Spike Lee publicity portrait for the film 'Summer Of Sam', 1999. (Photo by Touchstone/Getty Images)
I first saw Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam when it was released, in the summer of 1999. Its taut, frenetic, anxious portrayal of New York City in the summer of 1977 completely shook me. I walked out of the theater and for days after I couldn’t stop thinking about the July ‘77 blackout, a city in the midst of financial crisis, and a community at first paralyzed and then tragically, irrationally, mobilized by fear over a serial killer on the loose.
Lee’s film essentially examines one of the most distressed periods in New York history as if through a microscope. It is nominally about David Berkowitz, the so-called “Son of Sam” who murdered six people between July 1976 and July 1977, but really it’s about New York reaching a boiling point, as told through a small group of people in the Bronx who have known each other their whole lives. A blackout, a heat wave, a psychotic gunman roaming the streets, shooting brunettes in parked cars. The clash between disco and punk, the pre-AIDS sexual nonchalance, the homophobia. As tensions across the city rise, the group splinters, factions form and turn against one another, and the whole cauldron feels like it could explode at any minute.
I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Summer of Sam in the past several days, as the temperature in New York — both literal and figurative — is once again on the rise. I decided to watch it again for the first time in at least 15 years, thinking it might offer some modicum of comfort, a reminder that we’ve been here before, that social crises don’t last forever.
That’s not what happened. The film that felt so visceral 21 years ago today feels almost quaint. It’s still the directorial masterpiece it always was, but the problems it portrays appear much more manageable and contained. Simple, even. There was a mentally ill man shooting women in cars, yes, and the city was in turmoil. But at the film’s climax, when Berkowitz is arrested and the lights and AC come back on and none of the characters we’ve come to know have died, it feels definitively, satisfyingly over. You can leave the theater, or get up from the couch, and resume life as you know it. Man, you can think, the summer of ‘77 was crazy, and go about your business.
Today, against the backdrop of a global pandemic that’s seen more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, a president whose utter narcissism and incompetence have turned problem into crisis over and over and over again, and deepening distrust of the very institutions meant to protect us, we find ourselves on the brink of a civil war that has been heating up for more than 200 years.
Cities just coming out of lockdown have instituted curfews to quell protests that are meant, ostensibly, to speak truth to power and avenge the murder of George Floyd and countless — countless — others by the police, but also by those in power, namely the racist elected officials who think the olden days were somehow “great.” But these protests have sometimes been hijacked by those seeking to foment even greater discord, to destroy homes and businesses owned by and sering vulnerable communities, and even, it’s been suggested, to start a race war.
As Anne Applebaum recently argued in The Atlantic, we have to resist the urge to simplify the story of what is happening in America right now. It’s far too complicated for just one interpretation of recent events to guide us out of this mess. That’s because these events are mere symptoms of a sickness that’s existed deep in our social system from the outset.
We’re not dealing with one serial killer on the loose, or one particularly hot summer during a fiscal crisis, or even just a cultural upheaval. We’re dealing with nothing short of a complete and total reckoning with injustices that have never truly been addressed, despite all the efforts to address them dating back more than a century. If history is any guide, this moment may not be any more effective than those in the past. But maybe, when Barack Obama says the current protests are like nothing he’s ever seen before in his lifetime, this will be a moment when history doesn’t just repeat itself, but in which history is made.
All this said, Summer of Sam is still a fantastic movie.
I am a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and professor. I have covered contemporary art and film since the late 1990s, and have taught journalism and film courses at the
…I am a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and professor. I have covered contemporary art and film since the late 1990s, and have taught journalism and film courses at the college level since 2004.