Spike Lee's Blues

Abstract

This is a full-dress article about Spike Lee’s film, Mo’ Better Blues. The penultimate paragraph serves as an abstract: “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.”

Keywords: film, ritual, narrative, semimotics, shakespeare, race, racism. America, African-America, black, blues, music, jazz