黑色学府

From the second piece of film work titled “School Daze” produced by Spike Lee mainly focusing on the particular story which happened within a fictionalized historical black college/university’s campus ground called Mission College, which is apparently based of/modeled after real-life universities such as Morehouse and Spellman etc., the audiences could probably be able to tell a huge change/shift in terms of the generalized story-telling style as well as film atmosphere happening throughout the entire movie, which would distinctly set it apart from the previous debut piece of “She’s Gotta Have It”, whereas “She’s Gotta Have It” is clearly in general more art-style like with all of its black and white movie shooting scenes which all add up to the romantic aspects of the piece that would potentially remind its audiences of the French New-Wave genre due to the fact that it does sort of contain a bit of Jean-Luc Godard’s touch to it, while “School Daze’ on the other hand took on an obviously different approach, by apparently combining the all-American Musical style and further mix-match it with some reasonable amounts of light-hearted comedy elements in there, a quite unique yet eye-catching movie production is thus being born. Here within this essay, I am going to primarily focus on interpreting as well as examining on the specific dream-like ending portrayal of this film piece here, as by doing that, hopefully to be able to shed some light as well as provide some logical explanations as for why the film director himself decided to bring an end to the whole piece in that particular sort of way.

The last ever line of the whole entire film piece - “wake up”, which apparently is being told through the affirming voice/tone of actor Lawrence Fishbourne, while looking through the camera lens directly at its film audiences that way, is almost like breaking through the fourth-wall in a sense. The reason as for why Spike Lee intentionally put that in there as well as set the ending up this way, for sure could be up to many different possible interpretations. My own personal perspective, however, which results from previous in-film evidences being traced from different plot points throughout, as well as from certain scenes that could potentially considered to be the so-called “climax point” of all, would be that the particular line of the two word sentence of “wake up”, is without a doubt the most, if not one of the most, important main emphasis idea belonging to the whole entire storyline itself, which subtly expresses the film director’s (as well as many others belonging to the same exact minority racial group as him, apparently being called “African Americans” as a whole) concerns regarding the black community’s seemingly lack of unity and structure, as well as its members’ lack of agreeableness or kindness towards each other, during that supposed drastically changing period of time in terms of social, political and cultural atmosphere back in the 80s, alongside with the ultimate wish and hope, just like Martin Luther King before him did, for things in general to be turning out better in the upcoming future days to come, but if so and only if so, black people resides within America as a whole really start to learn to work as well as collaborate with each other more instead of remaining hostile or turning backs on each other, in order to head towards that common share of goal as well as the right path and direction, and ultimately, really start to do something about the generalized negative social situations and struggles as being presented, shown and revealed during that particular time era. As the audiences could probably be able to see from the specific dance-off musical battle scene being called “Good and Bad Hair” which supposedly happened and took place in a beauty salon setting/background, it is being suggested and expressed through this specific scene here, that there has indeed always been on-going conflicts and tensions happening as well as going on between a lot of different sub-branches or groups of African American people living back in time in the 80s, which these different groups of people (or as they would each insist to perceive and claim themselves to be more different comparing with each other, rather than try to focus on their shared similarities in physical traits or cultural characteristics, mannerisms, usages of language there) are indeed always constantly fighting and battling with each other, almost treating the other group as total opponent enemies on the battlefield/battleground in a certain way, instead of choosing to stick with each other or try to go and make friendships happening among themselves, in an almost ironically racial sense and manner (because those perceived groups of people would be in fact more similar to each other rather than different, at least comparing with a lot of the other racial groups out there no matter what), and in this particular context as being shown and presented within the whole dance battle scene there itself, is the presence of conflicts and hostilities instead of friendliness and kindness arising between two particular young African American college-age female student groups, one being the so-called “impure”/mixed-race (or girls carrying some amount of white blood with them resulting from their ancestors’ intermarriages) young black ladies, and the other one being the “authentic’ non-mixed race/“entirely black” African American school girls. As seen from this particular musical scene being featured in the film, one could thus be able to sort of imagine where this type of film inspiration would indeed all come/stem from, as it would probably be reasonable enough at this point to conclude that, film director and creator Spike Lee himself most definitely used to always happen to witness and see these sorts of continuously prevalent social conflicts taking place and happening right in front of his eyes, maybe on an almost near daily scale/basis throughout his own youthful years, and it is apparently also possible to imagine that all of these happening within the society in general as a whole during that particular time era, would indeed feel like urgent cultural matters as well as phenomenon to Spike Lee himself, and at times it may even feel somewhat obligatory and important for him in some certain ways, as he may consider himself (as well as a lot of the other college-age young African American students around him during his time) should probably go on to take some sorts of immediate actions to do something about all of these and maybe even tell people out there to stop fighting with each other and thus ultimately bringing an end to all of those negative social conflict events and situations, due to the impact tendency theory that those continuous racial conflicts within the general black community itself during that time would have the potential to be getting in the way of racial progresses and may also in turn lead to preventions of further racial developments in the long run there altogether as a whole (and without a doubt certainly do more bad than good/brings along more of the negative aspects than positive ones).

In conclusion to wrap everything up, in my personal opinion, that would be the exact reason as for why Spike Lee decided to create that kind/type of almost fantasy or dream-like ending there, first of all, because of the fact that realistically, the real-world is a place which can oftentimes be cruel and all the meanwhile, is also apparently filled with many different (societal, social, racial, cultural etc.) issues and problems, so as a result of that, if people still decide to continuously remain unaware (either intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or subconsciously) of, or choose to stay silent regarding those different obstacles being presented around them, and go on to simply lie around there and do nothing, exactly like when one would be sleeping in a dream state that way, it would be obvious to tell that things could never be able to progress from there and may even go further downhill and becoming worse, so to speak. Spike Lee, as it seems, was indeed trying to inform us on this extra important message, indirectly through the mouths and voices of multiple different actors and actresses including but not limiting to Lawrence Fishbourne at the specific ending scene of the film, as that scene would indeed prove to be the ultimate “wake-up call” to all of its audiences and viewers (not limiting to only blacks, although this piece here is undeniably a black-centered film work, but rather all kinds of racial groups out there) that way, that: The time as for currently right now, would indeed be considered a good time to be finally waking up from the ultimate utopian-like fantasy/dream world/dreamland as a whole, and really start to pay attention to each of our societal surroundings and environments that we happen to be in, and really start to take actions in order to make some urgent changes out there altogether for the better, for it would be undeniably true that the real-life/real-world is most definitely not a dreamland nor an utopia in anyway, and unless people really start to learn to try to not keep on hiding from the harsh reality or keep running away from it, and pretend that nothing is going wrong within the general society out there, we could never ever be able to make those problems disappear nor step on the right track/direction/path that way. It is indeed the exact time to finally wake up from the dream and face reality out there everybody, as soon as right now.