This is the first in my bi-monthly 2019 viewing series devoted to six Spike Lee features I haven't yet seen.I'm off and running on my new Spike Lee series. This despite wondering if my very first target, She's Gotta Have It, would actually be available in an easily accessible way.
I had no real reason to suspect it wouldn't be, except for the general sense of Murphy's Law pessimism that states that as soon as you announce plans to watch certain movies, they become unavailable if they weren't already. In the end, though, She's Gotta Have It ended up being as easy to find as flicking over to Netflix. Which makes sense, I guess, given that Netflix has a TV show version of the movie that got released a couple years ago.
Despite having heard a discussion of that show on The Slate Culture Gabfest, I didn't really know a thing about the movie before I started watching. I didn't even know that the title was a reference to a woman's insatiable sexual appetite, though once I did figure that out, I could easily retrofit the title to some of the discussion of the show on the podcast. (Since I hadn't watched the show I had been sort of "listening loosely," as I call it, to that particular discussion.)
Even in his first feature film, Spike Lee came in with a style that was easily recognizeable as the progenitor to all this future creative choices. Early on there are still images of his beloved Brooklyn scored to forlorn jazz music. If it hadn't been set in Colorado, we could very well have seen that same approach in BlacKkKlansman, it is so trademark Lee.
The film's black-and-white aesthetic, though, put me in mind of a different one of Lee's independent film contemporaries, that being Jim Jarmusch. Unfortunately, that's not a compliment in this case. Although only one of these was actually black-and-white, She's Gotta Have It put me in mind of Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Permanent Vacation, two Jarmusch films for which I have very little affection. That is to say, She's Gotta Have It felt aimless and cerebral, at times more fartsy than artsy, and not going anywhere fast.
Fortunately, that's when I fell asleep.
When I resumed the movie at the 38-minute mark the next night, Monday night, it really picked up and took shape for me. You could just say I was too tired to get in its groove on Sunday night, but I do think this is a movie that kind of ambles out of the gate and finds its stride as it goes. Not until just after that 38-minute mark did I get the film's central conceit, or that it even had one. It was then that I figured out that this was a movie about a woman with multiple partners, three in particular: Tommy Hicks' Jamie, John Canada Terrell's Greer and Lee's own most famous creation, Mars Blackmon. (More famous than Mookie? I guess we could debate that, though Mookie did not appear in a bunch of Nike commercials.) The dynamics that flow from that scenario are pretty rich.
Let's talk about that woman. Her name is Nola Darling, and she's played by Tracy Camilla Johns. For all that Nola Darling attains a certain kind of iconic status in this film, enough to make a new series about her 30 years later, Johns did not benefit from it. Perhaps we should credit whatever endured about Nola to Lee's writing rather than Johns' charisma, because she hasn't had much of a career since this movie put her on the map. And indeed she does strike a few false notes over the course of the film, so maybe she just wasn't cut out for acting.
The character, though, is certainly an interesting one. There's a temptation in watching She's Gotta Have It to label it as a prime example of Lee's problems with writing female characters, or perhaps to chastise Lee for a love of the naked female body, as some of the shots of Johns' breasts in this film preview those of Rosie Perez' in Do the Right Thing. (I should add, though, that random nudity was not considered as gratuitous then as it is now.) And this is, after all, the story of a woman whose sex drive leads her to constantly search for new ways of gratifying herself. In short, a slut, before slut shaming was a thing.
But there's something undeniably sex positive about the portrayal of Nola as well. She likes dick, sure, but she likes it in a way that is unapologetic. Neither does this make her a bitch or unfeeling. She genuinely cares about her three suitors, though if forced to pick she can figure out which one she likes best. As she is completely up front with them about their competition, both that they have it and and what the strengths and weaknesses of that competition is, she's engaged in a kind of radical honesty with both them and with herself. She knows who she is and she knows what she wants, and no man is going to tell her differently.
There is a scene that got mentioned on the podcast that is somewhat problematic, which the podcasters described as a rape scene, but one that I would be more likely to characterize as rough sex. When Jamie, whose affections for her are the purest, gets fed up with the way she's keeping him like a yo yo on a string, he accuses her of only wanting him to fuck her, not to make love to her. To demonstrate his point, he kind of throws her onto the bed and penetrates her from behind.
The thing is, it's part of the sex positivity that defines Nola that she actually kind of does want that and that this scenario is not entirely unwelcome to her. That's very close to saying "she's asking for it" or "she likes it" in a way some kind of Brett Kavanaugh douchebag would say it, but I think in this scenario you really do have to consider the person it's happening to. Nola is so perfectly in control of when she has sex and what kind of sex she has that it's kind of an insult to her to suggest that she'd let anything happen to her in the bedroom that she didn't want to happen. It's not that she couldn't be overpowered by someone, but that that she's such a strong woman that it's pretty unlikely to happen. She's also so good at seducing the men in her life that any kind of petulant sexual aggression they display is really an expression of the kind of puppy dog love they feel for her.
I can't say the portrayal of Nola's sexuality is entirely unproblematic, but there is definitely something progressive about Lee's choice to make this material the subject of his first movie. Nola really does come off well, and fully in control of her own destiny, while the men seem, well, petulant.
I enjoyed the odd kind of camaraderie between the men, as well. Nola has already told them about each other, and I think they know each other as well, but she forces the issue even further by inviting them all to a Thanksgiving dinner together. By the very polygamous conditions Nola has established, they are stripped of their natural male instinct to fight and hurt one another in the attempt to mark their territory. Simply put, she's never given them any illusions that they possess her. So they resort to passive aggressive tactics to get a leg up, and these morph into a type of bond informed by gallows humor and a sense of being all in this together.
I also really enjoyed a little touch Lee throws in over the credits. He gives each of his primary speaking roles a clapperboard with their name on it, and a chance to bring down the clapper while saying their names and throwing in a few humorous improvised comments. It gives the sense that this was a little family making this movie and they all had a lot of fun making it.
As for Lee himself? I enjoyed his Mars, but I'm still partial to Mookie.
In April I'll move on to School Daze.
No comments:
Post a Comment