Two Films by Spike Lee

In his films 25th Hour and Do the Right Thing Spike Lee uses New York both as a theme and a foundation for the visual structure of the film. In both cases, Lee relies on the cosmopolitan mosaic of New York to dramatize a series of inter-connected characters, much the way he seems to view New York as a place of interconnected characters.

In the film 25th Hour, Spike Lee uses New York as both background and character. Perhaps one could argue the city serves as a background character, a sort of extra floating around the set. The film is about a convicted drug dealer saying his good-byes the day before he is about to head to prison for a seven-year sentence. As A.O. Scott notes in his review of the film, the story is based on a novel by David Benioff, who also wrote the screenplay. The book was written and published well before the attacks of September 11th. References to the attack in the film, therefore, are original to the film.

The film begins with Montgomery "Monty" Brogan saving a dying dog on a street with the Brooklyn Bridge as the backdrop. This visual, therefore, ties the city and the character together in the story. However, the film next runs the opening credit sequence, which begins with a shot of New York skyscraper lit with brilliant light from above. Following shots show the "twin towers" of light used to represent the spot where the Twin Towers stood before they were decimated in the 9/11 attacks. The film, therefore, not so much as the story, sets up that th

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c of Mr. Lee's movie as an important element of its atmosphere, at times an obtrusive one." More than that, however, it seems an inappropriate one, even if the viewer accepts the premise suggested above, that Lee intended to equate Monty's drug dealing with American foreign policy. Essentially, the issue of 9/11 merely seems too "big" to serve merely as a backdrop for a story that is not ultimately about 9/11. Nonetheless, Lee's purpose might only have been to suggest that 9/11 so changed New York that one cannot use the city as a backdrop without addressing the attacks. There is another scene in the 25th Hour that most reviewers seemed to be unable to ignore. This is the scene in the bathroom, where Monty sees "fuck you" scribbled on the mirror and then watches as his reflection goes on a diatribe against everything that essentially makes New York New York. Most notably, the diatribe rails against the Sikhs, and the Pakistanis, and the Koreans, and the "brothers," and the rich ladies on Park Avenue who get too much plastic surgery. One reviewer called this "Lee's ostentatious setpiece [of] Norton's howl of non-PC rage" (Bradshaw 1). But the reviewer does not seem to appreciate that, in this scene, the words are not Monty's pe

Category: Film - T