CHI-RAQ
If Spike Lee were truly as infused with hubris as he might
wish American consumers of film to believe he is, he would have asked two
Chicago ministers, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright,
to pray to their God for the success of Chi-Raq the film and for the end of
urban violence in the city of Chicago, code name ShyRack. He did not hesitate to ask Reverend Jackson
to pray for the success of School Daze. See the caption and ocular proof in The
Films of Spike Lee: Five for Five (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1991). 58.. And
the film would have been endowed with the blessings of
liberation theology and spiritual credibility had he also persuaded
Reverend Wright to portray Father Corridan in the film. Wright and Jackson
would have given historicized Chicago authenticity to his enterprise, but their
involvement also would have prevented Lee from creating Chi-Raq as stereotype-reifying, slapstick pornography. The
ministers would have forced him and his actors to burn in flames of tragic
rather than comic "truth." Spike Lee is infused with chutzpah.
Lee has been in the
cinema game too long to waste his juice or to send Hollywood an ISIS message. He is not a fool. Despite his obvious possession of some
political consciousness, he is not a radical or an heir of Malcolm X. Like Aristophanes, he is a trickster of the
first water. And like the ancient Greek playwright from whose Lysistrata he borrows theme and surface
features, Spike Lee has good entrepreneurial skills. Satirizing the amoral depths of society and pious belief in
the sanctity of human life (# All Lives Matter) has commercial value in the
world of cinema. Money talks. It sponsors the confusion of shared values in
the United States of America. Money reinforces the documented reluctance of many
citizens who inhabit ShyRackish territory to enforce communal values, to break
silence. To be sure, those citizens are
not silent about the debilitating effects of entrenched systemic racism, the
mental illness which thugs and police people cultivate, and the production of genocide in the heart of
whiteness. They are quite vocal. On the
other hand, those who are most vocal about social injustice are most frequently
silenced and disappeared by money, mass media, and such films as Chi-Raq.
A comedy or comic film in the United States that smells of morality or serious
interrogation of political and social issues is damned from the
start. It is destined to turn no profit,
because (1) the conventions of comedy demand exaggeration and (2) Americans are
gluttons for trivia, the bling of nonsense. Abnormality has to be normalized. The comic
valorizes a certain degree of vulgarity. Comic satire, as Bamboozled demonstrated,
must embody dread, the quality of
conjoined repulsiveness and attraction that can provoke laughter. Should
abnormality and dread be the actual norm (the unfortunate case in sectors of
American society where ShyRackish communities exist), satire tends to succeed as
entertainment. It does not move
significant numbers of people to adopt progressive, life-valuing behaviors. Thus, Lee's attempt to transform Greek
satiric comedy into American comic satire delivers a gender-laden
mess of sexist, death-oriented, racist affirmation.
As a filmmaker, Lee is at the top of his game in terms of
understanding his audiences as well as the ideological apparatus of the music, entertainment, and film industries. Some of the awkwardness of films involves the effort to serve competing
desires. Artists who possess more than
the intelligence of a prenatal fetus generally desire to do the right thing. The industries , on the other hand, desire to
maintain power and what Charles W. Mills aptly named the American racial
contract. The ethical dilemma can be
addressed, but it can't be resolved. It
is a Forty Acres and Zora Neale Hurston mule no-brainer to be outraged by the sexism of Chi-Raq, its selling the slogan "No
peace. No pussy," it moral treason.
Some viewers of the
film might be able to cut through all the audiovisual, hip hop anointed shit
and hear Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) utter the name Leymah Gbowee and advise
Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) to discover why, at least once in African and world
history, sisterhood, prayer, and sex did matter and did make a difference. Out of the chaos of murdering cultural memory
in Chicago, of minimizing Iraq's erectile dysfunction, and of selling the booty call crack of America's puritanical Founding Mothers, Spike Lee and company drop on
viewers the challenge represented by Leymah Gbowee, Liberia's president Ellen
Johnson Sirleaf, and Tawakkul Karman, the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize for
Peace. Chi-Raq is not about peace and
dead children. It is not about pussy and
guns and what D. H. Lawrence wrote or
did not write about Lady Chatterley's cunt. It is
not about globally abused females and pathetic , demonic males, and innocent dead
children and the manifest destiny of ethnic self-hatred to perpetuate genocide.
Chi-Raq is about the world's orchestrated
failure to learn what needs to be done
from Aristophanes's Lysistrata , from
the 2008 documentary Pray the Devil Back
to Hell, or from Gbowee's book Mighty
Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood,
Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War (2011). It would surprise no one should it ever be
revealed that Pope Francis prayed for Chi-Raq
on December 8, 2015 when he opened the
doors of St. Peter's Basilica to mark the advent of a Year of Mercy during
which the world can celebrate a Supreme Being's love for those who thrive in
sin and are need of unconditional mercy.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 14, 2015
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