'She's Gotta Have It' is yet another letdown for Spike Lee fans

I had moderately high expectations for Netflix's reboot of Spike Lee's debut cult classic film She's Gotta Have It, and then some very positive reviews peaked my interest even more. But after watching just three episodes of the scripted series I was dumbfounded. This show contains all of Lee's worst tendencies, which seem to have been exacerbated in recent years. It purports to be a show about female empowerment and calling out the male gaze, and yet it is one of the most male-gazey shows I've ever seen, including one gratuitously long sequence at burlesque show that serves no story function whatsover. It takes stabs at saying something significant about a legit topic like gentrification, but it fails miserably by casting virtually every white character as an over-the-top racist snob, and doesn't seem to catch the irony that the show's upwardly mobile black characters are just as guilty of gentifying hip Brooklyn neighborhoods as the white ones.

I rolled my eyes of the in-your-face, redundant sex scenes. I cringed at the truly bizarre decision to not just lather the soundtrack in familiar pop songs but then to flash the album cover featuring said song (as if contractually obligated) at the end of the scenes they play in. Oh, and as per usual he drags Isiah Whitock, Jr. in to repeat his famous line reading of 'shit' from The Wire, in a running gag that has grown beyond tired. But what infuriated me the most was Lee's decision to once again put HIS monologues in the mouths of his characters, regardless of story or context.

The most egregious example comes early in the first episode, where our protagonist Nola Darling goes off on a tangent about how Denzel Washington was robbed for the Academy Award in 1992 for his lead role in Malcolm X in favor of Al Pacino. Now, this is not a new argument, hell, I've made it myself. And Lee has made it publicly many, many times.

And keep in mind this is Lee, speaking through one of the characters, talking about one of his own films, how great it was, and how it deserved more award love 25 years ago. It's positively Trumpian.

It doesn't help that the delivery of lines like these (or other tangents about Kevin Durant, and a particularly clumsy introduction of the Black Lives Matter hashtag) are not delivered with any kind of authenticity, restraint or subtlety. They just land like a thud, as does much of this show.

Now, the 1986 source material is problematic and simplistic too. Some of the gender politics of that film would not fly at all today. But it is a wonderful product of its time, and it's Spike Lee trying to find his voice as a very young, undeniably talented young man, so you can forgive its shortcomings.

But the sad fact is that Lee doesn't seem to have matured much in 30 years. Just like Woody Allen has grown incapable of writing believably contemporary people, Lee has also hit a brick wall of self indulgence. Quentin Tarantino is also guilty of forcing his actors to spew pop culture references with abandon, but he seems still skilled enough to have the story and content of a movie not be too
overwhelmed by them.

But this iteration of She's Gotta Have It totally collapses under the weight of Lee's unchecked ego, even with other collaborators and writers in the mix to reign him in. And for some reason, he makes many of the main characters from the 1986 version even less likable and sympathetic here, including Nola, who comes off as an obnoxious know-it-all, when I think we're supposed to view her as confident and poised.

This is yet another project like Red Hook Summer, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus and even Chiraq, which have a lot of potential, look great (as all Lee movies do) but feel incredibly tone deaf for the times we live in.

It's heartbreaking to me because Lee is a filmmaker I revered growing up. Movies like School Daze, Malcolm X, Do the Right Thing, Crooklyn, and Bamboozled (just to name a few) meant a lot to be as a creative person growing up and I think he was and is one of the most under-appreciated talents Hollywood has ever produced.

But alongside similarly-themed shows like Insecure and Atlanta, Netflix's She's Gotta Have It feels like it comes from some sort of alternative universe that in no way represents the one that I'm living in and it certainly isn't one that I want to see.