So, is this progress? Back in the dear dead days of the civil-rights movement, poor Kramer was discomfited when college students told him his movie was out of date because interracial love was no problem for them. But in early 1967 16 states still had laws against miscegenation, and the Ku Klux Klan picketed theaters showing the film. Cyrus is more honest than those ’60s students: interracial love is still an H-bomb for many Americans of every color. True, it’s more common now than it was in those days. In 1990 there were 211,000 black-white marriages in the United States, or four out of every 1,000 married couples, where in 1970 only 1.5 of every 1,000 marriages was mixed. But the issues are no less thorny. And the cultural dynamics have shifted. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was an educational film for white Americans who would be reassured by seeing their spiritual president and First Lady, Spencer Tracy and Hepburn, surrendering–a bit gingerly, of course–their white daughter to a black man.
“Jungle Fever” operates at a level much deeper than that of liberal piety. Spike Lee uses the theme of interracial sex to explore the mythology of race, sex and class in an America where both blacks and whites are reassessing the legacy of integration and the concept of separatism from every point on the political spectrum. The 34-year-old filmmaker’s best movie, it raises more crucial issues than any American film in a very longtime.
Spike Lee can hardly point a camera at anything without stirring up a ruckus. “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986) raised hackles both feminist and macho with its theme of a young black woman who ruled her sex life for her own pleasure, just like guys do. With “School Daze” (1988) Lee took heat from blacks for washing dirty linen in public with his portrayal of conflicts of class and color within a black college. “Do the Right Thing” worried some critics (including this one) with its incendiary climax of racial violence. And Lee drew accusations of antiSemitism for his portrait of two jazz-club owners in “Mo’ Better Blues.”
The victims of “Jungle Fever” are Flipper, a married African-American architect in a white firm, and Angie (Sciorra), his Italian-American temp secretary from Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. Their affair is bred from office overtime, Chinese takeout and a handy drafting table at the right adulterous angle. The flare-up of fever in the urban jungle plays havoc with a universe of characters: Flipper’s light-skinned black wife, Drew (Lonette McKee); his parents, a defrocked preacher (Ossie Davis) and his wife (Ruby Dee); his brother Gator (Samuel L. Jackson), a crack addict. On Angie’s side there are her shocked, racist father and brothers, and her longtime, sensitive boyfriend Paulie Carbone (John Turturro)–who embarks on his own interracial relationship.
Color, class, drugs, romance, family: no one can accuse Lee of avoiding the issue-any issue. It’s not a neat package, but Lee deals with passions, not packages. His movies are urgent collages of the hottest topics on the urban checklist. With a potent mix of comedy and concern, “Jungle Fever” scrambles toward a dissonant climax of hope and despair, carved out of anguish and an honest appraisal of the odds facing anyone who tries to bridge the chasm of race.
It was the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager attacked by Italian youths in Bensonhurst, that inspired Lee. “Harlem and Bensonhurst for me are more than just geographical locations; it’s what they represent. Yusuf was killed because they thought he was the black boyfriend of one of the girls in the neighborhood. What it comes down to is that white males have problems with black men’s sexuality. It’s as plain and simple as that. They think we’ve got a hold on their women. "
VINNY: Hey, Paulie, you seen Angie lately?
VEESHAY: Hey, Paulie, I heard she’s living in Harlem now. I saw her buying a Kangol.
VINNY: Yeah, and she got a pair of unlaced Jordans, too.
“This film is about two people who are attracted to each other because of sexual mythology,” says Lee. “She’s attracted to him because she’s been told that black men know how to f–k. He’s attracted to her because all his life he’s been bombarded with images of white women being the epitome of beauty and the standard that everything else must be measured against.” When the couple splits, Flipper argues that the basis for the affair was simply curiosity. “You were curious about Black … I was curious about White.” But Sciorra’s delicately tender performance belies Flipper’s assertion–and Lee’s stated premise. “Within the cast,” admits Sciorra, “there were some very, very different points of view about whether or not interracial love was acceptable or healthy.”
Of the interracial marriages in the United States today, 71 percent are between black men and white women; only 29 percent pair white men with black women. “Interracial marriage is an inevitability in a multiracial society, but I don’t think it need stand in the way of one’s ethnic identity,” says Shelby Steele, a leading black conservative. But not everyone sees it that way. Morris F.X. Jeff Jr., former president of the National Association of Black Social Workers, says: “From an African-American perspective, [interracial marriage] is not a very wise thing to do. There’s excitation in the crossover into the land of taboo. But after that, what? What happens to the white person who’s ridiculed by family and friends for relating to an ‘inferior’? What happens to the black person who gets ridiculed for relating to his ‘adversary’?”
In fact, Angie is beaten and banished by her father; then she and Flipper are cast out by his father (“I don’t eat with whoremongers”). It’s easy to draw the conclusion that Lee is sending a message of separatism. But Angie and Flipper aren’t meant “to represent every interracial couple,” says Lee. “This is just one couple that came together because of sexual mythology.” The other interracial relationship hinted at, between Paulie and a young black woman in Bensonhurst, is more hopeful because, says Lee, “their initial attraction is based on genuine feelings.” But whether the movie endorses or rejects interracial romance is not, ultimately, the point. Because what the movie is really about is a nation polarized by an unabating obsession with color.
DREW: You had to eventually go get yourself a White girl, didn’t you? … I’ve told you what happened to me when I was growing up … I told you how they called me high yellow, yellow bitch, White honky, honky White, White nigger, nigger White, octaroon, quadroon, half-breed mongrel…
Lonette McKee plays the enraged Drew with a passion reflecting her own childhood as the daughter of a black father and a white mother, and as the wife of a white man. “I adore my husband; I know I’ll be with him for the rest of my life,” says McKee. “But I don’t know if I would make the same decision to marry him today. I think I’d be looking in a black direction.”
It’s a commitment McKee’s character declares in “Jungle Fever.” “The man has gone, he’s f–king some White bitch and I still believe there’s good Black men out there,” she proclaims in a scene that’s a masterpiece of hilarious anger and profane candor. Drew’s women friends have gathered in a “war council” to support her. A kaleidoscope of every hue in the black spectrum, they let loose on race and sex: “White bitches” who throw themselves at black men, working-class black men who are snubbed by black women, selfhating black men who can’t deal with black women–every permutation of color and caste is riddled in a cross-fire of dialogue.
“We just rolled the cameras,” says Lee, “and kept shooting and shooting and the women, man, they forgot about that script. They were just vomiting that stuff up! I think it was all from their personal experience and that’s why that scene works.”
There’s no doubt that the real-life experience of the actors lends a depth to the interracial theme that no other film has approached. The final touch to this pressure of reality comes from the director’s own life. After his mother died in 1977, his father, Bill, a noted jazz musician, married a white woman. “I’d be lying to say it wasn’t an influence,” says Lee, “but that is not the reason I made the film at all.”
Lee has been criticized in the past for avoiding the issue of drugs. In “Jungle Fever” he redresses that grievance with a vengeance, producing sequences of harrowing power. He embodies the drug plague in the character of Gator, Flipper’s older brother who’s strung out on crack. Samuel L. Jackson’s bloodcurdling performance is the best in a film of superb performances. With his eyes like bombed out moons, and the spooky, sardonic little dance he does to worm money from his mother or brother, Gator is a demon of desperation. Searching the Harlem streets for Gator, Flipper winds up at the Taj Mahal, “the Trump Tower of crack dens,” a vision out of Dante. Lee’s brilliant cinematographer on all his films, Ernest Dickerson, says the key to the scene is in the flickers of flame that erupt when someone lights a crack pipe. “The idea is that every time someone lights up, a soul dies. All those little flames were souls dying in hell.” Almost imperceptibly, the theme of drugs takes over “Jungle Fever.” The comic element drops out, there is a final shocking confrontation between the strung-out Gator and his father, and the movie, which has been so replete with street eloquence, explodes in a cry of anguish.
“Jungle Fever” is a courageous film. Lee doesn’t spare the church, long considered the moral bedrock of black culture. The Good Reverend Doctor, father of Flipper and Gator, is a minister who’s been deprived of his flock, probably for sexual transgressions. The Purify family–embittered father, subservient mother, crackhead elder son, Buppie younger son trying to make it in the white world but “sinning” with a white woman–becomes a powerful microcosm of a black culture under violent pressure from all sides.
Lee’s ability to make such strong social statements within the framework of mainstream entertainment has made him the key black filmmaker in the movie business. “I’ve always felt that one can make entertaining, thought-provoking films and be successful at it,” he says. His next project is a movie on Malcolm X, with Denzel Washington as the militant black leader. Lee is asking for a $30 million budget; Warner Bros. is offering $22 million, but Lee is determined to pull it off. Ossie Davis, for one, has total confidence in Lee. “What Spike has done,” he says, “is to come into the marketplace not only as a director, a writer and a producer. Spike is also a marketeer, a mass marketeer in that profound and creative sense that Sam Goldwyn was and DeMille was and the Warners and the Cohns were.”
On another level, the 73-year-old Davis speaks movingly about Lee as “my role model. Spike taught me to stand up and be more insistent. When I made ‘Cotton Comes to Harlem’ most of my crew was white. One day, young black filmmakers sat in front of the camera and stopped production. There was old Ossie, favorite son of Harlem and look behind the camera. Nobody but him who’s black. Spike says, ‘No, goddammit, I want blacks and Chinese and cripples. This is my crew.’ I didn’t do that. He did.”
For Lee, echoing W.E.B. Du Bois, the problem is what he sees as the “duality” of blacks in a white America. “When Flipper’s in his environment he speaks one way. When he gets around black folks he goes back to his regular self. That schizophrenic s–t, man, will f–k you up. Thirty million of us ain’t going back to Africa, so we have to find a way to stop this schizophrenia. We’ve got to start owning our own m—f— businesses. We should have learned from the Reagan years that we ain’t number one on the agenda. We can expect no more handouts from the government. They’re tired of niggers. We’re going to have to do for ourselves.”
You wanta take a walk?” Spike Lee asks. With that, we set off on a tour of Oak Bluffs, a town of quaint gingerbread houses–and a sizable black community–on Martha’s Vineyard. Clad in short pants, new Nikes, a “Jungle Fever” T shirt and a Malcolm X baseball cap, the 34-year-old filmmaker feels right at home. Everyone recognizes him: a film student who rushes up for an autograph; Massachusetts’s secretary of the commonwealth who stops his car and gets out to introduce himself; motorists honking and waving as they pass.
Strolling along the harbor, Lee keeps an eye on the locals. Suddenly he breaks into Stevie Wonder’s title song from his new movie: “I’ve got jungle fever! Da-da-da-da-da-da! Do you see it?” Lee grins and indicates a tall young black man walking with a blond white woman. Minutes later a station wagon stops; a young white man leans out the window. “Hey, Spike, look here! White man, black woman!”
Real-life examples of his theme don’t surprise Lee, nor do the white people who want to shake his hand. “I have a large white following, quiet as it’s kept,” he says. “They try to play it The director: Off the like only blacks attend my films, but a lot of young whites have attended my films since ‘She’s Gotta Have It.’ They kind of deserted me on ‘School Daze’ and ‘Mo’ Better.’ It’s perception: ‘Oh, this is a black film, forget it. We’ll get him on the next one’.” The idea makes Lee cackle with laughter.
The spark for “Jungle Fever,” he says, “was the murder, the lynching of Yusuf Hawkins. Since ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ did not exhaust the subject of race relations, I thought it was time to go back to that again. But we had to have a bigger panorama, a bigger scope, a bigger canvas. Not only race, but class, sex and drugs. And color affects everybody in this movie.”
How he manages to pack so much into a two-hour format is a formidable challenge. “When I was growing up I remember watching ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ and he used to have that guy spinning the plates, remember that? That’s the way I see this film because we have a whole lot of stories”–Lee hops around, spinning imaginary plates overhead–“and just as one’s about to drop–uh oh!–you stop them from crashing to the floor.”
Lee now has enough clout in the film industry to juggle almost as many story lines as he could possibly want, “I have power-but within a budgetary limitation,” he says. “If they like the script, and I agree with the amount of money that they’re going to give me, then it’s my film. It’s not like they’re saying: ‘Spike, do whatever you want with this $50 million movie’.”
This kind of support allows him to say, “I am a romantic at heart. I do believe now, as Luther Vandross says, in the power of love. But at the same time, we have to make a distinction between that which is real and that fake Hollywood, Walt Disney walk into the sunset hand in hand. That s–t’s never been a reality.”
“Black filmmaking is still lagging,” Lee says. “When you compare what we’ve done in film to the other art forms, it’s really minuscule. We’re in the embryonic stages of film when you compare it to what we’ve done in sports, dance, music, art. Black cinema has produced no Charlie Parkers yet, no John Coltranes, no James Baldwins, Paul Robesons. We will, but we’re not at that level yet. " He mentions Oscar Micheaux, Ossie Davis, Gordon Parks, Melvin Van Peebles. Without them, “there would be no Spike Lee the filmmaker. They handed me the baton. I’m trying to run with it a little while before I have to give it up.”
