The Messy Introspection of Spike Lee’s “NYC Epicenters”

Spike Lee cannot wait for the picture to begin. He wants to have you in his custody from the moment you learn the name of the “joint.” It is possible that, among all of Lee’s projects, “NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½,” an oral history for HBO, reveals the most about his mammoth political and aesthetic appetites, in part because of its mammoth subject: twenty-first-century New York City, his home and muse. The ego is all there in the informality of the title, which gives off the weird gravitas of an epiphany scribbled in the Notes app. You can watch “NYC Epicenters” as a raw paean to the unbreakable city, but you can also watch it as a twilight retrospective of Lee by Lee. Unpredictably, the director splays himself across its seven and a half hours, offering up his messiness and his provincialism in equal proportion to his brilliance and his sensitivity. Take him or leave him. The documentary is not just visceral but a kind of viscera: Lee’s thought process enfleshed.

Lee has conducted two hundred interviews, rooted around for decades’ worth of television-news ephemera, and surfaced upsetting footage of catastrophe and corruption. He has also mined the film canon for off-kilter references—often to his own œuvre—and collaged all this into four episodes divided into two chapters apiece, each of which is roughly an hour long, with the exception of the last. (More on that final chapter later.) These chapters are held together not so much by theme as by pungency. Early frames show Donald Trump in March, 2020, boasting about the country’s indomitability against the coronavirus; underneath, a caption in large red type reads “President Agent Orange.” Later, Lee introduces Chris Cooper, the black birder who was targeted by Amy Cooper in Central Park, as “Harvard Edumucated.” As an interviewer, he’s avuncular. The occasional Knicks joke puts his subjects, survivors of trauma, at ease. Sometimes you need the showman and not the priest to m.c. the memorial.

Lee has rightly noted that his documentaries are underappreciated. “4 Little Girls” and “When the Levees Broke,” his operatic visits to historical events distant and recent, stand alongside his dramas “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X” as his finest, most controlled work. By comparison, the muckraker of “NYC Epicenters” is a scattered man, spun out of orbit by his outrage. “I wouldn’t want to be any other place in the world but here, the epicenter,” Lee says, in an interview, sounding not unlike Chris Rock at the mike. (Like that native son, Lee is a social critic.) Being in the eye of the storm, Lee can’t disambiguate its wider effects. He’s a bit tortured by his city’s suffering, and he yearns to do cinematic justice to every social injustice. The first two episodes, on COVID-19 and the Trump Presidency, ricochet from story to montage to interview to speculation. One minute, we are watching an affecting tribute to Margaret Holloway, the “Shakespeare Lady” of New Haven, a beloved and misunderstood street performer who died of COVID. A few minutes later, we are meeting Ron Kim, a state assemblyman from Queens and a target of Andrew Cuomo’s bullying. After that, the actor Jeffrey Wright is explaining an initiative by Fort Greene restaurateurs to feed first responders. Lee has attention to spare, but he does not have infinite time, and so threads are frustratingly dropped.

The second episode’s appraisal of Trump is obsessive rather than illuminating, but viewers will likely forgive Lee’s digressions on the basis of liberal good will. But our trust in our home-town ambassador is further tested. Lee is drawn to the truthtelling value of violent found footage; to him, paying respect to the dead requires the spectacle of putting on a wake. He is in an ambient argument with activists and critics who question the phenomenon of the viral lynching video. His series includes cell-phone videos of the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, and others. Because little of the documentary is based on his own shots, Lee imposes himself on archival material. He includes his short film “3 Brothers,” which splices the murder of Radio Raheem, from “Do the Right Thing,” with the killings of Garner and Floyd. Why? Perhaps Lee sees himself as a premonitory vessel who has discovered the junction at which fiction merges with history. He wants us to see these murders as he has seen them. He wants to enter the evidence into his filmic cosmos.

It was the reverberation of generation-defining disaster that moved Lee to thematically join 9/11 to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The absence of the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic, which also had an epicenter in New York City, speaks to a widespread dereliction of duty.) But Lee’s last two episodes, an anatomy of 9/11, feel separate from the rest of the documentary; in them, he passively echoes his own cinematic history. His 2002 crime drama, “25th Hour,” was the first and perhaps the last feature film to capture the inflamed post-9/11 national mood. Now, with the latter half of “NYC Epicenters,” he has made a haunting, judiciously paced memory piece. It is relentlessly graphic but, if you can stomach it, horrifically beautiful. The documentary, a product of its empire, can allegorize suffering. “It was like a movie,” the subjects repeat, recalling the chaos downtown. The originality of these episodes lies in Lee’s interviews with the survivors who appear in the footage he shows from that day. The candor of their witness and the granularity of their grief return a local dimension to the symbol of 9/11.

Lee has a gift for spotting fellow-rhetoricians and performers. The inclusion of these voices distinguishes “NYC Epicenters” from the slate of obligatory 9/11-anniversary specials airing this month. It is uncomfortable to consider the role of performance in victimhood, but we are never not self-styling; style is authenticity. For Lee, lingering on interviewees’ mannerisms, accents, and outbursts is as important as extracting their stories. When he likes the syntax of a subject’s response, he asks that person to repeat it, as if directing a character in a feature. The subject flinches but ultimately agrees, sometimes refining the story along the way. In effect, Lee encourages his interviewees to take ownership of their experiences, reminding them of their right to express individual thoughts about a collective tragedy. One first responder gives a chillingly entertaining, expletive-laden soliloquy. Another recalls his reaction after helping to clean up the wreckage: “Are you fucking kidding me? It’s 2001. I have gangrene?” With others, especially politicians and figureheads, Lee’s attraction to the sensational can be troubling. Earlier in the series, he introduces the overblown claim that Black people initially believed they were immune to the coronavirus, and CNN’s Van Jones says, “Those few words probably killed more African Americans than the Ku Klux Klan.” Whether Lee believes Jones’s overstatement is moot. He has included it for the drama.

The first version of the final episode sent to critics had hints of “Loose Change,” an Internet conspiracy docuseries from the mid-two-thousands. Lee spent thirty minutes indulging an evident pet project, questioning how the towers fell and interviewing members of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. (He also interviewed their detractors, but it is clear that his sympathies lie with the truthers.) In an interview with the Times, Lee doubled down on his interest in 9/11 conspiracies. “I got questions,” he said, when asked why he included the perspective of hoax junkies. He conjectured that “NYC Epicenters” might have an extrajudicial effect, triggering Congress to launch an investigation. Following a public outcry, he excised the segment, and the final documentary ends with a moving montage of images of heroism.

In those cut scenes, Lee is practically vibrating with curiosity and conviction as he fraternizes with the truthers. The segment would have been a career-defining offense. And yet it was also a strange window into his paranoias, which are not so different from those of many people in this country, and which have been induced by a rotted power system. The original cut may have inadvertently captured the American psyche. But, in the end, Lee, among our most headstrong artists, knew he did not have a choice. ♦