plug: Summer of Sam (1999)

“Since when does your hairstyle determine whether or not you're a fuckin' killer?”

Spike Lee and cast on location for Summer of Sam (1999)

Was planning on something else for today’s plug, but then Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam arrived in the mail from Netflix (yes, you can still get DVD rentals from Netflix in the mail, and yes, I’m probably the only genius you know who still does it 🤗) and it slapped so hard I figured I’d go ahead and make this a “Spike week” here at ESH, what with a new Spike joint coming out on Netflix tomorrow and my own run through available-to-stream Spike films in full swing.

I should probably note that Spike Lee won’t be the only Black filmmaker you’ll see highlighted around here in the coming weeks. My own movie diet has been shamefully lacking in work from Black filmmakers for, well, my whole life, so I’m trying to change that now and share my experiences with y’all along the way. To reiterate a point from The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey on the latest episode of The Big Picture podcast, “Spike isn’t the totality of the Black filmmaking experience, and I don’t want to suggest that. But for 40 years he’s told stories about that experience that have been seen more widely and discussed more feverishly than anyone. And they still haven’t been seen enough.” 

Summer of Sam isn’t about the Black experience per se, but it is about the modern-gothic shit show of the American experience, and it’s about the systemic cultural rot that still plagues us, perhaps now more than ever.

Four Horsemen of the ‘77 Apocalypse

One of my initial thoughts after watching Summer of Sam is that it’s a clear precursor to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, taking a similar fact-meets-fiction approach to capture the essence of a very specific time, place, and cultural moment. But where Once Upon a Time was a fairy tale-mirroring of history, Summer of Sam is an astute psychedelic nightmare version of it.

John Leguizamo and Adrien Brody (both doing some of their strangest and most fascinating work) play Vinny and Richie, a pair of old friends from an Italian-American neighborhood in The Bronx embarking on diverging paths. Vinny is a hot-blooded newlywed, moving through the New York disco scene with his wife Dionna (the incomparable Mira Sorvino) and navigating a vicious cycle of drugs, serial infidelity, Catholic guilt, and mounting paranoia. Richie gets deep into the New York punk scene, starts a band with Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), a friend from the old neighborhood who shares his love for The Who, and makes a living dancing at a gay erotic theater.

Tensions rise with the riots, murders, and blistering heat throughout the summer of ‘77. Vinny finds himself in a vicious downward spiral, fearing that the killer and maybe a Manson-esque cult is after him, just as some of the guys from the neighborhood start to wonder whether Richie might be the Son of Sam himself.

The whole thing plays out in a merciless kaleidoscopic haze of nightmare fuel with a singular touch of social awareness and comic chops that only Spike Lee can manage. To quote Sean Fennessey again, “Some directors interpret the past, some directors capture the present. Spike does both, and he sees the future.” Summer of Sam is a grimy, sweaty, strange, diabolical rocknroll portrait of American life — one that will hit mad close to home as we head into the blinding mass-dumpster fire of our own deadly summer.