The Gospel according to Spike

If you didn't make it in to see Spike Lee speak to a packed audience in the Calhoun College dining hall on Wed., Feb. 21, then you couldn't hear him explain the reason why: you weren't in with the gatekeepers.

TOM ISLER/YH Spike goes a'fishin... and uses Yale as shark food.

About 200 students were admitted to the Master's Tea, held in honor of Black History Month, and sponsored by Calhoun College, the Afro-American Cultural Center, the Film Studies Department, and the Yale Film Society. Lee's visit followed the Film Society's screening of his most recent film Bamboozled the night before. The tea was held in the dining hall to accommodate the large number of students; teas in the Master's house typically are limited to about 90.

Lee is well known for various films which he has written, produced, directed, or acted in, including She's Gotta Have It, Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, and Summer of Sam. Much of the Tea was devoted to the discussion of Bamboozled, which is a satire exposing the prejudices of network television through a modern-day minstrel show.

"Bamboozled was about the power of images, and not only who they hurt—who they're being inflicted on—but also the people that are doing that stuff to them," Lee said. "I think there's a lot of that stuff nobody had seen. I had never seen Judy Garland in black-face before."

Lee, in his confrontational style, believes that the difficult images that he conveys through his films are an important cultural message. "A lot of these stereotypical images are still with us today," he explained. In response to a question about Black Entertainment Television, he concluded, " I think a lot of gangsta rap is just a 21st century form of a minstrel show."

"It's about how films, from the beginning, and television, which is basically half the age of films, have been used to denigrate different types of people, that it has a lasting effect, and still has," Lee said. "I just see it as the same old noble savage. Y'know, `Massa, we is sick. Lemme die for you,'" Lee criticized, in reference to Michael Clarke Duncan's character in The Green Mile. "Now, if you want to make that a biblical thing, you can. But I have seen too many films in the history of cinema where they keep recycling the `happy slave,' and to me, that's what that character was."

Lee believes the reason for a lot of the prejudices perpetuated by the entertainment industry—and many other industries—is the lack of African-American representation am-ong the people making executive decisions, whom he calls "the gatekeepers." He joked, "When somebody decides that Homeboys from Outer Space is an idea, to me that says that you were not in the room."

"The media is still not a place where everything is equal; it just can't be," Lee said. "Just because Denzel gets $20 million a picture, because Chris Tucker gets $25 million a picture, and Will Smith gets 25, that means that we've arrived? There's not one black person in the television or movie industry that can green-light a picture."

"I don't want to seem like I'm on an anti-Jewish rampage, but you are not going to see the star of David burn on any sitcom, on any show on television, ever. It's just not going to happen. But we can burn the Puerto Rican flag and have people laughing and that's clearly fine," Lee said regarding a particular episode of the sitcom Seinfeld. "That's where the decisions are, and you got to be about getting to those spots: the gatekeepers. Everything else really doesn't matter."

Much of Lee's frustration was expressed because of the censorship of artists, mostly African-Americans, but primarily himself and his characters. When asked about the sarcastic reference to a Yale degree in Bamboozled, Lee replied, "When you do satire, you go after the biggest fish. If she'd said `I got my degree from Duke University,' it wouldn't have worked." Agreed, Spike. Fish away.

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