Spike Lee's 1994 "Crooklyn"
Spike Lee's famously strange, disjunctive whiplashes of tone and style from scene to scene — a benefit when it comes to his masterpieces like Do the Right Thing or Bamboozled, but which has otherwise soured me to the bulk of his filmography, especially his later work like BlackKlansman (2018), Da 5 Bloods (2020), and Highest 2 Lowest (2025) — are particularly well-suited to this autobiographical material: the Lees' origin story on a 1972-3 Brooklyn block. It was necessary for Joie Lee (fantastic screenwriter!!!) and Cinqué Lee, sister and brother of Spike, to come on board as collaborators, because they seem to bring a low-temperature, slow-unfurl element that counterbalances Spike's tendencies to want to turn everything that gets within 2 feet of him into an overly jokey, maximalist Almost-Musical with a Sam Fulleresque shouty quality that is half-charming, half-grating. Here that side of Spike flourishes in the Southern sequences (which I was charmed by — unlike, it seems, many contemporary reviewers, including the cultural critic bell hooks, who rather scoldingly accuses Spike of peddling old racist Hollywood stereotypes, when really, it's just as softly eccentric as your average Ma and Pa Kettle picture) and all the stuff on BedStuy bodegas and stoops (RuPaul and Joe Cuba!!!!).
I was convinced for half of the picture that he shot it on a beautifully fantastical, fake-feeling MGM sound stage but no, it's all on location. The anamorphic pinching is a simple but genius way of getting across, optically, the physical dislocation that a kid will feel when they're far away from their parents' home base.
The rest, the big stuff I like, just deals with the doldrums of the daily: bickering parents, finding stuff to do when you're bored, the adventures with weird neighbors and hanger-on eccentrics who sniff glue (Spike's best role? lol). The [SPOILER] stuff with the mother in the final act is so fascinatingly and intentionally ... underexplored. It goes with the signature Spike Lee disjunctiveness. A lot is being concealed here, and Spike furthers a very eccentric idea on what joy means here that he doesn't really focus on in any of his other films, which are so hell-bent on capturing the chaotic clashes of modernity. It takes kids, reminiscing fondly, and particularly the fact that he has to film from the point of view of a Black girl (the totally awesome Zelda Harris), for him to break his usual habits. And that dialogue between Delroy Lindo and Zelda Harris on the toilet seat is maybe the most devastating series of final lines I've ever heard in a Spike joint, about the happiness that comes with pain's cessation and all that. And then, Meet Me in St. Louis style, we manic depressively whiplash back to the bustling street, the hair styling, Soul Train on TV, enjoying the Knicks win in whatever way that translates to your daily life.
bell hooks is sharp on this and I cosign all her observations in her famous Sight and Sound magazine critique on the film, but we reach the exact opposite conclusions. What she knocks on the film, I find are its unabashed strengths. I don't at all find patriarchal order restored fully in its ending, an order that will in turn reify a conservative Black order — just as I don't at all read the ending to Minnelli's Meet me in St. Louis as a completely happy one that unironically celebrates America and family; darkness lingers always with Minnelli, and the same with Spike Lee in family-comedy mode. Against hooks, what I see is the pained, unsuccessful attempt to stifle immense suffering and melancholia and an unquantifiable grief in order to survive U.S.A. I see the sacrifices and the self-delusions maintained by a Black family in order to keep bravely alive the idea of a hope, a strived-for alleviation, from material conditions that keep them down—a devastating revelation that unites generations, a 10-year-old girl and her middle-aged father, as they sit wondering what will happen to them once they leave the safety of the shit-can.
"By normalising the family image, Lee refuses to engage with the issue of psychological abuse; all interactions are made to appear natural, ordinary, comedic, not tragic." —bell hooks
"By normalising the family image, Lee engages with the issue of psychological abuse that arrives out of that process of normality; all interactions are made to appear natural, ordinary, comedic, not tragic. And Lee, as a Black Hollywood filmmaker, refuses tragedy, yet allows it to seep in through the cracks of his exuberant image-making. The scenario, the difference in opinion of his siblings, is a riposte to this exuberance. A push-pull of moving proportions — at least to this critic." —me
