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Touting Spike Lee as a postmodern auteur is neither original nor surprising; what is remarkable, however, is how few scholars, marketers, journalists, or bloggers have treated Lee's authorship with serious attention, engaging his authorial style on its own terms. Most often, Lee is typecast as a biographycentric auteur, what Sharon Willis calls "the crudest forms of auteurism."1 She explains that "in its quest to market what it calls 'black product,' Hollywood publicity . . . stress[es] the continuity between a director's life and his work as a direct expression of personal experience."2 Illustrative of this ilk, the New York magazine piece "The Angriest Auteur" uncritically invokes the language of auteurism, while the bulk of the article catalogs and then attempts to reconcile Lee's wealth and lifestyle with his vitriolic filmmaker-star persona.3 Yet even more rigorous, detailed work like Melvin Donalson's chapter "Spike Lee: The Independent Auteur" provides a chronological account of Lee's life and career but leaves aside questions of how Lee might trouble, expand, or explode classical conceptions of the auteur.4
To explain these general tendencies in scholarship on Spike Lee as auteur, Willis invokes Valerie Smith's conception of the documentary impulse in black cinema, highlighting how biographical explanations for filmic representation act as a mark of authorization or authority. In other words, Lee's off-screen persona as an artist and activist grappling with issues of racism threatens to distort Do the Right Thing (1989) into an approximation or representation of lived experience. This "collapse of 'real effects' with social reality" stifles the power and impact of Do the Right Thing, reducing "the cinematic text to an argument, which does not allow us room to think through any relationship to fantasy structures . . . as well as through representational strategies."5 Willis goes further: "By framing in advance the questions that his film may raise, this story reduces their contradictions to the size and shape of the political debate as it is carried on in the mainstream media. And these films seem intent on raising questions that do not fit easily within this format, questions that might, if taken seriously, change the terms of the debate."6 Willis's evocative language here demands interrogation. Her analysis of Lee's auteurism...