Scarlet Masque Theatre Journal New Beginnings and Fond Farewells Vol. 1

Maloney 1 Will Maloney Professor Cherry THE-303-01 December 7 th , 2016 Critical Reception and Discussion of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing Since he began his directorial career at independent film festivals in the early 1980s, Spike Lee has been a polarizing figure. His latest full-length feature Chi-Raq , (2015), for example, which adapts the Greek comedy Lysistrata to the environment of gang violence prevalent in the neighborhoods of Chicago, was met with schizophrenic reviews. One Chicago Tribune reporter claimed the film “trades real lives for cheap laughs,” while a New York Times review touted it as “Mr. Lee doing his best work in years” (Ho, 2015, Dargis, 2015). As a side note, it is interesting to recognize how these opposite reactions seem to be place-specific—the scorching report from Chicago itself, while the more favorable one from a distance in New York City. Chi-Raq is by no means the only work of Lee’s to receive such fundamentally different interpretations. In fact, many of the criticisms Lee’s works in the 1980s and 1990s faced when they were released were scathing, even while later scholarship has shed light on more empathetic perspectives. Spike Lee himself has been called incendiary and pugnacious, a “race-baiter” and “white-people hater,” and at times his public behavior has the potential to be interpreted this way. This fire-starting interpretation of Lee becomes problematic, however, when it is the only lens through which his films are viewed—and reviewed. This essay, then, seeks to demonstrate the intricacies lost on movie critics who oversimplify Spike Lee’s work, focusing specifically on

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