Come Get Your Uncle. The Tragedy That Is Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq

 

When I was an acting student one of the most valuable lessons I learned was about “pushing”. Forcing emotion. The difference between a “yell” and a “shout” or a “scream” and a “cry”. The former is more often than not the qualities of a performance that is not rooted, does not trust itself and is not working from inner truth and if you could achieve the later in your acting people would connect with the emotion you were representing and not feel like they were being forced to understand an experience that is very common and human – the feeling of pain and anguish. They would like you better because you are not insulting their intelligence. We all know emotion, recognize it, no need to make it any bigger than it is, you could stylize it to give a certain quality relevant to the piece but you must always remember to work from truth, always. So if Spike Lee’s film Chi-Raq was an acting student my first note would be…..stop pushing, your audience is smarter than you think.

From the very start of Chi-Raq Spike Lee is dictating to me how I am supposed to feel about a situation that much of us understand, some as well as Spike and many of us even more than Spike, the issue of violence in America and in particular the city of Chicago. But the initial problem with the film is that its built on one huge false pretense, the myth of how he sees to be a “new” phenomena of “Black on Black crime” – which has been proven to be a myth of white supremacist construction. So no wonder he is forced to yell it at us like he is damn College Football coach, he has nothing to back up this pretense with and thus the film does not trust itself, it over performs because it has to conjure up feeling for an idea that actually isn’t real. Is the violence in Chicago real? You damn right, but why is it happening? Spike fails in this as he sits us down for 2 hours, squeezes out all the genuine emotion that can be found in Chicago’s current situation and yells at us statements of why we as a people don’t have our shit together, never once does he ask any fundamental questions of how we got here, he never even shows us what Chicago was, what glory was “lost” outside of a Michael Jordan statue – and I doubt if you ask any real Black Chi-Town native they would say that is a leading symbol of their cities pride. Why he doesn’t show it? Cause he doesn’t know what it is and frankly has no interest in Chicago outside of that fact he can take whats happening there and in the ghettoes of America and make it an opportunity to grand stand and scream his moral judgements like a high class preacher. And now I understand why Chicagoans like Rhymefest and Chance the Rapper have been against this film and I stand with them in full support after seeing it.

Chi-Raq was an offensive experience for me. Why? Because there was no conversation being had. We are berated and told to “Wake Up”. He forces his actors into the quagmire of over performance to compensate for a script and premise that is one-dimensional, they have to “push” their performances (Angela Basset was so hard to watch) because there is nothing to draw from in the text that is constructed with the logic of an after school special. The only actors who seem to understand what they are acting in are Wesley Snipes, who gives a strange but often well done performance rooted in absurdism and Dave Chapelle who appears in one quite funny scene – probably one of my two out loud chuckles – but we shouldn’t be surprised since Dave is one of our greatest satirists. It is sad because if Spike would have chosen to not act like he has all the answers and asked questions of us and himself as an American and Black Male he could have had the chance to do something extremely investigative. Instead he hides behind the premise of a classical greek play and the banner of satire to shield himself from criticism for once again, limiting women’s agency to their sexuality and mens weakness to their penis. And he never gets to any roots, he skirts (pun intended) and hides by giving a finger snap and booty swing in chorus while 70’s soul music plays (I swear I was watching Tyler Perry at moments – the irony), a growling hood face that is holding a gun or sexing a half naked Black woman or a speech by a do-gooder white preacher that is the only moment where structural racism is mentioned (yup) yet he never works structural racism into the structure of his drama! He feels comfortable doing this because of his deflector, so when someone critiques his intentions based on what they saw he or his supporters can say back “Well…its a satire!”. Its cheap, something I would expect from someone like….well….Quentin Tarantino. There goes that thing called irony again.

But where Chi-Raq was the most head splitting and frankly insulting is the idea of how Black people can solve their own problem of what Jon Cusack’s white preacher calls in the film “self inflicted genocide”. Spike placates the audience several times by yelling Black Lives Matter, mentioning Dylan Roof or Sandy Hook, throwing Tamir Rice’s name and flipping in a Mike Brown mention in one of his hoot and hollering speeches, but at the end he throws the onus of the responsibility for the end of community violence on Black people. That if we want the trauma centers, better schools, hospitals and for the establishment to respect and help our community we must pull our pants up, get on our knees, beg for forgiveness and redeem ourselves! Structural racism yeah its a factor…but…but….yall negroes gotta stop acting like savages first! Then you can get what you want, look Lysistrata did!!!!! Why can’t y’all negroes??!!?? WAKE UP!! This is where the satire fails miserably. Hollywood Shuffle, Network, Weekend, Dr. Strangelove, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Chameleon Street, even Spikes flawed but strong film Bamboozled and other truly great social satires in cinema saw the trap in preaching the redemptive solution, they knew their power was simply in presenting the situation, the pain these conflicts cause and the river of shit that humanity is in and that the audience needs to have a sit down and start having some honest conversations so we can find the solution amongst each other. Chi-Raq is not a conversation starter, its taking the conversation back to Bill Cosby finger waving at stupid negroes during college commencements why they are not getting ahead. Chi-Raq is Uncle Ruckus crashing the conversation with dated material. And thus is completely irrelevant and sadly has to make us question Spike’s relevance as a Filmmaker outside of his past work. (Trust me, that was not an easy phrase to type)

Chicago deserved better than what Spike Lee gave them, he exploited their harsh situation so he could grandstand and he should be held to task for it. I didn’t think Spike could disappoint me more after Red Hook Summer, I was wrong…because now he has not only made a bad film, but he has also made an offensive one.

Mtume Gant 12/8/15