Scarlet Masque Theatre Journal New Beginnings and Fond Farewells Vol. 1 | Page 65
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his 1989 film Do the Right Thing . It provides ample analysis of the reasons why these critics
react as viscerally as they do, and provides evidence from the films themselves to suggest that
perhaps there is more complexity to them than they were given credit for at their initial
release.
Spike Lee’s Public Persona
Spike Lee’s films are carefully thought out representations of conflicting attitudes
toward extremely complicated issues like race and gender relations. Unfortunately for Lee, as
well as for his audience and the community he is at times perceived to speak for, the bombastic
director’s public behavior is not always as carefully thought out. When Do the Right Thing lost
the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989, Lee accused his critics of racism. In the
ensuing twenty-five years, as Jason Bailey of The Atlantic describes in his 2012 article “When
Spike Lee Became Scary”:
[Lee] has … said some unfortunate things: that kids should skip school to go
see Malcolm X , that he can't make an anti-Semitic film because Jewish people run
Hollywood ("and that's a fact"), that it's "not too far-fetched" that the New Orleans
levees were deliberately destroyed .
Apart from these comments, Lee, when asked in an interview with Entertainment
Weekly why he opted not to use a studio to help shoot his 2012 film Red Hook Summer ,
responded, “I didn't need a motherfucking studio telling me something about Red Hook! They
know nothing about black people! Nothing! And they're gonna give me notes about what a
13-year-old black boy and girl do in Red Hook? Fuck no!" He has called South Carolinian senator