 | | A scene from Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”Universal City Studios |
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Once again, I have thoughts about movies to share with you. Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I watch a lot of movies and write capsule reviews for my own edification. For the past month or so, my wife and I have been (slowly) making our way through the films of Spike Lee, some of which I had seen, most of which I had not. For this set of reviews, I want to share my recent thoughts on three of Spike’s earliest (and most acclaimed) films. |
Even now, 30 years later, there aren’t many films like “School Daze.” It’s a big, overstuffed movie, crackling with its director’s obsessions and preoccupations, from the MGM musicals of the 1950s to the politics of the post-civil rights generation of African-Americans and the emerging class stratification in Black life. It’s heightened, highly stylized and high-energy, with characters that feel simultaneously like archetypes and real, living people. |
It is also completely, totally, uncompromisingly Black. This is not a comment about the cast, which is all Black and seems to represent every possible shade and hue within the community. It’s a comment about the sensibility. “School Daze” is a movie about Black people, talking to Black people, about concerns among Black people. There’s no sense, at any point, that anyone is concerned with anything any white person might think. It is insular in the best sense and, for non-Black viewers, a prime example of the power of film to show you a perspective profoundly different from your own. |
‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989) |
This is maybe my third time watching this movie, and on this viewing, the thing I feel most is sadness. That is because for as much as Spike Lee gestures to capital-I Issues like structural racism and police abuse, this isn’t a movie about Issues, it is a movie about community: about the individuals that make up any community, about the challenges and fears and resentments and anxieties and joys and happiness that fill their lives, and about the ways racism frays the bonds of community with suspicion and hatred. |
The bright colors and hyperstylization cannot hide the fact that “Do the Right Thing” is a profoundly sad film, attuned to how we can’t avoid the burden of our history and how the pain of that history shapes our relationship with ourselves as well as those we have with one another. |
I’ll leave the final word to Samuel L. Jackson as Mister Señor Love Daddy: “My people, my people, what can I say; say what I can. I saw it but didn’t believe it; I didn’t believe what I saw. Are we gonna live together? Together are we gonna live?” |
It is hard to make a good biographical film. You can’t actually fit the full scope of someone’s life into a 120-minute movie. It’s why the best films in the genre center on a singular event in an individual’s life versus the full sweep of their experiences. And even then, it’s tough. |
Malcolm X is a traditional biopic in that it attempts to tell the story of the Black nationalist and human rights leader from start to finish. But rather than try to avoid or work around the fact that lives — to say nothing of the life of Malcolm X — are big and complicated and impossible to contain, Spike Lee structures the film around that very fact. “Malcolm X” is a nearly three-and-a-half-hour epic built from a great number of styles and genres. But it’s not haphazard. Everything has a purpose. Within this picture, you’ll find the gangster movie, the race film, the prison drama, the Hollywood musical, the Western and the desert epic. You’ll see Spike Lee use the heightened and exaggerated style for which he’s known as well as documentary styles and even cinéma vérité. And all of it — every technique, every camera movement, every edit — tells the singular story of a man struggling, till the very end, for self-actualization. |
That, to me, is what is so brilliant about this movie, including Denzel Washington’s incomparable performance. There are many ways to tell the story of Malcolm X, and this one focuses almost all of its attention on him as someone who exists in a near-constant state of invention and reinvention, struggling to find a path that will bring him — and those around him — to freedom and a knowledge of self. And when he does find it, he must pay for what he’s gained with his life. |
My Tuesday column was a somewhat arch argument that Trump needs to disavow the extremists on his own side if he wants to win re-election. |
What he needs to do right now is condemn those responsible for violence and disavow those who act in his name. He needs, in other words, what political observers have come to call a “Sister Souljah moment,” a pointed repudiation of a radical element within one’s own coalition, named for Bill Clinton’s rebuke of the eponymous hip-hop artist while speaking to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition during the 1992 presidential campaign. A display like Clinton’s would show the country that Trump can be trusted to govern on behalf of all Americans. |
My Friday column was a look at the conspiracy-theorizing that has come to characterize a large part of the modern Republican Party. |
The “new” conspiracism, by contrast, is conspiracy without any discernible theory of the world. It rejects explanation, however distorted, in favor of disorientation and delegitimization. It is the difference between a conspiracy that tries to make sense of an otherwise incomprehensible reality — however anomalous that sense might be — and one that doesn’t care for the real at all. The “new conspiracism” is certainly partisan, but it isn’t especially political. |
Kim Kelly on public defenders in The Baffler. |
Hari Kunzru on the intellectual history of “whiteness” in The New York Review of Books. |
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at jamelle-newsletter@nytimes.com. |
 | | A bridge over the Rivanna River Reservoir in Charlottesville, Va.Jamelle Bouie |
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Charlottesville has its fair share of problems, but it is a very beautiful place to live, as you can see in this photo, taken last month while I was on a long bike ride. |
Now Eating: Hot and Sour Zucchini |
It’s a summer ritual: finding something to do with all of the zucchini you get from a single garden plant. To that end, I’ve been making this recipe at least once a week. It helps that it is delicious. A few notes: You’ll want to slice the zucchini as thin as possible (I used a mandolin) so that it cooks quickly in a hot wok. Also, if you use a carbon steel wok, I highly recommend you try cooking outside with charcoal; it’s the easiest and safest way to get the high heat you need for wok cooking. And fair warning: This recipe is pretty spicy. You’ll want to serve it with a cooling element, like marinated cucumbers. This recipe comes from “The Big Book of Wok & Stir-Fry.” I’ve had it in my cookbook library for years, by way of my wife, but only started to use it last month. It’s good! |
- 2 large zucchini, thinly sliced
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons peanut oil
- 1 teaspoon Sichuan pepper, crushed
- 1 fresh red chile, seeded and thinly sliced
- 2 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced
- 1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh ginger
- 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
- 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
- 2 teaspoons sugar
- 1 scallion, green part included, thinly sliced
- a few drops of sesame oil
- 1 teaspoon sesame seeds
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Put the zucchini slices in a large colander and toss with salt. Cover with a plate resting on the zucchini and put a weight on top. Let drain for 20 minutes. Rinse off the salt and spread out the slices on paper towels to dry. |
Heat wok over high heat (if carbon steel, until smoking), then add the peanut oil. Add the Sichuan pepper, chile, garlic and ginger. Fry for about 20 seconds, until the garlic is just beginning to color. |
Add the zucchini slices and toss in the oil. Add the rice vinegar, soy sauce and sugar, and stir-fry for 2 minutes. Add the scallion and stir-fry for 30 seconds. Sprinkle with sesame oil and sesame seeds and serve immediately, over rice. |
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