Spike Lee: Movie Star
The idea of a writer or director acting in their own projects is nothing new. We see it across all genres, from Ben Affleck’s crime thrillers to the neurotic comedies of Albert Brooks to the singular point-of-view of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha, which could only be embodied by Gerwig herself. For the most part, nobody thinks much of this fairly common practice. Unless you are Spike Lee, in which case the fiercely political and consciousness-raising nature of your films leads to questions from consumers, scholars, and journalists about the implications of the choice to step in front of the camera. In Spike Lee’s America, David Steritt identified a key characteristic of Spike Lee’s cinema as its “continual willingness to raise hard questions and problems confronting contemporary America without claiming to have the illusory solutions and make-believe answers that mainstream movies constantly peddle,” (Steritt 8). However, some might argue that Lee’s mere presence in front of the camera indicates a tipping of the hand behind the camera in regards to where he thinks the answers lie.
The most famous example of this reading is the inescapable question of “Did Mookie do the right thing?”, which seems to always be the first point of discussion in regards to Lee’s 1989 film of the same name. “If Lee did not whole-heartedly endorse Mookie’s actions, he would not have played the character himself,” goes the line of thought. One wrinkle to this reading, however, is that if you ask Lee himself, he does not seem to think much of his abilities as an actor. In an interview regarding his debut film She’s Gotta Have It, Lee insisted, “I’m not that impressed with myself as an actor. I don’t think much of myself that way. I don’t have a whole lot of range as far as acting,” (Fuchs 49). Maybe he is just being modest, or maybe this quote is a sign that he only steps in front of the camera when it’s practical rather than out of a genuine desire to act. Regardless of authorial intent, we can still interpret a lot from the roles Lee chooses to play. Not just in his movies, but in TV appearances and his cultivated public persona, as well. Even if he does not show as much range as an actor as some of the multi-hyphenates listed above, each character fills a different niche in their respective story, and when you look at them all as a whole, you can start to see the evolution of Spike Lee’s ethos as a public figure. This essay will chronologically examine some of the key performances in Spike Lee’s career, from his debut film to the present day, with insights into each performance as well as exploration of the connective tissue between works that will situate each performance within the overall trajectory of his career from scrappy tube-sock salesman to one of our few “celebrity directors.” In the 1980s, when Lee first started out with his strictly Brooklyn-bound projects, he referred to his home borough as “the launchpad to a career as ‘a Black nationalist with a camera,’” (Steritt 21). This essay will explore how the ideals of the “Black nationalist” shift when he stops observing with the camera and starts being observed by it.
Lee’s first acting role might be his most iconic, despite being merely a supporting player vying for attention from both his love interest and the camera itself. In She’s Gotta Have It, Nola Darling juggles three men, including Lee’s comical Mars Blackmon. The role does not ask much of Lee in terms of emotional heavy-lifting, but it set the template for many of his characters that would follow: morally-dubious men trying to scrape by, whose quick-talking charm and humor help us to look past their less admirable traits. At least for a while. Lee himself “didn’t expect people to like [Mars], the way they did,” (Fuchs 50). But many of the tics that he felt betrayed his lack of acting skills actually helped to cement the character’s iconic status. What Lee saw as a rushed, untrained line delivery came across to viewers as a flustered, motor-mouthed eagerness-to-please, which is endearing relative to the calculated but cruel manner of rival boyfriend Greer. And what he knew was fumbling repetition due to lack of memorization inadvertently led to the birth of an iconic catchphrase. Mars’ refrain of “Please baby, please baby, baby baby please!” may not have originally been included in the script, but it’s the most lasting line from the movie and one that would later launch a lucrative line of Air Jordan commercials for “Mars Blackmon.” Perhaps the fact that this side character has had a much longer cultural lifespan than the film’s ostensible lead is telling of Lee’s inability to write dialogue with the same ear-catching quality for his female characters. Lee struggles to convey Nola’s “goodness”, so instead, the men in her life are fleshed out with more flaws to create a contrast between her and them. Ultimately, this does little to give us a sense of her interior life, and most of what we learn about her is conveyed through the choices she makes in regards to the men in her life. Mars’ immaturity stands in stark contrast to Jamie and Greer, almost to the point that one wonders what Nola sees in him, but Lee’s scrappy performance “gives the story added humor, spice, and, above all, energy,” (Steritt 24). That last word serves as a commonality between many of Lee’s early characters. They provide a spark of energy that catalyzes the story.
His next two characters catalyze conflict as a result of being pulled in two different directions by two different groups. For School Daze’s Half-Pint, he’s torn between his real family and his chosen family. He runs to Dap, his troublemaking activist cousin, when he needs a favor, but his loyalty usually lies with fraternity leader Julian, aka Dean Big Brother Almigh-ty. With Julian lies the promise of increased social standing and a newfound sense of belonging, while Dap wants Half-Pint to focus on the larger societal issues affecting Black people at home and abroad. However, it’s not so clear-cut as a simple battle for his soul between good and evil. Dap displays some colorist beliefs and a condescending attitude towards non-college-educated men he encounters at a fast food restaurant, and both men repeatedly sideline and diminish the women in their lives as part of their rivalry with each other. School Daze may not have been set in Spike’s beloved Brooklyn (which, given it was only his second film, did not seem like as radical of a departure at the time as it does now), but his approach to crafting an ensemble is the same. Journalist Sarah Vowell explained her admiration of Lee with the following assessment: “His mosaic storytelling impulse feels like what America is supposed to feel like. The citizens of his cities are not faceless, nameless representatives of the masses. They are unique individuals. . . . Ultimately, Lee’s films are never going to be about any one thing, race included. They’re art, not politics, and the responsibility of art is to the story, to the image, to whatever the artist himself cares about,” (Steritt 10). All of these qualities can be found in his earliest ensemble cast. The film was criticized for its messiness, but the goal was not to deliver clean, palatable answers to the audience, and his sole interest was telling a story in service of his characters, not his audience. These characters are college students who are still figuring things out. The film’s resolution is not a resolution of its conflicts but a resolution of what the next step should be. The film’s last words are “Wake up!”, and although Dap and Julian are looking at the audience as the line is delivered, they could just as easily be looking at Half-Pint. Over the next four years, he could continue down the fraternity brother path, or take up Dap’s politics, or find some other cause, as long as he wakes up and fights for something. By casting himself as this character at a crossroads, Lee exhibits frankness about his ideological shortcomings as an artist. Unlike other filmmakers, Lee does not condescend to his audience and act like he knows how to solve racism, colorism, or hair politics. All he can do is raise our awareness of these issues. Some critics may argue that he could have stayed behind the camera and made the same point, such as scholar Michelle Wallace who referenced Lee’s performance in the film by referring to him as “the big-eyed auteur,” (Steritt 30). The phrase “big-eyed” implies that Lee is reaching beyond his capabilities as an actor in order to have a movie star moment, but given the various embarrassments that befall Half-Pint, it is unlikely that Lee took the role out of vanity. Instead, he chose for himself a character that serves as “a living link between the opposing camps in the story. He is an appropriate analogue for Lee, the filmmaker who creates racially complex fictions on the screen in order to communicate with racially complex audiences in movie theaters,” (Steritt 30). Lee’s next character would fill a similar role, albeit in a more central capacity and with a wider gap to bridge between camps.
As Mookie in Do The Right Thing, Lee once again embodies a man at a crossroads between two communities. And this is the film where community emerges as the main theme across Lee’s body of work, more so than any one “issue.” Ideas as complex as the barrier between private and public space and as simple as “are we going to live together?” define the relationships in the film. Throughout the film, Lee exhibits an “ awareness that African-Americans and Italian-Americans and Anything -Americans are socially and psychologically grounded in both parts of their hyphenated racial/ethnic designations…Lee’s steady alertness to the cultural complexities arising from this doubleness of identity plays a crucial role in his films’ ability to touch, move, entertain, and occasionally infuriate such a broad array of viewers,” (Steritt 8). The characters themselves may not think much about their underlying similarities, but if anyone can bridge the gap and answer these questions, it’s Mookie. He just needs to wake up first, like Half-Pint. When he’s not walking up and down the block conversing with his friends while on a delivery run, he’s “behind enemy lines” in the pizzeria. He may bicker about certain aspects of his job, but when Sal says he thinks of Mookie as a son, it’s clear that the statement has a basis in reality even if Mookie appears less than enthused at the notion.
As an actor, Lee displays a general attitude of aloofness throughout the film. A less charitable interpretation would attribute this to a lack of depth as an actor, but Lee’s somewhat monotonous delivery helps to convey that Mookie generally does not get angry or passionate about things the way most of the other characters do. In fact, one of the most apparent similarities between the African-Americans and Italian-Americans in the neighborhood is Mookie’s general disinterest in holding a serious conversation with either group. He replies to Da Mayor’s plea to “do the right thing” and Radio Raheem’s story of Love and Hate with the same incredulousness and disinterest he deploys when Sal calls him a son. He may have the widest view of anyone in the neighborhood, but unlike Lee, he does not really look.
Since Mookie’s view of his neighborhood is not the same as Lee’s, it stands to reason that just because Lee physically carries out Mookie’s climactic action, he does not necessarily endorse it. In fact, the movie does not even frame the moment as a political act that needs to be endorsed or disavowed. Scholar Elizabeth Hope Finnegan writes, “Mookie’s act is not an act of power; it does not change the structure of power in the community. To suggest that Lee thinks it does strikes me as bizarre. Mookie’s action is precisely the act of the powerless; it has psychological but not political force. The destruction of property does not, in itself, effect entry into the space of appearances,” (Conrad 84). The film frames the moment as a previously indecisive character taking action. Mookie’s decision is personal, not political, and viewing Lee’s work and his characters purely through an ideological right/wrong lens does a disservice to the much broader canvas he is painting on, which is summarized by David Steritt as an “expansive, nuanced, proudly opinionated, richly multifaceted portrait of American society, with a particular focus on issues of class, race, and urban life,” (Steritt 5). The key word there is multifaceted, which is something that some contemporary white critics did not seem to want Lee to be. Lee’s casting as Mookie and Mookie’s relationship with Sal’s two sons can be read as a bit of sly commentary on Lee’s relationship with mainstream critics at the time. Yes, Pino’s overt bigotry is the bigger threat, but when Vito defends Mookie by telling Pino, “he’s alright,” the implication is that Mookie is not like “The Other”, he’s alright because he’s more like “us” than “them.” Whether intentional or not, Vito’s reasoning reads as a distancing from the Black community rather than an embrace. The scene pokes fun at critics who seemingly embraced Lee’s work in order to prove their bona fides but then bristled anytime his work felt a little too radical for their liking. By placing himself in the role of Mookie, Lee told white critics that he was not searching for their approval. Claiming to know someone allows you to exert authority over them, and this was Lee’s reminder to these critics that they did not really know him.
Much like with School Daze, Do The Right Thing’s resolution is one between its characters, not a resolution of the issues it raises. Mookie and Sal do not know what the future of the restaurant or even the neighborhood will be, but they can recognize each other as two fathers who are both trying to look out for their kids. For a film that increases in volatility over its runtime, it is a surprisingly low-key ending, but it works thanks to the strength of the performances. Like Lee, Danny Aiello came to acting in a roundabout way. He worked a number of jobs from bus driver to nightclub bouncer before scoring a small role in The Godfather Part II. Like Mookie, he’s spent a long time “trying to get that money. Trying to get paid,” and this brings an authenticity to the part that might not have been there with Lee’s original choice Robert De Niro. Lee has been praised for his “ability at choosing singular actors,” and sometimes that means looking past traditional qualifiers in search of someone who has the lived experiences that make them feel at home in the story. This applies to both Aiello and Lee himself.
In the 1990s, Lee’s acting roles shifted from catalysts to observers. His Shorty is the first person we meet in Malcolm X, but he disappears entirely from the story around the halfway point. By this point, viewers were used to Lee casting himself in key roles, so Shorty’s sudden disappearance helps to further the genre bait-and-switch trick that Lee pulls multiple times throughout the film. Malcolm X changes shape from an old-school musical to a gangster film to a prison drama to a political thriller to a David Lean epic and so on, and at a certain point, it grows beyond the point of needing a Spike Lee character to catalyze the story. The film’s source material is The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told To Alex Haley, and Shorty’s exit from the film cues us to think of this movie as “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told To Spike Lee”, rather than a story shaped by Spike Lee. Lee sidelines himself out of deference to a story that is bigger than him.
Unlike the larger-than-life Malcolm X, the story of Crooklyn is uniquely personal to Spike Lee, since it is based on his family life during the early 1970s. However, rather than return to a central role, Spike remains on the sideline along with his sister Joie, who conceived the film’s story. The bigger “Spike Lee” character is the one not even played by Spike himself- it’s Clinton, the pre-teen stand-in for young Shelton Jackson Lee. Spike hangs around the periphery as the perpetually-high Snuffy, whose most memorable appearance comes in a dream sequence where he chases after Troy (a stand-in for young Joie). On a metatextual level, the moment plays as Troy/Joie being haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Future- an alternate version of her brother, a warning of how he could turn out if he does not make something of himself. Or maybe he just thought it would be funny to play a comically inept drug fiend. Lee’s most peripheral role yet came in his 1995 film Clockers, where he plays a character named Chuck Bridges, Sr. You would not know that from the movie itself, since Chuck is never named on-screen, and his only purpose is to show up in two scenes and explain a crime scene to the detectives. Once again, this is a “meta” cameo for Lee. Like Do The Right Thing, Clockers is a film about a neighborhood in decline, but here, Lee is merely an observer rather than a central figure. As Lee’s films continued to underperform at the box office and not receive their due from the critics, he started looking towards other projects besides the ones he built from the ground up. This role as an “observer” was a reflection of his changing career path. He could still tell powerful stories about community, but he would not always be able to do so from within the deeply personal framework that characterized his early career.
In the mid-90s, Lee’s biggest on-screen performance came not from a film, but from a series of Air Jordan commercials with Michael Jordan, and this marked the start of transition that would cement itself over the next decade. Despite the fact that Lee the director seemed to be transitioning from an auteur to a journeyman (albeit, a very skilled one), Lee the public figure had never had more exposure. Behind the camera, this period of time contained Lee’s first forays into documentary filmmaking (4 Little Girls), TV movies (Sucker Free City), and an increase in gun-for-hire directing gigs (25th Hour, Inside Man), but while his personal brand diversified in his work, it become more solidified in his public persona. Biographer Kaleem Aftab summed up Spike’s public persona with the following, “Spike Lee is a quintessential New Yorker: whether watching basketball games courtside at Madison Square Garden, employing the city as the primary location for most of his films or providing his oft-reported commentaries on politics and life,” (Aftab 3). Pop culture journalist Sean Fennessey called Lee “the avatar of Knicks fandom” due to “his constant TV appearances”, and it is safe to say more people have seen his face in this context than they have in any of his movies. In the 2010s, his film output and his public appearances have continued steadily, albeit entirely divorced from each other, as the director began to take on more celebrity testimonial roles in commercials. When looking at some of the commercials in question, they feel a bit at odds with the ideology of his films. In the 1990s, critic Armond White dismissed Lee as “primarily a ‘first-rate marketer’ who ‘knows what a young audience wants, and . . . supplies it…Barbara Walters picks hot topics every day. The pretense of seriousness doesn’t mean you’re serious,” (Steritt 7). This feels like an unfair assessment of Lee as a director, but I will admit that it has some merit when evaluating Lee as a public figure. When Lee pops up in commercials for Uber or Capital One, it may elicit some eye-rolling, but these endeavors are ultimately harmless. The commercial that garnered the most controversy was the one that reunited Spike Lee the actor with Spike Lee the director. In 2021, Spike Lee directed and starred in a commercial for a cryptocurrency known as Coin Cloud. What separated this commercial from past testimonials is that it tries to gain legitimacy from Spike Lee the artist, not just Spike Lee the public figure. The commercial utilizes several of Spike Lee’s signature techniques, such as the double dolly shot and the montage of people directly addressing the camera. The commercial feels disingenuous with is claims that cryptocurrency is “new money” designed to uplift LGBTQ+ and POC communities, and it would almost be preferable to see Lee simply sell out rather than wholeheartedly argue in favor of the kind of capitalist schemes he rejects in his films. When watching the commercial, one wonders what happened to the Black nationalist with the camera.
Spike Lee might have never considered himself much of an actor, but he has proven adept at crafting a unique persona for himself both inside and outside of his films. In his early work, he embodied a link between communities whose only obstacle in his capacity to create change was his own indecisiveness. This was Lee’s way of being upfront with audiences that he did not hold all of the answers and was more interested in raising questions. As a public figure, he is known for his passionate support for the Knicks and all things New York, and he has managed to carve out a space for himself as one of our few “celebrity directors” despite having few box office hits on his resume. However, Lee’s persona as a celebrity is sometimes at odds with his ethos as a director, given some of the products he elects to attach his name to. If Lee ever decides to act in one of his films again, we can only hope that the character will be more in line with the artist rather than the celebrity.
Works Cited
Aftab, Kaleem. Spike Lee : That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It. New York, W.W. Norton, 2006.
Fennessey, Sean. The Big Picture: “the Importance of Spike Lee.” Spotify, 9 June 2020. Podcast.
Finnegan, Elizabeth Hope. “(Still) Fighting the Power: Public Space and the Unspeakable Privacy of the Other in Do the Right Thing.” The Philosophy of Spike Lee, edited by Mark T. Conard, University Press of Kentucky, 2011, pp. 75–94, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jcwgn.9. Accessed 10 May 2022.
Lee, Spike, and Cynthia Fuchs. Spike Lee : Interviews. Jackson, University Press Of Mississippi, 2002.
Sterritt, David. Spike Lee’s America. Cambridge, UK ;: Polity Press, 2013. Print.
