Comparison of Spike Lee Films

Comparison of "Do the right thing", "Shes gotta have it" and "Clockers"

One running theme throughout these films was the use of an African-American Protagonist, and in both Clockers and Do the right thing, they were struggling with racial issues,which is typically the theme of Spike Lees films. For example in Clockers we see a couple of white police officers patting down a group of black teenagers in search of drugs or other contraband, and they do it in a way that is aggressive and embarrassing for the teenagers, with no real intentions other than the stereotype that black teenagers are always carrying drugs. There is also a scene when a group of white police detectives are examining the dad body of a black man, and they do it in a way that is unprofessional and disrespectful. However, the theme is not always about racial issues, for example in Shes gotta have it we see the protagonist struggle with making her mind up about which of the three men that shes dating she wants to be with. The reason Spike Lee liked to make his movies about racial issues was because he was very political and he wanted to express these issues via his movies, however he got a lot of discrimination for only using African-American characters, and so in his later films he used white actors to star in his movies, only to gain negative comments from black people saying that he had betrayed them.
Typically, Spike Lee would stage his films in urban areas, commonly New York as that was where he was from. He did this because this is where a lot of the discrimination that black people were receiving was, as well as the fact that it was cheaper to film in areas like this instead of a studio. They were also usually filmed in a short amount of time due to a small budget, and time was money.