Spike Lee Speaks... but Not for Everybody

"Imagery is everything" -- Spike Lee 11/11/10

MY JUDGMENT
I am regretful to say that I was extremely disappointed in Spike Lee. First, I can't believe we spent $30,000 to have someone come and talk about himself for an hour and answer personal questions for another one. What a scam. No wonder he didn't want anyone taking video? What does he have to hide? Is he so frightened of ruining his image or saying something embarrassing, or does he simply want people to continue to pay him thousands of dollars to sit in a chair and talk about his favorite topic: himself. Lee mentioned that the most difficult thing about making films is getting funding. I wonder how much of his own funds from these events he contributes.

So why is this leftist so bitter and cynical about such a daring filmmaker? Well, it doesn't help that he sued Viacom several years ago for "stealing" his name, Spike, for the rebranding of TNN as the "first network for men"--as if TV hasn't generally been for men to being with! (But they're not anti-feminist: just recently they put up a Top Seven Cutest Feminists list, explaining "Contrary to popular belief, attractive women are allowed to be feminists").

To make things worse, the Atlantic reported in a recent article that Lee has sold-out to the French-owned corporation, Absolut.

In June, writers and fans converged on the Brooklyn Lyceum, in Park Slope, for the fifth annual Brooklyn Blogfest. This year, for the first time, it had corporate sponsorship: Absolut. Not coincidentally, Lee was the featured speaker... As for how to keep Brooklyn a "rich source of material and inspiration," Lee called on the audience to blog about his new vodka and proposed that each neighborhood could come up with its own Absolut Brooklyn-based cocktail... Maybe Lee just really loves Brooklyn... But if that's the case, why didn't he team with one of the many great Brooklyn-born-and-bred breweries and distilleries?

Lee likes to portray himself as an enemy of gentrification and a defender of the traditional, Brooklyn vernacular. Instead, he's become a tool in the borough's commodification and the worst enemy of everything he once stood for.

In other words, I was bias already going in. Yet, this did not entirely roast my optimism that I would walk away with some new knowledge.

THE TALK
Lee's narrative was as follows: "Parents kill more dreams than anybody"--don't listen to their pressure to make money. You are most blessed when you are doing something you love. Don't surround yourself with negativity. Just do it, but never alone--you need to collaborate to be successful in the film industry. And most importantly *everyone needs to find their own way*; there is no formula (something several audience members apparently didn't hear). The biggest problem in the black community is crack, or at least it his symbol of what went wrong since the 1970s (he divides African-American history into B.C. and A.C). Nowadays, only 50% of black youth graduate high school and there are more black male young adults in prison than in college. We spend more on our prisons than on our education, and we house something like 25% of the world's prisoners (despite having only 5% its population), most of which are incarcerated for drugs.

Lee does not stop there. The problem, he says, isn't simply the war on drugs and anti-poor government policy, but the absence of black male figures. I'm with Lee here, certainly, Afro-Americans boys develop their concept of self through modeling figures in the house, community, and media. And this is where he really infuriated me. Ultimately what his diagnosis for the socio-political ills of Afro-American communities is the presence of a man in the home! Now perhaps this could include a grandfather or brother or older cousin, but these were not the examples he provided. Instead, he was referring to either husbands or boyfriends of single mothers--as if black women could not raise respectable children themselves, that they are deficient parents because of their gender. Would the same be said of a woman--that girls always need the presence of a woman in the home? No, because as Simone de Beavoir explains, women are considered the inessential.

My suspicions of the heterosexist implications and presuppositions of this statement (an insult to all lesbian sistahs out there) found further evidence in his response to a question about why there are not more good roles for black women. Very frankly he said, "black women need to write their own roles." In a single sentence, Lee purged himself and other screenwriters of the responsibility to create roles for his sistahs in the industry--and this after he was complaining of the institutional racism of the industry that keeps people of color out of top tier positions to grant funding to controversial and films that don't target a middle-class white audience!

I became even more suspicious after his uncritical response to one of the few good questions from the audience: what did he think of the Antoine Dodson's auto-tune sensation? His response: "It's funny!" The inquisitor was paralyzed in silence, waiting for some kind of explanation. Of course, things become un-funny once you have to explain them, but did he really ponder why he thought it was funny? Isn't he after all a cultural critic? Why does a cat got his tongue on this subject? Is there simply something he wishes to hold back so as not to say to tarnish his image?

Supposedly he was naturally funny; but the song was made about an interview in which he was intending to be anything but funny, to hold the attempted rapists accountable. As was mentioned towards the end of the discussion, one of the students said she found him really gay. Immediately, people started laughing and nodding, saying they didn't even think about that. Whether conscious or not, such sentiments are still homophobic. Why people laugh is less because he is black, but more so because he is flamboyant. He's a gay caricature to laugh at (as opposed to with--at least until he attained popstar status)... And to be honest, I find it funny too, but I am not satisfied with finding the humor as being "natural".

So is Spike Lee homophobic and dismissive of being an ally to women? I don't know. But that is the feeling I had walking out of there that night beyond my disappointment. Perhaps, I'm being overly critical and judgmental--I accept that. But I don't think my intuitions are so unfounded to make such critiques mere antagonism.

Disney's Animal Pedagogy

In class last week, we discussed Disney narratives complicity in heteropatriarchy and white racism. No surprise, other students were extremely resistant to recognizing any problems with Disney. Disney has done such an incredible job at hoodwinking the public of its innocence through its strict censoring and infiltration into the American family ethos, that it has become almost invulnerable to criticism, especially any criticism along the already taboo lines of thought on gender and race.

I was shocked that Abigail, normally a relatively progressive student in the class reacted with such vehement disgust that people would dare challenge Disney's mulitnational corporate media empire. All those gasps she made during the documentary I thought were disgust at having once been naive to the racism in the film, but no, it was because people attack the inventors of her childhood. Childhood. It's the closest to home, it is the home we discover ourselves thrown in; it's language (what Heidegger calls the "house of Being") the house of our narrative identities, the fertile soil of the roots of our subjectivities. To threaten and shame such "comfort food" (perhaps as much so as critiquing "meat") is to threaten identity, to throw one into self-criticism, to dare one with an opportunity to change, to open an abyss of possibility and an abject perspective to reassess one's child world. It is to choose bad faith, to choose cowardice over responsibility to at least critically reflect.

White Male Privilege of Naivete
Fortunately, this wasn't the first time I had been exposed to these criticisms of Disney. I had been reading Sociological Images for a couple years and connected to some other sources. For instance, Nostalgia Chick's take on Disney Princesses (Pocahantas, Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, and Hercules.):

One thing people have trouble wrapping their heads around is that racism need not be intentional and that context matters. Gwen at Sociological Images had this to say about the Princess and the Frog:

Depicting Cinderella as a maid doesn’t play into pre-existing stereotypes of White women; it’s just an individual portrayal. A Black character cast as a maid, to many people, reproduces an image of Black women that goes beyond the individual–whether the creators intend to or not, such images bring with them associations to the Mammy character and real oppression of African American women in a culture that saw them primarily as servants for more privileged groups.

In other words, depicting a white woman and a black woman as a servant will resonate with two very different historical and cultural contexts through which we make sens of the narrative, and that certain representations may be chosen simply because of implicit biases and correlations within world of narrative in which we live. White middle-class ablebodied heterosexual males, and the like, have certain privileges in which they take for granted their own race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc, something not afforded to the vast majority of the world. To become reactionary verses well-reasoned to such criticism is exposing a serious level of naivete.

While some have argued with films like Mulan and The Princess and the Frog, Disney has finally become more race conscious and more empowering to women, there are still issues. As Lisa from Sociological Images notes

But, to be fair, these princesses aren’t radical. They aren’t pushing the envelope of femininity. They are only reflecting the fact that ideal femininity in the West has changed such that the perfect woman now incorporates some masculine character traits. “Some” is the operative word here. Today’s ideal woman is still feminine, but she works, wears pants, and plays sports. She may even be a sports fan and drink beer. But she also preserves her femininity, especially those aspects of femininity that mark her as “for” a (just barely and totally benevolently of course) dominant male. She still doesn’t disagree too vigorously or laugh too loud. She marries a man who is slightly older, more educated, larger, taller, and makes a bit more money at his job that is just slightly higher prestige. And, no matter what, she looks, dresses, and moves in pretty, feminine ways.

Put another way, Disney's representation of princesses is lagging behind cultural attitudes about women rather than simply being ahead or even with the times. And this isn't saying much either, given that, in my opinion, our culture has become hypersexualizing of both men and women (and not in the liberatory sense, but the commodification sense) in addition to giving preferential treatment to the hyperfeminine and male archetypes).

Responses to my Classmates
I prodded Teresa to speak and at last she did. I gave her a round of applause as did some other students, but regrettably the other three graduate students, two of which who are in Women and Gender Studies did not contribute. According to them, they were too infuriated to say much, too hopeless to expect the class to understand the theory.

I was glad I could finally cut in my critique at the end of the ignorance that saturated the petrified sponges that were some people's brains. I made several points: 1) NON-INNOCENT: Disney is a multinaitonal corporation that seeks above all else profit, not art. 2) POWERFUL: Disney is a dominant figure in American media, and its work has international influence. 3) DOMINANT DISCOURSE: Disney plays into fabricated narratives that are neither traditional nor progressive, but simply racist (stereotypes, symbolic annihilation, orientalist, villainous accents) and sexist (no mothers, sexualized, victims, white middle/upper-class and conventionally beautiful). 4) SUBJECTIVITY: Children who watch these seek models for social behavior, which is bad enough, but some children have no one to identify with in the film or have more racial identification with stereotypes and animal others (i.e. how do Amerindian children feel when they see the Indians in Peter Pan or the Africans feel when they identify with gorillas?). Finally, 5) RECOGNITION: People are not just creating a hissy-fit for entertainment; at the very least, the dominant demographic should be willing to take into consideration, to hear out, marginalized groups who feel they are being caricatured.

Of course, there are always criticisms in regards to this. Some will argue that 1) we teach the same American narratives in school (so two wrongs make a right), 2) corporations are businesses and aren't responsible for content (so we shouldn't hold businesses accountable for racism and sexism), 3) that its damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't (so you are critiqued both when the majority of your films are entirely absent of diversity and when you include racial stereotypes in your movie--as if there weren't an alternative), 4) kids either aren't effected or walk away from it later when they know its false (so then there is no reason people would be so invested in defending Disney), and 5) kids shouldn't know the truth and stereotypes make it easier to think (WTF????).

The Human Race of a Different Species
Disney has had a long history of racist iconography: Fantasia's (1940) pikaninny slave, Dumbo's (1941) sambo crows, Peter Pan's (1953) rendition of "Indians," Lady and the Tramp's (1953) Siamese cats, The Jungle Book's (1967) orangutan singing "I want to be like you," Aladdin's (1992) demonization and orientalization of Arabs, The Lion King's (1994) hyenas, Pocahantas' (1995) (mis)telling of the truth of American colonialism. and Tarzan's (1999) absence of Africans admits the African rainforest. Although I'm no 21st century American historian, it seems that some of these racial depictions were made at corresponding times of racial tension in American history. For instance, the Siamese cats were in theaters during the Korean War, the Jungle Book was made amidst the civil rights movement just prior to the assassination of MLK Jr., and Aladdin was released shortly after the Gulf War. Coincidences? I don't know.

What I'm particularly interested in is how "animals" function in cartoon fables to displace the realness and ugliness of real moral problems and crimes onto uncanny others, thereby making the adult and horror appropriate for child fantasy. As Harrit Ritvo (1987) discusses in her seminal book, Animal Estate,

As material animals were at complete at the complete disposal of human beings, so rhetorical animals offered unusual opportunities for manipulation; their position in the physical world and the universe of discourse was mutually reinforcing... both discussed and exemplified a central theme of domination and exploitation. Animals were uniquely suitable for rhetoric that both celebrated human power and extended its sway, especially because [the English] concealed this theme at the same time they could express it…. Talking about [animals] offered people who would have been reluctant or unable to avow a project of domination directly a way to enact it obliquely (5-6)

Through animal representations, largely made possible through the disappearance of an unmediated encounter, projected meanings took on a new "reality" in which, through animal tales, one could likewise make representations of others seem "natural." So the power relations in a particular society become inscribed on animal representations and get read back through a circular logic that has forgotten the lies.

It is difficult not reading the song "I wan'na be like You," written by two white men and sung by Lois Armstrong in Disney's The Jungle Book, a colonialist narrative itself, as anything but racist,especially since it went into production shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!

Oh, oobee doo
I wanna be like you
I wanna walk like you
Talk like you, too
You'll see it's true
An ape like me
Can learn to be human too

Perhaps few animated animal features appropriate and colonize the bodies human-animals as much as those about insects. Bees and ants are fertile sources to impose cultural representations on (human) nature, by building gender and class relations off of misrepresented social structures. One need only look at Bee Movie. Gwen writes:

how animals are anthropomorphized tells us a lot about our social assumptions and what we’re comfortable with. There’s no reason the worker bees’ sex has to be changed, except that it makes more “sense” to us that the hard-working providers would be male. The choices to make the males the center of the story, to make them bigger than the females, and to portray female bees as fawning groupies desperate for male attention tells us an awful lot about the gender stories we tell ourselves about humans, and that they’re important enough to us that even children’s movies have to recreate those stories, no matter how much fiddling with reality it takes.

Previously, I've looked into similar anthropomorphisms related to Gotmilk.com and the film Barnyard, which features a steer with utters. It's all bull (pun intended).