Lee’s film is quite the opposite and can almost be seen as a call-to-action for more films to be made that bring up issues of race and prejudice and gender.
College daze show full#
Most high school and college movies are full of white characters, token black characters and precious little to say about society. It is also a necessity due to the lack of diversity within most high school or college-set films. It’s on-the-nose, perhaps, but it exhibits such youthful energy and audacity that one can’t help but admire its straightforwardness. An entire early sequence in the film is a musical number titled “Straight and Nappy”, during which a lighter-skinned, straighter-haired group of women clashes with a darker-skinned, curlier-haired cohort. There are few films that tackle colourism there are fewer still that tackle it in such flamboyant manner. The themes that Lee addresses in School Daze are varied and important, but what sets the film apart are the scarcity of those themes in mainstream movies and the way in which Lee tackles them. However, through the film’s almost observational style – at least when compared to his debut’s kineticism – Lee is able to focus his viewers’ attention on the intersectional debates and moral quandaries of his characters. The film has no real plotlines other than the antagonism between Dap and Julian and the attempts by Lee’s character, Half-Pint, to pledge into Julian’s fraternity. Directly opposing him is Giancarlo Esposito’s Julian, the leader of a fraternity as well as a controlling misogynist.
Dap ( Laurence Fishburne), a socially-conscious student (his motto: “Uplift the race”), wants to divest and organises various marches and demonstrations around campus. Set at the fictional Mission College, but filmed at and based on real-life historically black colleges like Spelman and Morehouse, Lee’s film follows the lives of several students on homecoming weekend as they grapple with the issue of divesting from South Africa during this time of apartheid.
While it’s tempting to look at Spike Lee’s 1988 sophomore feature as a harbinger of black-led comedies to come – such as 1994’s The Best Man – or even as an inspiration to Richard Linklater’s similarly loose and slice-of-life-esque Dazed and Confused (1993), the truth is that School Daze is a singular exploration of race, gender and class politics on an all-black campus.
0 kommentar(er)
