The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Top 10 (OK, 4) Endings to Spike Lee Movies

I'll begin by more-or-less paraphrasing the opening paragraphs of Andrew's piece, because he basically stole a lot of what I was going to say. Real life is messy, and doesn't come with neat little endings to stories. So when you're writing a film, you have two options. Either end the story with a big, climactic punchline, and leave the taste of phony, Hollywood formula in the audience's mouth, or go for a more realistic semi-resolution, fade to black and leave the audience with an unsatisfied feeling and their popcorn half-eaten.

But the great thing about movies is that they are a visual medium, so that they don't rely entirely on plot mechanics to convey ideas. A story with a weak--or, let's say, a soft narrative conclusion, can have a strong visual conclusion that gives you a sense of closure without an unnaturally constructed plot device.

The most famous example of what I'm talking about is probably the freeze frame at the end of The 400 Blows. Narratively, there's no spectacular climax to the story. It's just one chapter in a life, ready to bleed into the next. But that final freeze frame serves as a full stop, if not an exclamation point, leaving the audience feeling satisfied that they have seen the end.

The master of this style of ending, in recent decades, is Spike Lee. I've always thought the endings of his movies were among the most poetic in contemporary American cinema. He first tried this strategy out on his second film, School Daze, which ends with Laurence Fishburne walking into the quad of his college campus early in the morning, ringing a bell and yelling "Wake up!" In literal narrative, it doesn't really make much sense for Fishburne to do this. It would, in fact, probably result in a serious asskicking from fellow students who were up partying until six in the morning the night before. But of course, he's not telling them to wake up, he's telling them--and us--to wake up. OK, it's a bit "on the nose," and I'll grant that it's not Spike's best film, but I like the idea.

Lee's next movie, Do the Right Thing, remains his most famous. Now, Do the Right Thing doesn't exactly fit my thesis--it's hard to imagine a non-genre movie having a more definite narrative climax--but I like the way he uses recurring visual motifs to underscore the themes of the film. When Smiley enters the smoldering remains of Sal's Pizzeria to pin the photo of Martin and Malcolm on the wall, the figures whose opposing views on the use of violence for political ends scroll across the screen at the start of the credits, it brings all of the movie's themes together. Of course, this isn't technically the ending--it's followed by the denouement of Sal and Mookie's conversation the next morning in front of the aftermath--but it feels like the end.

In Get on the Bus, Evan (Thomas Jefferson Byrd) has his son, Evan Jr. (De'Aundre Bonds) shackled to his leg as a court-ordered punishment for petty theft as they ride a bus across the country to attend the Million Man March. The shackle serves as a symbol of slavery, both for the audience and for the passengers on the bus. The final shot is of the shackle left abandoned on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. And although the metaphor is not perfect--whatever failings and prejudices of the criminal justice system may have led to this situation, the kid had committed a crime--it ties up the story with an image that has remained embedded in my mind, long after I've forgotten what actually happened when they showed up at the march.

My favorite of Spike's fantastic endings is from He Got Game, and it's an image that has stayed with me through the years, and could possibly be my favorite ending from any film. After two-plus hours of trying and failing to reconnect with his son Jesus (Ray Allen), Jake (Denzel Washington) has returned to Attica. Jesus stands alone in a gym, picks up a basketball and hurls it in the air, as the music of Aaron Copeland swells on the soundtrack. The basketball spins slowly through the air, like the bone in 2001, and finally lands in front of the father's feet inside the prison walls. It's such a beautiful, poetic image, expressing all the frustration of a communication breakdown, and at the same time the hope that communication can happen beyond language and words, perhaps through the sport that is both the bridge and the wall between them.

I didn't even get into 25th Hour, which has one of the greatest endings of all time, partially because it doesn't really fit with what I'm saying, and partially because I can't quite remember the order of what happened. Maybe the reason I admire this stuff so much is because I have such a hard time writing endings. In fact, I'm having a tough time figuring out how to end this right now. Maybe I should just close with an image of, I dunno, a typewriter eating my fingers. See, it's harder than it looks to come up with this stuff.