Netflix’s She’s Gotta Have It Is Spike Lee’s Badass Feminist Do-Over
Photo: David Lee/Netflix
Not often are filmmakers offered the opportunity for a do-over, especially when they’re as bold a directorial voice as Spike Lee. Auteurs tend to recut and reconfigure their creations until they find that perfect vehicle of their vision, but self-remakes are rare. Ozu did it. So did Hitchcock, Hawks, Mann and Capra. The danger is that you screw it up (Funny Games, anyone?) and you miss your chance at redemption. But with Netflix’s She’s Gotta Have It, that’s exactly what Lee got—and he didn’t miss his shot.
Based on Lee’s debut film of the same name, the series stays true to the much of the movie’s ideals and plot, but gives more expansive psychologies to its superfecta of love interests: Jamie Overstreet (Lyriq Bent), Greer Childs (Cleo Anthony), Opal Gilstrap (Ilfenesh Hadera) and, yes, Mars Blackmon (Anthony Ramos) return to pursue the affections of one Nola Darling (DeWanda Wise). Hell, you even see the return of S. Epatha Merkerson’s Dr. Jamison (here played by Heather Headley). It’s a sign of maturation that its love interests are given a new depth here—and I say “its” when referring to love interests, because this show (and the movie) is the character of Nola Darling.
Nola is our perspective and our subject, the end-all, be-all of the series. She is the She and boy does she have to have It. Direct address (and more of Spike Lee’s best) returns with a bang as the style is the same but the budget is bigger. This is what happens when you let a dreamer dream, when the imagination behind the scrappy yet inventive She’s Gotta Have It is fully financed to achieve its potential.
While the film exploded Lee onto the national stage, the show embraces all the quirks and signatures he’s developed over a long career (musicality in collage-like montages and choreography, lyrical writing, bombastic framing, a general tendency to err on the side of provocative and sexy) and brings them full circle. When writing to interrogate your youth—which the show, focused on the romantic and artistic aspirations of a black woman in Brooklyn, does while Lee self-reflects with his namefellow creations—the more detailed, exploratory format of TV compliments the inevitable instinct to go long and thorough. And Lee has much to interrogate.
Lee recently told The Hollywood Reporter, “People always ask me if there’s one thing I could take back, a do-over. The first thing I say is the rape scene in the original film from 1986. So I’ll apologize again right here. That should’ve never been in there.” In the movie, Nola is raped by one of the men she dates and then chooses, after following a batshit line of reasoning, to be monogamous with him. It’s an act that’s spun questionably for character development, is initially rewarded and, even if the pair’s happy ending is deconstructed by the finale, is never treated with anything close to the disgust it merits. The 1986 film was progressive but imperfect, still leaning on many well-worn stereotypes as it fought off a choice few.