plug: School Daze (1988)

"WAKE UP!!!"

I’ve only seen a small handful of Spike Lee movies, and none of the ones people generally consider his best, but every time I watch another Spike Lee joint I’m blown away by it in some way or another. Which is why I’m taking the opportunity to go through the new wealth of Spike Lee movies currently streaming on Netflix and HBO Max.

Over the weekend I started my Spike run with 1988’s School Daze; a playful, vibrant, dark, funny, brutally honest, hyper-stylized musical look at the tumultuous lives of black students at a historically black college. A young, painfully charismatic Laurence Fishburne fronts the cast as a socially conscious student leading an anti-apartheid movement at the school, advocating for divestment from South Africa. Fishburne and his buddies clash with the fraternity Gamma Phi Gamma and their women’s auxiliary, the Gamma Rays, in a series of stylish moments and musical numbers beautifully remixed from Old Hollywood musical conventions and infused with a new and exciting voice. Lee makes great use of the college setting to explore the fraught paths and social hurdles that people of color are forced to navigate in a country that continues to subjugate their existence and impose division upon their communities.

For younger viewers, there will inevitably be an “ok boomer” quality to Lee’s work. His last film, the 2018 Best Picture contender BlacKkKlansman, has already aged poorly in its “historic inaccuracies and movie-making liberties that make the police appear to be allies in the fight against racism and white supremacy.” But I think his contributions to Black cinema, marked by a consistent, singular, and inventive remix of classic movie-making techniques to magnify the Black American experience, will always be something to marvel at and, hopefully, learn from.

School Daze isn’t short on ideas or signifiers of ideas that haven’t aged particularly well, but it also utilizes the college experience to explore the inherited racism of American institutions that makes it impossible for people of color to “explore ideas” with the freedom that white Americans take for granted. It’s fun and thoughtful, sexy and horrifying, celebratory and somber, mischievous and immediate, and it shows us that the impulse to ignore identity politics is an ugly, nefarious privilege.