Boyz Of New Black City

By RICHARD CORLISS

On a New York City subway train stocked with edgy white folks and one slouched and stuporous young black man, three inner-city toughs storm into the car. They shout at the black rider, then drag him to the floor and stomp on his face. The other passengers cringe, until the pummeling abruptly ceases and all four men rise smiling, as if for a curtain call. "Ladies and gentlemen!" one of the thugs intones with cultured geniality. "You have just witnessed another performance of Ghetto Theater."

Hangin' with the Homeboys, the engaging new black-Hispanic comedy in which this scene appears, isn't the only place you can catch some provocative episodes of ghetto theater. The pageant of inner-city anger and anguish is playing at a theater near you. Suddenly, it seems, dozens of films by black directors are in circulation, from artistic achievements like Charles Burnett's family drama To Sleep with Anger (now on video) to breakthrough hits like Mario Van Peebles' dope opera New Jack City, the year's fourth highest grossing picture. Some of the black films pack promise, others just threaten -- but all are tonics to a movie industry that otherwise looks ready to doze off into a coma of retreads and revisionism.

One man created the market for black-movie rage: Spike Lee. This acerbic auteur is probably best known as Michael Jordan's best pal Mars Blackmon, the hyperverbalizing Nike footwear flack on TV. But with scathing screeds like Do the Right Thing (1989) and the current Jungle Fever, Lee, 34, has carved a niche for fierce minority movies -- a niche that can be enlarged by other directors who are even younger, more choleric, closer to the action if not to the edge. Call them the Spikettes.

Lee's movies and prickly attitude make Hollywood squirm, but the town recognizes his value. "Spike put this trend in vogue," says Mark Canton, executive vice president at Warner Bros. "His talent opened the door for others." Van Peebles testifies, "If it weren't for Spike, I wouldn't be here." Lee is happy to have the brotherhood's company: "There are some people out there who were just meant to make films. That's the sense I get."

The undeniable sense is of a flood of ambitious "race movies" -- showing, just now, more passion than art -- where a year ago there was only a trickle. It is as though American moviegoers had been introduced to a body of films from a previously obscure locale: the teeming, forlorn outpost known as New Black City.

A few of the New Black City pictures dance lightly around searing social dilemmas. Bill Duke's A Rage in Harlem is an old-fashioned gangster movie, content to showcase Robin Givens' pert charms. And Michael Schultz's Livin' Large!, a kind of Homeboy Alone, hatches broad but pointed comedy from the perspective of a black street reporter (Terrence (("T.C.")) Carson) who lands a job with an all-white news team. But most of the films sketch, in furious strokes, a portrait of the ghetto and of its most feared and hopeless denizen, the black male.

In Straight Out of Brooklyn, a heart cry from Matty Rich, 19, life crushes everyone. It has drained the teenage hero's father, who takes his bitterness out on the woman he loves. Daddy has whupped Mama so many times that her insides are on the outside. She wears her bruises like a badge of the black woman's burden. In one devastating montage, Rich shows a series of row houses, apartment courtyards, projects. From inside each one a man yells at a woman, and something breaks. It is enough to drive a decent boy like Dennis to grand theft to get straight out of Brooklyn. At the end of Brooklyn, two major characters die, simultaneously though apart. No twist of plot is too improbable for the makers of New Black City films, because they know that no tragedy is uncommon to the ghetto.

John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood is another slice of fictionalized autobiography: a life story that could have been a death warrant. The boys in the neighborhood must wonder if they have any choice but dying poor from drugs or dying rich selling them. Lame as moviemaking craft, the picture is nonetheless a harrowing document true to the director's south-central Los Angeles milieu; he paints it black. Boyz N the Hood functions both as a condemnation of the world outside any big-city movie house and as an inspiration to those aspiring outsiders who would change history by filming it.

In mainstream movies a generation ago, Sidney Poitier was Hollywood's Martin Luther King Jr. Poitier's screen characters were as noble as any blond hero -- nobler, because they withstood and deflected so much unjustified abuse. But the role of soulful sufferer was a dead end for blacks on both sides of the movie screen. Intransigent white America could not be persuaded to lift blacks to equality. Could the system then be scared into action? The Watts and Newark riots of the mid-'60s may have been mainly fratricidal, and the your-money-or- your-wife taunts of the Black Panthers may have been mainly street theater, but they lent an image of the black man as a figure of strength and menace. We don't want to be you, these blacks told whites; we want to be us. And we be bad.

Baadasssss, as in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which Melvin Van Peebles (Mario's father) made in 1971. Sex-sated and X-rated, Sweetback trumpeted the bustling era of blaxploitation films. Their heroes were no lilies of the field. They dealt drugs (Super Fly) or tracked down drug dealers (Shaft). Short on artistry but long on verve, these violent epics were significant for the same reason they remained, in every sense, a minority entertainment: they were movies made not only for blacks but, often, by them. African-American filmmakers had kicked their foot through the industry's back door.

That didn't last. A raunchier brand of action comedy co-opted the blaxploitation genre; Schwarzenegger and other supertough white dudes won the affections of the black audience. And still Hollywood would not make movies that scanned the spectrum of African-American life. The top black stars of the '80s, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, were segregated from many hero roles because they were seen only as inspired clowns. In buddy movies with white co- stars, they rarely got the girl -- any girl. They were Hollywood's best- paid second-class citizens.

As it was in movies, so it was in other areas of pop culture such as music, TV and sports. A few blacks were revered in a few fields; many others were relegated to the back of the bus, with little to do but toss epithets and stink bombs at the whites up front. The color-blind society that King dreamed of is still only a dream. Blacks can't shed their skin, and whites can't shed their guilt and fear: guilt over the literal and social enslavement of black Americans, and fear at the violent revenge taken by the black men at the heart of a white man's nightmare. Everybody has known this for years, even in Hollywood. But for years too, only Spike Lee was making films about it.

Lee must have been doing something right; he certainly made enough enemies. If people weren't annoyed by his blacker-than-thou dissing of Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg and Whitney Houston, they were vexed by Lee's movies. A few reviewers knocked his first feature, She's Gotta Have It, for the vapidity and cupidity of the female lead. "I wanted to tell the story of a black woman who was living her life as a man," Lee says, "except that she was honest about it."

School Daze, his musical-comedy satire of social climbing at a black college, raised black hackles for addressing an embarrassing topic. "You hear stuff about the other people holding us back," says Lee. "But it's often our own black folk that get down on us."

Do the Right Thing had critics predicting that the film would foment wildings by blacks against whites. Racial violence did erupt in Brooklyn's Bensonhurst neighborhood that summer, but the victim was a black man, Yusuf Hawkins, whose murder inspired Jungle Fever. "He was killed for supposedly coming to visit ((a young Italian-American woman))," Lee notes, "when all he wanted to do was look at a used car. But sex and racism have always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into being was to protect white Southern women."

Last year's Mo' Better Blues, a dyspeptic study of a musician who cares only for his trumpet and his ego, took heat for its sardonic depiction of two Jewish businessmen. Lee had an answer for that charge too. He wanted to open Jungle Fever with advice to those who accused him of anti-Semitism: "They can kiss my black ass." After discussions with his patrons at Universal, the prologue was cut, but the director is typically unrepentant. "They can kiss my black ass two times," he avers.

What remains of Jungle Fever is controversial enough. Some people have urged a boycott because, they allege, the film puts down black women. Lee is hardly unique among black directors (or, notoriously, black rap artists) in viewing woman as something between an enemy and an enigma. In Boyz N the Hood, most of the women are shown as doped-up, career-obsessed or irrelevant to the man's work of raising a son in an American war zone.

However valid the charge against the women in Lee's earlier films, it is misplaced in Jungle Fever. In a "war council," black women discuss the lure of white men and the hierarchy of skin tone. "I'm going for a true tribesman," one woman says. Another (played by Lonette McKee), deemed more attractive to whites and blacks because she has light skin and Caucasian features, decries her isolation from both worlds.

This character has reason for her rancor. Her architect husband, Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes), has wandered into the sexual curiosity of his Italian- American secretary, Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra). Their affair, which they confide to friends, is soon the talk -- the shout -- of their respective neighborhoods, Sugar Hill in Harlem and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. The animosities are mirrored in two subplots. Angie's sweet, nerdy friend Paulie (John Turturro) pursues a romance with a classy black woman (Tyra Ferrell). And Flipper's crackhead brother (Samuel L. Jackson) collides with his Bible- bred parents (Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee).

Like Do the Right Thing, which began as a live-action Sesame Street and then flipped out into a race riot, Jungle Fever is really two movies in one: the first hour an essay on various volatile issues, the second a dramatization of how these issues inform and ruin ordinary lives. Lee tries hard to spread the intensity, and the ignorance, judiciously. He lets a geek chorus of Italian- American guys in Bensonhurst blame black men for everything from Central Park rapes to the mongrelization of jockdom. "They took our sports," one fellow grouses, "baseball, football, basketball, boxing. What do we got left? Hockey?"

What they have is the purest breed of prejudice. They hate all blacks for the sins of some blacks; they resent the black male for his perceived genital superiority. The film's title announces as much. This is a story, Lee says, "about two people who came together because of sexual mythology." The legend on a jacket worn by one of Lee's colleagues at last month's Cannes Film Festival put the matter bluntly: JUNGLE FEVER, OR FEAR OF THE BIG BLACK DICK.

But that's just sass. The movie is really about the ghetto epidemic of drugs, an issue Lee has dodged until now. Less than a Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, this is a Guess Who's Going to Hell, because Jungle Fever locates its primal power in Felliniesque scenes of Harlem crack palaces and epochal confrontations between the drug-addicted and the drug-inflicted. The essential action is not horizontal (mating games across color lines) but vertical (poisoning the family tree, pitting father against son). Who is sleeping with whom matters less here, as it should anywhere, than the people who die and the things that kill them.

As it spirals into the underworld of hatred and despair, Jungle Fever kicks into movie overdrive. It establishes kinship to those fervid '50s weepies directed with deadpan skill by Douglas Sirk: All That Heaven Allows, with young Rock Hudson and middle-aged Jane Wyman daring a love that flouts convention; and Imitation of Life, in which wannabe white woman Susan Kohner throws herself on her black mother's coffin and sobs out her remorse to the throb of a Mahalia Jackson spiritual. Jungle Fever is no less brazen -- or assured. A righteous man shoots his deranged son, and the man's wife unleashes a scream that blends with the gospel wail of . . . Mahalia Jackson. Here Jungle Fever ascends fearlessly into the delirium of high Hollywood melodrama: it's berserk Sirk.

The thrill of hearing a chorus of urgent voices, like those of Lee and the filmmakers who follow him, can carry with it a demand for realism. Moviegoers may want each new film to provide even more sensational ghetto revelations. But the new generation of African-American filmmakers need be no more shackled to the neighborhoods they escaped from than was Sirk, born in Denmark, or Lee, born in Atlanta. Having proved they can tell the stories they lived, they are now charged with spinning more universal human metaphors onto celluloid. Even Lee will make better films. His new competition will see to that.

And the industry will see to it that they keep delivering A-quality pictures on B-movie budgets. "All these films mean is that Hollywood can make a dollar off of them," Lee says. "Black films will be made as long as they make money." Just now he is having trouble raising the $25 million or so he needs from the studio producing his biopic of Malcolm X. "I need mo' money, mo' money," he says, laughing. "I don't want the wrath of Allah comin' down on Warner Bros.!"

White moviegoers could use a little wrath these days, and should not be shackled by Hollywood-worn notions of entertainment. It's time to see if Ghetto Theater can play in every American mall, and whether the mass audience can take pleasure and pain in the bulletins from New Black City.

With reporting by Pat Cole/Los Angeles