Spike Lee’s Earlier Films Work Up to ‘Malcolm X’

One thing about Spike Lee, he generates shock waves. Unlike most filmmakers, his ripples start in the pop culture and swell right into the realm of public debate.

Look at the sprawling, forceful “Malcolm X.” Lee’s 3 1/2-hour take on the ambiguous black leader has inspired countless newspaper and magazine articles on his life and what he means to contemporary society. Even “Nightline” reflected on him, with Ted Koppel observing black and white students as they argued whether Malcolm X was a racist and if he’s now a healing symbol for an anxious age.

It’s not the first time Lee has been the catalyst for hearings on what it means to be black in America, and how whites fit into that perplexing equation.

His influence is strikingly broad, having grown steadily since his first commercial film, “She’s Gotta Have It.”

“She’s Gotta Have It” (which is on video, as are all Lee’s movies), released in 1986, is small-frame and sloppy, but it tickles in unsuspecting spots, tweaking our notions of sexual stereotyping along the way. The story centers on a randy black woman with three black boyfriends. They’re crazy about her, but she isn’t sure about them. One thing she is sure about is sex. And variety. She’s gotta have it--with all three.

Lee revealed his ability to turn apparently simple situations into streetwise comic opera. The language is hip and vervy, and the grainy black-and-white imagery has a loose, here-and-now aura to it. Lee doesn’t pull everything together--the resolutions are prosaic when the rest of the picture isn’t--but “She’s Gotta Have It” is fresh. And in its limited away it even provoked talk about how unfettered women can be when interpreting their sexual identity.

“School Daze,” Lee’s next film (a pseudo-musical!), is set in an all-black Southern college. The 1988 release is one of Lee’s weakest works, although it too raises some intriguing issues. He primarily wanted to contrast blacks who embrace their ethnicity with those who don’t, who would rather be more like the successful symbols they see in the white world.

Lee used an obvious statement in this conflict of assimilation and black pride. His white “wanna-bes” are lighter skinned and proud of it. The other students are darker and proud of it. Against this collision, funk-flavored tunes with edgy lyrics break out every now and then, but the movie fails to keep tune with itself. Ultimately, “School Daze” is more curious than compelling.

Then came “Do the Right Thing,” which is compelling, for a lot of reasons. The 1989 movie pushed Lee’s career up, up and away and secured a niche for him in the public arena. He moved from a black orientation to a black-white orientation with this one. The nature of race relations in America, touched on tangentially by Lee before, is met head-on.

The Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in “Do the Right Thing” is a barbed mesh of races, a place where the rainbow coalition is all but fractured. Blacks, whites and Asians mix uneasily in this Brooklyn neighborhood. It seems inevitable when a riot finally breaks out near the end. The movie’s incendiary imagery is dangerously sensational, and it makes you nervous, and that’s the point.

Lee admitted he was burned out following “Do the Right Thing.” His reaction was to take it easy, and what followed was a huge misstep in 1990 called “Mo’ Better Blues.” Lee said he wanted to do a real Hollywood movie, the kind with drama and not necessarily anything else, and it’s nice to think he found the experience liberating. But it’s the most self-conscious film he’s made. The plot follows a selfish sax man (Denzel Washington) with women trouble. The biggest surprise is how boring this is, a flaw not usually associated with Lee.

He rebounded with “Jungle Fever,” the 1991 release exploring an interracial affair. The controversy this time out was big, maybe not as with “Do the Right Thing,” but big nonetheless.

The movie, in its most honest passages, goes right to the heart of the matter, poking into the essence of black-white attitudes. Lee’s stance is often confused--the central relationship between a black man and white woman is doomed, but another one between a white man and black woman appears hopeful--and segregationist impulses dance with a more open view. But that’s not necessarily a severe fault line; it’s reflective of this ambivalent generation.

As with Lee’s better work, the film has vitality, perhaps his greatest accomplishment as a director attempting to mingle entertainment with sociological art. Lee’s thinking (at least what ends up in his movies) on profound subjects may not go much deeper than good conversation at a dinner party, but it tends to inspire more, much more, later. There’s value in that resonance.