From the opening
image of Spike Lee’s new movie Chi-Raq – a red, white, and blue
map of the United States composed entirely of the silhouettes of a variety of
guns – it is clear that the filmmaker intends to take on the volatile issue of
blacks and gun violence in war-torn Chicago, nicknamed Chi-Raq by its black
inhabitants after the Middle Eastern war zone. Lee has a habit of provoking racial
controversy, and that is no less true of this darkly humorous satire (“not
a comedy,” he insists) set in the murder capital of the United States. True to the
director’s form, Chi-Raq provokes and dissatisfies those on both sides
of the debate.
Spike Lee has
attacked both white and black fellow filmmakers in the past for reasons related
to race. As noted in his profile at the Freedom
Center’s Discover the Networks resource site, Lee excoriated Tyler Perry for
the stereotyped depictions of black characters in his hugely popular comedies,
and Woody Allen for not featuring enough black characters in his movies set in
Manhattan. From his perspective that racism is deeply entrenched in American
culture, the enormously wealthy Lee has railed against such issues as interracial
couples, Charlton Heston and the NRA, NASCAR, the war in Iraq, the shooting of
Michael Brown, and the gentrification of New York. He suspects the government
of having engineered the AIDS epidemic and the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He
has supported Barack Obama and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He has
stated that blacks can’t be racist, because they don’t have the political power
to impose racism.
But interestingly,
Chi-Raq doesn’t take an entirely expected position about blacks and gun
violence. Lee could have made a movie about a white cop shooting an unarmed
black man, which is the supposed epidemic ravaging the black American
community; instead, he made a film that lays the responsibility for the high
rate of black deaths annually from gun violence largely on the black community
itself. Unlike the Black Lives Matter movement, Lee is willing to face the
harsh reality of young black males perpetrating violence against other blacks.
That message
didn’t go over well with many blacks. The film’s trailer alone, featuring some
comedic moments that some took as making light of the topic, was enough to
cause a backlash against Lee. Grammy-award winning rapper Rhymefest even
demanded that the director issue an apology to the city of Chicago.
The template for
the movie’s style is classical Greek theater – more specifically, Aristophanes’
comedy Lysistrata, in which the titular heroine attempted to force an
end to the Peloponnesian War by persuading the women of Greece to withhold
sex from their men until those warriors lay down their arms. Lee’s protagonist
is also named Lysistrata, and the script is even written mostly in verse and
utilizes the ancient Greek technique of a chorus that provides background
information and commentary – here in the form of a scene-stealing Samuel L.
Jackson.
In Chi-Raq,
Lysistrata is the girlfriend of up-and-coming rapper and gangbanger Chi-Raq of
the Spartan gang, which is waging a turf war against the Trojans (another nod
to the story’s ancient Greek roots). After a black child dies in the street
from a stray bullet fired by Chi-Raq, Lysistrata decides to do something about
the perpetual violence. Inspired by video footage of the activist Leymah
Gbowee’s sex strike in Liberia, Lysistrata decides to organize all the women
from both gangs to dedicate themselves to “total abstinence from knockin’ the
boots” until the men give up their guns and cease the endless killing.
“Everybody here
got a man in the orange and purple colors, banging and slanging, fightin’ for
the flag / riskin’ that long zip of the cadaver bag,” she implores the Trojan
women.
“It’s how we
live,” argues one.
“It’s how we die,”
Lysistrata counters. “You wanna lose your man to a driveby?”
Uniting behind the
slogan, “No peace, no pussy,” the women lock it up and leave their macho men
high and dry. The community impact is immediate and dramatic: “Even the hoes
are no-shows,” one man complains, and the local strip club owner laments that
“This famine affects the lower regions, where all you young Trojans do most of
your thinkin’.”
Noted lefty actor
John Cusack plays Father Mike Corridan, a clear representation of real-life radical leftist
Chicago priest Father Michael
Pfleger, who is a longtime friend and supporter of Barrack Obama, Jeremiah
Wright, and Louis Farrakhan. Cusack’s character delivers a fiery sermon to
a packed African-American church mourning the death of another child, in which
he pushes the predictable leftist line: children die because politicians are in
the pocket of the National Rifle Association; gun shows provide buyers a
loophole to avoid gun control laws; crime will end when young blacks are
guaranteed jobs (“and I don’t mean at minimum wage!”); Jesus was a social
justice warrior (“He rolled with the poor”).
Meanwhile, in the
film’s least bombastic and most effective plea for blacks to take charge of
ending the culture of violence, a young gangbanger crippled for life by a
bullet tells the stubborn Chi-Raq that the thug life is no life at all: “This
ain’t livin’. This ain’t life. We gotta do somethin’ different, bro.”
Lysistrata’s movement
quickly goes national, then international, as women from places as far-flung as
India and Brazil get behind the “No peace, no pussy” commitment. Back home, her
next step is to seize the Chicago Armory (under the command, bizarrely, of a
caricatured, openly racist, Southern white general whose office is adorned with
a huge Confederate flag). This prompts the riot police and even the Army to
step in for a standoff. The police commissioner, a black man, argues with
Lysistrata that thuggish behavior isn’t winning her side any sympathy. She
finishes with a pro-Black Lives Matter speech and expresses contempt for “you
and your Ben Carson sort.”
In “Spike Lee's
Troublesome Chi-Raq Does Not Have the Answers,” a reviewer at
the radical feminist site Jezebel called complains that the director muddied
his message by incorporating “too many” points of view – by which she probably
means anything other than the Black Lives Matter perspective. She resents that
he puts “a large onus on black people to, in Lee’s words, ‘Wake up’ and search
inward.” She’s frustrated that he said in an interview, “We cannot be out there
[protesting] and then when it comes to young brothers killing themselves, then
mum’s the word… You can’t ignore that we are killing ourselves, too.” Who
exactly is ignoring it? the reviewer wonders.
Who is ignoring
it? Too many young blacks. Chicago in 2016 is well on its way to setting a
record pace for gun violence: in the first eleven days of the year, at least
120 victims have been either killed or wounded by gunfire, mostly from gang
rivalries. Lee couldn’t have predicted that the timing of his movie (it opened
in limited release in December) would be so tragically perfect.
From FrontPage Mag, 1/17/16
