Mulling the Riddle of Two Spike Lees

Almost from the time he began 14 years ago with “She’s Gotta Have It,” I’ve wondered whether there were two Spike Lees making his movies. One Spike was a romantic sensualist, in love with color, movement and shadow, capable of immersing his camera deep in the raw processes of sex and other physical exertions for their own sake.

That Spike doesn’t get talked about as often as the other Spike--the one who insists on dispensing tough lessons to his audiences, slapping their faces with cold, wet towels, dripping with reality.

It often seems to me that one of these Spikes--the sensualist or the lecturer--keeps getting in the way of the other, playing a kind of semi-friendly, elbow-to-elbow, one-on-one pickup game as the movies unravel, spin out and explode. Neither of these Spikes seems to have much in common except for the manner in which they conspire to keep a third Spike Lee from coming into being--one who can tell a story straight and true without making such a mess of things at the end.

Sensualist and lecturer came as close as they ever did in “Jungle Fever” (1991). Yet here, as in many of his films since, Lee’s distance from his characters as complex human beings becomes frustratingly noticeable. There are “stories” in these movies. But they become less important to him than the ideas, contradictions, visceral jolts, attitudes and platitudes he piles on to the weak backs of these narratives like unpaid bills.

You get the feeling he’s trying to work out things in his own mind by renting all of ours for a while. That’s all well and good, but even the most vivid of his characters seem like relative throwaways, either crushed by didacticism or swamped by lush, empty imagery.

The process can often be as exciting as it is exhausting. Even when he has other people’s stories to tell, as with “Malcolm X” (1992) or the documentary “4 Little Girls” (1997), we’re not altogether spared from Lee’s thrashings. But those movies glow brighter than others in Lee’s body of work. I wouldn’t put last year’s “Summer of Sam” in this company. But this was one of those occasions when the sensualist was as ferociously charged as the lecturer, permitting some savage, exuberant fun before the usual messy crash at the end.

Now comes “Bamboozled”--an occasion for the lecturer to really let us have it in the teeth. The notion of placing blackface minstrelsy within the contexts of both African American upward mobility and media manipulation is juicy with potential. And the concept alone--Harvard-educated black TV producer puts on wildly successful “coon show,” as it is referred to in the film--is enough to sting the eyes.

Yet Lee, once again, indulges in sensory overload, piling on a parade of “types” ranging from the white, hip-hop-loving (“Yo, I’m blacker than you!”) network VP to the Mau Mau street insurgents who are set up to challenge the neo-blackface phenomenon, yet come on like sorry stereotypes themselves. Even they have to choke back their laughter, and we (I guess) have to choke back our laughter at them. Or do we? And what does the producer, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans, himself enacting a stereotype), really think of what he’s done? Lee gives wildly varying clues. But in Delacroix, he aims for a complexity he’s finally incapable of bringing across.

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There isn’t a well-developed character anywhere, except for the black producer’s assistant (hardly anyone seems to notice how good Jada Pinkett-Smith is in this role) whose personal dilemma over the show’s success should be at the movie’s heart. But Lee keeps her just out of reach, making her simply another component of his swirling, self-contradictory thought processes. By the end, she’s just part of the mess that the director insists we sort through for ourselves. He’d like us to be, at the very least, angry over what we’ve just seen. I am. But not in the way he intends.

(Oh, by the way: Those who believe this to be the best satire on race and media manipulation by an African American director are urged to head straight to their nearest video store and rent Reginald Hudlin’s “The Great White Hype” from 1996. It’s not only a leaner, richer model of its too-rare species, but makes better use of Wayans’ talents.)

A squandered opportunity such as “Bamboozled” makes me wish that Lee would step down from the lectern and realize that one can best teach a lesson by not seeming to teach at all. The lesson Lee needs to learn could be obtained from his own “The Original Kings of Comedy,” in which those four masterly raconteurs he captures in concert make cogent, telling points by just kicking back, telling their stories.

Maybe Lee doesn’t think he can continue to be heavy by traveling lighter. But I’m still rooting for him to try.