Spike Lee, 'Artist'

National Review, July 26, 1999 by James Bowman

The terrible career of a flamethrower.

Mr. Bowman is movie critic of The American Spectator, American editor of The Times Literary Supplement, and media critic of The New Criterion.

To the many interesting ways of dividing the world up into revealing dichotomies-innies and outies, over-the-roll people and under-the-roll people, Republicans and Democrats-let us add the division between self-proclaimed "art" lovers and those who are immediately suspicious when they hear the word "art."

Most conservatives, I imagine, belong to the latter category, and one reason is suggested by the public reaction to the release of Spike Lee's Summer of Sam.

Criticized for exploiting the victims of the Son of Sam, the serial killer David Berkowitz who terrorized New York in the summer of 1977, Lee put forward his membership in the tribe of "artists" as if that alone were sufficient to still criticism. "I feel that we're artists," he said. "I don't think we can be put in a straitjacket all the time." And his case was taken up by most critics and others of the "artists" tribe, who circled the wagons with their usual efficiency.

Harold Schechter, a professor of literature at Queens College, for instance, cited on the op-ed page of the New York Times Henry James's essay "The Art of Fiction" to the effect that it is the fictional artist's (and therefore also the filmmaker's) absolute right to "touch the sad things of life." Schechter implicitly compared Lee's film to Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy, whose story "was ripe for sleazy exploitation. But out of it Dreiser fashioned a masterpiece."

This and other works of art, Schechter claimed, cannot be criticized for being based on real crimes: "It's either a good book-or movie-or a bad one. But choosing the subject is the artist's prerogative." Curiously, he ventured no opinion on whether Summer of Sam is a good movie or a bad one. Instead, he confined himself to knocking down the straw man he himself had set up, the mythical critic who says that "choosing the subject" is not the artist's prerogative. But the complaint against Spike Lee was not that he had no right to choose this subject, but that he had chosen badly-in fact committing the "sleazy exploitation" that, according to Schechter, Dreiser avoided.

Joe Roth, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, whose Touchstone Pictures released the film, told the Los Angeles Times that "part of what you hope in these jobs is that you have relationships with artists who, in skirting the rules or running close to the rules, sometimes create great work"-leaving the distinct impression that the skirting of the rules is what makes them artists. But Roth too was non-committal about whether, in this case, a "great work" had been created by Spike Lee, whom he referred to as a "somewhat controversial artist."

In fact, both factions, "artists" and anti-"artists" alike, find it easy to make the assumption that merely being obscene or "controversial" qualifies one as an "artist." Lacking any positive sense of what a work of art should be, we have only one real qualification for membership in the tribe, which is controversy.

Ask any casual observer to name a contemporary artist, and chances are he will name Andres Serrano, Christo, Jeff Koons, Gilbert and George, or perhaps Karen Finley. All are widely publicized for being bizarre, obscene, or otherwise "controversial," but what other publicity is available?

In the same way, ask anyone who doesn't take a close interest in the movies to name a contemporary film director, and you are as likely to get "artists" like Lee or Oliver Stone as you are phenomenally successful commercial directors like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. The lesson for anyone who wants to be famous as an "artist" is that the surest way to do it is to be controversial.

Certainly, this is a lesson that Spike Lee learned early in his career with his first feature film, She's Gotta Have It (1986), an unremarkable bit of juvenilia that attracted attention for representing sexual acts just about as explicitly as you can do without earning an X rating.

Since then, Lee has become a celebrity and so has been able to cultivate "controversy" offscreen in the media by making outrageous comments-often timed to coincide with the release of a new picture-such as that he would like to take a Louisville Slugger to black Republicans. His most recent such comments revealed that he thought Mayor Giuliani of New York "evil" and that Charlton Heston ought to be shot with a .44-caliber Bulldog-David Berkowitz's weapon. He later ambiguously backed away from both of these remarks, saying, for instance, that he had been "only joking" about the shooting of Heston and that he had intended to be "ironic."

At his best, as in the early films School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), and Jungle Fever (1991), Lee used a similar sort of ambiguity to qualify the radical statements he almost made. Was it right for young black men to sacrifice their chances for an education and thus for personal success in order to protest against apartheid? Was "the right thing" for them to express their anger at bigotry and social injustice by rioting or not? Was interracial romance between blacks and whites to be encouraged or deplored? Viewers of these movies could not be entirely sure which way they were being led because Lee himself was not sure.