee is so prolific, with twenty-four features to date since 1986, not to mention numerous shorts, music videos, and commercials. But I’m excited to trace Lee’s career, partially because I saw some of his most acclaimed films when I was first getting into movies in the 1990s, a white kid living in suburban Wisconsin who definitely didn’t understand the complexities of what I was watching at the time.¹ In retrospect, Lee’s movies (and others by Kurosawa, Fellini, etc.) helped me fall in love with cinema, which introduced me to a vast global community in which the hopes and fears of someone totally unlike me could provoke an overwhelming emotional response.

Born in Atlanta, Lee’s family moved to Brooklyn when he was a kid—first to Crown Heights, then Cobble Hill, then Fort Greene. His father, Bill, was a jazz musician who, Lee proudly recounts, played bass with Bob Dylan until “Dylan went electric,” after which Bill refused to work with him. Spike’s mother, Jacqueline—who gave him his nickname (his real name is Shelton, Jacqueline’s maiden name)—taught arts and Black literature at St. Ann’s School. As Lee tells it, he inherited his father’s love of sports and his mother’s love of movies; the latter would take him to films like Mean Streets and Bye Bye Birdie, awakening in him a love of cinema.

It was the summer of 1977—the summer of the New York blackout, the summer of Sam (serial killer David Berkowitz), the summer of disco—when Lee decided he wanted to become a filmmaker. As the struggling city lay in darkness during the blackout, Lee picked up his Super 8 camera and recorded footage. (One of his prominent subjects was block parties at which DJs would spin and mix records—1977 was also the unofficial inauguration of hip-hop.) When he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta a few years later, Lee turned this footage into his first documentary, Last Hustle in Brooklyn (which I wasn’t able to find for this project). It was also at Morehouse that Lee met Monty Ross, who would go on to act in Lee’s early movies and co-produce films like Do the Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992).

After graduating from Morehouse, Lee returned to New York and attended the graduate film program at New York University. It was here that he completed his thesis film in 1983, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, which won AMPAS’s Student Award (somewhat ironic considering Lee’s longstanding animosity with “the Academy”). As Lee said at the time, barbershops are “second only in importance to the church in the Black community,” which is suggested by the fact that shots of spinning barber poles act as visual bookends in the film. (Despite the black-and-white image above, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop was actually shot in vivid color by Lee’s frequent cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, a fellow student at NYU’s graduate school.) The plot follows the barbershop’s manager, Zach Homer (played by Lee’s Morehouse cohort, Monty Ross), who inherits the establishment when the owner, Joe (Horace Long), is killed by small-time gangsters. In addition to being a site for community activism and impassioned conversation, the barbershop has also maintained an illegal numbers racket for years, headed by local gangster Nicholas Lovejoy (Tommy Redmond Hicks). When Joe tries to steal money from Lovejoy, he’s tied to cinderblocks and thrown in the East River—paving the way for Zach to take over.

The character of Zach Homer is somewhat atypical for a male protagonist in a Spike Lee film: an average guy just trying to make ends meet, dealing with feelings of inadequacy. Some aspects of the film are thematically similar to (but tonally different from) another landmark of Black American independent cinema that came out the same year, Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts, about a family living in Watts, Los Angeles. In Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, Zach takes pride in the titular business, though he believes his wife, Ruth (Donna Bailey), is ashamed of it: “You can’t stand being married to a barber!” he says during one of their numerous fights. Films like Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop and Bless Their Little Hearts show how issues of class and race are closely related.

On the surface, Lee’s film is about Zach’s decision whether to keep the numbers racket going in the barbershop, knowing that he’ll be targeted by Lovejoy if he doesn’t. At its core, though, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop is about the relationship between Zach and a troubled young boy, Teapot (Stuart Smith), whom Ruth gets a job at her husband’s establishment. (She’s a social worker—with a graduate degree and a cushy career, a point of contention between her and Zach—who tries to pull Teapot out of his dangerous family life.) There’s a surprising sweetness to Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, presented mostly through Zach and Teapot’s surrogate-father-son relationship. This is epitomized by the poignant final shot, which offers a moment of quiet tenderness between the two characters. This moving sentimentality is heightened by the fact that Teapot may be a younger version of Spike Lee himself: the character is inspired to become an artist by a chance encounter with a Black photographer, and he uses the money that Zach gives him at one point to buy his first camera.

The exuberance and social commentary that would define Lee’s later films are present right from the start. Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop begins with a few guys joking around off-camera, accompanied by a plain gray screen—a striking way to disorient the audience immediately. Conversations at the barbershop revolve around political topics like the purpose of voting in a corrupt system and Ed Koch’s troubled mayorship. In one scene, Zach recites a rhyming commercial for a hair-straightening product while Teapot delivers a rhythmic monologue about Converse sneakers, foreshadowing later, virtuoso scenes in Lee films driven by wordplay and rap-like delivery.

For a relatively short film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop is packed with provocative moments: one man’s recollection of a nightmare in which he’s the last Black man in the world (“there’s not even coffee, chocolate, or brown sugar”); a scene in which two young kids practice swearing and acting tough, preparing for a life of crime; another in which a character claims that the numbers racket is the poor man’s stock market. The dialogue constantly verges on the blunt and didactic, which might be a flaw in later Lee films, though in this case it’s an invigorating sign of Lee’s youthful energy. (Honestly, though, his energy seems unflagging regardless of age.) The visual dynamism that Lee would create with Dickerson in his later films is also apparent here, with several quick but graceful tracking shots and compositions stuffed with multiple planes of action.

All the way down to the 40 Acres and Mule Filmworks logo and the “Spike Lee Joint” opening credit, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop is an electrifying sign of things to come from the director. It also begins the trend of his movies serving as family affairs, with his father Bill composing the music and several of his siblings acting as extras. Sure, it also presages some of the flaws in his later works (awkward performances, sophomoric humor, plots that over-rely on cliche), but it must have hit the independent film scene like a jolt when it was released in 1983.

Three years later, Lee’s feature debut, She’s Gotta Have It, was released. Despite the earlier influence of Black independent filmmakers like Billy Woodberry, Charles Burnett, Melvin van Peebles, and William Greaves, She’s Gotta Have It still feels like an anomaly and a landmark: a comedy steeped in unexpected diversions halfway between jazz music and Jean-Luc Godard, exuding an irrepressible love of cinema. While Lee had initially planned on making a movie about bike messengers to follow up Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, he turned to the more low-key She’s Gotta Have It when funding on the former fell through. Eschewing the constrictive genre tropes of Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, She’s Gotta Have It takes a comedic story about a love rectangle and spins it into a liberating study of character and identity.

The film succeeds largely thanks to Tracy Camilla Johns’ performance as the one-of-a-kind Nola Darling, a graphic artist living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn (one of Lee’s home neighborhoods as a kid). Nola is comfortable juggling three male lovers: Tommy Redmond Hicks (the villainous Lovejoy in Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop) as the seemingly solid but deeply insecure Jamie Overstreet; John Canada Terrell as the preening, image-obsessed Greer Childs; and Lee himself as the immature but charismatic Mars Blackmon.² (Lee only played the role because he didn’t have the money to hire another actor, but his laugh-out-loud performance might be the second best thing about the movie.) Another would-be lover makes unrequited advances at Nola: Raye Dowell as Opal Gilstrap, a lesbian character who presents the weakest storyline in the film.³ Nola’s arrangement seems peculiar to almost everyone in the film—“A nice lady doesn’t go humping from bed to bed,” Jamie tells her—but she makes the point that men have the luxury of balancing numerous women at once, so why shouldn’t she have the same freedom?

Indeed, She’s Gotta Have It deserves credit for portraying a complex, empowered Black woman who refuses to be defined by the men in her life. (In fact, those men are the ones who find themselves judging their self-worth in relation to Nola.) The film clearly reserves most of its admiration for Nola, who lives life according to her own rules and creates a world steeped in art. (She paints the striking murals that populate her Brooklyn loft, and in a clever touch, her jazz musician father is played by Bill Lee—introduced in a gorgeous head-on shot as he plucks an upright bass.) Near the end, Nola utters something like a raison d’être: “It’s about control. My body, my mind. Who’s gonna own it—them or me?”

Lee has never been seen as a feminist filmmaker—at times, he’s been accused of outright misogyny—but She’s Gotta Have It finds him at least attempting to portray a woman with sensitivity and complexity. Before writing the screenplay for She’s Gotta Have It, Lee and a former classmate from Atlanta, Tracey Willard, issued a questionnaire to thirty-five women, asking them about their fantasies, sexual proclivities, and views on men. While the finished product isn’t perfect, it does convey a remarkable and memorable character whose contradictions feel true-to-life—and again, Johns’ performance is instrumental in this regard, at once hopeful and melancholy, radiant and cynical. Unexpectedly, it’s the fatuous Greer who comes closest to understanding Nola when he concludes that she sees in Greer, Mars, and Jamie separate components of a single, ideal organism.

It must be said that the radical nature of Nola’s character is undercut by the most criticized aspect of the film: its rape scene. Near the end of She’s Gotta Have It, Nola calls Jamie and begs him to come over, even though she already broke things off with him when she refused to choose a single lover. When she demands affection from Jamie, he violently bends her over and violates her, in a haunting low-angle shot with a single ray of light illuminating the shadows behind him. This scene could be read as a harsh denunciation of the anger and cruelty of men, but that reading is contradicted by what happens next: Nola continues to see Jamie for a while, and she vows to try and be monogamous in order to make things work despite his “near rape,” as she calls it (though there’s nothing “near” about it). Narratively, this development doesn’t make sense: soon enough, Nola is (thankfully) back to her polyamorous ways, refusing to be tied down by any one man. In the end, Jamie’s rape of Nola is empty provocation that plays no role in furthering the narrative or deepening the character’s complexity. To his credit, Lee has said as much in recent interviews: “It was just totally . . . stupid,” he said about the scene in 2014. “I was immature. It made light of rape, and that’s the one thing I would take back. I was immature and I hate that I did not view rape as the vile act that it is.”⁴

In contrast to that unforgivable scene, Lee also creates one of the first jaw-dropping highlights of his filmography. Early on, Jamie wishes Nola a happy birthday by telling her to close her eyes and click her heels three times while repeating, “There’s no place like home.” Then, a la Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Nola is transported to a world of vibrant color, a blast of radiant imagery in the midst of She’s Gotta Have It’s black-and-white aesthetic (which, it should be said, is equally radiant in its own way, thanks to Ernest Dickerson’s gorgeous cinematography). The color sequence is a dance number taking place in a Brooklyn park, set to an original composition by Bill Lee. Though it’s presented as Jamie’s gift to Nola, it’s really Spike Lee’s gift to the audience: a ravishing formal interlude that’s mostly disconnected from plot or character, allowing Lee to revel in his love of movies (and giving his father a musical spotlight).

Despite its flaws, there’s a lot to love about She’s Gotta Have It, from the opening quote by Zora Neale Hurston to the actors stating their names to the camera while clapping a slate during the closing credits. The beginning of the film consists of still black-and-white photographs (shot by Spike’s brother David) that present a marvelous Brooklyn atmosphere (which reminded me of the D.A. Pennebaker short film Daybreak Express from 1953). Lee, serving as his own editor, creates stylish jazz-like rhythms, as when a line of dialogue from Jamie both opens and closes a particular scene, or when shots of Greer and Nola’s naked bodies in bed are intercut with split-second rapidity, matching the quick tempo of a record they’re listening to.

The film is as political (check out the news headlines that Nola pastes into one of her collages) as it is funny, boasting at least three great comedic performances—foremost among them Lee’s own as Mars Blackmon. He’s a diminutive, gregarious ball of energy—you immediately understand why Nola would want to keep him around, offsetting Jamie’s sullenness and Greer’s self-obsession. Mars spits out his mantra to Nola— “Please baby please baby please babybabybaby please!”—with rat-a-tat precision, insults a rival by calling him a Celtics fan, and responds to Jamie’s assertion that he might share Nola with Mars with a drippingly sarcastic “That’s mighty Black of you.” While Tracy Camilla Johns is the movie’s heart and soul, Lee (as Mars) is its infectious sense of humor. It’s hard to say which part of Lee’s performance as writer-director-actor-editor-producer is most impressive, but it’s easy to see how She’s Gotta Have It catalyzed one of the most remarkable careers in modern American cinema.

Next Up: School Daze (1988)

Notes

1. Malcolm X, for example, I only saw once: on home video with my dad when I was about ten years old. I’m eager to rewatch it with at least a little more awareness of the film’s social and historical contexts.

2. Let me take a moment to applaud Lee’s character names. Not since Preston Sturges has an American writer-director concocted such wonderfully bizarre monikers.

3. Lee has sometimes been accused of homophobia, and Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop includes a moment in which Zach insists that he won’t do the “faggoty curls” that were popular among African American men in the early ‘80s. While I think most of Lee’s films try to expose homophobia instead of expressing it in an uncritical way, such dubious characters and statements are uncomfortable at best and immature at worst.

4. An entire essay could be written about this scene in particular—like the fact that Nola envisions not only Jamie but also Greer and Mars assaulting her, as if this is what the entire male species might do if their egos aren’t validated. If the scene had been handled differently—especially the aftermath of it—it could have been read as a brutally honest depiction of the horrors that men are capable of and the double standards of the power dynamics between men and women. As it is, it feels like an excessive punishment of a woman whom the film spends most of its time lionizing.