Spike Lee’s Epicenters: Finding a Narrative in the Chaos
In 2002, fifteen months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Spike Lee’s 25th Hour was released. The film centers around a drug dealer coming to terms with his impending incarceration, but its deeply felt themes of loss and regret in a traumatized New York led many to call it the greatest film to deal with 9/11, even if it does so indirectly. With his latest documentary, Lee directly addresses the disaster, but as its title suggests, NYC Epicenters 9/11->202112 is about a lot more than just the attack on the World Trade Center.
Lee possesses an immense documentary talent, and his When the Levees Broke documentary was one of the best films of his career. It was a poignant and searing account of Hurricane Katrina and the enduring spirit of New Orleans. Despite its more than four-hour runtime, Levees was an incredibly focused piece of work; Lee was a director with a mission, and a simple thesis runs through the entire film: the people of New Orleans were devastated, and they deserved more help from their country.
Epicenters, on the other hand, is a uniquely scattershot affair, split between chapters on 9/11 and the coronavirus pandemic. While Levees set out to capture a specific period of time in a specific location, Epicenters spends half of its runtime trying to make sense of an ongoing pandemic and a myriad of hot-topic political events. This is not to say that the pain of Hurricane Katrina had resolved when Levees was released in 2006; Lee made a point of showing how the disaster’s effects would be felt for years after. Epicenters, however, includes news footage from as late as June of this year. COVID is far from over, and its underlying political implications are still revealing themselves.
To his credit, Lee seems to understand that it would be impossible to form a coherent statement about the past year and a half. Therefore, the COVID episodes are all over the place, and Lee transitions between topics at incredible speed. One moment, Lee is joking around with interviewees about the Knicks, and the next he’s interviewing people who lost family members to COVID. No issue is too big or too small. He doesn’t even keep the focus of the series confined to its titular city; there’s a lot of attention paid to the 2020 election and one of the biggest segments centers around the storming of the Capitol Building on January 6.
While Lee has been a mostly silent navigator in his previous documentaries, he’s consistently heard and seen in Epicenters. He becomes one of the main characters, frequently joking with the interviewees and even giving interviews of his own. For the most part, this is a welcome addition to Lee’s formula. His inclusion makes the series feel personal and transparent. Epicenters is centered around the spirit of real New Yorkers, and there are few people more synonymous with the city at this point than Lee.
Sometimes, this approach gives us a transparent and interesting glimpse into Lee’s thought process. One particularly effective segment finds Lee voicing his frustration over the “defund the police” slogan while interviewing a group of activists. He argues that the slogan’s provocative nature distracts from the core issues behind police reformation movements. Then, Cori Bush explains how she believes the slogan has been useful in the following interview, saying that it has prompted widespread discussion and made it possible for important reforms. Lee is then heard saying that she’s educated him and that he hadn’t thought of it that way before. It’s an honest moment that foregrounds the importance of discussion and reflection.
Still, Lee’s blind spots and biases have perhaps never been more apparent. He has a joking, friendly relationship with Mayor De Blasio, as evidenced by their constant jokes about New York sports teams and their shared dislike for the disgraced Andrew Cuomo and his corruption. Lee never asks De Blasio any hardball questions, even when younger, activist interviewees voice their disappointment in De Blasio’s handling of Black Lives Matter protests and police brutality. Not questioning De Blasio on that issue feels like a missed opportunity. Even with the documentary’s massive runtime, there’s no way that Lee could cover everything, but there’s something tepid and unquestioning about Lee’s dynamic with his celebrity interviewees. His portrayal of New York would be richer and more complete if he went deeper with his questions, especially when talking to his rich and powerful friends.
Formally, Epicenters finds Lee at his most playful. When text appears on screen, it’s in the form of bright red letters that evoke a high school powerpoint presentation. When an interviewee is from Brooklyn, the text reads “Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn.” The Bronx is “Da Boogie Down Bronx,” January 6 is “Da Insurrection Day,” and President Obama is “Barack ‘Brudda Man’ Obama.” Lee gets the biggest kick out of his nickname for Donald Trump: “Agent Orange.” It’s a tame, Facebook boomer joke that apparently warrants a segment devoted to how the name originated (Busta Rhymes was the first to say it).
Elsewhere, Lee plays around with his footage and music; for example, he plays a snippet of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” during a segment focusing on the blame-shifting of New York politicians. He includes pieces of On the Town, On the Waterfront, The Great Dictator, and his own Blackkklansman and Do The Right Thing. He samples pop culture the way his hip-hop heroes sampled soul songs, and it results in a hodgepodge of ideas and images that’s hard to pin down even as it’s fun to watch. Many of these decisions are designed to evoke laughter, and it can be disarming to have explicitly humorous moments in a documentary about such widely felt tragedies. However, by switching his styles and not getting tied down to one tone, Lee is able to capture the genuine emotional core of our present moment. Just like life in 2021, Epicenters is tragic and exhausting and absurd and frightening and funny and uplifting, sometimes all at once.
So, yes, Lee wears his heart and his humor on his sleeve. Many of his jokes don’t land, and some of the segments feel warmed over Daily Show or Bill Maher bits. At one point, he plays the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught,” which is about how prejudice is a product of nature rather than nurture, over a montage of innocent babies. It’s hardly a profound choice. To put it simply, there are parts of Epicenters that are lame. It’s virtually impossible to comment on Trump or COVID in a way that feels funny or fresh in our hyper-saturated media climate. On the other hand, this kind of commentary has been a staple of the past few years, and so Lee’s editorial decisions help to capture the feeling of 2021. There’s a good-natured, earnest quality to Lee’s joking, especially when he’s interviewing everyday New Yorkers, and it contributes to the intimacy of the series.
Perhaps it is Lee’s deep connection to New York that allows him to infuse so much levity into Epicenters. Whereas Levees was reverent and reserved, Lee’s handling of his home city’s tragedies runs the emotional gamut. An interview with Christian Cooper, the Central Park birdwatcher who was racially harassed by a female dog walker who threatened to call the police, is a relatively humorous look at the racial conflict that still exists in the city. This interview immediately segues into footage of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police, which happened on the same day. The contrast between the two incidents is stark, and viewers are shown the Floyd footage without comment by Lee. That painful video’s placement underscores how an ultimately casualty-free confrontation between two people in central park could have turned into something far more tragic.
This lack of focus and the inclusion of seemingly every big news story of the pandemic makes the COVID episodes of Epicenters feel like a rough wrap-up of the past two years. There’s nothing wrong with that. As a kind of video essay time capsule, the series will be fascinating to watch decades from now. It’s a summation of the modern news cycle by a restless media addict who just happens to be one of the greatest American filmmakers of the past fifty years. This could make it an invaluable resource for future generations. But for those of us confined to the present, who remember the cataclysmic early months of COVID like they were yesterday, it can be exhausting. Lee covers seemingly everything, from the first quarantine announcements to the Andrew Cuomo press conferences to the Black Lives Matter protests of spring. The only way it could be more 2020 is if he devoted some time to talking about Tiger King. But because he chooses to tackle all of it, very little of it feels entirely fleshed out.
The episodes focusing on 9/11, on the other hand, are more confident, slowing down the pace and cutting to the emotional core of a story we’ve all heard before. Lee interviews dozens of everyday people with their unique connections to the tragedies, patiently establishing connections with each of them. He painstakingly takes us through the events of that day, mining as much pathos from the buildup as he does from the eventual attack. The tonal whiplash and formal experimentation from the COVID episodes have been replaced with precision and conviction that shows Lee at his absolute best. It’s easy to handle the 9/11 attacks with vague sentimentality, but the humanity and empathy that runs through these episodes is astounding, and it drives home the impact of an event that many viewers may be too young to truly remember.
This half of the series is transcendent. As opposed to a worldwide catastrophe that has continued for more than a year, there’s a built-in time constraint to the attacks on the World Trade Center. The COVID chapters show us a little about one year; the 9/11 chapters show us a lot about one day. Sometimes it takes the gift of hindsight to make sense of an event, and Lee is able to look back at 9/11 with twenty years of hindsight on his side.
There’s something to be said about the larger structure of the series. The COVID half comes first and the 9/11 half finishes the series. Could it be that Lee realized his 9/11 portion was stronger and decided to conclude the series on a high note?
In practice, this decision to move from the present to the past sends an interesting message to the viewer. No one knows what the future holds in regards to COVID, and it’s a scary, uncertain time to be alive. Lee begins Epicenters in this uncertainty, but when he moves us into the past to examine 9/11, he offers a glimpse at people who were able to come together and move past a tragedy. The resilience of New Yorkers is often talked about, but it’s rarely been conveyed as thoroughly as here. There is not some grand thesis at play in Epicenters, but, by linking two very different disasters, Lee grasps onto the universal human truths that bind us together.
That’s not to say the series is an entirely hopeful one. Lee recognizes the solidarity and positivity of the response to 9/11, but he doesn’t shy away from the dysfunction and pain that resulted from the attacks. He touches on discrimination against Muslim Americans, the decline of the once-beloved Rudy Giuliani, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The series ends with Lee mixing the triumphant final scene of On the Waterfront, where Marlon Brando’s character stands up and walks despite being badly beaten, with footage from the failed War on Terror and its awful toll. Leonard Bernstein’s mournful, powerful score from that film plays over images of bombs going off and towers being toppled, and people forced to march and protest for their human rights. Asian Americans were attacked and harassed because of COVID the same way that Muslim Americans were attacked because of 9/11. The division of today is nothing new, and what started in 2001 as a unified response to a national trauma gave way to decades of unnecessary bloodshed. By sampling On the Waterfront, Lee uses his love of cinema to highlight how there has always been a necessary struggle for progress and a need to fight for the future, even when any progress can be reversed and the evils of the future can never be predicted.
