Spike Lee is going to infect the world with yet another dose of racial hatred and divisionary cinematic polemic.

I really enjoyed Lee's two movies Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X but I think that this is outright exploitation. Lee's intentions are very clear with this project:

[Lee] wouldn’t be shocked if rumors about government involvement in the flooding proved true.

If anything was demonstrated during Katrina, it was the government's incompetence to enact a successful project plan in the midst of a natural disaster.

The Bush administration would have gained far more GOP access to black voters by successfully rescuing thousands of doomed poor black people in the nick of time, than they would have by murdering a few thousand poor, unconnected, and uninfluential Democratic voters.

I think Lee's intentions here are a futile attempt to revive his stalled film-making career. And he refuses to acknowledge that as an artist, you can only draw a frame around a social situation so many times and unless you are willing to pierce that frame and allow your audience an artistic breakthrough, they will leave you and history will forget your artistic exploits as those that could have soared but instead only hovered.

But What Do You Think?

TAGS: Spike Lee, Hurricane Katrina