The Akira Kurosawa movie that shaped Spike Lee’s career
After exploding into the industry with his 1989 film Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee became renowned for his complex stories around contemporary American issues, exploring Black identity, modern media and oppression through his satirical and deeply cutting perspective. As a former graduate of the prestigious New York University film programme, Lee began his studies admiring the work of the greats, engaging with global cinema and infusing this with his own distinctive voice. But when discussing the work that has most inspired him, he listed one film that heavily inspired the structure of his 1986 effort She’s Gotta Have It.
She’s Gotta Have It follows a young woman called Nola Darling who has a sexual relationship with three men, all of who want her to commit solely to them. We see the story being narrated by each character and the perspective of each person in Nola’s life. It forever changed the landscape of independent filmmaking in the ‘80s, with an intelligent approach towards the story of Nola’s sexual liberation and empowerment.
However, perhaps what was equally as groundbreaking as the subject matter was the structure of the screenplay, which showed each man’s perception of Nola and critiqued the male desire to possess and control her through their own skewed justifications. And when asked about his inspiration for this, Lee explained, “Akira Kurosawa is one of my favorite filmmakers. I was introduced to him at NYU. I saw Rashomon and a lot of his samurai films with Toshiro Mifune. For those who don’t know, Rashomon is about a rape and a murder. There is some very elegant storytelling [and four points of view], where the witnesses speak to the audience. They give their version of what happened”.
The idea of exploring multiple perspectives of one event is arguably what makes the film so engaging, exploring the idea that truth is rooted in our own experiences and limited by bias and personal motivations. Because each of these men wants to ‘own’ Nola, they cannot understand her choice to not be monogamous, refusing to understand her reasoning for doing so and seeing it as a flaw of her character instead of as a reflection on them and their treatment of her.
Lee expanded on this by saying, “So taking that element, in She’s Gotta Have It, we got to understand Nola through the interpretations given by the three men she’s dating, and from Nola herself. And, like Rashomon, we wanted the audience to decide whom they believed”.
This is a clever technique that allows us to better connect with each character and see the wider context of a story, leaving us to decide our own version of the truth based on which narrative we feel is most authentic and believable. But by aligning us with Nola as well as the men in her life, we begin to see how narrow and limited their perception of her is, not seeing her as a multi-faceted being with the right to have true agency and freedom over her choices.
It’s a timeless film that perhaps remains as so by paying homage to the great films of the past and incorporating this into the future.
