Spike Lee's Blind Spots on Lesbianism By DAVID YAFFE
Every October 11, students, professors, and administrators across the United States are supposed to out themselves. In that annual ritual known as "Coming Out Day," a swirl of festivities covers campuses in a wash of pink triangles, Indigo Girls posters, and AIDS-awareness pamphlets. LUG's (Lesbian Until Graduation) and BUG's (Bisexual Until Graduation) mingle with the newly declared lifers, in a weeklong series of events that have become as commonplace as fraternity hazing and a post-graduation jump in the fountain.
This year's Coming Out events are likely to include heated discussions of She Hate Me, Spike Lee's latest movie. For most campus lesbians -- at least those without a counterintuitive sense of humor -- it will hardly be greeted as a love letter.
There's a certain masochism that goes with the Spike Lee experience, and everyone, black or white, Jewish or gentile, male or female, has somehow borne the brunt of his personal filmic affronts. I sat through the anti-Semitic caricatures of Moe and Josh Flatbush in Mo' Better Blues and nearly walked out on Richard Belzer's Shylockian turn in the atrocious Get On the Bus, yet I have steadfastly continued to see every Lee film. His first feature film, She's Gotta Have It, culminated in a rape scene, and his flights down misogyny lane have continued throughout his career. Lee's film may well get a screening during Coming Out Week, but expect to cross a picket line on your way in.
For those brave enough to actually venture into a screening, Lee has something for everyone, and if She Hate Me is not exactly your kind of movie, fear not, for it's at least five or six movies crammed into one. After giving up on interracial love in Jungle Fever, Jewish entertainment impresarios in Mo' Better Blues, black-Italian relations in Do the Right Thing, and college recruiters in He Got Game, Lee brings in a stable of foxy international lesbians and sets them up with his martyred, black male sexual god. Lee's title alludes to the nickname of former XFL football player Rod Smart, who wore the moniker on his jersey. When Lee reversed the gender to a title that conveyed female contempt, it is hard not to believe that he was anticipating the likely response from women.
The plot -- or should I say plots? -- centers on Jack (Anthony Mackie), a young, handsome Wharton M.B.A. and biotech CEO who burns his bridges when he informs on his corrupt colleagues at the Securities and Exchange Commission after an AIDS vaccine is squashed by corrupt colleagues. (The protagonist's full name is John Henry "Jack" Armstrong. Slavery and transgression for the first two names and jazz improvisation and genius for the last. Get it?)
After Jack gets fired and blacklisted (as it were) and even has his HSBC account frozen, he resorts to pimping himself out to the lipstick lesbian friends of Fatima (Kerry Washington), his former fiancée who left him two weeks before their planned wedding after Jack caught her in bed with a woman named Alex (Dania Ramirez). Fatima has a steady stream of lesbian friends with money and ticking biological clocks, and, of course, they tend to look like Beyoncé. They are willing to pay $10,000 each to bear this guy's children, and all approve when, after asking him to strip (and, turning the tables, degrading him by calling him "bitch boy"), they can't help but be impressed with what they see.
Co-screenwriter Michael Genet told me that Lee was inspired by reports of lesbians' conceiving babies with turkey basters, but somewhere along the line both Genet and Lee realized that good old-fashioned man-on-woman action would be more cinematic. When I asked Lee why this was necessary for She Hate Me, he replied: "What would you rather see?" "Of course," I told him, "I'm a straight man. But are you making this movie for the entertainment of straight men or the empowerment of lesbian women?"
Lee never really answered that question, but I'm sure he would like to do both. Jack is a sensitive yet virile lover, and with the help of Viagra and Red Bull he takes on a dozen clients a night. As these lipstick lesbians enjoy their fence hopping beyond the realm of plausibility -- and this, despite Lee's consulting of the lesbian Village Voice sex columnist Tristan Taormino -- it would be hard to imagine a view of bedroom relations more incongruous with the prevailing mood on many campuses (I'm thinking of Smith College rather than West Point). Lee, who takes credit for tipping the 1989 New York City mayoral election to David Dinkins with Do the Right Thing, believes that She Hate Me will have the power to help drive Bush from office and inspire revised gender relations. He is also trying to give a nod to his academic audiences. He tells me that he counts Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West as friends, and he even included a tongue-in-cheek reference to both scholars from John Turturro's Don Angelo Bonasera, who dropped their names trying to prove that he's not only down but erudite.
In what could be termed The Apprentice meets The L Word meets The Sopranos, there's also a mafia subplot in She Hate Me, a contorted racial allegory, and enough conspiracy theories for a few Michael Moore screeds. Jack's corporate enemies eventually come back to haunt him, leading to a prison sentence, while scores of his clients of every nationality give birth to his healthy, adorable babies. After serving a prison term that is ultimately reversed by Judge Ossie Davis because he has "that many children to support," Jack is on the beach like an African chieftain, flanked by Fatima and Alex and their spawn, and he escorts each of the women off the Isle of Lesbos with a deep, passionate kiss. Lee told me with a straight face that this was his sincere advocacy of a nontraditional family, but it might have really been a last-ditch attempt to spice up a dish that had gone rotten. Stirring up debate has been Lee's meal ticket for years, but while he's used controversy in the past to elucidate, this time he is revealing blind spots of his own.
At the press screening I attended, one woman stood up and loudly proclaimed "This is offensive!" and stormed out with a similarly miffed posse in tow. Sure it is. It's a Spike Lee Joint, not an Adrienne Rich reading. Lee has always used allegorical figures to get his polemics across, but this time the message is a bit muddled. The muddling could be in the service of confronting conventional stereotypes, since Lee has often used ethnic stereotypes to confront them. With his lesbian characters, however, he never really rises above the girl-on-girl action that dominates the heterosexual porn industry. Just as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued in Epistemology of the Closet that there is no stable definition of "straight," "queer," or "bisexual," there is also not a stable definition of something Lee has made himself an expert on: African-American masculinity. Lee, in his inimitable fashion, empties out his brain and leaves it to the critics and commentators to sort out the enticing, chaotic rubble. "I create my movies to start dialogue," Lee told me, although this one might produce more of a shouting match. If there are some angry lesbians during this year's Coming Out week near you as a result, Lee's attitude is: Bring it on.
Yet in a moment when President Bush is trying to shore up his political base by attacking gays and lesbians for wanting to make their commitments legal, the offended woman in the screening room did have a point. Lee hopped the fence to make a lesbian movie, only to affirm a man's traditional place, with the women acting as his decorative, erotic entertainment. The movie opens with a picture of George W. Bush on a three-dollar bill -- as in "queer as" -- and while the movie makes it clear that the auteur is no friend of Bush, the film's affirmation of marriage between a man and a woman -- at least apart from the polygamy -- is not much different than the spirit behind the Defense of Marriage Act recently defeated in the Senate. Spike Lee made a lesbian movie the president could love, and it is hard to imagine that this is what the world needs right now.
David Yaffe is a writing fellow in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Fascinating Rhythm, a forthcoming book about jazz and American writing.