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Cinematically speaking, it’s one of those “oh, that scene” moments: suffocating heat, an ice cube tray, Rosie Perez’s naked, heaving breasts. An exceedingly tight close-up of Rosie Perez’s naked, heaving breasts. And you’ve got Spike Lee—clearly enjoying his auteur/actor privileges—rubbing an ice cube over said breasts, paying crooning homage to “the right nipple” and “the left nipple.”
Like all “Spike Lee Joints,” the ice cube scene between Tina and Mookie from Do the Right Thing was beautifully shot, a carefully choreographed dance of light and shadow, sexuality and humor. But was it erotica, or exploitation? Or both? Were you bothered by Tina’s bared breasts? Or by her bared teeth as she berates Mookie in a shrieking crescendo of abuse?
Spike Lee has long had an interesting relationship with the women who inhabit his films. It is, of course, the artist’s prerogative to play the provocateur. Fair enough. But when it comes to his female characters, it’s as though Lee can’t decide whether to worship them or punish them. Case in point, Do the Right Thing, now celebrating its 20th anniversary: On the one hand, you have the saints: Mother Sister (Mookie’s mother figure) and Jade (Mookie’s sister). And on the other hand, you have the sinner: the cruelly castrating Tina (Mookie’s baby mama).
Call it Spike Lee’s woman problem. From Do The Right Thing to School Daze to Jungle Fever to He Got Game to She Hate Me and virtually every other fiction film Lee has written and directed, his female characters have never been afforded the complexity of the men in his films. (He admitted in an interview for an authorized biography in 2005 that he’s allowed "unreconstructed male chauvinism" to play a big role in his films.)
It all began with She’s Gotta Have It. Which is too bad. If you were grown and black back in ’86, when She’s Gotta Have It made its critically acclaimed debut, it was hard not to be enamored of all things Spike. Here was a film that created a space for black independent filmmakers, a film that was smart and funny and featured black folks who were smart and funny, too. (And, it should be noted, smart, funny black folks who weren’t named Eddie Murphy.)
She’s Gotta Have It was contemporary and provocative, posing interesting questions about sexuality and double standards. It featured Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a beautifully boho sister who refused to be constrained by societal notions of what girls should and shouldn’t do. She had to have it, and so she got it, on the regular—with multiple partners. (Including Lee, aka Mars Blackmon, who immortalized male begging for sex with the line, “Please baby please baby please baby baby baby please!”)
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Game to She Hate Me and virtually every other fiction film Lee has written and directed, his female characters have never been afforded the complexity of the men in his films online games
This article is spot. I should add that Lee isn't the only great film director guilty of this crime. Coopla are just as bad. I'm not sure why this is. It's pretty sad.
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One of the main reasons I'm so selective about which movies I'm willing to pay money for is because most women characters are so badly written. I can't tell you how many arguments I've gotten into with folks who think a specific movie is so great, yet they fail to see how bad the female characters were written or portrayed.
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The question becomes, how much "complexity" do we want/expect from film? The truth is that cinema is art, not a tool for social engineering or even a reliable reflection of societal norms. Spike paints male/female relationships, and female characters better than they have even been cast in the history of popular cinema. Up until the mid-80s, black women had to be topless within five minutes into a movie to even get cast as hookers, mammys or sassy Safires. Spike's female characters, if they are not all Earth Girl and Feminist'd-out, at least have depth. They make choices, they call shots. You have never seen and may never see again, a black female onscreen so complete and complex as Nola Darling. Spike's women control their own destinies, and often pay the price for bad decisions. Just like the rest of us.
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Spike Lee is not Michael Bay or Brett Ratner churning out Hollywood junk. His Original works are artistic expressions. They are his unique POV and in many ways are intended to provoke. Are the female characters as well developed? No. Was the scene in She's gotta have it disturbing? YES. But 20 yrs later and this film still has the muscle to provoke, to anger, to make some afraid....
In short, it's what i love about Filmmaking.
@blakenterprise
Actually, this isn't the first time critics have looked at the female characters in Spike's films and found them problematic. Those critiques and observations have been around for as far back as "She's Gotta Have It," but they haven't always had mainstream exposure in a forum such as this.
"The Spike Lee Reader" (ed. by Paula J. Massood) has a number of essays which I've seen before in other venues which address the subject (bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambera, and Michelle Wallace) and over the years I've sat with other women and we've discussed it. It's important that we do put those issues on the table because they permeate throughout culture.
Speaking with Rosie Perez, Joie Lee as well as other women who have played those parts is an important part of documenting how the movie affected them both as actresses and as people and it reveals much as it may incite. To dismiss any criticism as meaningless or farcical, or think that a particular actress at that particular time had enough juice in her career to say 'no' without losing the part altogether is somewhat disingenuous.