Sunday, August 14, 2011

Spike Lee on the Shakespeare Tip

The following is an excerpt from a working paper on Spike Lee’s Mo’Better Blues. The paper is “Spike Lee’s Blues” and you can download it from my SSRN page.

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The depiction of this marriage [between the protagonist, Bleek Gilliam and Indigo] is, unfortunately, the least satisfactory and least plausible section of the film. As a coherent dramatic statement, the film ended with Bleek's failed comeback when he sat-in with Shadow (his former sax player) and Clarke in the Dizzy club — the club's name is an obvious reference to Dizzy Gillespie, jazz's last elder statesman and trumpet-playing counterpart to Bird, who did have a club named after him, Birdland. His subsequent marriage and child are not very plausible. He proposes marriage to Indigo in the very terms which he had rejected and satirized in "Pop Top 40." Now that he cannot be a musician, he changes his mind about one-and-only-forever love. Now he wants/needs a woman to save him. And the woman accepts him. But Bleek hasn't grown and deepened in any obvious way; he has just transferred his dependence from his career to a wife. Which is to say, simply, that Spike Lee hasn't quite figured out how to resolve these problems.

But he does give some indication of how he wants the matter resolved. To see this we have to examine the final scene of the movie. It parallels the first scene quite closely, so closely that any difference is thereby foregrounded. That difference, we can only assume, is what has been gained by the events of the picture.

Thus, in the final scene, a young boy is practicing his trumpet when his young friends come after him to join them in play. To emphasize the parallel with the opening scene, Lee uses the same child actors. In the final scene, as one would expect, Bleek is the father and his son, Miles (named after Miles Davis?), is the boy. But where young Bleek had been forced to continue practicing, young Miles is allowed out (at Bleek's urging) after a little sermon on the importance of practicing. Bleek, we are to infer, doesn't want to impose the inflexible discipline on his son that his mother had imposed on him. Young Miles will not, we are to presume, grow up in the crippled way that Bleek did.

By staging the final scene in this way Lee is asserting that Bleek has gained a measure of flexibility and insight, that he has grown though his experience. That is, he is asserting something which he hasn't, in fact, shown. Mo' Better Blues happens in two distinct phases. One runs from the beginning up through Bleek's failed come-back at the Dizzy club. The other runs from Bleek's proposal to the end. The only thing which binds these two together is Lee's cinematic assertion that the second is the logical continuation of the first. But, whereas the moves in the first phase are carefully plotted, with plausible causal links between the actions and reactions of the various characters, the moves in the second phase are not carefully plotted, they are only asserted, with a great deal of dramatic weight falling on a montage sequence set to the music of John Coltrane. And the transition between the first and the second phase is similarly implausible. It is clear that what Lee wants to say requires these two phases, otherwise he wouldn't have made the movie this way. It is also clear that Lee hasn't yet been able to establish a coherent framework in which to make this statement.

This situation is not unprecedented in dramatic history. Five-hundred years ago Shakespeare created some plays — Pericles, Cymbaline, and The Winter's Tale — that were similarly broken into two phases. Let's look at one of them and compare it to Mo' Better Blues. Like Mo' Better, The Winter's Tale breaks into two movements. In both cases, the second movement focuses on the offspring of the characters introduced in the first piece.

In Shakespeare's play the first phase is a tragedy. King Leontes becomes insanely jealous of his wife and, in consequence, acts so as to lose his wife, his son, his daughter Perdita, and his childhood friend, Polixenes. And then, when all this has happened, Leontes learns that his jealousy was unfounded. The second phase is a comedy which picks up sixteen years later. Leontes recovers Perdita, who marries Polixenes' son, Florizel, thereby restoring his friendship with Polixenes. And, at the very end, Leontes' is reunited his wife, who wasn't dead, but only hiding. The ending is a happy one.

This is an implausible and disjointed piece of work and yet, with a bit of sympathy and inspiration, it does work. We must simply assume that, during the sixteen years which we don't see, Leontes has undergone a transformation which allows him an expansiveness and generosity in the second phase which he didn't have in the first. Shakespeare has no way of showing this growth in Leontes, so he simply asserts it and gets on with his play.

Both dramas thus have a sense of being cobbled together by two different and not well-coordinated sensibilities. Each begins under the aegis of one sensibility and advances to the point where the protagonist is cut off from society. At this point the other sensibility takes over and shows us a protagonist whose return to society is centered around his child. Leontes finds his daughter and, in marrying her off, gains a son-in-law. Bleek has a son and, through him, regains his attachement to music.

The parallel is not, however, exact. In Shakespeare's play the two phases are approximately equal in length (the first is, in fact, a bit shorter than the second). In Mo' Better the second phase is only 10 to, at most, 15 minutes long, with the first movement thus taking up most of the movie. Further, the biggest single part of the second phase is taken up by the montage sequence, showing us courtship, wedding, birth of the child, and scenes from the child's youngest years. There is no dramatic action in this sequence at all, no cause and effect, just the images of the montage. Finally, there is a crucial difference in emphasis.

In The Winter's Tale there is no sense at all that the younger generation will escape the problems which splintered the older generation. The issue isn't raised in any way. But, the whole point of having a second phase in Mo' Better Blues is to indicate that it will be different with the next generation. Whatever Leontes learned, however he grew, it only allows him to put his own life back together. Whatever Bleek learned, however he matured, it is causing him to raise his son in a different way. Where Bleek was incapable of sharing himself with both his muse and his wife, perhaps his son Miles will not be so constrained. Mo' Better Blues points to a changed future, but The Winter's Tale does not. Perhaps Spike Lee knows something that Shakespeare didn't.

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