Porno, Disco, and Summer of Sam: Spike Lee on Sexuality

At the time of its release Summer of Sam (1999) was seen as a notable departure for Spike Lee, whose body of work up to that point had been predominately focused on the Black community and American race relations, but it was actually a return to the events that had formed him as an artist. In the summer of 1977, New York City was caught in a paroxysm fueled by rapid social change and the city’s fiscal crisis but ignited by the freak coincidence of a record-breaking heatwave, a massive blackout that plunged the city into anarchy, and a serial killer whose reign of terror extended from the city’s nighttime streets to the front page of the Daily News. Unable to find a summer job while home from his second year at Morehouse College, Lee took an 8 mm film camera and hit the streets, documenting a city in crisis. He returned to Morehouse in the fall determined to become a filmmaker, editing the footage from that summer into his first film, a short titled Last Hustle in Brooklyn (1979). While Last Hustle in Brooklyn is presumed lost, Lee’s twelfth feature film shows us the summer that produced one of America’s greatest filmmakers as he remembered it 22 years later. 

While there are many portraits one could paint of 1970s New York, in Summer of Sam, Lee depicts a sex-soaked city caught between the free love ethos of the previous decade and the sex panic that would define the next. The 1972 red-carpet premieres of Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano) and Behind the Green Door (Artie and Jim Mitchell) had heralded the beginning of a “porno chic” era in which going to see an X-rated flick was a sign of one’s sexual sophistication. As the public’s appetite for adult entertainment grew, New York’s Times Square became ground zero for what the early antipornography group, Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), had described in 1963 as a “floodtide of filth…threatening to pervert an entire generation of American youth.”¹  The question of perversion aside, the CDL’s prediction of a rapid swell in the adult industry was on the money. In 1965, there were nine businesses within the city designated for “adult use,” but by 1977, there were 245.² Adult theatres and bookstores, video arcades, strip clubs, peep shows, live sex shows, massage parlours, and street-based sex work proliferated, turning Times Square into a commercial sex district that much of the city – including its burgeoning feminist antipornography movement – saw as less an indicator of sexual liberalism than of urban decay.

While the city scrambled to curb sexual commerce through new zoning laws, disco was circulating an ethos of sexual hedonism that was impossible to contain. Disco was unabashed in its worship of the body, not only venerating sexual pleasure in the lyrics of songs like Donna Summer’s 1975 hit “Love to Love You Baby” but encouraging a bacchanalian frenzy of nonstop dancing fueled by intermixing records and the ready availability of cocaine and quaaludes. As disco historian Albert Goldman put it in 1978, “All disco is implicitly orgy.”³ The sexually libertine environment of the discotheque reshaped the kind of sex its congregants were having outside of it, leading many to experiment with alternative lifestyles and sexual practices, such as swinging and group sex. When it opened in January 1977, the “members-only” sex club Plato’s Retreat (depicted in Summer of Sam’s own orgy sequence) provided a semi-private place for the sexually adventurous to meet, effectively codifying disco’s sexual philosophy. By the summer, discomania had reached such a fever pitch that 2 a.m. trains were often as packed as those at rush hour.⁴ “Now is the summer of our discotheques,” declared nightlife reporter Anthony Haden-Guest that June. “And every night is party night.”⁵

The Son of Sam killer loomed over this summer of sexual abandon as though he were divine retribution for the city’s slide into sin. Later identified as David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam targeted young brunettes and seemed particularly motivated to attack them when they were in a parked car with a male companion, as though he were punishing them for their nighttime trysts. Later, after admitting that he had lied about receiving demonic commands to murder, Berkowitz would say that he had been motivated by the shame of being a product of an extramarital liaison, leading his biological mother – a young brunette, like his victims – to give him up for adoption. He targeted lovers in parked cars to prevent the kinds of accidental pregnancies likely to produce unwanted offspring like him. In truth, Berkowitz was less interested in sparing others the pain of illegitimacy than he was in punishing women for their sexuality and the anguish his own repressed sexual urges caused him.⁶ As he entered the courtroom for sentencing in 1978, Berkowitz repeatedly chanted that his final victim “was a whore” before shouting that, if given the chance, he’d kill her – and “all of them” – again.⁷

In Lee’s film, the working-class Italian-American neighbourhood of Throggs Neck is caught in the eddy created by these sexual dynamics as they ebb and flow across the city and its cultural topography. Located on the southeastern shore of the city’s northernmost borough, Throggs Neck was both at a remove from Manhattan and the radical reorganization of American culture that was taking place within it and centrally located between Berkowitz’s preferred hunting grounds of the Eastern Bronx and Queens. At the same time that the neighbourhood cops, mafiosos, and corner boys become increasingly fascistic in response to the possibility of a killer lurking unseen within the community, two very different romantic couples seek freedom from the neighbourhood’s social norms through nighttime excursions into the city. By all appearances, Vinny (John Leguizamo) and Dionna (Mira Sorvino) are an average young married couple who work service-industry jobs by day and spend their nights at the local discotheque, but their hypnotically erotic dance routines belie a dysfunctional sexual relationship that neither knows how to repair. While Vinny strives to conform to the conservative sexual values he was raised with – alienating his wife in the process – punk couple Ritchie and Ruby are bonded by their shared quest to free themselves from convention. Manhattan serves as a kind of sexual agora, forcing each couple to grapple with the conflict between what they should desire and what they actually do. For Ritchie (Adrian Brody) and Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), Times Square is a literal marketplace of ideas, allowing them to repeatedly explore the outer limits of their desires as they engage in a variety of sex work over the course of the film. Vinny and Dionna’s one excursion into Manhattan leads them ultimately to Plato’s Retreat, where love is given freely and without judgment, but their one-night stand with sexual liberation only plunges them more deeply into the stultifying sex and gender norms that have threatened their relationship since its beginning. 

As he had done with Do the Right Thing (1989), with Summer of Sam Lee uses a catastrophe to show how the conditions that produced it were so common as to be almost unremarkable. Like Berkowitz, the men in the neighbourhood see the world as made up of whores who deserve punishment and Madonnas who don’t. Whether a woman is one or the other depends entirely upon the whims of the men around her; it’s they who get to decide. When Ruby objects to being taken only to hotel rooms by her WASP-y boyfriend, he calls her a “guido wop skank,” provoking the neighbourhood guys to run him off. But once he’s gone, they continue to taunt her with similarly sexist slurs. That Ruby is a slut isn’t a matter of debate; who gets to shame her for it is. The only man in the neighbourhood who doesn’t define her by her sexual experience is punk outcast Ritchie who – when asked whether Ruby’s extensive sexual past bothers him – remarks simply that what she did before he met her “is her business.” That the question is posed by serial philanderer Vinny underscores the deeply sexist double standard that undergirded the sexual libertinism of the 1970s. Unable to see women as whole beings, Vinny must split his love and his lust between the woman he’s married to and the women he isn’t, but in doing so he both leaves Dionna sexually unfulfilled and commits to cheating on her in perpetuity. After his philosophical discussion with Ritchie about the nature of desire, Vinny attempts to bring Dionna into his sexual world when, after being turned away from Studio 54, they find themselves at Plato’s Retreat. However, he can only experience his feelings afterward as disgust for her participation in the group sex he initiated. When he calls her a whore, Dionna responds, “You were there too. You’re a whore!” Vinny’s response is a succinct summary of his entire sexual worldview: “I can’t be a whore, I’m a man.” 

For Vinny, “whore” and “woman” are such tightly fused concepts that not a sliver of logic can come between them. As a hairdresser whose customers seem to seek him out more for his cock than his curling iron, Vinny’s masculinity is compromised both by his pink-collar trade and the suggestion that his sexual services can be bought. When Vinny finds out that Ritchie has been performing in porno flicks and gay strip joints, he can only rationalise it by questioning whether Ritchie is gay. His inability to get an answer that resolves his confusion leads him to betray Ritchie to the neighbourhood mob, as though there were a slippery slope from non-normative sexuality to mass murder. (This is more or less what antipornography feminists and the Evangelical Christian right would argue just a few years later.) Ironically, the film’s healthiest sexual relationship is also its most socially deviant. By the end of the film, Ruby has joined Ritchie in sex work, leading the neighbourhood corner boys to accuse him of having turned her into a porn star. But he is the only man in the film who neither reduces Ruby to her sexual behaviour nor expects sex from her. On the contrary, he delays their sexual relationship until they have formed a deep emotional connection and built an actual relationship, and theirs is the only relationship that survives the summer. 

Unequivocally, Spike Lee is the most incisive commentator on race relations in the history of American cinema, but Summer of Sam shows him to be an equally astute observer of how gender and sexuality are also contested cultural terrain, serving simultaneously as tools of social control and as sites of pleasure and freedom. Summer of Sam is a magnificent film for many reasons, but its real legacy is the challenge it poses to sexual dogmatism and the violence such dogmatism inevitably engenders. It is both a deeply political and extremely sexy film, and only Spike Lee could have made it.

Summer of Sam (1999 USA 142 mins)

Prod Co: Touchstone Pictures, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks Prod: Jon Kilik, Spike Lee Dir: Spike Lee Scr: Victor Colicchio, Michael Imperioli, Spike Lee Phot: Ellen Kuras Ed: Barry Alexander Brown Mus: Terence Blanchard Prod Des: Thérèse DePrez Art Dir: Nicholas Lundy Cos Des: Ruth E. Carter

Cast: John Leguizamo, Adrien Brody, Mira Sorvino, Jennifer Esposito, Michael Rispoli, Saverio Guerra, Brian Tarantina, Al Palagonia, Ken Garito, Bebe Neuwirth

Endnotes