The Root has a week-long retrospective on Do The Right Thing, which I highly recommend reading. Doing so has made me reflect a bit on my own thoughts about the Spike Lee canon.
Let me first say that I love Spike Lee’s films. When I was about 16, I went on a Spike Lee bender and watched everything he’s ever made. My two favorites not counting his biopic of Malcolm X, (which is everyone’s favorite) are Mo’Better Blues and He Got Game. I love the former because the exchange between Shadow and Bleek about art and accessibility (If you played the sh*t that they like, the people would come) I can hear in my head to this day. As for the former, Denzel Washington‘s ability to make a character who should be, by any standard, irredeemable, both sympathetic and believable made me watch the film all over again.
The thing is though, is that Spike clearly has mad issues with Jewish characters. While I’m able to enjoy his films despite his grudges–it’s nonetheless distracting: the greedy sniveling stereotypes who own the club in MBB, the Jewish bus driver in Get On The Bus who thinks his racism is justified by his own history of oppression. The worst though, by far, is a character that Spike omitted: the character of Hymie from his Malcolm X biopic.
There’s a scene that takes place, both in Malcolm’s biography and Spike’s film, where Malcolm reflects on the white people he’s known in his life, and decides that none of them really cared about him. In the film, this conclusion comes easily. In Malcolm’s autobiography though, he hesitates when he thinks of Hymie, a Jewish shopkeeper who employed him and loathed Jews who tried to assimilate by changing their last names. This would seem to be significant to me, given what Malcolm ultimately decided to do with his own last name, and given his ultimate conclusion near the end of his life that white people weren’t devils after all. I couldn’t figure out why Spike had omitted him from the film.
As a belligerent, cornrowed college freshman I got to ask Spike the question during an appearance he made on Vassar’s campus. He didn’t have an answer–other than that the film was “too long” and he couldn’t fit Hymie in. I couldn’t help feeling that Hymie simply wasn’t as convenient as the fictional Jewish characters we’re used to seeing in Spike Lee joints.
— A. Serwer
