CRITICAL RESPONSE: I

Critical Inquiry

Spring 1991
Volume 17, Number 3

Excerpt from
Spike Lee, Corporate Populist
by Jerome Christensen

The celebrity of Spike Lee is of a different order than that of Malcom or Mandela or Jordan. Because Do the Right Thing is a motion picture, it is, notoriousl, damned difficult to isolate the person responsible. Who is Lee the person, disentangled from Mookie the character? Surely not Lee the actor. Lee the writer? Lee the director? Lee the producer? If the claim of personal responsibility makes any sense it is because Lee combines all those roles and commands a unique position of independence. Spike Lee, that is, can take personal responsibility because he has corporate responsibility for his film. Spike Lee is by no means the least of a group of eighties filmmakers-- George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Michael Cimino preceded him-- defined by their recognition that is not the producer, director, writer, or star who is the auteur but the corporate body that comprises those functions. Lee is the first black filmmaker to transform, deliberately and programmatically, personal responsibility into corporate responsibility.8 In doing so he has assumed the postmodern burden: in order to be what Mitchell designates a "full human being" one must become a corporation. Mitchell praises Lee for the complexity and power of his public art. If he has attended to the public context and social consequences of Lee's filmmaking, he might have seen it for what it is: the most advanced expression of the emergent genre of corporate art.

Lee's celebrity is the capital that sustains Forty Acres and a Mule Productions. The purity of the effect of Lee's work of art coincides with the inviolability of the corporate logo affixed to T-shirts and caps merhandised at his retail outlet, Spike's Joint. It would be senseless to deny that this is independence,9 but it would be foolish to ignore the kind of independence it is. Lee's independence is epitomized by the subhead for a syndicated story entitled "Filmmaker Spike Lee: Doing the Right Things," promoting the 1990 Mo' Better Blues: "Studio backing hasn't reduced his independence."10 Lee's independence acquires its social silhouette and its political feel by virtue of his dramatized opposition to the major studios. That thematics is graphically exploited in the opening of Mo' Better Blues, where a voice-over in black dialect mockingly cuts in during the display of the Universal Pictures logo. It is allegorized by the vulgar anti-Semitism with which Lee characterizes theJewish clubowners Mo and Josh, standing for the parasitic Jewish moneymen (for example, Lew Wasserman of Universal) who run the film studios. Universal may continue to bankroll Lee, but, the film assures us, it does not soil his art or compromise his independence any more than the vile clubowners do the noble Bleek's. The film's anti-Semitism is a tip-off not only that the inaugural display of subversiveness is mere cheek but also that the very opposition to which it gestures is nothing more than a convenient fantasy. Spike Lee could capitalize on his celebrity to attain independence with such ease not because "genius will out" but because the studio system is in disarray. Most of the so-called major studios have long since become captives of corporate conglomerates.11 Moreover, as Mark Crispin Miiler has argued in his searching essay "End of Story," the films themselves are speedily being transformed into moving billboards for corporate advertising.12 Miller shows that the standard of "narrative justification" that regulated the representational code of classical Hollywood cinema has systematically been superseded by the commercial intervention of product plugs, whether for, Pepsi-Cola, Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, or Frito-Lay. Lee can do business with the studios and maintain his independence because thev share the same social ontology (in the glitzy Mo' Better Blues every shot is either derived from or destined for a television commercial) and belong to the same corporate intertext: Forty Acres and a Mule aspires to the status of Touchstone Pictures; Spike's Joint is a nascent Disney World.

What makes Lee vulnerable is not, as he perceives it, his race but the patina of populism with which he glamorizes his image in interviews and essays: the claim that his films speak on behalf of a black people unjustly deprived of the full benefits presupposed by citizenship in a republic.13 It would be pointless to hold Spike Lee ethically responsible for the pure effects of his art, for the logic of the pure effect entails a transcendence of ethical consequences. Doing the right reading of Do the Right Thing means appraising its impure effects. What, then, would an impure effect be? It is not something to be cognized out there in nature. But it shows up in a story like this: A young black filmmaker makes his first feature, She's Gotta Have It, which has surprising commercial and critical success. Not the least measure of its success is that it attracts the attention of Jim Riswold, associate creative director for Wieden and Kennedy, the ad agency that handles Nike. Riswold likes the film and likes the fact that Mars Blackmon, the central character (played by Spike Lee), wears Nikes. In 1987 Riswold makes a deal with Lee to make television commercials for Nike.14 In 1989, in a new film by Lee, a film about consumption (the consumption of images, the consumption of pizzas, consumption by purchase, and consumption by fire), there occurs an episode in which a white man inadvertently steps on a black man's shoes. The cry "you almost knocked me down, man! The word is 'excuse me'" is answered by a casual apology, which in turn is met with the indignant rejoinder, "Not only did you knock me down but you stepped on my brand new, white Air Jordans I just bought." Like a projectile, the brand name shatters the glass of realism and momentarily moves the film into the inebriating hyperreality of product fetishism. The problem of cleaning the dirt from the Air Jordans and erasing the insult to Buggin' Out's self-esteem becomes an important motif in the film, contributing to, if not purely causing the violence of the confrontation in the pizzeria. Meanwhile, after the film, outside the theater, away from the TV, shoes are bought. Many Air Jordans. Some with money earned by the sale of drugs. Shoes are stolen. Some from the dead bodies of black youths, who have been killed without any other narrative justification except their possession of Nikes and because someone's gotta have them. A happy ending?

It may seem perverse to equate the plug for Air Jordans with the trashing of the pizzeria--but the link was first forged by Spike Lee. Defending himself from the charge that his commercials for Air Jordan irresponsibly promoted an appetite for expensive athletic shoes, which indirectly contributed to the epidemic of brutal black-on-black assaults and robberies, Lee replied,

We all remember these same experts who predicted 30 million Afro-Americans would riot across the country leaving the theaters after having seen "Do the Right Thing" last summer. I'm still waiting for one garbage can to be thrown through a pizzeria window.... The Nike commercials Michael Jordan and l do have never gotten anyone killed.15

Commercials don't kill people, people kill people. Or, as Jesse Jackson, put it, "Nobody has ever been shot with a gym shoe." Jackson's bit of wit was quoted by black columnist Clarence Page in a recent column in the Chicago Tribune. Page rejoined that inner city youths "have been shot, stabbed or beaten because of their gym shoes, all because their street-corner society does a better job of teaching our young how to be consumers than to be producers."16 Although Page is a persuasive advocate of black independence, he does not confront the Spike Lee effect. What happens when the black producer becomes a corporate populist who maintains his profits and his independence precisely by encouraging black consumption? If Page overlooks the problem, Spike Lee shouts it down. The defense of Spike Lee is the defense of the National Rifle Association, of Seagram's, of Philip Morris (which, by the way, has its product Miller High Life beer; vociferously plugged by the Mayor). By restricting the issue of consequences to the absurdly rigorous standard of identity--the one for one reproduction of action by action--and by insisting on the very lockstep narrative justification that he has abandoned in his art, Lee hopes to segregate himself from all bad consequences.17 It is almost certainly true that Lee did not intend that anyone would be killed as a consequence of his plugging Air Jordans; it is also likely that he did not intend to attract the offer of a major advertising contract by dressing Mars Blackmon in Air Jordans. But those are the tales events tell. And it is the denial of the possibility of such a narrative on which Lee's repudiation of corporate responsibility depends. In contemporary film and television the suspension of narrativejustification, whose hallmark is the television commercial, facilitates the suspension of the ethical relation, thereby equating the intentional "Do the Right Thing', with the autonomic "Just Do It."18 For Lee to deny the potential connection between the indiscriminate hawking of shoes and a climate of indiscriminate crime is incredibly to render his advertising as the commercial version of the Air Force's vaunted surgical strike: here aimed not at taking out the brown-skinned bad guys but at eliciting the pure effect of a sovereign consumption. The insistence on pure effects in art as in life effectively legitimates the refusal to acknowledge deaths by shrapnel and infection, the everyday truth that our acts have unintended consequences which, whatever our race, leave us liable for others.

Spike's Joint exemplifies corporate populism's will to repackage the residue of an archaic act of political assertion into a pure act of consumption with no obligations that are not reducible to the terms of the contract and no consequences besides the ring of the cash register. But Lee's crude antiSemitism in Mo' Better Blues, a symbolic displacement of Giant's (played by Lee) parasitic relation to the trumpeter Bleek, attests to Lee's own anxiety about the possible impurity of his relation to the black community. Lee's concern was validated by the boycott of Nike shoes launched this past August by Operation PUSH in Chicago. The boycott, justified by the contrast between Nike's remarkable sales performance in the black community and its alleged lack of minority managers, installed Operation PUSH in the "Buggin' Out" position and uncannily resituated Spike Lee in the "Mookie" position as an accomplice of the targeted white-owned business. But even more interestingly, Operation PUSH focused their boycott by adopting a catchy slogan. As of 20 August 1990, the receptionist at their Chicago office was answering the phone, "Operation PUSH--say no to Nike."19 The slogan adapts Nancy Reagan's celebrated "just say no to drugs" to new ends. It remains to be seen how powerful a weapon the slogan will be in the sneaker wars; but it is a potent lens with which to review Do the Right Thing. According to Lee, the film had been criticized for the depiction of a ghetto neighborhood spotlessly clean and absolutely free of drugs.20 Whether or not that criticism was fair, thanks to Operation PUSH we can now see that it was wrong. "Say no to Nike" identifies the drug in Do the Right Thing not as the crack you don't see but as the Air Jordans you do. The white man may soil the shoes, but the shoes soil the community. And Forty Acres and a Mule Productions sells the shoes.

It would be wrong to blame Spike Lee for failing to foresee the unintended consequences of his art. It would be the right thing for Spike Lee to acknowledge that bad consequences have occurred.21 Even Exxon has gone that far. But of course Exxon can afford to because it sells oil, arguably something people need for their material well-being. Lee has no resource besides his estimable talent and his inestimable celebrity. As Rick Telander has charged, the manufacturers and advertisers of such products as Air Jordans create "status from thin air to feed those who are starving for self-esteem."22 The fruit of corporate populism, such status is the food that Spike Lee sells as the simulacrum of his own ethereal celebrity. The true business of Do the Right Thing is to fashion and promote a myth of incorporation. In the symbolic landscape that is Lee's New York, the pizza parlor is cleared away so that the Lee family can scoop up the real estate. Sal's Famous becomes Spike's Joint. Sal took pride in having nourished the kids of the neighborhood on his pizza. Spike's Joint hawks Spike Lee T-shirts, feeding its customers "public art." That Do the Right Thing did not cause riots does not mean its effect was pure; its message, the index of its corporate populism, was never "burn baby burn" but "you gotta have it."

8. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times Lee complains, "And, I think it's reaching the point where I'm getting reviewed, not my films" (Lee, "I Am Not an Anti-Semite," New York Times, 22 Aug. 1990, p. A25). The complaint is disingenuous in that it insists on a split between films and Lee (property and person), which not only the casting but the corporate identity that the films have constructed aims to dissolve. Similarly, Lee's celebrity, the capital on which that corporate identity is based, dissolves the distinction between feature film and television commercial.

9. See Nelson George's essay "Forty Acres and an Empire: Spike Lee Plants the New Motown in Brooklyn," written in praise of Lee's new "Spikeabilia Emporium" at I South Elliot Place in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. In articulating Lee's seamless translation of an ethnic into a corporatist ethos, George visits contempt on those who, with heads "still stuck in the '60s," see a contradiction between Lee's "nationalist underpinning" and his dealings with "major studios and national advertisers." According to George, "In the face of modern corporate infotainment monoliths, the most realpolitik counterstrategy is to be in business with as many as possible" (Village Voice, 7 Aug. 1990, p. 61).

10. Charles Champlin, "Filmmaker Spike Lee: Doing the Right Things," Baltimore Sun, 5 Aug. 1990, p. G1.

11. For a vivid account, see Steven Bach, Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of "Heaven's Gate" (New York, 1985).

12. See Mark Crispin Miller, "End of Story" Seeing Through Movies, ed. Miller (New York, 1990), pp. 186-246.

13. For a discussion of corporate populism in the contemporary academy, see Jerome Christensen, "From Rhetoric to Corporate Populism: A Romantic Critique of the Academy in an Age of High Gossip," Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 438-65. Corporate populism is the postmodern variant of the political and economic formation analyzed by R. Jeffrey Lustig in Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920 (Berkeley, 1982).

14. See Gene Seymour, "Spike and Nike: The Making of a Sneaky Sneaker Commercial," Entertainment Weekly, 30 Mar. 1990, pp. 30-31.

15. Spike Lee, "Don't Blame Shoes for Society's Problems," The National, 19 Apr. 1990, p. 23.

16. Clarence Page, "Building Businesses Offers More Hope than Ritual Boycotts," Chicago Tribune, 8 Aug. 1990, p. 15.

17. For a useful account of this controversy, which produces some persuasive anecdotal evidence that black kids are indeed being killed for their sneakers as well as for other paraphernalia promoted by sales representatives in cynical disregard for the social consequences, see Rick Telander, "Senseless," Sports Illustrated, 14 May 1990, pp. 36-49.

18. Is it an accident that "Just Do It," a slogan for Nike commercials, which has appeared on T-shirts across the country, coincides with the so-called subliminal phrase "Do It" that became the basis for a recent California lawsuit against the heavy metal group Judas Priest, charged with triggering suicide in two teenage fans? The ethical issue is not hether "Just Do It" could directly produce automatic behavior but whether it cultivates the belief in and acceptance of automatic behavior.

19. In light of Operation PUSH's original goals for the boycott, the slogan was ill-chosen, since Operation PUSH at first dissociated themselves from the attacks (made largely in the white press) on Nike for the expensiveness of their shoes and their methods of merchandising them to black youths. Operation PUSH's aim was merely reciprocity: you sell blacks shoes; you should hire blacks. According to that aim the employment of Lee and Jordan is a good thing. But the logic of the pharmakon will have its way.

20. A recent revival of the complaint: "Journalists ask me, 'Spike, why aren't there any drugs in your films?'--as if African-Americans are the only people on earth who use drugs and African-American filmmakers are somehow the only filmmakers beholden to tackle that issue in their work" (Lee, "I Am Not an Anti-Semite," p. A25).

21. In "I Am Not an Anti-Semite" Lee has resorted to the strategy of denial and countercharges of racism that he employed in the sneaker controversy.

22. Telander, "Senseless," p. 43.

Jerome Christensen teaches in the English department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of books on Coleridge and Hume and one forthcoming on Byron. Currently, he is completing a study of the continued pertinence of the romantic turn of mind called Romantic Theory, Romantic Practice.

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