Un-lee-shed: School Daze

This is the second in my 2019 series watching a Spike Lee movie I haven't seen every two months.

"Wake up!" the character played by Lauren Fishburne, then credited as Larry Fishburne, yells a number of times in a typically direct Spike Lee ending to School Daze. The message, I suppose, is that the students of historically black Mission College need to wake up to the ways they are selling out their own cultural history, turning a blind eye to important social movements, and generally treading water. Race is not explicitly referenced, though there is a definite fissure between black characters who have dark skin and those who have lighter skin, indicating that interracial relationships (wanted or otherwise) are indecently recent in the history of those family trees.

However, the kind of deflating aspect to what is obviously designed as a galvanizing moment is that it's not direct enough. Spike Lee tends to say things in a loud and unambiguous way, and usually it's not possible to mistake what he's saying. Here, though, it is. He's structured his narrative so that Fishburne can deliver a climactic two-word phrase that amounts to "check yourself before your wreck yourself," but the narrative leading up to that point has not clearly enough indicated what these characters need to check for.

The most dominant aspect of School Daze -- which I thought was set in a high school prior to watching it -- is its investigation of fraternities at Mission College, which also includes sororities, various hangers on, and those who set themselves up in opposition to the Greek system. It all comes back to the Greeks, though. So what you'd think Lee's message would be is that the conformity and blind obedience that goes along with the fraternity system is the thing Lee's shouting down, even if it's not the kind of Lee message we would ordinarily expect. Fraternities don't seem like they are, or have ever been, a hot-button issue for African Americans.

Except the sheer amount of time Lee spends with the Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity, led by the character played by Giancarlo Esposito among others, is a strange kind of endorsement of the various rites, rituals and humiliations associated with pledging a fraternity, which is happening for the entire running time of the movie. Lee himself even plays one of the "Gammites," as they are called -- the fraternity's pledges. He and Esposito are collaborators on the film's most shameful moment, when Esposito prostitutes out his own girlfriend (Tisha Campbell) so that Lee's character can lose his virginity on drop night. Clearly the movie does not support the actions of either of these guys, but it does not seem to frown on them as much as one would expect. It would be too simplistic to suggest that by playing one of these characters, Lee is suggesting it is something he as the director believes in, because I don't sense Lee needs to be the hero of his own films. But the whole thing is a bit problematic.

I've come in kind of sideways on School Daze, I suppose. I should tell you that it is not, primarily, a message movie, Fishburne's climactic theatrics notwithstanding. In fact, on the surface it reminded me a lot more of another movie with the word "Daze" in the title, though it would come after this: Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. School Daze is, at its core, a hangout movie, and in this respect it is quite fun.

In a form that was not present in his debut (She's Gotta Have It) but would come to be a defining characteristic of Lee's work, School Daze is an ensemble movie, one where you feel like you get to know a bit about a lot of different characters. It is also, for all intents and purposes, a musical, which I don't think Lee would return to until Chi-Raq (which I will also be seeing later in this series). Some of the numbers are typical musical numbers, where the characters break out of whatever everyday activity they were doing to sing and dance, and others are "diagetic musical numbers," in other words, performances that are experienced as performances by the characters. They are without exception fun and even sometimes poignant, and act as the lubricant between scenes of characters hanging out, sassing each other, and interfacing with those who oppose them.

There are a lot of familiar faces in this one, including three actors who would star in the TV show A Different World, most notably Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison. Hardison is, inexplicably, one of the top-billed in the cast, though he hardly has any lines. You've also got future Lee regulars like Roger Gunvere Smith, Bill Nunn and Ossie Davis, as well as multiple Lee siblings. Samuel L. Jackson even makes an appearance. This cross-section of charismatic actors I either already knew then, or have since come to know and love, just contributes to the sense of hanging out with friends for two hours, walking in their steps as they go through life in an Atlanta college.

The only reason why this is not fully satisfying on its own is you feel like Lee is trying to say more. He has a whole song devoted to differences in hair between light-skinned and dark-skinned people, and Fishburne's big political initiative is to protest the school's investment in South Africa, from which they need to disengage in the era of Apartheid. But Lee has not yet found the ideal way to streamline this content into a coherent message, so for the most part it just feels sprinkled over the proceedings at random. Which is why the big "Wake up!" ending feels like a bit of an anticlimax.

Still, this is a clear artistic and creative step forward from She's Gotta Have It and seems to lay the groundwork for what he was able to accomplish the following year in his masterpiece, Do the Right Thing. That alone makes it worth seeing.

It was poignant to watch this on the same day that I learned of John Singleton's death, as I think of Lee and Singleton as joint pioneers in a period of vital black cinema that began with Lee and which Singleton pushed forward significantly through Boyz N the Hood. That was also the movie where I was introduced to "Larry" Fishburne, who stars here. Singleton was not able to remain vital in the ways Lee has, as he steadily transitioned into more of a genre filmmaker. But he deserves credit for his role in this important historical moment, and it felt nice to pay a sort of tribute to him by watching School Daze, however accidental the tribute was.

In June I will jump forward to 1996 with Get on the Bus, pending availability.