TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061791/0617420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 15KB | 293 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 64

Boyz Of New Black City


Spike Lee's Jungle Fever heads a wave of films that convey the
harsh truths of ghetto rage and anguish

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Pat Cole/Los Angeles


    On a New York City subway train stocked with edgy white
folks and one slouched and stuporous young black man, three
inner-city toughs storm into the car. They shout at the black
rider, then drag him to the floor and stomp on his face. The
other passengers cringe, until the pummeling abruptly ceases and
all four men rise smiling, as if for a curtain call. "Ladies and
gentlemen!" one of the thugs intones with cultured geniality.
"You have just witnessed another performance of Ghetto Theater."

    Hangin' with the Homeboys, the engaging new black-Hispanic
comedy in which this scene appears, isn't the only place you can
catch some provocative episodes of ghetto theater. The pageant
of inner-city anger and anguish is playing at a theater near
you. Suddenly, it seems, dozens of films by black directors are
in circulation, from artistic achievements like Charles
Burnett's family drama To Sleep with Anger (now on video) to
breakthrough hits like Mario Van Peebles' dope opera New Jack
City, the year's fourth highest grossing picture. Some of the
black films pack promise, others just threaten -- but all are
tonics to a movie industry that otherwise looks ready to doze
off into a coma of retreads and revisionism.

    One man created the market for black-movie rage: Spike
Lee. This acerbic auteur is probably best known as Michael
Jordan's best pal Mars Blackmon, the hyperverbal izing Nike
footwear flack on TV. But with scathing screeds like Do the
Right Thing (1989) and the current Jungle Fever, Lee, 34, has
carved a niche for fierce minority movies -- a niche that can
be enlarged by other directors who are even younger, more
choleric, closer to the action if not to the edge. Call them the
Spikettes.

    Lee's movies and prickly attitude make Hollywood squirm,
but the town recognizes his value. "Spike put this trend in
vogue," says Mark Canton, executive vice president at Warner
Bros. "His talent opened the door for others." Van Peebles
testifies, "If it weren't for Spike, I wouldn't be here." Lee
is happy to have the brotherhood's company: "There are some
people out there who were just meant to make films. That's the
sense I get."

    The undeniable sense is of a flood of ambitious "race
movies" -- showing, just now, more passion than art -- where a
year ago there was only a trickle. It is as though American
moviegoers had been introduced to a body of films from a
previously obscure locale: the teeming, forlorn outpost known
as New Black City.

    A few of the New Black City pictures dance lightly around
searing social dilemmas. Bill Duke's A Rage in Harlem is an
old-fashioned gangster movie, content to showcase Robin Givens'
pert charms. And Michael Schultz's Livin' Large!, a kind of
Homeboy Alone, hatches broad but pointed comedy from the
perspective of a black street reporter (Terrence (("T.C."))
Carson) who lands a job with an all-white news team. But most
of the films sketch, in furious strokes, a portrait of the
ghetto and of its most feared and hopeless denizen, the black
male.

    In Straight Out of Brooklyn, a heart cry from Matty Rich,
19, life crushes everyone. It has drained the teenage hero's
father, who takes his bitterness out on the woman he loves.
Daddy has whupped Mama so many times that her insides are on the
outside. She wears her bruises like a badge of the black woman's
burden. In one devastating montage, Rich shows a series of row
houses, apartment courtyards, projects. From inside each one a
man yells at a woman, and something breaks. It is enough to
drive a decent boy like Dennis to grand theft to get straight
out of Brooklyn. At the end of Brooklyn, two major characters
die, simultaneously though apart. No twist of plot is too
improbable for the makers of New Black City films, because they
know that no tragedy is uncommon to the ghetto.

    John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood is another slice of
fictionalized autobiography: a life story that could have been
a death warrant. The boys in the neighborhood must wonder if
they have any choice but dying poor from drugs or dying rich
selling them. Lame as moviemaking craft, the picture is
nonetheless a harrowing document true to the director's
south-central Los Angeles milieu; he paints it black. Boyz N the
Hood functions both as a condemnation of the world outside any
big-city movie house and as an inspiration to those aspiring
outsiders who would change history by filming it.

    In mainstream movies a generation ago, Sidney Poitier was
Hollywood's Martin Luther King Jr. Poitier's screen characters
were as noble as any blond hero -- nobler, because they
withstood and deflected so much unjustified abuse. But the role
of soulful sufferer was a dead end for blacks on both sides of
the movie screen. Intransigent white America could not be
persuaded to lift blacks to equality. Could the system then be
scared into action? The Watts and Newark riots of the mid-'60s
may have been mainly fratricidal, and the
your-money-or-your-wife taunts of the Black Panthers may have
been mainly street theater, but they lent an image of the black
man as a figure of strength and menace. We don't want to be you,
these blacks told whites; we want to be us. And we be bad.

    Baadasssss, as in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which
Melvin Van Peebles (Mario's father) made in 1971. Sex-sated and
X-rated, Sweetback trumpeted the bustling era of blaxploitation
films. Their heroes were no lilies of the field. They dealt
drugs (Super Fly) or tracked down drug dealers (Shaft). Short
on artistry but long on verve, these violent epics were
significant for the same reason they remained, in every sense,
a minority entertainment: they were movies made not only for
blacks but, often, by them. African-American filmmakers had
kicked their foot through the industry's back door.

    That didn't last. A raunchier brand of action comedy
co-opted the blaxploitation genre; Schwarzenegger and other
supertough white dudes won the affections of the black audience.
And still Hollywood would not make movies that scanned the
spectrum of African-American life. The top black stars of the
'80s, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, were segregated from many
hero roles because they were seen only as inspired clowns. In
buddy movies with white co-stars, they rarely got the girl --
any girl. They were Hollywood's best-paid second-class citizens.

    As it was in movies, so it was in other areas of pop
culture such as music, TV and sports. A few blacks were revered
in a few fields; many others were relegated to the back of the
bus, with little to do but toss epithets and stink bombs at the
whites up front. The color-blind society that King dreamed of
is still only a dream. Blacks can't shed their skin, and whites
can't shed their guilt and fear: guilt over the literal and
social enslavement of black Americans, and fear at the violent
revenge taken by the black men at the heart of a white man's
nightmare. Everybody has known this for years, even in
Hollywood. But for years too, only Spike Lee was making films
about it.

    Lee must have been doing something right; he certainly
made enough enemies. If people weren't annoyed by his
blacker-than-thou dissing of Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg and Whitney
Houston, they were vexed by Lee's movies. A few reviewers
knocked his first feature, She's Gotta Have It, for the vapidity
and cupidity of the female lead. "I wanted to tell the story of
a black woman who was living her life as a man," Lee says,
"except that she was honest about it."

    School Daze, his musical-comedy satire of social climbing
at a black college, raised black hackles for addressing an
embarrassing topic. "You hear stuff about the other people
holding us back," says Lee. "But it's often our own black folk
that get down on us."

    Do the Right Thing had critics predicting that the film
would foment wildings by blacks against whites. Racial violence
did erupt in Brooklyn's Bensonhurst neighborhood that summer,
but the victim was a black man, Yusuf Hawkins, whose murder
inspired Jungle Fever. "He was killed for supposedly coming to
visit ((a young Italian-American woman))," Lee notes, "when all
he wanted to do was look at a used car. But sex and racism have
always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men
who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into
being was to protect white Southern women."

    Last year's Mo' Better Blues, a dyspeptic study of a
musician who cares only for his trumpet and his ego, took heat
for its sardonic depiction of two Jewish businessmen. Lee had
an answer for that charge too. He wanted to open Jungle Fever
with advice to those who accused him of anti-Semitism: "They can
kiss my black ass." After discussions with his patrons at
Universal, the prologue was cut, but the director is typically
unrepentant. "They can kiss my black ass two times," he avers.

    What remains of Jungle Fever is controversial enough. Some
people have urged a boycott because, they allege, the film puts
down black women. Lee is hardly unique among black directors
(or, notoriously, black rap artists) in viewing woman as
something between an enemy and an enigma. In Boyz N the Hood,
most of the women are shown as doped-up, career-obsessed or
irrelevant to the man's work of raising a son in an American war
zone.

    However valid the charge against the women in Lee's
earlier films, it is misplaced in Jungle Fever. In a "war
council," black women discuss the lure of white men and the
hierarchy of skin tone. "I'm going for a true tribesman," one
woman says. Another (played by Lonette McKee), deemed more
attractive to whites and blacks because she has light skin and
Caucasian features, decries her isolation from both worlds.

    This character has reason for her rancor. Her architect
husband, Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes), has wandered into the
sexual curiosity of his Italian-American secretary, Angie Tucci
(Annabella Sciorra). Their affair, which they confide to
friends, is soon the talk -- the shout -- of their respective
neighborhoods, Sugar Hill in Harlem and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn.
The animosities are mirrored in two subplots. Angie's sweet,
nerdy friend Paulie (John Turturro) pursues a romance with a
classy black woman (Tyra Ferrell). And Flipper's crackhead
brother (Samuel L. Jackson) collides with his Bible-bred parents
(Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee).

    Like Do the Right Thing, which began as a live-action
Sesame Street and then flipped out into a race riot, Jungle
Fever is really two movies in one: the first hour an essay on
various volatile issues, the second a dramatization of how these
issues inform and ruin ordinary lives. Lee tries hard to spread
the intensity, and the ignorance, judiciously. He lets a geek
chorus of Italian-American guys in Bensonhurst blame black men
for everything from Central Park rapes to the mongrelization of
jockdom. "They took our sports," one fellow grouses, "baseball,
football, basketball, boxing. What do we got left? Hockey?"

    What they have is the purest breed of prejudice. They hate
all blacks for the sins of some blacks; they resent the black
male for his perceived genital superiority. The film's title
announces as much. This is a story, Lee says, "about two people
who came together because of sexual mythology." The legend on
a jacket worn by one of Lee's colleagues at last month's Cannes
Film Festival put the matter bluntly: JUNGLE FEVER, OR FEAR OF
THE BIG BLACK DICK.

    But that's just sass. The movie is really about the ghetto
epidemic of drugs, an issue Lee has dodged until now. Less than
a Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, this is a Guess Who's Going to
Hell, because Jungle Fever locates its primal power in Fellini
esque scenes of Harlem crack palaces and epochal confrontations
between the drug-addicted and the drug-inflicted. The essential
action is not horizontal (mating games across color lines) but
vertical (poisoning the family tree, pitting father against
son). Who is sleeping with whom matters less here, as it should
anywhere, than the people who die and the things that kill them.

    As it spirals into the underworld of hatred and despair,
Jungle Fever kicks into movie overdrive. It establishes kinship
to those fervid '50s weepies directed with deadpan skill by
Douglas Sirk: All That Heaven Allows, with young Rock Hudson and
middle-aged Jane Wyman daring a love that flouts convention; and
Imitation of Life, in which wannabe white woman Susan Kohner
throws herself on her black mother's coffin and sobs out her
remorse to the throb of a Mahalia Jackson spiritual. Jungle
Fever is no less brazen -- or assured. A righteous man shoots
his deranged son, and the man's wife unleashes a scream that
blends with the gospel wail of . . . Mahalia Jackson. Here
Jungle Fever ascends fearlessly into the delirium of high
Hollywood melodrama: it's berserk Sirk.

    The thrill of hearing a chorus of urgent voices, like
those of Lee and the filmmakers who follow him, can carry with
it a demand for realism. Moviegoers may want each new film to
provide even more sensational ghetto revelations. But the new
generation of African-American filmmakers need be no more
shackled to the neighborhoods they escaped from than was Sirk,
born in Denmark, or Lee, born in Atlanta. Having proved they can
tell the stories they lived, they are now charged with spinning
more universal human metaphors onto celluloid. Even Lee will
make better films. His new competition will see to that.

    And the industry will see to it that they keep delivering
A-quality pictures on B-movie budgets. "All these films mean is
that Hollywood can make a dollar off of them," Lee says. "Black
films will be made as long as they make money." Just now he is
having trouble raising the $25 million or so he needs from the
studio producing his biopic of Malcolm X. "I need mo' money, mo'
money," he says, laughing. "I don't want the wrath of Allah
comin' down on Warner Bros.!"

    White moviegoers could use a little wrath these days, and
should not be shackled by Hollywood-worn notions of
entertainment. It's time to see if Ghetto Theater can play in
every American mall, and whether the mass audience can take
pleasure and pain in the bulletins from New Black City.