No single filmmaker in the history of cinema has done more for African American representation on film than Spike Lee. The films he was making, the things he was doing, and most importantly the things his films were saying were revolutionary for 1980s audiences.Moviegoers had grown accustomed to minority characters being either dignified in the manner of Sidney Poitier or villainous or comic relief or some other unusually broad stereotype filling a niche. Blaxploitation had come to represent black culture in the 70s and Lee helped it shake off that image, giving black audiences films about them, set in the here and now.
Lee also introduced black culture and life and thought to white audiences who had been just fine with Bill Cosby's Cliff Huxtable being the representation of an African American they could embrace. Through Lee's films, white audiences—particularly white teenagers who wanted a taste of what life was like outside their suburban confines—were introduced to three-dimensional black characters wrestling with universal problems. Like Sesame Street helped introduce many of my generation—late Gen X-ers—to the concept of diversity, Spike Lee's films helped us see that at the end of the day, we're all struggling with the same stupid problems.
This is not to say that films like Do the Right Thing,Malcolm X, and laterBamboozled, didn't carry powerful messages to those same white teenagers, namely that there are obstacles in the way of that warm and fuzzy feeling that we're all the same. Just as the film's felt liberating for black audiences, white audiences were having to confront white privilege in bold and often aggressive new ways. While I obviously cannot speak to the African American experience in regard to Lee's filmography, I can say that as one of those aforementioned teens coming of age just as Lee's career was kicking into high gear, his films definitely impacted the way I saw my place in the world.
Lee also did a lot to help push sexuality in black cinema out of the realm of exploitation, often by presenting nudity as a way of showing a character's vulnerability. Whether that's for sexual pleasure or having a frank conversation or even a soldier coming upon a topless woman doing her laundry, there are many layers of meaning behind some of Lee'snude scenes. By showing healthy sexual relationships between black characters, Lee was helping to de-fetishize the image of black women as representing the exotic which was prevalent, at least, in American cinema.
Let's go all the way back to near the beginning of Lee's career and start with his second feature...
She's Gotta Have It (1986)
Technically Lee's first feature is the hour-long 1983 flick Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, but most people think of the Spike Lee style truly starting here in this 1986 comedy about Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) and her three lovers, including one played by Lee himself. Shot in black and white by longtime DP Ernest Dickerson behind the camera, She's Gotta Have Itbrought contemporary romance in the African American community into the mainstream in a way that ran counter to the so-called family values on display in the country's number one show, "The Cosby Show."
Tracy Camilla Johns gives a terrific performance as Nola, exuding sexuality in such a way that you buy these three dudes all being obsessed with her. She goes topless a number of times throughout the film...
The film's entire aesthetic hinged on naturalism, and the nudity feels right in line with that concept. This wasLee's breakthrough mainstream film and he himself revived this concept for the digital age on Netflix with a short-lived TV series of the same name in 2017 and 2018. Everything old is new again, and this film still feels fresh even if the lingo and the fashion seem dated.
Do the Right Thing (1989)
After 1988's happy-go-lucky tale of an inner-city high school with School Daze, Lee took a bold step forward with Do the Right Thing.The film took the look and feel of any number of music videos or programs playing on MTV on a given day and strategically wove it through a story of racial tensions boiling over during 24 hours spent in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. Lee uses an editing strategy that likely felt frantic to audiences who selected Driving Miss Daisy as the Best Picture the same year this film came out, but now feels efficient and effective at moving with alacrity through such a sprawling ensemble.
That he does it all in the span of two hours is nothing short of a miracle, let alone that he makes you care about a great many of these characters, invests you in their narratives, and presents all sides of a story equally, even if Lee judges them not morally equal. It builds outrage in its audience, getting them firmly in the corner of Mookie, played by Lee, when he tosses a trash can through the window of his employer's pizza shop. Prior to all of that, however, the film invests you in Mookie's relationship with Tina (Rosie Perez), the mother of his son. They spend the hot night attempting to cool off with the aid of some ice cubes, which Lee rubs all over Perez while he compliments her body...
The film earned Lee his first Oscar nomination and it feels every bit as relevant in 2019 as it did thirty years ago.
Mo' Better Blues (1990)
This 1990 celebration of jazz is probably most significant in retrospect for being the first time Lee worked with leading man Denzel Washington. Washington plays the fictional trumpeter Bleek Gilliam, who spends the first half of the film clawing his way to respectability through great discipline. As the film progresses, however, he begins totake things for granted too much, and has a nasty habit of self-sabotaging his career and his relationships. 28 minutes into the flick, he sleeps with his friend's girl Clarke, played by Cynda Williams, and we see her breasts when she bites his lip...
Forty minutes later, he's settled into a new relationship with Indigo (Joie Lee), and we briefly see her breasts as they have sex...
But just a minute later, we catch him back in the arms of Cynda Williams...
Jungle Fever (1991)
One of the more talked about and controversial films of 1991, the phrase Jungle Fever quickly became cultural shorthand for any white person that, ahem, got hot for a black person. "Could you imagine such a thing?" is sort of the premise of this movie, but it's a little more deep than that. Wesley Snipes' character is a successful architect, happily married to Lonette McKee, with whom he has a perfectly healthy sex life. They open the flick having very loud sex, which might not seem groundbreaking, butnot many movies—particularly ones that are overtly about infidelity—open with a minority married couple having hot sex...
Then another native Brooklynite, Annabella Sciorra, plays a woman who starts working for Snipes and acquires the titular affliction. He ends up sleeping with her, though Sciorra doesn't go nude...
He eventually ends up back with McKee, who is kissing him topless in bed when we next see her after all has been revealed, but as the camera gets closer, we see that she is weeping, and ultimately doesn't end up taking the philanderer back...
For my money, this film's legacy lies in this killer Stevie Wonder music video it gave us...
Girl 6 (1996)
The first of two films Lee released in 1996 is a seemingly slight tale of an actress (Theresa Randle) who can't take the abusive power of the men in charge of the industry, so shetakes a jobas a sex phone and begins wielding a new kind of power over powerful men. The film opens with her landing an audition for Quentin Tarantino, playing a slightly exaggerated version of himself—if such things could be believed. Tarantino eventually asks Randle to take off her top, and after she reluctantly complies, he begins humiliating her to the point that she eventually gets up and leaves...
Though this only six minutes in and the rest of the film finds her working for a sex phone line, it's curious that the nudity in the film stops here, but this scene awkwardly and perfectly captures the humiliation many actresses must endure in this industry.
He Got Game (1998)
The next two films we're going to discuss are definitely the two most skin-filled in Lee's career,starting with his first reunion with Denzel since Malcolm X earned the latter an Oscar nomination—he lost to Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. Here Denzel plays Jake, the convict father of a top high school basketball prospect—played by future NBA Hall of Famer Ray Allen—who gets an offer to be paroled for a week by the governor in order to convince his son to sign with the governor's alma mater. If he does, the governor will commute Jake's sentence and get him released from prison.
Of course nothing goes right for Jake, the perennial screw-up, but everything goes right for his son Jesus, who gets not only a threesome with Jill Kelly and Chasey Lain...
He also gets to be in close proximity to and even handle a 19 year old Rosario Dawson's bare breasts...
Milla Jovovich co-stars as the hooker with the heart of gold who takes Jake in and starts a relationship with him, but her day job is working as a prostitute, which she clearly disdains...
She Hate Me (2004)
Perhaps the most sexually confused and confusing film of Lee's entire filmography is this 2004 misfire starring a young Anthony Mackie as a man who makes a living impregnating rich lesbians. It came just two years after one of Lee's absolute best films, 25th Hour, and has a troubling message behind it: All lesbians just need a man with a good dick to straighten them out, literally and figuratively. Mackie's ex-wife is Kerry Washington, who is now in a lesbian relationship with Dania Ramirez, and the women want to have a baby, so they're going to pay Mackie $10,000 to impregnate Washington.
This leads to two developments: First is that Mackie cures his financial woes by offering his services to many lesbians like Bai Ling...
and Aura Grimolyte...
All of whom enjoy the sex, which is a point the movie keeps needlessly raising. Not long after this, he comes over to the house hoping he might be on the road to mending his relationship with his ex, only to find Washington and Ramirez going at it, with a nice look at Kerry's rack and Dania's boobs and buns as they get busy in bed...
The movie takes a left turn after this, making a half-hearted attempt to argue both sides of, essentially, the film's message, but it ends with Mackie, Washington, and Ramirez agreeing to be a polyamorous throuple, so that sort of cements his stance on things. Granted the notion of polyamory as a serious thing in a mainstream film in 2004 was more than a little bit groundbreaking. Still, one can't overlook some of the more troubling sexual politics on display.
Miracle at St. Anna (2008)
Spike goes to WWII with this epic dramatic film based on anovel by a man named James McBride who is, sadly, not Mr. Skin. Four African American soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines in Italy in late 1944, and receive aid from a local woman sympathetic to their plight, played by the gorgeous Valentina Cervi. We meet her an hour and a half into this nearly three-hour movie, as she is topless and hanging laundry outside her home while the soldiers approach...
Before long, she finds herself in a love triangle with two of the soldiers—played by Michael Ealy and Derek Luke—and we see her breasts again twenty minutes later when she gets busy with Ealy...
Oldboy (2013)
Perhaps the biggest failure of Lee's career, both artistically and financially, is this unnecessary remake of Park Chan-wook's absolutely perfect 2003 film of the same name. We covered this film at length in a recent Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy column, so there's no need to re-litigate this flick. Click here to check out that column and then come back.
Chi-Raq (2015)
Just prior to Spike's latest career-reviving flick, BlacKkKlansman, which earned him his first Oscar, he put a new spin on an ancient tale. Chi-Raq was made as a response to the spate of gun violence that plagued the city of Chicago for several years, filtered through the Greek protest comedy classic "Lysistrata" by Aristophones. In the original work and Lee's film, a group of women decide to go on a sex strike in order to get their men to stop fighting. In the original play it was over the Peloponnesian War and in Lee's film, the general gang violence in the city of Chicago.
Teyonah Parris plays Lysistrata, concocting the same plan as her namesake did thousands of years ago, though neither she nor co-star Ilfenesh Hadera actually go nude in the flick...
Thankfully co-star Lorraine Ward bares some terrific TA while getting busy withNick Cannon...
While Chi-Raq obviously failed to connect with audiences, it showed that Spike Lee was a filmmaker still willing to push buttons, still willing to go places a lot of other filmmakers wouldn't go. Obviously mainstream tastes have caught up to him, awarding him his first Oscar earlier this year and ensuring that the absurdly prolific Lee will continue churning out movies for years to come.
Spike Lee Movies with Nudity Not Covered in This Column
—Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)
—She's Gotta Have It (Netflix Series 2017-2018)
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
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Non-nude images courtesy of IMDb
