[In the following review, Saltman discusses Lee's Jungle Fever, asserting that 'Amid his pop sociology and artistic excesses, Lee demonstrates a thoroughly contemporary consciousness and the ability to put it on film."]

Spike Lee developed his skills in independent movie making and music videos, working his way up to become an American auteur—perhaps not quite ready to be an artistic successor to Woody Allen, but ready to enter the social and political space left by Costa-Gavras and Godard, and in racial issues to locate himself somewhere between Eddie Murphy and Malcolm X. In other words, Lee is hard to pin down. Perhaps of all his work so far Jungle Fever is the hardest to locate. Lee's filmic style is a kind of slowed-down MTV, an assemblage of fragments which present his social concerns broadly and unanalytically. As an entertainer he mastered the attack language of pop music and night-club comedy and adapted it with persistence and ambition to interracial and intraracial issues. Some serious reviewers have rejected Jungle Fever, first for Lee's apparent scorn for integration, second for his misreading of black-white relationships, and third for his creation of bad art. They find the love relationship in the film to be superficial: the interracial affair between a black man and a white woman is dismissive, and the whole issue of interracial relationships is treated too harshly. Because the affair doesn't work out and the two lovers split at the end of the film to go back to their neighborhoods (Bensonhurst and Harlem) Lee seems despairing and separatist, and in fact appears to attack integration in the manner of the black nationalists of the sixties—but without their heroism.

The answer to this criticism may lie in Lee's use of social types from the African-American and white worlds. Neither Lee's talent nor interest point toward character in depth; in flat panels he raises the racial and ethnic types who make up his story. The audience can hardly help but notice that the plot in Jungle Fever is a mockup of Romeo and Juliet by way of West Side Story; in this case culture-and-race-crossed lovers represent not some Renaissance notion of the individual creative romantic self but racial and ethnic stances. There is no lyric here but rather a desultory passionate moment, an experiment in cross-race sex, followed by confusion and regret. Without the intensity or complexity of their literary ancestors, the lovers play an ensemble role together with others in the film who also make a strong claim upon our attention and are portrayed just as sharply and just as superficially.

In this context the film would therefore seem to fail. But my point is that the love story is a pseudo-theme designed to present race relationships and stereotypes, a cleverly ironic frame designed to dismiss traditional romance, to point out its irrelevance. The real theme of Jungle Fever is, in fact, the power and persistence of racial oppression; the film argues that the chief issue for blacks is the amelioration of their condition, to which other issues must be subordinated. This theme is distributed in the film in curious ways: it does not move toward a single overwhelming point, nor does it unify a variety of interrelated points. The love story plays no better or more unifying part than any other story within the film. Lee's concern transcends "romance"; he has little use for idealized sexual relationships in the face of vital economic and political needs—his crude verb for sexual intercourse is "to bone." This cynical attitude about romance is certainly not new for him; it was thoroughly developed in She's Gotta Have It, where it was a form of domination.

It is a mistake to accuse Lee of failing to develop the love story in Jungle Fever or even give it time to mature; he even rejects the tradition of secrecy between lovers. The affair is almost immediately evident to both the black and the white families and friends of the lovers. The social matrix takes precedence over intimate romance, making the sexual affair a localized social disaster and not a personal event. The lovers only succeed in dramatizing the incommensurability of the white and black worlds of New York, typified by white Bensonhurst and black Harlem. And Lee wants it that way. He could have chosen Greenwich Village as the scene of an affair with which to examine the subtle personal pressures that touch mixed-race couples; but that was not his story. The subjects of this decentered film are instead the black condition, the drug-riddled poor, the continuing economic disaster of a devastated Harlem, and the problems of the black middle class, whose confused and uneasy black professionals (the hero is a talented architect) are inescapably caught up in the realities of racism. Flipper Purify, played by Wesley Snipes, works for a glitzy white firm while in Harlem the houses are falling down. He is disassociated from his surroundings even though he chooses to live in Harlem. His romance with an Italian-American temp-secretary is halfhearted, hardly a challenge to his marriage. The film opens with a highly charged sex scene between Flipper and his wife, played by Lonette McKee, and in its heat there is no implication that the hero is jaded, or suffering a midlife crisis—he is clearly happily married, and the subsequent "boning" of the white woman performed upon his architect's drafting table becomes an act of curiosity for both characters and of cynical social commentary on Lee's part. In setting up this situation Lee is not critical of black professionals only; the social and economic background of the affair is part of its foreground. He is insisting that the black condition takes precedence at this time and place over personal issues.

Yet Lee's obvious manipulative traits, his conceit, his MTV personality, his money-making commercials with Michael Jordan, his presuming to be a spokesman for blacks, distort the perception of his movie. He neither analyzes the black condition with care, nor does he reveal much compassion for it. He appears to lack the high seriousness that characterized earlier spokesmen for African-American causes; writers like Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, and Eldridge Cleaver were intensely analytic, and presented the issues in sharply focused works. Lee's world is cool, eclectic, and despairing, its focus wanders; it suggests a cynical yet dismayed withdrawal from situation similar to television commercials that show young African Americans playing basketball on brick courts in city ghettos wearing impossibly expensive Nikes.

Lee's cynicism, his lack of focus, of unity, is the key to his special effect as film-maker. He is often under attack for not doing what he does not intend to do, while what he does achieve is misunderstood. Unlike Woody Allen, he does not focus upon a single complicated protagonist who represents contemporary dilemmas. Allen's strongly centered, highly unified work reflects the modernist traditions of Bergman and Fellini, but Lee's work celebrates the despair and pleasure attendant upon disunity. Jungle Fever is loosely connected, decentered; it portrays the black condition in one anecdote after another containing characters who surface and disappear like offshore rocks. An example is Flipper's family: his brother, played beautifully by Samuel Jackson, is a drug addict who will do virtually anything short of murder to find his fix; but the incidents which lead to his death at the hands of his father have virtually nothing to do with the hero's interracial fling. The father is also a story in himself (in a perhaps too easy performance by Ossie Davis): a rigidly religious preacher bitter over the black condition but unable to do anything about it. The tentative romantic subplot involving the secretary's ex-boyfriend and an intellectual black woman comments on the difficulty encountered by successful black women—they turn to white men rather than "ordinary" black men, since there aren't enough successful black males to go around and since black males are intimidated by successful black women. Thus another off-focus aspect of the film explores the plight of black women of achievement who feel emotionally, sexually isolated—a gathering in which black women unload their complaints is perhaps the film's funniest scene. Lee's anecdotal method differs here from the multiple-story form familiar to us in movies and on TV, in films like Towering Inferno or Airport (one may call it "The Grand Hotel Method"), because this form is designed to explore character, as superficial and stereotyped as that character might be. Lee's point is social and not individual, and his loose structure is a mockery of plot. The final incident, a stereotypical freeze frame, depicts the hero embracing in anguish a black teenage junkie hooker, confronting the black condition from which he has been escaping through personal ambition and cross-racial dalliance. The hero has passed the hooker at various points in the film, so the final shot comes as no great shock in itself—what is shocking is that the hero's sudden tortured outburst completely shatters any notion of his character we may have gleaned from the film. This scene cannot be explained logically by the glimmer of plot which supports it; although Flipper has witnessed the failure of his interracial affair and the murder of his dope-addict brother by his father, he has given no hint of the emotional resources needed for his explosive reaction.

Lee seems incapable of making a straightforward statement about the social and political issues he depicts. His juxtaposition of anecdotes defines no particular stance, no unified vision. Those who want a definite statement such as "Fight the power" will not find it, because Lee is himself divided about the nature of the struggle. He will not and perhaps cannot embrace an ideology. He inhabits an aimless political space. As Robert Chrisman says of Do the Right Thing: "Lee's inability to present a coherent value system in the replication of black life in his films raises the question, indeed, what is the right thing?" It is too easy to claim that Jungle Fever raises significant questions; questions must be asked in coherent and significant ways. Lee's assemblage of anecdotes prevents him from entering deeply into any one of them. The very structure of his work is against analysis and for surfaces. With an entertainer's despair of depth and delight in types and observation, he gives us sketches of men and women in the context of a racist society. These are types but not, with the exception of a few misses here and there (Flipper's bosses and his mother), stereotypes. Flipper and his wife are not stereotypes; Flipper's brother transcends stereotype as a drug addict like a virtuoso musician transcends a night-club hack.

Essentially, then, the film is episodic, a combination of burlesque and street theater brought into the multi-million dollar milieu of a nineties film. It is relentlessly popular in its quest for effects, in its shtick. Incidents in the film stand out and apart from each other as if they were culled from different films. The astounding scene in the Taj Mahal crack house is dreamlike and expressionistic; the scenes between the bible-thumping father and his family are melodramatic family drama; the scenes involving the Italian fathers (who are comically similar, though Anthony Quinn's portrait is more accomplished) are farcical; the scene in which the hero's wife throws his possessions from the window of their apartment is an adaptation of Lee's communal street scenes in Do the Right Thing. Jungle Fever is decentered in plot, in filmic style, and ultimately in tone.

The film's tone—comic, angry, cynical, turgid, ridiculous, melodramatic, despairing—is its most vital aspect. This tone is decentered in the sense that it neither knows itself nor proceeds from a unified authorial identity; it is not so much ambiguous as it is vaporized in the multiple stories and styles of the film. The special quality that distinguishes Jungle Fever from other postmodern films like Blue Velvet or Crimes and Misdemeanors in which the tone is at bottom despairing is the film's socio-political message, which ultimately cannot permit the wry, cynical helplessness of Lynch's and Allen's films. There is always a reformer's hope in even the darkest political films, and this is true of Jungle Fever. Lee's achievement is to combine an unfocused construction of contingencies with serious political satire. His work cannot be characterized as a monolith but rather as a sprawling and varied city. Such combinations would seem to be self-canceling, but in this case the result is an unsettling comedy which demands that Americans make room for diversity, for the multiplicity of otherness. Amid his pop sociology and artistic excesses, Lee demonstrates a thoroughly contemporary consciousness and the ability to put it on film.