I saw Chiraq last Friday. I wont write
a review or critique that's not one of my strengths. So I will share my brief
thoughts as a moviegoer, a consumer who paid his loot to see the movie.
I recognize that the appreciation or critique of any art must also include whatever biases, expectations and aspiration we bring to that art—movies can be mirrors too. Viewing art implicates us in idiosyncratic ways. For this reason, there will always be debates over literature, movies, plays and music. The mistake is in believing our view is the right, and that everyone else’s view is wrong. We are often seeing the same thing but viewing and experiencing it differently. That is the beauty of art, which ironically is so often lost on the appreciators of that art.
It is special kind of blindness, a weakness of deep insight, to suggest that a consumer of art cannot critique a work of art unless they are prepared to make that art themselves. That is like saying that while dining at a restaurant if you don’t like the food, rather than complaining about a meal you paid for, you should go to the kitchen and make your own meal--and still pay for it lol. Appreciation and critique are both evaluations. If critique is unwelcome because it is an aesthetic judgment of value and worth, then so to is praise, which is also an aesthetic judgment of value and worth.
I love Spike Lee--his vision, his courage, his brashness, his backward ways of trying to get us to go forward, his willingness to never stop going in the lions den of white racial animus, for his love for us. In my mind he is one of the most important American filmmakers of the 20th century. His contribution to a certain generation of Black folk sense of identity, his introduction of our voice on our terms into the cinematic vernacular, the number of folks behind and in front of cameras he put on, the ways he (along with many others) has created kind of expectation of Black genius after the Blackploitation era is inestimable.
Spike has always had issues with Black women—as do most Black men. Always. Most of us-men and women—have overlooked them because that's what we've all learned to do: sacrifice Black women for the illusion of Black progress. (Although African womanists and Black feminist have voiced this consistently.) All artists’ art betrays their subconscious, at some point. Just listen to R. Kelley. (Just imagine all those woman and girls who unfortunately "encountered" R. Kelley, and upon listening to his music, wondering is he talking about me? And seeing others who say they love them dancing to that music).
Spike’s lens has generally been more
incisive and insightful when the issue was between group dynamics –Black and
White. (For example, Do the Right Thing, Bamboozled, When the Levees Broke,
Four Little Girls) as opposed to within group dynamics (Black and Black), (for
example, Girl 6, She Hate Me, or She's Gotta Have it)
At what point do Black people, the worlds oldest people, stop rummaging thru Europe like an indigent looking for a thrown away meal, in the hopes of mimicry and move towards cultural mastery? How can you win when your most creative minds are always looking for ways to paint Europe in blackface rather scouring Africa and her considerable diaspora for stories that begin with us, live in us and last?
Shouldnt that Black imagination mean something more than rummaging through the stories of Europe for a blackened version to produce? Shouldnt it also include, primarily include, us digging into our considerable storehouses of our story telling that exists on both side of the Atlantic. How many times are we going to resurrect Shakespeare like a washed up rapper and charcoal him up in Blackface? How long will our best ideas remain European ideas draped in Kente cloth? We have a unique history in the world and future that remains in peril, shouldn’t our art reflect our own special cultural truths and unique challenges?
While I understand what he was trying to do with Aristophanes Lysistrata. Chiraq was a failed effort as a film and as satire, a poor film generally, which completely ignores the ways in which sexual violence silences Black women and men. Spike's strength is Brooklyn, a place he knows well. In Chiraq, he took on city he clearly didn’t know. A topic that required more nuance, knowledge and sophistication than we've seen in any Spike film or speech to date, and a deep appreciation for Black women as a cosmic force rather as mattresses with protest ability. In short, it required more than a demonstration that Spike as a grown man can still be relevant as a marketer of his films; it required a Spike Lee who had shown he had grown past his weaknesses as a filmmaker.
Seems more and more like Shelton is making films these days as opposed to Spike. I'd love to see Spike return and have Shelton sit down somewhere. I still think Spike has great films in him but maybe like Tiger Woods and Mike Tyson before him, I simply can't bring myself to believe that his best may be behind him. Maybe I'm still waiting for Spike like I'm waiting for Tiger—to show me he can still win a major.
Black Love is Black Power.
—Ádìsá
