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critical review, analysis of Spike Lee's "Mo Better Blues"
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Spike Lee's Blues
by
William Benzon
A B S T R A C T
This is a full-dress article about Spike Lee’s film, Mo’ Better Blues, that I never
published formally. The penultimate paragraph: “In attempting to construct the image of
jazz, and its musicians, in the stylizations of a black mythology, Spike Lee committed
himself to working against the received conventions. By insisting on one simple truth
about jazz, that it is disciplined stylization, Lee began to undermine those Hollywood
conventions. But he was unable completely to free himself from the Romantic
conventions which determine our vision of the artist and his place in society. Lee's
displacements don't alter the fact that, at the core, his protagonist is a self-destructive
descendent of the Romantic Artist.”
C O N T E N T S
The Cultural Psychodynamics of Racism...............................................................................3
Discipline of Jazz: From Nature to Culture...........................................................................4
Destructiveness and Creativity: The Albatross of Romanticism..........................................6
The Blues in the Night .............................................................................................................9
Sacred Music ..........................................................................................................................12
Conclusion: Hollywood vs. Jazz ..........................................................................................14
References...............................................................................................................................14
14 August 2011
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Spike Lee's Blues 2
Spike Lee's Blues
After emancipation . . . all those people who had been slaves, they needed the
music more than ever now; it was like they were trying to find out in this music what
they were supposed to do with this freedom: playing the music and listening to it—
waiting for it to express what they needed to learn, once they had learned it wasn’t
just white people the music had to reach to, nor even to their own people, but straight
out to life and to what a man does with his life when it finally is his.
—Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle
Musically speaking, the cool period always reminded me of white people's
music. There was no guts in that music, not much rhythm either. They never
sweated on the stand... This music, jazz, is guts. You're supposed to sweat in your
balls in this music. I guess the idea was not to get "savage" with it, biting, like we
were.
-- Dizzy Gillespie, to BE or not . . . to BOP
Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues occupies a portentious moment in the cultural life of these United
States of the blues. It is about an African-American art form, jazz, which has been so influential
that it defined two periods in American cultural history—the Jazz Age and the Swing Era—and is
constructed in a medium, motion pictures, which has, through most of its history, confined
African Americans to marginal roles. The popular image of the jazz musician has been
dominated by European-American mythologizing. In Mo' Better Blues Spike Lee has set out to
reclaim the image of jazz and its musicians for his own culture.
It is difficult to tell whether or not he has succeeded. It is easy to replace a screen full of
white faces with a screen full of black ones, but the story they ennact seems to be cut from the
same Hollywood cloth. However satisfying it may be to see black jazz musicians enact their lives
in relationships with other people of color, it is a rather superficial satisfaction if those
relationships are negotiated according to the rules of the same old social contract. If African-
American culture is essentially the same as European-American culture, then that superficial
satisfaction is the only satisfaction to be had. In that case, there is only one story of the jazz
musician, the one we've been seeing for decades, and it makes little substantial difference
whether it is told by an African American or a European American and whether or not the actors
and actresses are white or black.
But, if that were true, then, for example, there would be no significant difference between
jazz music and classical music. There is, however, an enormous difference between them, a
difference so great that it alone is enough to suggest that African Americans and European
Americans are culturally different.1 Further, the tremendous influence which jazz has had in both
1 That African Americans and European Americans are culturally different is not something which is
seriously questioned in this essay. Such difference is assumed. But I want to emphasize that I think the
difference between African-American and European-American music is very strong evidence for this
cultural difference. Thus, while it may be reasonable to think of African-American literature as one branch
of Western literature, comparable to French, or German, or English literature (cf. Gates 1988, xxii), it
would be very difficult to think of jazz, or blues, or hip-hop, for example, as branches of Western music.
These musics differ from Western music in the most fundamental aspects of rhythm and tonality. They
grew up in the shadow of Western music, and certainly have been influenced by it. But they have never
Spike Lee's Blues 3
American and world musical culture suggests that, whatever jazz is, it speaks profoundly to deep
human needs and aspirations. Thus the attempt to restore the jazz musician, and jazz music, to a
black mythology cannot be a simple matter of replacing white faces with black. Much more is at
stake. There is a different culture, different values, to be realized.
If we are to understand the conflicting forces at work in this film—jazz itself versus the
Hollywood version—then we must first take a look at the psycho-dynamics of the cultural milieu
in which it exists. In order to see what Spike Lee was trying to do, we must first understand what
has been done, and needs to be undone. Thus I want to take a brief look at the psychodynamics
of racism before I turn to the Mo' Better Blues.
The Cultural Psychodynamics of Racism
There is a curious and disappointing passage in Chapter 9, "Revolution," of W. E. B. Du Bois'
Dusk of Dawn (1940, reprinted in Huggins, ed. 1986, pp. 770 - 771). Du Bois says: "My own
study of psychology under William James had predated the Freudian era, but it had prepared me
for it. I now began to realize that in the fight against racial prejudice, we were not facing simply
the rational, conscious determination of white folk to oppress us; we were facing age-long
complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge..." And that was it. He
acknowledged the relevance of psychoanalytic thought, but did not use it in developing an
analysis of racism. Subsequent intellectuals haven't done a great deal to write the discourse Du
Bois only implied. Economics has become a routine intellectual instrument in the examination
of racism, but psychoanalysis has not. Or rather, it once was so used, but no longer.
Still, enough has been done to serve our purposes. Freud argued that, in general, much
behavior is driven by unconscious desires. Moving beyond the individual psyche, he argued,
perhaps most explicitly in Civilization and Its Discontents, that Western civilization is built on a
foundation of emotional repression. Racism is a culture-wide manifestation of that repression.
The basic point is simple: many of the characteristics racists have attributed to blacks are simply
the repressed contents of their own hearts and minds which they have projected onto the objects
of their racism. In particular, the heightened sexual desire and potency, and the greater
emotionality, with which whites have plagued blacks has more to do with white neurosis than it
does with black behavior.
In an essay originally published in 1947, Talcott Parsons (1964, pp. 298-322) explored the
dynamics of aggression, arguing that Western society is so structured that aggressive impulses are
often generated in situations where they cannot be directly expressed, creating a need for ethnic
and national Others who can be scapegoated. Calvin Hernton explored the sexual dynamics of
racism in a study originally published in 1965 (and reprinted in 1988). Erik Erikson made a
general theoretical statement in the final chapter of his Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968). And
Joel Williamson (1984) has taken this psychological line in an examination of the lynchings
which once plagued this country, especially in the two decades straddling the turn of the century.
The thrust of these studies is the same: racists are punishing others for their own sins. Western
civilization has not created adequate means for directly incorporating the full range of human
emotion into its cultural practices. Consequently, it has been forced into racism as a one means
of dealing with the resulting repression and self-hatred.
However, if the lynching is the archtypal scene of racist violence, there is a different
archtypal scene, one quite different from lynching and more directly applicable to an essay which
is working its way towards Mo' Better Blues. Consider those night clubs, such as the Cotton
lost their African roots, which have remained primary (on African roots, see Schuller 1968, and Collier
1978). To the extent that contemporary American culture has been influenced by these musics, and the
related dance forms, that culture is non-Western.
Spike Lee's Blues 4
Club, where the performers were black but the clientele was exclusively white. Why were all
those white people listening to black music? The question is not a new one, and the answer is
obvious (in the same way that the applicability of Freud to racism is so obvious that it has been
little discussed). European Americans have liked African American music because it has
expressive powers which are lacking in European and European-American music. In particular,
African-American music is comfortable with sexuality, while European music is not.
Thus, while the Cotton Club, which I take as figure for the role of jazz in the white world, is
ostensibly a place of entertainment, it also functions on a deeper level as a school, a school in
which the teachers are black and the students are white. What are the students learning? They
are learning a cultural stylization of emotion which is more adequate to their needs than the one
they learned are home, in school, or in church. Where the lyncher, and his descendents, is
desperately trying to preserve the restrictiveness of his culture, the white jazz fan, and his
descendents, is trying to break free from that restrictiveness.[2]
The dominant image of the jazz musician serves the needs of this dynamic. While the white
fan esteems jazz and its musicians, this esteem necessarily misreads its objects. For, as Amiri
Baraka (then writing as LeRoi Jones, 1963) has observed, while the white jazz afficionado is
rebelling against his own culture, the black jazz musician is not necessarily rebelling against his
culture. On the contrary, the jazz musician is articulating the innermost dynamics of his culture.
His culture and the white fan's culture are not the same, though both exist in the same society.
This then is the situation Spike Lee faced when he made Mo' Better Blues. In particular, he
was working in the wake of two movies, both of which were acclaimed, at least by some, for
finally giving us an adequate cinematic representation of jazz culture. I am talking, of course, of
Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight, and Clint Eastwood's Bird. Both pictures have their
virtues (among others, Dexter Gordon in the first, Charlie "Bird" Parker's music in the other), but
both pictures are gloomy and depressing studies of black victims doomed in a white society.
Whatever the truth of this view, it is not a view which gives any insight into how or why this
magnificient music came to be. The culture which created the music is, as always, invisible. In
these films, which were very much on Spike Lee's mind as he made Mo' Better, the music exists
as an object of white desire and an occasion for white guilt. The joy that animated the stage of
the Cotton Club has been replaced by the grimness hanging in the air after a lynching.
Discipline of Jazz: From Nature to Culture
Let's move into an examination of Mo' Better Blues by considering a statement by Branford
Marsalis, the saxophone player whose playing has been featured in the sound tracks of a number
of Lee's movies, including Mo' Better: "People are convinced that jazz is just some magic thing
that happens with Negroes. We just wake up with horns in our mouths. But to play what we
play, you have to be a supreme musician. The art form requires . . . the discipline of a classical
musician." This statement, which is quoted in Lee's book about Mo' Better Blues (Lee and Jones
1990, p. 185), captures one of the white misconceptions which Lee intended to counter in his
2 In her biography of Josephine Baker, Phyllis Rose constrasts European exoticism with American racism
(1989: 44): "Exoticism is frivolous, hangs out at nightclubs, will pay anything to have the black singer or
pianist sit at its table. Racism is like a poor kid who grew up needing someone to hurt. . . . The racist is
hedged around by dangers, the exoticist by used-up toys." What see means by exoticism is thus similar to
what I mean in talking about the Cotton Club as a scene of racism. Whatever qualms I have about her
term—I think talking about "exoticism" makes it a little too easy to loose sight of the fact that it is a form of
racism, depending on the underlying psychodynamics of racism—her general discussion is an excellent
one.
Spike Lee's Blues 5
movie, a misconception, incidentally, which is brilliantly elaborated in Julio Cortazar's (1968)
story of "The Pursuer."
It is a misconception which is one of favorite the themes of racism, Natural Rhythm. Scott
Brown, in his book on the pianist James P. Johnson (1986: p. 83) tells how musicians in the Clef
Club, which served as a booking agency for black musicians in the New York area early in the
century, would memorize their music so that they could play their "society" engagements without
having to read music. These musicians were well-schooled and capable of reading music, but
their white clients expected them to be illiterate. Thus, had they read music on the job, it would
have threatened their employer's conception of them and thereby threatened their jobs. The same
conception is embodied in a cartoon which Lincoln Collier reproduced in his biography of Louis
Armstrong (Collier 1983, between pp. 214 and 215). The cartoon originally appeared in 1931
and has four panels, the first showing the infant Louis in the cradle. In the second panel Louis
proclaims "I'se goin' play de trumpet"; in the third panel his father is buying him a trumpet. And
in the fourth panel we see young Louis, trumpet in hand, about to play a note which is written as a
high B-flat. As any trumpet player will tell you, this note is difficult to reach, requiring several
years of embouchure development before it is within range, and several years beyond that before
it is within comfortable range. The cartoon clearly depicts a case of Natural Rhythm.
Jazz is no more, or less, natural than any other music. It reflects culturally patterned
stylization, to borrow a word from Albert Murray (1976), and its musicians must have
considerable discipline and experience to execute its patterns with appropriate conviction—
something which, incidentally, Phyllis Rose (1989) properly emphasized in her admirable
biography of Josephine Baker, the dancer and singer. Spike Lee goes to considerable trouble in
Mo' Better Blues to thematize the importance of discipline in the life of his protagonist, Bleek
Gilliam.
The movie's opening scene shows discipline at work. Young Bleek is practicing the
trumpet when his friends come by and ask him to come out to play. He wants to, but his mother
insists that he practice. His father was initially inclined to let Bleek out, but ends up backing his
wife on this and so, much against his will, Bleek continues to practice. The opening scene is
about discipline working against natural impulse.
A bit further on we have another scene which emphasizes discipline. We are now in the
present and we see the adult Bleek practicing in his loft in the early afternoon. He is interrupted
by Clarke Betancourt, one of his two lovers. He berates her about showing up when he's
scheduled to practice ( Lee and Jones 1990: p. 230): "How many times do I have to tell you I
have a certain amount of hours allotted to practice daily? You know my program, yet you
consistently overlook it." The discipline which his mother had imposed on him is now a part of
his personality. Bleek Gilliam works at his music. Other scenes pick up this theme; in one we
see Bleek writing music as he ignores Clarke; in another we see the band rehearsing.
The point, that Bleek Gilliam is a disciplined musician, is a simple and obvious one, made
with simple and obvious scenes. But, because it contradicts the basic stereotype of the jazz
musician as a child of Natural Rhythm, it is very important. Bleek Gilliam wasn't born to jazz.
He had to work for his music. He had to discipline himself to its rhythms and forms.
The type of jazz Lee chose as Bleek Gilliam's style underscores this point. He is a "neo-
traditionalist," to use Spike Lee's term. He is a contemporary player whose music is rooted in and
derived from older jazz idioms, like the real-life musicians who actually play the music of the
fictional Bleek Quintet (the Branford Marsalis quartet, plus Terrance Blanchard on trumpet). In
this case, the idiom is the hard-bop and modal jazz music of the early and middle sixties—Miles
Davis before he went electric, John Coltrane before he went totally "outside." Unlike Bird, both
the real musician and Clint Eastwood's representation of him, Bleek Gilliam is not trying to create
a new style. Rather, he is consciously and deliberately investigating an older style.
Spike Lee's Blues 6
This is, of course, standard practice in classical music. Much to the dismay of at least some
critics and musicians, most performances of classical music do not feature contemporary works.
They feature works from a standard repertoire of mostly Nineteenth Century compositions. Neo-
traditionalist jazz musicians are in the process of "classicizing" their music and thereby asserting
that it has a past which is worthy of being preserved in the present. The music isn't some natural
flowing forth, it is a cultural artifact. By making Bleek Gilliam a classicist of black music, and
by emphasizing his discipline, Spike Lee wrenches him free of the racist stereotype of Natural
Rhythm, which denies blacks the capacity for significant cultural achievement and thereby
reserves culture for whites.
This bit of plotting ramifies. Much of contemporary philosophy is heir to a Romantic
tradition which seeks authenticity in unmediated communion with nature—this is the same
Romantic tradition which sees various "noble savages" as living in blissful harmony with nature.
Spike Lee is, however, seeking authenticity in the rigorous pursuit of culture. Even as
philosophers bewail the impossibility of unmediated experience, Spike Lee seeks to celebrate
mediating cultural forms. Culture, artifice, discipline, these are not evil; their necessity is not to
be decried. To the contrary, it is the source of authentic experience. Just as "bad" means "good"
in black vernacular (but only when spoken with the appropriate nuance), so Spike Lee is
implicitly reversing the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. Culture isn't a prision.
Mediation isn't evil. They are necessary for authentic art.
Unfortunately things are not so simple, not so, dare I say it? black and white. The legacy of
Western culture is not so casually transcended. There is no doubt that Spike Lee is revising the
terms in which jazz and its musicians are to be understood. But this revision has yet other
ramifications.
For Bleek's discipline is closely linked with his self-obsession In fact, it is the vehicle of
that obsession. Bleek isn't master of his discipline. It has mastered him. It isn't the agent of his
will, rather it is a substitute for it. His discipline is a form of dependence, playing the same
functional role in this story that substance abuse plays in Clint Eastwood's Bird, or in the earlier
Young Man with a Horn. Where the stereotypical jazz musician destroys himself through drink
and/or drugs, Bleek destroys himself through discipline. And so we must move on to another
aspect of Lee's Revised Standard Version of Jazz, his attempt to free Bleek of self-
destructiveness.
Destructiveness and Creativity: The Albatross of Romanticism
On this matter we can quote Ernest Dickerson, Lee's principal cinematographer: "We didn't want
to focus on the self-destructiveness of jazz musicians, like White filmmakers had done in the
past," (Lee and Jones 1990: p. 62). Bleek Gilliam isn't self-destructive in obvious ways; he
doesn't drink, smoke, or do drugs. Rather, Lee displaces the stereotypical jazz musician's self-
destructiveness into another character, Bleek's boyhood friend, Giant. Giant is addicted to
gambling. Being addicted to gambling isn't quite the same as addition to drugs and alcohol—
there is no ingestion or injection of foreign substances into the body. But it is addiction, it is a
form of dependence. The gambler needs his hit of risk as surely as the addict needs his drug.
Giant is also Bleek's manager. While the musicians in Bleek's group insist that Giant is an
incompetent manager, Bleek remains committed to him. This commitment eventually costs
Bleek his vocation, though it is perhaps stretching things a bit to put the causality so directly.
Giant's incompetence and Bleek's blind commitment to him are brought up early, in Bleek's
first scene with Clarke (which we've already discussed), where he scolds her for interrupting his
practice (Lee and Jones 1990: p. 231): Clarke: . . . . You don't know what you want. Make up your mind. Be a man. Don't be
wishy-washy on me.
Spike Lee's Blues 7
Bleek: I know what I want. My music! Everything else is secondary.
...
Clarke: Let me give you a tip. If your music is the be all to end all as you state, to ensure
that, you better get rid of Giant as your manager.
Bleek: Clarke, please stay out of my business. Thank you.
Clarke: Are you fucking him, of what? He's a horrible manager. Everybody can see that
but you.
...
Bleek: Why are you bringing all this confusion into my home?
Note first of all that Clarke isn't at all impressed with Bleek's sense of himself, his insistence that
music is first. She thinks that he doesn't really know what he wants, an assertion previously made
by Indigo, Bleek's other lover. Second, she asserts that Giant's incompetence is common
knowledge. Everyone knows it except Bleek and, of course, Giant himself. This and other
assertions of Giant's incompetence are so unequivocal that we have to wonder just why Bleek
insists on Giant remaining manager even though it hurts his career. Giant's incompetence, and
Bleek's loyalty to him, are absolutely central to the movie.
As the movie progresses we see Giant becoming more and more in debt to his bookie. And
we learn that this isn't new behavior; Bleek has, in the past, had to square Giant's gambling debts
in order to save him from "enforcement" proceedings. This time, however, Giant gets too deeply
in debt for Bleek to cover for him. Enforcement proceedings escalate from a couple of broken
fingers to a much more severe beating, which takes place outside the nightclub where Bleek is
performing. When Bleek comes to Giant's aid, the thugs beat him up as well. Most particularly,
they smash his trumpet into his mouth, breaking teeth and injuring his lips, doing so much
damage that Bleek's embouchure (the formation of facial muscles which allows a wind player to
get a sound out of his or her instrument) is destroyed. Bleek's career as a musician is finished,
though he does make an attempt to come back.
Thus, while Bleek isn't addicted to drugs or alcohol he is "addicted" to Giant and this
"addiction" destroys his career. Move by move, the course of Bleek's self-destruction is quite
different from the course of (Clint Eastwood's) Bird's self-destruction. But the final result is
much the same, a musician is destroyed. A dynamic which had been internal to one character in
"Bird" has become distributed across two characters in "Mo' Better Blues." One is reminded of
Thomas McFarland's observation that Shakespeare's Othello is so vulnerable to Iago's
manipulations that one suspects the two dramatic characters are the embodiements of one
personality structure; Iago is just an externalization of Othello's self-destructiveness (McFarland
1966, p. 72). In a similar way, Bleek and Giant are one. Bleek Gilliam is no more free of
addiction and dependence than Bird was.
Spike Lee's attempt to create a clean-cut, strongly disciplined jazz musician, one free of
self-destruction, thus cannot be taken at face value. The cultural logic in force is deeper than
Lee's attempts to revise it. The fact of the matter is, the self-destructiveness of jazz musicians in
movies has as much to do with cultural stereotypes of artists as it has to do with the reality of life
in the jazz business. And perhaps it is this general cultural attitude to which Spike Lee is
objecting, even if his cinematic response disguises the problem without making fundamental
changes.
This self-destructiveness is simply part of our essentially Romantic conception of the artist.
Self-destructiveness isn't an affliction which Hollywood has concocted specifically to slander
black musicians. Hollywood is perfectly happy to present us with self-destructive white
musicians. Thus, in his recent movie The Doors, Oliver Stone depicts lead singer Jim Morrison
as being a monster of adolescent mysticism and chemically mediated self-destruction; next to him
Eastwood's Bird is almost a model of middle-class propriety.
Nor is this treatement confined to musicians. Would Hollywood have been so interested in
Van Gogh if he hadn't sliced his ear off? (And, is it any accident that the paintings of this most
Spike Lee's Blues 8
romantically destructive of artists have, in recent years, brought higher prices than those of any
other artist?) Jazz musicians are worthy of Hollywood treatment precisely because some of them
have been flamboyantly self-destructive and therefore can be easily assimilated to extant
stereotypes of artists.
This conception of the artist became firmly fixed in the Western imagination with Goethe's
publication of The Sufferings of Young Werther in 1774. To be sure, Werther wasn't an artist in
the sense of being vocationally dedicated to art, though he liked to paint and sketch. And his self-
destructiveness wasn't manifested in substance abuse or gambling. Rather, he was a love-addict
who committed suicide because he would never be able to have the woman he loved; she was
married to another. He serves as an archetype for the artist because he was a man of intense
feeling who was alienated from his society. As such, he proclaimed that "I have been drunk
more than once, my passions have never been far from madness, and I regret neither; for, at my
own level, I have come to appreciate why all extraordinary people who have achieved something
great, something apparently impossible, have been inevitably decried by society as drunkards or
madmen" (Goethe, translated by Steinhauer, 1970, p. 33).
It is thus easy for us to think of artists as at least eccentric, if not always crazy. Thus, in
his very influential Silence (1961, p. 127), the avant-garde composer John Cage approvingly
quotes Rilke's remark that he had no interest in being psychoanalyzed because "I'm sure they
would remove my devils, but I fear they would offend my angels." That is, madness is not just
something which afflicts artists, among others, but rather it is the source of their creativity.
The trope of the rebellious artist, defiantly drunk with feeling, is a vehicle through which
Western culture reminds itself of the affective life it has foresworn. The artist feels what we
cannot. Through identifying with him we get access to those emotions which we must otherwise
hold in check. When the artist self-destructs we are reminded that emotion is dangerous. And we
are thus returned to our ordinary mode of emotional repression.
The self-destructiveness of our artists is simply the price they pay for their intense feeling.
As long as we believe that they must pay that price, we are willing to accept our less intense, but
safer, lives. We accept our repression because we believe it to be the only way to a secure life.
We cannot tolerate the possibility that a life of strong feeling is not self-destructive but, on the
contrary, is deeply creative, nurturing, and sustaining. It is thus no accident that the artists in our
movies, and novels and plays, generally die. That is the only way we can tolerate them. The idea
of a mentally balanced artist, whether painter, dancer, jazz musician, etc., doesn't make sense.
Most of us would not be prepared to recognize such a person as a real artist. Western culture's
emotional repression is thus no more hospitable to its own artists than it is to blacks. It must
scapegoat both.
Thus when Spike Lee set out to create a jazz hero who isn't self-destructive, he was dealing
with a cultural dynamic which has been central to Western imaginative life for at least two
centuries. By dealing with the issue of the artist's self-destructiveness in a context where he could
convincingly frame it in ethnic terms—attempting to cleanse the image of the jazz musician from
white prejudice—Lee tricked himself into accepting a superficially different version of the same
old tension between Western civilization and its discontent with emotional vitality. The surface
(discipline in Lee's version, drugs and/or alcohol in the standard Hollywood version) is different,
but the result is the same—destruction—implying that the underlying cultural psychodynamics
are the sameas well. The jazz musician is thus condemned in both the white and in Lee's black
mythology.
What's the point of reclaiming the jazz artist from white fictions if black fictions aren't any
more hospitible to him? Yes, it is comforting, for a change, to see black jazz musicians
interacting in a black community—as various people assert in Lee's book about Mo Better
Blues—but Bleek Gilliam retains his life only at the cost of losing his art.
Spike Lee's Blues 9
I don't in fact think Mo' Better Blues is quite as bleak as I've been implying. But, we're
going to have to look at different issues if we're to have any chance of getting Mr. Lee out of the
doghouse, or, to be more precise, to understand the exit strategy he has mapped out, if not
executed. We need to examine Mo Better Blues as a movie, not about a jazz musician, but as a
movie about a man trying to figure out what role women are to play in his life. For this is, in fact,
what drives the movie's plot.
The Blues in the Night
You don't have to examine Mo' Better Blues very closely to realize that relatively few of the
moves in its plot depend directly on Bleek Gilliam's occupation as a jazz musician. This is not a
movie about his struggle for recognition, or his quest for a musical style, or the hazzards of fame
and fortune. When the movie opens Bleek is a recognized artist, people line up around the block
to hear him play. His style is established. The plot is driven by Bleek's relationships with Indigo
and Clark and by his relationship with his business partner, Giant.
So, let's forget about jazz and see what Lee is saying about his relationships with women.
Lee notes that he didn't want to make a (standard) film about a man torn between a "good"
woman and a "bad" woman (Lee and Jones 1990: pp. 43-44), as, for example, "Young Man with
a Horn" had Kirk Douglas torn between Doris Day (the good woman) and Lauren Bacall (the bad
woman). In such stories the good woman is an asexual saint while the bad woman is a
seductively sexual sinner. These are stories about the split image of women which Freud (in, for
example, "A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men") diagnosed and which has been
explored extensively since then. The good woman is a stand-in for the asexual mother while the
bad woman is the sexual temptress who tries to take the man away from his mother.
Bleek Gilliam's two women are both sexual creatures. Are they both bad women? Or has
Lee really managed to transcend the split image of women?
One scene in the movie shows Bleek in bed with one, then with the other. We see two
different encounters which have been edited into one to make the point that, on some level, Bleek
doesn't differentiate between these women. Not only are both women sexual, but Bleek goes to
some pains to make the point that his relationship with each is basically sexual, not "love,"
whatever love is. Bleek is skeptical about love. "Pop Top 40 R 'n' B Urban Contemporary Easy
Listening Funk Love," a quasi-rap musical pastiche with spoken lyrics, is the liveliest musical set
piece in the film and it has Bleek speaking lyrics which satirize popular music's enchantment with
one-and-only-forever romantic love. Bleek will have nothing to do with "love" and makes it clear
to both women that his music comes first. It is obvious that his career, music, is playing the role
of the saintly good woman. Just as Bleek's self-destructiveness has been displaced onto Giant, so
his allegiance to the maternal good woman has been displaced onto his career.
This takes us back to the opening scene of the film, in which the discipline imposed on
Bleek is imposed by his mother. Bleek's artistic discipline is an internalization of his mother,
making his allegiance to his art an allegiance to this internalized mother. The activity though
which Bleek takes a public role in his community, playing jazz, is at the same time an activity
which binds him to his childhood and to his internalized mother. Thus his musical success seems
to require that he avoid relationships with women which could destroy the psychological basis of
his musical discipline.
Bleek is not free of the conflict which derives from the split image of women. Despite
Lee's attempt to transcend it, the psychological dynamic behind the good woman/bad woman
story is strong in "Mo' Better Blues," only it's surface form is changed. Both of Bleek's women
are bad women, women who threaten to distract him from his true love, the good woman jazz.
Oddly enough, his proficiency in jazz is part of what attracts these women to him.
Spike Lee's Blues 10
So, where are we? The artistic self-discipline which marks Spike Lee's black view of the
jazz musician turns out to be a form of psychological dependence which keeps Bleek
psychologically tied to his childhood. A premise (the authenticity of disciplined experience)
which seemed to have the latent power to free us from a mistaken search for unmediated
experience now seems to be a defense against a failure to differentiate the self from one's mother.
Lee knows that Bleek is self-centered, that is part of the story he set out to tell (Lee and Jones
1990, pp 41-42), but he doesn't seem to realize that this also undermines his desire to free Bleek
of self-destructiveness. If we can show that Bleek's blindness to Giant's managerial ineptness,
which blindness leads Bleek to his artistic death, is just another aspect of his self-obsession, then
the solipcistic circle is complete and Bleek is as enclosed in Cartesian isolation as any white
intellectual. But the argument that Giant and Bleek are aspects of one personality gives us this
one for nothing. Bleek remains psychologically anchored in his childhood, to his mother's
discipline, to his childhood friend, and is unable to establish commited contact with other adults.
He is confined to the orbit of his own psyche.
Giant is passive in the face of an inner demand for the thrill of gambling; Bleek is passive in
the face of an inner demand to play the trumpet. Giant bends the world to the needs of his
gambling and Bleek bends it to the needs of his art. Both of these fictions collapse in the same
act of violence at the hands of the bookie's thugs. This act of violence is the dramatic climax of
the movie. In the wake of this moment Bleek is forced to assume a new identity as the movie
moves into its second, redemptive, phase. Bleek finds that identity in marriage to Indigo and in
their son, who is learning the trumpet. Bleek is thus saved, but his art is behind him.
The depiction of this marriage is, unfortunately, the least satisfactory and least plausible
section of the film. As a coherent dramatic statement, the film ended with Bleek's failed
comeback when he sat-in with Shadow (his former sax player) and Clarke in the Dizzy club—the
club's name is an obvious reference to Dizzy Gillespie, jazz's last elder statesman and trumpet-
playing counterpart to Bird, who did have a club named after him, Birdland. His subsequent
marriage and child are not very plausible. He proposes marriage to Indigo in the very terms
which he had rejected and satirized in "Pop Top 40." Now that he cannot be a musician, he
changes his mind about one-and-only-forever love. Now he wants/needs a woman to save him.
And the woman accepts him. But Bleek hasn't grown and deepened in any obvious way; he has
just transferred his dependence from his career to a wife. Which is to say, simply, that Spike Lee
hasn't quite figured out how to resolve these problems.
But he does give some indication of how he wants the matter resolved. To see this we have
to examine the final scene of the movie. It parallels the first scene quite closely, so closely that
any difference is thereby foregrounded. That difference, we can only assume, is what has been
gained by the events of the picture.
Thus, in the final scene, a young boy is practicing his trumpet when his young friends come
after him to join them in play. To emphasize the parallel with the opening scene, Lee uses the
same child actors. In the final scene, as one would expect, Bleek is the father and his son, Miles
(named after Miles Davis?), is the boy. But where young Bleek had been forced to continue
practicing, young Miles is allowed out (at Bleek's urging) after a little sermon on the importance
of practicing. Bleek, we are to infer, doesn't want to impose the inflexible discipline on his son
that his mother had imposed on him. Young Miles will not, we are to presume, grow up in the
crippled way that Bleek did.
By staging the final scene in this way Lee is asserting that Bleek has gained a measure of
flexibility and insight, that he has grown though his experience. That is, he is asserting
something which he hasn't, in fact, shown. Mo' Better Blues happens in two distinct phases. One
runs from the beginning up through Bleek's failed come-back at the Dizzy club. The other runs
from Bleek's proposal to the end. The only thing which binds these two together is Lee's
cinematic assertion that the second is the logical continuation of the first. But, whereas the moves
Spike Lee's Blues 11
in the first phase are carefully plotted, with plausible causal links between the actions and
reactions of the various characters, the moves in the second phase are not carefully plotted, they
are only asserted, with a great deal of dramatic weight falling on a montage sequence set to the
music of John Coltrane. And the transition between the first and the second phase is similarly
implausible. It is clear that what Lee wants to say requires these two phases, otherwise he
wouldn't have made the movie this way. It is also clear that Lee hasn't yet been able to establish a
coherent framework in which to make this statement.
This situation is not unprecedented in dramatic history. Five-hundred years ago
Shakespeare created some plays—Pericles, Cymbaline, and The Winter's Tale—that were
similarly broken into two phases. Let's look at one of them and compare it to Mo' Better Blues.
Like Mo' Better, The Winter's Tale breaks into two movements. In both cases, the second
movement focuses on the offspring of the characters introduced in the first piece.
In Shakespeare's play the first phase is a tragedy. King Leontes becomes insanely jealous
of his wife and, in consequence, acts so as to lose his wife, his son, his daughter Perdita, and his
childhood friend, Polixenes. And then, when all this has happened, Leontes learns that his
jealousy was unfounded. The second phase is a comedy which picks up sixteen years later.
Leontes recovers Perdita, who marries Polixenes' son, Florizel, thereby restoring his friendship
with Polixenes. And, at the very end, Leontes' is reunited his wife, who wasn't dead, but only
hiding. The ending is a happy one.
This is an implausible and disjointed piece of work and yet, with a bit of sympathy and
inspiration, it plays well. We must simply assume that, during the sixteen years which we don't
see, Leontes has undergone a transformation which allows him an expansiveness and generosity
in the second phase which he didn't have in the first. Shakespeare has no way of showing this
growth in Leontes, so he simply asserts it and gets on with his play.
Both dramas thus have a sense of being cobbled together by two different and not well-
coordinated sensibilities. Each begins under the aegis of one sensibility and advances to the point
where the protagonist is cut off from society. At this point the other sensibility takes over and
shows us a protagonist whose return to society is centered around his child. Leontes finds his
daughter and, in marrying her off, gains a son-in-law. Bleek has a son and, through him, regains
his attachement to music.
The parallel is not, however, exact. In Shakespeare's play the two phases are approximately
equal in length (the first is, in fact, a bit shorter than the second). In Mo' Better the second phase
is only 10 to, at most, 15 minutes long, with the first movement thus taking up most of the movie.
Further, the biggest single part of the second phase is taken up by the montage sequence, showing
us courtship, wedding, birth of the child, and scenes from the child's youngest years. There is no
dramatic action in this sequence at all, no cause and effect, just the images of the montage.
Finally, there is a crucial difference in emphasis.
In The Winter's Tale there is no sense at all that the younger generation will escape the
problems which splintered the older generation. The issue isn't raised in any way. But, the whole
point of having a second phase in Mo' Better Blues is to indicate that it will be different with the
next generation. Whatever Leontes learned, however he grew, it only allows him to put his own
life back together. Whatever Bleek learned, however he matured, it is causing him to raise his
son in a different way. Where Bleek was incapable of sharing himself with both his muse and his
wife, perhaps his son Miles will not be so constrained. Mo' Better Blues points to a changed
future, but The Winter's Tale does not. Perhaps Spike Lee knows something that Shakespeare
didn't.
Spike Lee's Blues 12
Sacred Music
Now we must confront the montage sequence. It takes the Mo' Better Blues into a different mode
of experience. The key to this mode is in the music itself, which is the "Awakening" section from
John Coltrane's A Love Supreme album. More than any other jazz musician, John Coltrane saw
himself as a priest, and his music a communion with the divine. It is quite clear that Spike Lee
loves Coltrane's music deeply. Lee's comments on A Love Supreme make this explicit (Lee and
Jones 1990: p. 42): "It's a very spiritual work and I used it as inspiration for the film. The love
in A Love Supreme goes beyond romantic love. It's love for God and the human community."
Lee's only resolution to Bleek's dilemma is love for a supreme being. His vision is thus
ultimately sacramental, but he was unable to create a single coherent cinematic form adequate to
that vision. Instead, he alludes to it through the music itself and the accompanying montage.
The process which brings Bleek to treat his son with more generosity than he had had for
himself, and for others, is a thus sacred one. To depict it Lee had to take his movie into a
different filmic mode. That mode is the montage. Causal connections between events are
dropped. Bits and pieces move by so swiftly that we don't have time to ponder their plausibility.
We can only accept them and keep on moving as this sacred journey moves us to the final scene,
the scene in which Bleek is finally restored to his music through his son.
This montage sequence is not, however, the only manifestation of the sacred in Mo' Better
Blues. Lee had originally wanted to call this movie A Love Supreme, after Coltrane's album, but
was unable to secure Alice Coltrane's permission to use the name because he was unwilling to
eliminate all profanity from the script. The title Lee used actually used derives from another
piece of music, one played by the Bleek Quintet to mark Bleek's loss of both Indigo and Clarke.
Earlier in the movie Bleek had explained that "mo' better" is another term for sexual intercourse.
The "Mo' Better Blues" is thus a tune written to mark Bleek's loss of sex partners. However,
regardless of what its name proclaims, that piece of music is gospel music, not blues. Its chord
changes are gospel changes, not blues changes, and its emotional tone is one of the many moods
of gospel rather than one of the many moods of the blues. The title music still links the movie to
the sacred despite the fact that the title isn't what Lee had wanted.
Lee's father wrote the tune under the title "Deep Valley" (Lee and Jones 1990, p. 157), a
title which has gospel resonance (though it might have another resonance as well; one of Duke
Ellington's most erotic ballads is called "Warm Valley"). The tune's gospel roots are quite
obvious to anyone familiar with African American musical traditions —I attended one screening
of the movie where the audience began rhythmic clapping during this tune, and only this tune, as
if they were in church. The title tune, "Mo' Better Blues", is thus a bridge between the erotic and
the sacred.
To use semiotic terms, the title consists of a sequence of signs in which the signifiers are
linked by the conventions of the language system to erotic signifieds. However, this set of signs
is linked by the supervening convention of the naming relationship to a referent—the song
itself—which is not erotic. The referent is sacred. Eroticism has thus become the sign of the
sacred. This is the standard stuff of poetry, dreams, and mysticism, but not of exoteric
Christianity, not of mainstream Western culture, in which the sacred and the sensual are in
opposition.
This link between eroticism and spirituality is deeply embeded in the African-American
stylization of experience. Michael Ventura (1987a and 1987b, see also Buerkle and Barker 1973,
pp. 3-21) has given a succinct historical account of the route from African religious ceremony
through New World voodoo to jazz and on to rock and roll, the point being that there is a
comparatively recent historical linkage between African religious practice and African-American
musical practice. The erotic expressivness of African-American music isn't just something
projected on to it by repressed European Americans. That eroticism is real. But it doesn't
Spike Lee's Blues 13
originate in the bedroom. It originates in a stylization of experience which goes back to West
African ritual. This eroticism is part of an African stylization of the sacred.
Thus there is a rich interplay between African American sacred music and various secular
forms—blues, rhythm and blues, soul, jazz. Consider, for example, the remark by the great
bluesman, B.B. King, that "Gospel singers sing about heavenly bodies and we blues singers sing
about earthly ones" (Smith, 1988, p. 149). He clearly differentiates between blues and gospel, but
implies that there is an abiding link as well. The outrageous androgynous Richard Penniman
(Little Richard) has moved back and forth between preaching the gospel and singing rock and
roll, and he's hardly the only African-American musician/preacher, though he's the best known
(Keil 1966, pp. 43 ff., Lincoln and Mamiya 1990, p. 362). Similarly, Sixties soul, with Aretha
Franklin the queen and James Brown the king, is based in gospel music (cf. for example, Peter
Guralnick 1986)—a connection made in Robert Townsend's recent film, The Five Heartbeats, in
which one of the musicians is a preacher's son and another overcomes his self-destructiveness by
being born again. Between black popular music (and dance as well), with roots in black religion,
and white derivatives from it, much of contemporary America's stylization of sexuality and
secular love is derived from African religious ceremony.
This stylization is based on specific and precise biologically-given patterns for expressing
emotion. Manfred Clynes (1977) has investigated the nature of emotional expressiveness and
has found basic temporal patterns, pulsations or rhythms, through which we express our feelings.
Clynes calls these patterns essentic forms. His investigations have involved people from both
Western and non-Western societies and he has found the same patterns in all his subjects. This
suggests that the essentic forms are biologically given and not cultural conventions. While the
number of essentic forms seems to be open-ended, there are seven basic ones: love, grief, awe (or
reverence), joy, anger, hate, and sex. To say that jazz is comfortable with sexuality is simply to
say that the essentic form for sexuality appears in jazz performances. And, correlatively, to say
that classical music cannot deal with sexuality is to say that the essentic form for sexuality does
not often appear in classical music.3
While these essentic forms are biologically given, whether or not they are incorporated into
music depends on the codes of a culture's stylization. A culture isn't obligated to codify our full
biological legacy; the exclusion of part of that legacy is, after all, what repression is all about.
African America has included sexuality in its musical codes while Europe (and European
America) has not, for the most part, done so, at least not without the example and tutelage of
African America.
Thus it isn't at all surprising to find a connection between the sexual and the sacred in Mo'
Better Blues. The fact is, Spike Lee would have had to work hard and self-consciously to avoid
the connection. It is deeply part of his cultural heritage, something he is, but which Hollywood
can only aspire to, if it can see it at all. It is a connection which is inherent in the music itself, it
is part of the jazz metaphysic, the jazz stylization of experience. Jazz is comfortable with
3 I should note that, while Clynes has investigated music, he has not, to my knowledge, done a comparative
study of the appearance of the various essentic forms in various musics. Nor have I done so. Thus I am
only giving my subjective estimate of what is going on in the music. It is not, however, a wildly
idiosyncratic estimate. The sexuality which is so very obvious in jazz—to both its detractors and its
devotees—is not at all obvious in classical music. Yes, the famous Liebestod from Wagner's Tristand and
Isolde is very passionate, but it isn't very sexy; the sex is thoroughly sublimated. Similarly, while the
Viennese may have though the waltz was hot stuff, it doesn't come close to Louis Armstrong's performance
of "Tight Like This." Stravinsky's Rite of Spring qualifies, but it is late in the evolution of classical music
and it's eroticism hasn't become a standard practice. European and European-derived music, and
musicians, remain dubious about hip-swinging music.
Spike Lee's Blues 14
sexuality whereas classical music is not. Thus jazz can move between the sacred and the sexual
in a way that classical music cannot. The fact that jazz's sexuality is part of the stereotype doesn't
negate the fact that jazz can be very sexual (among other things).
However, it is only within the music itself that the sacred and the sexual can easily
accommodate one another. In the movie's plot they are in conflict. For
Bleek's conflict between allegiance to the musical profession as a source of identity and his
commitment to loving a woman is a conflict between the sacred and the sexual. For Bleek, music
is a sacred vocation, a calling—he has a picture of Coltrane, the musician/priest, hanging on his
wall. Music gives meaning and structure to his life. It is the source of his being. It is also, as we
have seen, the internalized mother. The split conception of women which is at the root of Bleek's
psyche forces the sacred and the sexual to be defined in opposition to one another.
Thus Bleek is caught in a peculiar irony. As he lives, the sacred and the sexual are in
conflict. But what he is committed to as a sacred vocation is a form of music in which the sacred
and the sexual have free commerce with one another. This irony is not only Bleek's. It is Spike
Lee's as well.
Conclusion: Hollywood vs. Jazz
All art involves the stylization of experience. Such stylizations are hardwon creations of
communities and artists working over time. Because African Americans have for so long been
denied a significant place in the movie industry, the available cinematic stylizations are mostly
European and European-American. That is where Spike Lee has to start. Actually creating an
African-American cinema is much more difficult than articulating the need to create that cinema.
What Spike Lee had to work from is a Hollywood stylization of the jazz musician which
derives from Romantic mythologizing about The Artist. This mythologizing assumes that strong
emotion is outside the pale of civilized possibility. It is something to be admired, and even
desired, but only that. It is not something one should be, something one can live. If one cannot
live it, then there is no hope of dealing adequately with either the sexual or the sacred, much less
in dealing with both. Whatever conflict there is cannot possibly be resoved since the conflicting
elements are too dangerous to handle, to touch, to be felt. They can only be repressed. This
European-derived stylization of the artist is, of course, put a part of the larger stylization of
experience which also includes racism.
In attempting to construct the image of jazz, and its musicians, in the stylizations of a black
mythology, Spike Lee committed himself to working against the received conventions. By
insisting on one simple truth about jazz, that it is disciplined stylization, Lee began to undermine
those Hollywood conventions. But he was unable completely to free himself from the Romantic
conventions which determine our vision of the artist and his place in society. Lee's displacements
don't alter the fact that, at the core, his protagonist is a self-destructive descendent of the
Romantic Artist.
But he gave us something more. He suggested that the future can be different, that by
changing the way we raise our children, we allow to have a freer world than ours has been, or is.
That idea is not a new one. But how often have you seen it dramatized in a movie? Mo' Better
Blues is flawed, but it attempts to indicate a better future. Because of that, it cannot be
dismissed.
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