In the intervals between group confrontations are several sketchy stories that function as the narrative outline: the seduction and corruption of a fugitive Jigaboo, Half-Pint (Spike Lee); the punishment of an ambitious Wannabee, Jane (Tisha Campbell); and the blown opportunity of a campus organizer, Dap (Larry Fishburne), to develop political coherence. The stories make useful points about intracommunity contradictions. Unfortunately the film’s agenda to make a wake-up call is undermined by the film’s misogynistic and gay-hating sensibility.
Independent filmmaker Marlon Riggs responds to the homophobic bigotry in School Daze in his 1989 film Tongues Untied. A scripted performance-arts work about tribal rights and the tribal rights of Black gay men, Untied uses a clip from Daze in a section of the film that catalogues examples of heterosexist aggression by Black film- and video-makers. The clip is from the Greek show. Da Fellas launch into a call-and-response: “When I say Gamma, you say fag. Gamma (fag), Gamma (fag), Gamma, Gamma, Gamma, Gamma …” Da Fellas continue their disruption of the step contest by issuing threats to the fraternities they’ve labeled “fags”—“Get back or we’ll kick your ass.”
Lee’s School Daze, Riggs’s Tongues Untied, and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (a film frequently programmed with Untied)—each makes a claim on history while taking a position on the “dirty laundry” issue. Daze positions its statements on colorphobia and divisiveness as a counterpoise to the history of struggle chronicled in the prologue. Untied, through an innovative mix of idioms (autobiography, lyrical poetry, dramatic monologue, cinema verité-like scenarios, archival footage), challenges the attempt by the Black community to exclude its gay sector from Black radical history. Footage of gay rights marches is superimposed on footage of civil rights marches during the culmination of Riggs’s assertive argument.
Looking is a meditation on Langston Hughes that uses the Harlem Renaissance as a cultural reference point for Black gay artists in Britain. Julien sets up a wished-for call-and-response between Harlem of the 1920s and southeast London of the 1980s. He uses archival materials, clothing, literary utterances, and period music to script the yearned-for dialogue. The quest by contemporary Black gay poets for an ancestor, a forefather, a tradition, a past, has to override a double silence: Langston Hughes disclosed little about his sexual identity and the executors of the Hughes estate demanded, in addition to various cuts, that Hughes’s voice be lowered on the sound track.
Tradition, Mission College’s and the G Phi G fraternity’s, is what Julian/Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito) continually uses as his source of authority, especially in his war with Da Fellas. The radical tradition that Dap could invoke to strengthen his position is not honored at Mission. The three films together—Daze, Untied, and Looking—make for an excellent program on the issue of negotiating identity, individual and collective, in spite of invisibilized histories.
School Daze is a musical. It does not operate like an old MGM down-on-your-heels/up-on-your-toes sis-boom-bah on a mock set of Claremont College. It is not “good news” on campus that Daze is singing and dancing about. More is at stake at Mission than whether Grady (Bill Nunn) makes a touchdown. The college is being held hostage by the “old money” robber barons. A wake-up call occurs in a scene in which the chairperson of the board of trustees (Art Evans) advises the president of the college (Joe Seneca) to squash the student-led divest-now campaign because the venerable personages who finance the college will not tolerate being told where they may or may not invest their money. Actor Evans laments, “Why won’t our people support our institutions?” At the time of Daze’s filming, Cheney and Fisk were being bailed out of serious financial difficulty.
Lee, to make a wake-up call about intracommunity self-ambush, chooses an enshrined genre of the dominant cinema, musical comedy, whose conventions were not designed to address an embattled community’s concerns. Much of the tension on screen derives from his effort to link two opposing discourses: will the ideological imperatives of Lee’s agenda subvert the genre, or will the ideological imperatives of the genre derail his agenda? The linchpin is the cinematic rhetoric (framing, choreographed moves, delivery of choral ensemble, costuming) surrounding the fraternity that links the generic conventions (say, spectacle) to the critique of community divisiveness. The story is grounded in Afrocentric modes and idioms (homecoming events, Da Butt, all-up-in-your-face-isms), as are the devices Lee habitually draws from French bedroom farce, nouvelle vague, and Scorsese, as well as from independents who work outside of the industry. “Face,” which has become a Lee signature, for example, is the visual equivalent of the oral tradition that resonates in the opening phrase of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye: “Quiet as it’s kept…”
The rival groups at the college are repeatedly in each other’s face. In the scene at the women’s dorm when Half-Pint attempts to get a date, Lee goes beyond using mainstream film devices—talk, shot-response, shot—so that a series of women appear who say, without having to actually articulate it, “Get out of my face.” When Dap figuratively gets in Da Fellas’ face because Da Fellas prefer to go to the dance rather than keep a vigil in the shantytown, they in turn get in our face: “Lighten up, Marcus Garvey,” “Preach, Jesse,” “Chill, Farrakhan,” “Teach, Malcolm.” The close-ups in this scene reconnect us to the history in the prologue, reminding us of what is at stake. The “face” device is responsible, in part, for the intimacy Lee establishes between filmmaker, film, and spectator.
Lee’s decision to link old conventions with new ones allows him to deliver pleasure in some of the forms by which dominant cinema keeps audiences addicted to voyeurism, fetishism, spectacle, mystifying notions of social relations, and freakish notions of intimate relations. The mix also allows Lee to present characters in their milieu and to address socially relevant issues, both of which the dominant cinema rules out. What is lost in the mix is the opportunity to articulate a radical Black discourse. What is gained is the opportunity to position several types of spectators.
Since the test case of television’s All in the Family, commercial success has depended on the ability of an entertainment industry product to address a polarized audience. White reactionaries seeing themselves on prime time were affirmed in their bigotry. White liberals, reading the show as an expose, congratulated the inventors of Archie Bunker on their “progress.” Many Black people, desperately needing to see any sign of U.S. Bunkerism defanged, tuned in each week to crack and to reassure each other.
Sexist/gynophobes, heterosexist/homophobes, and other witting and unwitting defenders of patriarchy champion Spike Lee films. So do nonreactionaries. So do many progressives. Not because the texts are so malleable that they can be maneuvered into any given ideological space, but because many extratextual elements figure into the response. Hunger for images is one element; pride in Lee’s accomplishment is another. That the range of spectators is wide speaks to the power of the films and the brilliance of the filmmaker.
Many spectators are willing to provide the interrogation missing in the representations on screen because of progressive features: ensemble (collective) playing, the mutually supportive affection of Dap and Rachel (Kyme), the themes of color and apartheid, the pro-Afro aesthetic of Da Butt, and the cast mix of veterans, newcomers, and performers known in other media. Many spectators do not view the film as separate from the figure, Spike Lee, behind it, or the emerging movement that figure is a part of.
The message of Daze for large numbers of spectators is entrepreneurial, cultural, political, and emblematic of the resurgence of African-American expression by the generation that came of age in the post-1960s era. The mixed-strategy approach in the Lee films has released a voice the dominant industry would prefer silenced—the B-boys. Lee’s composite push (T-shirts, books, and sound-track CDs) has helped to create a breakthrough for various forms of cultural expression in the marketplace. His commercial success has helped to create a climate of receptivity for Black filmmakers in Hollywood. His preparation
of audiences for more active spectatorship is a boon to hundreds of independent Black filmmmakers and videographers working in the independent sector.
The color issue is introduced early in Daze in a robust production number called “Good and Bad Hair” (“Straight and Nappy” in the casebook). The two groups of sisters encounter each other in the dormitory hallway; neither will give way. Jane, a blonde with green contact lenses, accuses Rachel, a brown-skinned sister with a short ’fro, of having eyes for her boyfriend, Julian. The others, meanwhile, are cracking on one another’s weave jobs, kinks, and attitudes. The close-up is held on the two actresses, Kyme and Campbell, in each other’s face. Their cohorts call one another Jigaboos and Wannabees. The face-off triggers a production number in a beauty parlor called Madame Ree Ree’s. There the women sing and dance a femme de guerre to a 1940s-style big-band swing composition with fallout lyrics.
The Rays and Da Naturals encounter each other several times. The behavior never varies; they sling color-hair insults, but nothing develops. With the exception of a pained remark Rachel makes to Dap after she has a run-in with Jane, no attempt is made in the film to explore, say, the cost of this proracist pathology. Such an exploration could have occurred in three scenes involving Rachel and her roommates (Alva Rodgers and Joie Lee), but instead they discuss “men are dogs.” And it could have also occurred in one scene involving Jane and the other Rays, but instead they plan a party for the frat brothers.
Colorism is reintroduced as a subject in scenes between Rachel and Dap. Dap does not support Rachel’s plan to pledge Delta. “They do good work in the community,” she argues. Dap, a campus organizer, is opposed. Sororities are as bad as fraternities, he maintains, although he’s helped his cousin Half-Pint pledge. Dap’s denunciations include charges of color prejudice. She accuses Dap of being equally color-struck, belligerent as he is about light-skinned folks. She teases him too about his claims of being pure African. When he won’t relent, it occurs to her that his attraction to her may be PR-motivated. “Having one of the darker sisters on campus as your girlfriend is good for your all-the-way Black nationalist image,” she says and exits. Although Dap and Rachel get together again, no further mention is made of her charge.
Not verbally stated but visually presented, color caste combined with gender and class operate in the story of Daryl/Half-Pint. He has working-class origins and middle-class ambitions. The viewer’s attention is frequently called to the fact that he is brown-skinned, short, and spare by his placement among light-skinned and husky fellow pledgees and among light-skinned and “healthy” sisters. To “graduate” from a less-privileged caste to a more-privileged caste as a member of the reigning fraternity, Half-Pint perseveres in a grueling regimen. The pledgees wear dog collars and chains; they get down on all fours and bark like dogs; they gobble Alpo on command from pet bowls; they drop their pants to be whacked with a mammoth paddle. Half-Pint is singled out by the president of the campus chapter, Julian/Big Brother Almighty, for taunts about his “manhood.” To enter G Phi G, the pledgees will be branded. We see Julian’s huge, ugly scar of a “G” during one of his scenes with Jane.
The seduction and corruption of Half-Pint culminate in his participation in sexual treachery engineered by Julian. It is gender coercion—“You’re a pussy.” “Only a Gamma man is a real man and a real man ain’t no virgin”—that drives Half-Pint into the men-as-predators/women-as-prey brotherhood. His supremacist-warped agenda to flee his social origins led him to G Phi G. The extravagant attention that the movie gives the frat forces in terms of production and design makes the seduction and corruption of Half-Pint plausible.
The depiction of the fraternity’s abusive order and of Half-Pint’s ordeal makes a good argument for men engaging in the feminist enterprise of dismantling patriarchy. But what is made more visible in the film is the vested interest men (and women) have in an order characterized by male power, prestige, and prerogative.
The topic predictably raised in postscreening discussions by spectators who identify with Half-Pint is society’s standard of male attractiveness. Art Nomura in his video Wok Like a Man tackles the implications of the Euro-American standard of height, weight, and aggression for Asian men. On-screen and off, one way to become attractive is to have social power or prestige through male bonding, most usually in terms of a shared sexist socialization to despise and exploit women.
Alien standards of beauty internalized at great psychic cost by African-Americans are taken up in Ayoka Chenzira’s provocative short Hairpiece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People. The politics of color links such works as Julie Dash’s Illusions, Denise Oliver and Warrington Hudlin’s Color, Henry Miller’s Death of a Dunbar Girl, Maureen Blackwood’s A Perfect Image? Shu Lea Cheang’s Color Schemes, and Ana María García’s Cocolos y Roqueras. The politics of female representation is treated in Sharon Alile Larkin’s A Different Drummer. And the complexity and subjectivity of women’s experiences is the forte of Zeinabu Davis, Camille Billops, Michelle Parkerson, and Barbara McCullough. These issues are central to discussions about the presentation of Jane (Tisha Campbell). The bases of her characterization are classic features in the construction of the feminine: narcissism, masochism, and hysteria. Her seductive display at the ball singing “I Don’t Want to Be Alone Tonight,” her ambition, and her voluntary sacrifice (“I did what you told me, Julian”) are classic she-was-asking-for-it features of femicidal texts.
Uplift the Race informs us that in the original script the frat members entered the Boning Room and ran a train on Jane. Apparently, the thinking behind this particular wake-up call went like this: Isn’t it a drag the way men get over on women and how women allow themselves to be ripped off, so let’s sock it to this character Jane to protest the unfair situation. Yeah, right. But the appearance of intended meaning (protest) fails to mask the constructed meaning (punishment).
When the Lee films are programmed together, a disturbing pattern emerges. Posters of naked women nailed to the wall in Joe’s place of business in Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads reappear in Mo’ Better Blues as pictures the musicians pass around while telling one of the guys he should dump his white lover and get himself “an African queen.” They hand him pictures of naked Black women. In Daze, a male character says “pussy” in one scene, and in the next the Gamma Rays say “Meow.” A more frightening continuity exists between the gratuitous attack of the woman on the stairs in Joe’s; the rough-off of Nola in She’s Gotta Have It, an act assuaged by her term “near rape”; and the scapegoating of Jane in Daze after she appears in a porno-referenced sex scene with Julian.
Jane is drawn in the conventional pattern of sexual iconography that hallmarks the industry. Gender issues receive no better treatment in Daze than in usual commercial fare. But the possibility, and perhaps the intent, were present. The repetitive and exaggerated attention that Lee gives to statements like “a real man,” for example, beginning with the first entrance of the frat and the pledgees, sets us up for an exploration that is merely sketched by the comparison-contrast between Julian and Dap—their styles of leadership and how they maintain intimate relationships. What a “real woman” might be is never raised, and little attention is given to the characterizations of female characters.
It was not necessary, of course, to have the frat brothers run a train on Jane. Their presence outside the door and their readiness to go in and “check out how Half-Pint’s doing” are suggestive enough of gang rape, particularly after the earlier command was given to Half-Pint to bring “a freak” back to the dorm. It will take another kind of filmmaker, perhaps, to move to the next step and illuminate the homoeroticism-homophobia nexus at play in gang rape and in the kind of surveillance engaged in by the frat brothers, and in the kind of obsessing Mars, Jamie, and Childs engage in about each other through Nola in Gotta. Dap’s character doesn’t articulate the simple wisdom that gay-hate and dominance aren’t really crucial to male development. Dap jams his cousin, but he welcomes Julian into the
inner circle of the final wake-up call in the film. Would that there had been as much attention paid to human values as to production values.
The antiapartheid theme is introduced in Daze’s opening scene. It is the first wake-up call. “We’re late,” Dap informs the student body assembled around the administration building. Other universities have been pressured to divest, but Mission hasn’t. Dap urges the students to take action: to march, to disrupt classes, to stage a sit-down, and, if necessary, to close the school down. He is drowned out by offscreen chanting—“It takes a real man to be a Gamma man and only a Gamma man is a real man.” The frat marches the pledgees onto the turf; they disrupt the rally, seize the space, and disperse the crowd. Within seconds Dap and Julian are in each other’s face; in the background, visible between the close-up of the two actors, is a “Free Mandela” banner. Virgil (Gregg Burge), the student council president, steps in between Dap and Julian and breaks them up. A similar scene occurs during the homecoming parade when Julian takes exception to the introduction of a political banner by Da Fellas at traditional festivities. Virgil steps in again and breaks them up. In pay back, Dap and Da Fellas disrupt the Greek Show and bogart the step contest. We assume that their performance will reintroduce the anti-apartheid theme. It does not. Instead it reasserts an aggressive machismo (“Daddy Lonnnngstroke …” “Get back or we’ll kick your Gamma ass …” “When I say Alpha, you say punk”).
A link, though, is made between South African apartheid and the U.S. sharecropping system. It occurs at the top of the longest, most emotionally varied sequence in the film. This sequence is an audience favorite. Dap insists that Da Fellas help him defy the ban issued by the administration. Booker T (Eric A. Payne) ’lows as how he’s not risking being expelled by continuing in the divest-now campaign. He’s the first in his family ever to go to college; his family “slaved” to get him there. Dap tries to get him to see that the situations are related, that apartheid is international. Da Fellas walk, fed up with Dap, who speaks of the campaign as a personal mission and of their participation as proof of their loyalty and friendship to him (shades of Julian’s “Do you love me, Jane? Well, you’re going to have to prove it”). He murder-mouths them as they exit. Sulking, he hurls a dart at the board. There’s a knock on the door. Dap opens it. Piled in cartoon fashion against the door jamb are Da Fellas. “Do revolutionaries eat Kentucky Fried Chicken?” Grady wants to know.
Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions Page 15
