To the editors:
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In reviewing Jungle Fever, Jonathan Rosenbaum noted that Spike Lee’s “beginning to listen with profit to his actors” who’ve helped him broaden his conception of his characters. But such apparent praise points to Lee’s fundamental limitations as an artist: he cannot imagine characters developing beyond the racial stereotypes they represent. In a movie such as Do the Right Thing, whose subject was racial stereotypes, he came close to creating a masterpiece, composed of short undeveloped sequences that revealed our prejudices and hatreds. But given an interracial relationship supposedly at the core of his narrative Lee cannot imagine for more than the length of half the movie what a man and a woman might come to think and feel about each other–how in short to develop his characters beyond the taboo attraction that first brings them together. So the relationship is broken off in mid-movie with the Wesley Snipes character saying, revealingly, to his lover that sampling the myth of interracial sex was what they really sought and no more.
While Oliver Stone and others must go back 30 years to make any kind of left of center statement (Mississippi Burning, The Long Walk Home, Running on Empty are all set safely in the past), Lee remains the only major director with the guts to deal with contemporary issues, but he still lacks either the talent or the will to understand, portray and develop even his own people with any depth of insight beyond the prejudices which many Americans take for the truth of the matter.
