Tonight I went to a screening and discussion of Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” at BAM. My cousin Imani Perry Author of More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States was on the panel along with historian Renee Romano, author of Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America and co-editor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory; Michele Wallace, film critic and author of Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman.

First, this is not a Spike Lee Joint that I have seen recently. It’s not like “Do The Right Thing” or “School Daze”. I barely remember any notable lines from the movie.

The cast is composed of many of the regular actors who appeared in Spike Lee’s movies back in the early 90s but Samuel Jackson and Halle Berry were standouts.

Second, the fashion is the movie is great. The Harlem folks are very stylish, very Cosby Show-esque with bright colors (orange, purple, red, electric blue). 

Other thoughts:

• Ruby Dee delivered some hilarious lines.  Can we get a Facebook petition started to get her to host SNL?!  She could have a career revival like Betty White.
• The soundtrack was mostly Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra and Mahalia Jackson.
• The last movie about Black/White interracial relationships was “Something New” (2006) with Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker. Even that movie hinted at class differences.
• The crackhead hangout, the Taj Mahal, was at 145th and Convent Avenue. Today, that area is pretty gentrified.  I went to dinner in a restaurant Harlem a few weeks ago and I was the only Black person there. It was weird.
• Not everyone who is biracial is a hippie boho.

Anyway, the movie is more about family dysfunction, drug abuse, adultery and race and class identity than it was about a interracial relationship.  In other words, it is not a love story.