Spike Lee’s Phantasmagoric Fantasy and the Black Female Sexual Imaginary in She Hate Me

Deborah E Whaley

doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1092

Abstract

This paper examines the sexual politics of the Spike Lee film She Hate Me (2004). The film’s director and collaborative writer attempts to integrate the memory of the initial whistle blower of Watergate, the Black American security guard Frank Wills, with a contemporary Black corporate hero story. She Hate Me also includes a subnarrative of sexual surrogacy and Black female sexuality, which emerges as the central narrative by the film’s end. I argue that the film presents a phantasmagoric fantasy, which postulates normative conceptions of sexuality, while purporting to represent the non-normative Black female sexual imaginary in a sympathetic way. I build upon this argument by addressing the following questions: How does the dominant narrative of She Hate Me reify conservative notions of the conjugal family? In what ways does Lee’s construction of Black sexualities undermine the cultural politics of Frank Wills’s memory? How does Lee’s compilation of sexual iconography serve the purpose of sensory stimulation, rather than a serious contemplation, of the parameters of sexual identities? Through my exploration of the homonationalist ideology upheld in the film, I assert that Lee’s stale illusion of sexual representation and underdeveloped political narrative creates a nebulous sexual and political phantasma of representation.

Highlights

In what could be termed, The Apprentice meets The L Word meets The Sopranos, She Hate Me [is] a contorted racial allegory
Cultural critics, including Rebecca Walker, have, to use popular vernacular, “called Spike Lee to the mattresses” concerning his misogynistic portrayals of Black women on the silver screen. In her discussion of Lee’s entire body of films up until 1994, the late cultural critic Toni Cade Bambara argued against the idea that the polarization created for spectators in his films results in a transformative narrative
The film is not successful as a transformative film just because of its silly lipstick lesbian sub-plot, its masking of the history of Black female sexual degradation and exploitation, and its melodramatic Black male victim-hood ad nauseam shown in most scenes and dialogue

Summary

Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

Disappointed by the lack of critical attention to Spike Lee’s 2004 film She Hate Me, I decided to put pen to paper. She Hate Me is similar to Lee’s previous films, insofar as a main component of the film is to reveal the plight of a Black male protagonist and to present Black women as co-conspirators in Black male subjugation. In this film, he does not use “Black female humiliation as plot resolution,” as cultural and feminist critic Michele Wallace writes about many of his previous films..

Deborah Whaley

Going Back to the Mattresses

Conclusion