Is Spike Lee for real, or just taking the piss out of himself?

This post is not going to comment on the merits of Spike Lee's remake of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low as a movie. I'm still trying to sort out how much I like Highest 2 Lowest, but the answer is "at least somewhat." 

No, this post is about how the movie has an excessive axe to grind with Boston sports.

If you pay even half attention to the NBA, you know Spike Lee is a diehard New York Knicks fan. The camera always goes to him on the sidelines, raising his arms in disbelief if a call goes against his team, and looking vaguely delirious when the Knicks are on a run. In fact, Lee almost saw his dream of the Knicks doing -- well, anything -- come true this year, but they were KO'd by the Pacers in the conference finals. (After beating my Boston Celtics.)

Lee clearly had Highest 2 Lowest in the can before the Celtics and Knicks met in May. In fact, H2L debuted at Cannes that same month, with Lee decked out in Knicks colors as part of his red carpet tuxedo. 

But he was sure to put some Celtics hate into this movie before he wrapped it. (The Celtics had already won last year's championship by then, I would guess.) 

So one of the first plot points involves Denzel Washington's character telling his son to take off his green headband because he doesn't want him to wear those colors in his house. It's a headband his son wears to a basketball practice, and then exchanges with his friend, leading the wrong kid to get kidnapped and the plot mechanics to get moving. 

But that scene is not enough. Coaching the practice -- actually a basketball camp, I'm reading -- is former NBA player Rick Fox, playing himself. If you are not familiar with Rick Fox, he was drafted by the Celtics in 1991 and played with them until 1997. At which point he moved to the Lakers and played with them for almost exactly the second half of his career before retiring in 2004. In a fairly clear instance of "right place, right time," Fox -- a decent NBA player but not a difference maker -- was on the Lakers for their run of three straight championships in the teams led by Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal. So of course, "former Laker" is the identity Fox adopts most, and I get that. 

Lee, though, is not satisfied with the fact that Fox switched from the Celtics to the Lakers -- who are actually the Celtics' rivals, not the Knicks -- and has to get Fox to throw some shade the Celtics' way. 

Before that there's a little self-deprecation on Lee's part. The son character is mixing it up with Coach Fox a bit, with Fox telling him not to talk trash when the Lakers (who aren't mentioned by name) have 17 championship and his Knicks only have two. But the Celtics part comes in later.

When the son goes missing -- at this point, they think Washington's actual son has been kidnapped, and not his driver's son -- detectives show up to ask Fox questions. One asks Fox for an autograph. Fox offers an autograph to the other, who says "No thanks." The first detective explains of his partner: "Celtics fan." Fox rejoins: "It figures."

It figures? It figures this cretin would like the team that drafted him and gave him his earliest opportunities in the NBA? It figures?

This all rings a little hollow because Knick fans' hatred of the Celtics is pretty much a one-way street. Knicks fans consider the Celtics their rivals, but the reverse is not true. The Celtics have been so much more consequential than the Knicks over the history of the two franchises that this year's loss in the playoffs is literally the only time I can remember the Knicks breaking our hearts. The Lakers are the Celtics' real rivals. (So the scene where Lee gets Fox to lord the Lakers' success over this character, a Knick fan, is kind of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" territory). 

It's kind of like what Yankee fans (say they) feel about the Red Sox as rivals -- you can't truly be rivals if one team just has so much more success than the other. The Yankees are on 27 world championships while the Red Sox are on only nine. Similarly, the Celtics have even one more championship than the Lakers, 18 to 17, but that makes 18 to 2 over the Knicks -- way more lopsided than the Yankee-Red Sox imbalance. (And that's what also makes the Celtics-Lakers rivalry so good.)

But wait there's a lot more to say about the Yankees-Red Sox within Highest 2 Lowest, which reveals how the Red Sox have indeed gotten under the skin of Yankee fans in the past 25 years, when the former has a 4-1 edge in championships. I think we can get to that now. 

Lee is less known as a Yankee fan, but he is that too. Actually, I feel like he has most of his affinity for the Brooklyn Dodgers, because Brooklyn is his hood, but the Brooklyn Dodgers haven't been a thing for about 65 years. So maybe he's subsequently adopted the Yankees as a team that is actually, you know, in New York.

After the Celtics stuff in Highest 2 Lowest is done, Lee shifts to a lot of loving shots of Yankee icons and Yankee Stadium, incorporated a little more smoothly than that sounds, in a way similar to how he incorporates images of Black musicians that he loves, in this and other films. But then the Boston sports hatred becomes textual again.

The mid-film centerpiece is a planned money drop from a New York subway -- the 4 train, I believe, since that's the one that goes from Manhattan to Yankee Stadium. Aboard this train are a bunch of people in Yankee caps (which include Denzel). You'd see this on an ordinary day in New York, but maybe not with quite this concentration, as these fans are on their way to the Bronx to see the Yankees. Presumably the Yankees are supposed to be playing the Red Sox, but you never know -- "Boston sucks" chants break out among Yankee fans when they get together, even when they're not playing the Red Sox. 

But just because these chants break out in real life does not necessarily mean you have to make them such a focal point of your movie.

Indeed, variations on the "Boston sucks" chant continue for more than five minutes of screen time during this scene of cross-cutting between the subway, a Puerto Rican pride festival, and at least one other location, possibly involving police assembling to intervene with the drop. At one point, the emergency brake is pulled on the train, and the chant -- led by John Turturro's brother Nicholas -- switches to:

"Boston pulled the motherfucking emergency break! Boston pulled the motherfucking emergency break!"

And here's where I'm wondering if Lee is just taking the piss.

My premise this whole post has been that Lee is myopic in some essential way, as all diehard sports fans are, and he believes that the Yankees and Knicks are fundamentally good and the Red Sox and Celtics are fundamentally evil. (If we're talking fundamental values, though, the Yankees were the fascists who did not allow their players to have facial hair other than moustaches until this year.) I mean, if you bleed for your team, I think you really are blind to the fact that the reasons to root for these uniforms are as arbitrary as where you happened to be born. 

But the emergency brake line makes me wonder. Clearly it's intentionally comedic -- you could never really get people on a subway to chant such a complicated and vulgar phrase in unison, especially when there would be all ages of people and all comfort levels with profanity present in that train car. But is he also having a little fun at the expense of Yankee fans? 

If you're going to blame the Boston Red Sox for something as obviously incorrect as a train stopping on the tracks, doesn't it undermine the validity of everything else you're chanting about?

One thing that's clear, though, is that Lee can't let his sports hangups go. 

Another thing that's clear is that this sort of shit talking still works on me, meaning I'm no better than he is.

Why else would I write a piece like this if this comparatively small part of Highest 2 Lowest hadn't actually bothered me on some level? 

And in that spirit, I proudly note this: I am writing this post on YED.

If you don't know what "YED" is, that would not surprise me, because this is a movie blog, not a sports blog. But even if you are a baseball fan, you might not know what this acronym means, unless you are embroiled within this bitter rivalry enough to have picked up on its finer details.

"YED" is an abbreviation of "Yankee Elimination Day." It is the day we celebrate each year -- well, most years, and every year since 2001 with the one exception of 2009 -- when the Yankees are officially eliminated from playoff contention, from their ability to win that 28th ring. (I had a brief "argument" on Facebook with a friend who said it should be Yankees, with an S, Elimination Day. He's wrong.)

So yes, earlier today Australian time, the Toronto Blue Jays punched their ticket to the American League Championship Series for the first time since 2016 by taking out the Yankees by a 5-2 score and winning the American League Division Series 3-1. This after, I should note, the Yankees beat the Red Sox 2 games to 1 in the Wild Card Series the previous round, the Yankees winning two in a row after the Red Sox won the first game to push them to the brink of elimination.

Given that the Yankees got spanked in the first two games against Toronto and their one win required a comeback from being down 6-1, I'd say sorry, Mr. Lee -- the Red Sox may suck, but if so, the Yankees do not suck less than by a margin that is statistically significant.