Spike Lee sells out

by MC17

Spike Lee has been making politically conscious 
films since 1987 (see MIM web site for reviews of 
some of his films) including Do the Right Thing, 
School Daze, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and She's 
Gotta Have It. Spike himself has spoken out on 
police brutality and the lack of Black 
representation in films, not as someone MIM would 
hold up as representing good revolutionary 
politics, but as someone who made it in Hollywood 
while still putting forward good political 
messages. 

But this year Spike Lee sold out to the 
U.$. Navy. Spike Lee was the lowest bidder to 
produce six recruiting ads for the Navy for 
payment of $2.5 million. According to Navy 
spokesperson Edward Brownlee "When people ask 'Why 
Spike Lee?' I say 'Why Not?' He's able to connect 
with an audience we're interested in recruiting." 

What Spike Lee is doing is worse than the 
bourgeois ad firms who advertise for the navy: he 
is taking his street credibility and turning it 
into an effective recruiting campaign for the 
imperialist Navy. Lee said "I'm very grateful to 
be given the shot because there are some backward 
people in the world who have a very narrow vision 
of who I am, of what I'm about, and what I can 
do." This sounds like all the Black nationalist 
messages in Lee's films were just tools used by a 
conniving man skilled at making money. He can play 
the ghetto scene and he can play the imperialist 
regime, whatever pays he plays. 

Lee's Navy 
commercials focus on the financial aid for low 
income youth, praising the opportunities offered 
by the Navy to poor oppressed nation youth. He 
shows kids getting out of the military and 
returning home to study, travel, sing, rap and 
dance. He neglects to mention those youth who die, 
disproportionately oppressed nation men because 
that is who disproportionately join the armed 
forces. And of course nowhere does Lee mention 
that the job of the U.$. Navy is to murder around 
the world in the name of defending u.s. 
imperialism. 

Notes: Revolutionary Artists Workshop AWOL 
Magazine, Volume One, Spring 2001.