Bums Begetting Bastards

Only frauds seek controversy. So what does it say about Spike Lee that controversy has become his stock-in-trade? His latest film She Hate Me concerns a buppie executive, John Henry "Jack" Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), who loses his corporate job and becomes a stud for hire, impregnating lesbians at $10,000 a pop. Gullible film producers probably imagined "Art" when hearing the premise, but that's more naive than dreaming dollar signs; the resulting movie is so far from any recognizable human experience that it's not art. It's ridiculous.

She Hate Me would be less deplorable had it simply been made for money. Instead, Lee's blatant attempt at controversy plays viewers cheap. Using a checklist of hot-button subjects, he fashions a story that combines the Enron scandal, homophobia, Watergate, divorce, class inequity, AIDS and the exploitable subsets of racism (poverty, illness, unemployment). As Charlie Rose unwittingly derided Lee, "What's that got to do with Enron?"

Conflating a lurid high concept with moral gravity, Lee caters to the market for political outrage and profane spectacle. It's Paul Schrader's rebel-artist shtick: He thinks his harsh truth is an antidote to the culture's timidity. In She Hate Me, Lee pretends to examine modern moral hypocrisy—as if exposing the sexual license of an upper-echelon businessman critiqued his class' professional practices. He wants to spice up a story of white-collar, fluorescent-lit, skyscraper ethics by linking them to the black and gay ghetto's low-down, primal sex drive. And still, he's no less puritanical than Schrader would be.

This film (its title alters a remark by football jock Rod Smart) is worse, since it roots ideas of moral turpitude in African-American (and dark ethnic) licentiousness. Uh huh, it's racist. The media lets Lee get away with this (and his other spiritually ugly movies) due to the utter confusion surrounding politics and culture. His previous film, 25th Hour, sucker-punched people who, seeing their personal anxieties in Lee's Ground Zero abyss, accepted his facile character psychology. The ostentatious depiction of post-9/11 trauma distracted viewers from realizing that instead of being enlightened, their distress had merely been exacerbated.

It's a shrewd, very New York tactic. (Expect Lee to one day run for office: dogcatcher.) Lee knows that just as controversy has replaced news reporting, it can also be used as a substitute for drama. Such cynicism has become the dominant method of contemporary filmmakers who have given up moving audiences emotionally and settle for encouraging their distrust, contempt and sarcasm. This same tendency has caused The Terminal to be undervalued. It's why Lee chooses projects by headlines, not themes. Bringing up issues without thinking them through, he implies that no clarity is possible (distrust). His cast of hateful characters offers no illumination and can only be viewed aghast (contempt). Finally, he shows off fallible behavior, regardless of the emotional offense, simply to pique our bemusement (sarcasm).

Here's the way this works in She Hate Me: When Jack is laid off, instead of seeking a credible work alternative, he takes his father's (Jim Brown) bad advice that as a black man, his life options are limited. This bogus "wisdom" from a jaded character never challenges Jack (though it ironically expresses Lee's own middle-class petulance). As the plot develops, Jack's siring scores of fractured families and innumerable children simply fulfills an already benighted worldview. These would-be farcical events are, actually preposterous—a Molierian predicament is hooked onto a lewd, hiphop-era social thesis. You'd have to be starving for stupidity to swallow the plot's illogic.

Jack's now-lesbian ex-girlfriend (Kerry Washington) sets up a business, easily recruiting other lesbians who want to be impregnated, including her own new lover (Dania Ramirez). The parade of exotic dykes lining up to be serviced, carrying dollar bills and favored sex toys, is a gimmick enacted for prurience with no believability. Unlike Molière, the characters behave according to the coarsest multiculti stereotypes; their psychology remains unexplored. Everyone—from Woody Harrelson and Ellen Barkin as Jack's ruthless white bosses to Brown and Lonette McKee as his bickering parents—is just gangsta.

Brazenly giving in to the most superficial stereotypes, Lee appeals to those cultural profiteers who want to revive the warp of racial and sexual difference as a twisted celebration of identity politics. That's the cynical quagmire in which Jack justifies his behavior: "Survival makes a person do things they know in their heart is wrong." Spike winds up offering immorality. Lee's script (co-written with Michael Genet) doesn't delve deep enough into how we are human—and thus fallible. She Hate Me's convoluted dirty joke comes down to bums begetting bastards—a pimp's morality.

Relying on topical references doesn't make our millennial fever felt; it's just name-dropping, issue-dropping, button-pushing. Shallow controversies. Today's sex-money-morality nexus was explored more deeply in French director Jean-Claude Brisseau's outre Secret Things. "Feeling naked under a coat gave me a sense of superiority over people in the street," Brisseau's calculating femme-fatale heroine confessed in voice-over. But when Jack's in bed with different women, his thinking doesn't extend beyond his erection; when he testifies in court against his white employers, his loyalty doesn't go beyond himself. Brisseau, however, accomplished an exacting scrutiny of bourgeois sexual behavior and how it relieves or reflects the corporate personality. He avoided mixing up issues of licentious ethnicity and social responsibility, while Lee stumbles on the difference between instinct and social habit.

Lee's early promise to explore Black Americans' secret attitudes and personal conflicts has devolved into selfishness and received social platitudes. He's Hollywood's equivalent to a rapper whose only notion of political rap is to complain—about others. It's an extremely commercial tactic, which may explain why the most memorable image in She Hate Me is not the gruesome suicide or the montages of physical non-intimacy, but the credit sequence featuring graphics on a phony three-dollar bill. The textured paper and undulating lines of green and black ink present an almost erotically close meditation on money—it suggests that Lee's deepest ambivalence is neither about sex nor morality. So when Jack sums up, "We are all hypocrites!" he's not confessing; it's Lee boasting.