Who's Next? (1999)

SIDE ONE

1
“BABA O’RILEY”

An insidiously repetitious bit of programming, an unyielding throb, setting the tempo, pushing forward, shooting forward with the brutal, unwavering determination of a wind-set toy that will mindlessly march into walls until its straining gears grind to dust. Beneath that, an organic and windmilling roar, a riffage of sound we know by heart: authentic, red-blooded and bloodied-red, human.

This is the programmable-electric-organ meets guitar-rock intro to the song “Baba O’Riley,” the first track on The Who’s 1971 album, Who’s Next, a loose nine-song narrative cycle based on a rock opera written by Who guitarist Pete Townshend about a dystopic society split into two halves—those who live deeply-programmed, socially-brainwashed lives, and the savage primitives living as their authentic selves.

It’s also the centerpiece of writer-director Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, playing in its real-time entirety at the film’s exact midpoint, wherein Lee unleashes a jagged distorto phantasmagoria of imagery in montage, one that in its smeary discordia captures the world of the film and its story thus far—a knotting of the film’s heady, troubling themes to pop music, exploding forth almost like a chorus at Sam’s halfway point. In its sickly neon and guttergunked expressionism, the “Baba O’Riley” set piece—as perfect and daring a set piece as one can imagine in a filmography full of them—spews forth a cascade of New York City lives in a surreal spume of their real-life moments and their half-remembered dreams. Spattered across the screen are their most spirit-crippling fears and their most lurid lusts (and for some characters, those are one and the same), these people who live deeply-programmed, socially-brainwashed lives, and the savage primitives living as their authentic selves. And between those two camps—haunting them both, binding them all, a man both half-programmed and half-savage, playing alone in his fetid apartment with his toy alphabet building blocks and using them to spell a name for himself, to build an identity, the same way disparate, disconnected songs can build to an entire album’s story—lurks the film’s organizing principle and its characters’s shadow-self.

The misogyny-driven Mr. Murder. New York’s .44 Caliber Killer. The Son of Sam.

2
“BARGAIN”

Anarchy in the Bronx.

Such was the original title for the script penned by future Sopranos star and writer Michael Imperioli and his writing partner, former punk musician Victor Colicchio, a script which Imperioli planned to direct and slipped to Spike Lee at the premiere of Girl 6 (1996) with the hope that Lee would produce. A small character drama set in the Italian-American neighborhood of Country Club in the Bronx, Anarchy wove two stories from Imperioli and Colicchio’s pasts into one—as youths, both knew men who were attacked and nearly beaten to death by mobs looking for the Son of Sam killer in the summer of 1977. Their script focused on a young punk musician who would be betrayed by his best friend and suffer the same fate.

As script polishes and rewrites progressed, the film’s scope grew too large, swelled into a form too unwieldy, metastasized into something too complicated for Imperioli to comfortably direct as his debut, and Lee—one of the greatest American directors of his generation, having written and directed such important films as She’s Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988), and He Got Game (1998), and such all-out masterpieces as Do the Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992)—assumed control of the production in a bargain with the two writers to get the film made. With his control came a fundamental shift in vision, and a return to the storytelling style of a film that is one of America’s finest: Do the Right Thing.

Do the Right Thing served as an evisceratively incisive inquiry into American race relations and their fault lines within the compressed setting of a single sweltering summer day and block in the Black neighborhood of Bed-Stuy; Summer of Sam acts as its companion piece exactly one decade later, expanding the canvas of DTRT both literally and figuratively across an entire city being burned alive (with DTRT’s one-day scorcher now spread atop an entire boiling summer) while NYC is held under siege by a serial killer in 1977. Rather than being soundtracked by the bruisingly iconic Bomb Squad beats of Public Enemy, Summer is instead chockablock with The Who’s proto-prog-punk power-chord snarl frothing against the glassy-eyed coke-pop of disco. Instead of narration from the outside of the neighborhood looking in by DTRT’s resident DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy, there are the real-life letters of Summer’s titular madman screeding from the inside looking out, all of which gives the film a dissonant and soul-sickening quease that is—however jarring—most assiduously an intentionality, resulting in a difficult, deranged masterwork.

3
“LOVE AIN’T FOR KEEPING”

With this expansion in scope also came a change in focus, shifting from DTRT’s racial politics to the sexual ones of Sam, as Lee took Imperioli and Colicchio’s script about Bronx tribalism and imploded it into a vulgar, hallucinatory investigation into the extraordinarily destructive consequences of misguided and maladjusted masculinity. Gone is DTRT’s Black neighborhood sparked into violence around a lone Italian-owned pizzeria; instead, there are two men—two appositive poles of tortured masculinity—and the women drawn to them, and the monster that lurks between them both.

There is Vinny (an alternately smooth and feral John Leguizamo in both the greatest performance of his life and the best performance in a 1990s Spike Lee joint not given by Denzel Washington), a man who is a disastrously, devastatingly bad lover to his wife, Dionna (a heart-caving Mira Sorvino) in multiple senses of the word. Bad in that he refuses to share his physical love and his deep-seated sexual needs with her, so synapse-whipped is his mind by a Madonna-Whore complex, so that their sex is often a fast, perfunctory missionary speed-fuck without eye-contact, communication, or intimacy. Bad in that he does share that love with almost everyone else, hunting and fucking any brunette woman in the five boroughs he can find, reveling in his (still laughably tame) kinks (“You know, butt fuckin’, 69, doggy style…”). Bad in that Vinny is willing to risk letting his needs destroy Dionna’s life and the lives of his lovers in order to get what he needs, since he is unwilling to share them (and thus have true, real love) with his wife.

There is Ritchie (a vulnerable, haunting/haunted Adrien Brody), a neighborhood kid who grew up with Vinny and their knockabout pals Joey T. (Micahel Rispoli), Anthony (Al Palagonia), Brian (Ken Garito), Woodstock (Saverio Guerra), and “Bobby the Fairy” (Brian Tarantina), but who left the Bronx a paison years ago and has now returned from the Lower East Side a punk—fake British accent, dog collar, spiked hair, libidinous androgyny, tight clothes—and is unrecognizable to his former friends who, aside from Vinny, reject him at every turn. Yet, despite their friendship, Ritchie is wholly unlike Vinny. While the NYC punk wrestles with his own needs, including bisexuality (“I got these things I like doin’. I like doin’ ‘em so much, it’s like I have to do ‘em…”), he does not reject them, nor does he hide them. Rather, he shares himself and his needs openly to the neighborhood woman he falls for, Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), with an honesty both bracing and loving. He does not selfishly keep his love, nor clandestinely slip it to anyone on the side. He is the inversion of Vinny in nearly every way—fashion, philosophy, lover. Man.

And there is the Son of Sam (Michael Badalucco), the true-life woman-hating murderer whose killing spree that climaxed in the summer of 1977 held the entirety of New York City hostage, and whose film persona binds, reflects, and then ultimately separates Vinny and Ritchie forever with his actions, almost as if he were a force conjured by their subterranean kinship and masculine pathos. He is a killer who hunts and kills any brunette woman in the five boroughs he can find, reveling in his (laughably ridiculous) fantasies of being driven by a 2,000-year-old dog named Harvey (John Tuturro [really]). A man who wrestles with his own needs and crafts a bizarre persona for himself. A monster of twisted masculinity, and the twisted masculinity of a monster.

4
“MY WIFE”

Vinny and Dionna arrive in the film dancing to the machine-throbbed sheen of propulsive dance music at their local disco, Vinny all primped and styled to look like Italian masculinity avatar John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, with Dionna as his almost extraterrestrially beautiful trophy wife. As they dance together, both genuinely in awe of the other, of their beauty, of their bodies, of their moves, reality becomes heightened and the other club dancers disappear, as if the love generated by these two is so powerful that no one else on earth could exist but them.

Later that night, Vinny fucks Dionna’s cousin in the ass, parked on a streetcorner as Dionna continues to dance at the disco.

They aren’t alone, though—unbeknownst to either, the Son of Sam is watching, in the shadows, drawn by the heat and the sound of their sex, the short and stubby .44 revolver throbbing in the sweaty pulse of his hand. The real Son of Sam was frequently drawn to street-necking couples, and in the film, Vinny’s need to fuck a near-stranger—in his car, in public, while his wife is waiting—almost wills the killer into existence and arouses his interest, like a kind of lumpen fuck-golem conjured not from clay but illicit cum and blood. But another—far more chaste—parked couple, offended at Vinny’s wanton sexuality, honk and brite-light him off, and find themselves upon the killing block to assume the consequences of Vinny’s actions, their bodies soon rippled with bullets, the ellipses of Sam’s story of madness. As will continue throughout his life, the consequences of Vinny’s selfishness fall upon the heads of those around him.

Even later, driving Dionna home from the disco, Vinny is perversely compelled to drive past the corner where earlier he fucked her cousin (the same way serial killers are often compelled to return to the scene of their murders) only to find an NYPD crime scene. Vinny stumbles over to the carbound corpses; he will later narcissistically admit to Ritchie that in their bodies he sees less a consequence of his actions and more a warning from God to abandon his kinks and simply have dutiful, banal sex with his wife.

As Vinny’s guilt over his sexual needs and his philandering to achieve them grows concomitantly with the Son of Sam’s body count, he’ll soon find himself spiraling out of control, screaming out his bedroom window at his conception of the killer in the middle of night. (Meanwhile, the Son of Sam will scream out his window in the middle of the night at the dog he claims drives him to kill.) Vinny, terrified of the aberrance he misperceives in his own sexual desires and guiltsick over what he does to achieve them, craves his own divine annihilation with the same serrated lust that drives him to fuck Dionna’s cousin, to fuck his boss, to fuck Ruby years ago, to fuck any brunette he can.

To assuage Vinny’s panic, Dionna pulls him from the bedroom window and between her legs in a moment of extraordinary tenderness and sadness, desperate to make love to him in the warm lamplight of their bedroom and see him, and let him see her. Instead, Vinny flicks off the light and spasmically fucks and orgasms in seconds, leaving her in the melancholy dark, wordless and alone.

Vinny and Donna are last seen truly happy together later in the disco in which we met them, dancing again to joyous coke-pop rhythms, doing the hustle in matching blood-red outfits. As they dance, the room is empty again, just like that first time. But not because their love separates them from the crowd, as before. Rather, the fear of Sam’s spree has left the streets and clubs empty at night. The Son of Sam, the consequences he engenders, the fears he represents, the masculinity he corrodes, leaves Vinny and Dionna absolutely separated and alone in the world.

5
“THE SONG IS OVER”

“What’s your idea of love?” Ritchie asks Vinny under the neon hum of an all-night diner.

“Commitment, responsibility, marriage, kids…” Vinny mechanically rotes. Passion, sex, communication, intimacy, and honesty go unmentioned, unconsidered—all the things Dionna craves, prays for, and asks Vinny for during this, their final summer together, one of the hottest on record. All the things he gives away carelessly to everyone else.

Dionna tries. As brunette women throughout New York flood salons like Vinny’s to die their hair blonde to avoid the Son of Sam’s aim (in a nimble bit of screenwriting, Vinny is a hairdresser—both a nod to Warren Beatty’s sexaholic salon worker in Shampoo, as well as another example of the symbiosis between the film’s serial killer and serial cheater: the Son of Sam pushes women to salons, where Vinny waits to serve them every way he can), Dionna dons a platinum blonde wig, not for safety but for spice, actively attempting to introduce role play into their sex life, yet another attempt at sexual intimacy Vinny rejects (“I’m gonna turn the light off, OK?”).

At one point, Dionna even musters the bravery and vulnerability to ask Ruby how she once managed to seduce Vinny. Ruby’s answer is at once blunt, ugly, empathetic, and true: “You can’t be his wife, that’s #1.”

Dionna tries one last time. After she and Vinny are unable to gain admission to the hyper-exclusive Studio 54 (as if the couple’s vibrant, vital powers of dance we have seen throughout have now drained from their marriage), they are pulled with a crowd into Plato’s Retreat, the notorious swinger’s club for couples. In a final bid to understand Vinny and his needs, Dionna gives herself to the limb-pretzeled and fuck-fogged room of bodies, falling into a threesome with an unknown man and woman. Vinny watches her in wild lust as he fucks an unknown woman, his face only slacking into regret, shame, and hate after he climaxes and guilt settles into his marrow once again.

In one of the finest, most artfully composed scenes of Spike Lee’s career, Vinny drives Dionna home in mute shock, shortcutting through a cemetery—this terrified man once again linking sex and lust with death and annihilation, though the only annihilation that occurs is to their marriage. Vinny berates Dionna for fucking anyone but him, calling her a whore while defending his own actions (“I can’t be a whore, I’m a fucking man”). Lee keeps the camera trained in close-up on Dionna’s passenger seat as she flings herself from the car, with only her and Vinny’s thrusting, gesticulating hands occasionally entering the frame. The seat stays empty—whatever else is to happen, Dionna’s place next to Vinny is now gone. He has created another victim: his wife. And as he exits the car to chase her, she takes the driver’s seat and drives away, the camera still on that empty seat, Vinny just behind it, chasing, screaming, and begging as he is swallowed by the darkness of the cemetery night, and the dead who lie in it.

SIDE TWO

1
“GETTING IN TUNE”

The evening early in the film that begins with Ritchie and Vinny musing about love at the diner ends with them standing on the beach, debating their dueling visions of love, of life, of everything. Ritchie attempts to convey the urges he wrestles with daily, and the dichotomy of modern life, musing aloud about whether his unconfessed and unspecified (to Vinny) bisexuality—and the sex it drives him to do—are “natural.” Like a certain opening song by his favorite British band of punk forefathers, Ritchie contemplates the meshing of the inorganic with the real and pleads, “Now, do I really like doin ‘em, or was I preprogrammed at an early age to respond to liking them?”

Vinny, peacocking with hypocrisy and having no idea what the fuck Ritchie is talking about, simply barks for his friend to “take some responsibility for yourself.”

And so that’s what Ritchie does.

Immediately attracted to Ruby, he asks her on a date. Needing some quick cash for their evening, he in his punk garb and she in her disco diva look, Ritchie takes her to the gay strip club Male World (a fitting subtitle for Summer of Sam), where he performs a cabaret burlesque show on stage for an audience of hungry male eyes, a performance that is not simply for cash but something deeper, something more artful and heartful, an act of soul-excavating and vulnerable expression. Afterwards, he fucks a male audience member for more cash while Ruby knowingly waits downstairs in the club.

All of this could have happened before Ritchie picked Ruby up, all of it illicitly done in cratered rooms with a lone damp and fucksprung mattress at its center, a male world Ritchie keeps only for himself and those who pay him for it. Like Vinny he could refuse to acknowledge the agency of his need, refuse to share it with his partner.

Instead, he shows her everything, and rather than recoiling, Ruby joins him. First by ditching her disco look and forming a punk band with him (their first song is a transcription of the Son of Sam’s letters into lyrics—whereas Vinny turns his obsession with the killer narcissistically inward, Ritchie transforms it into something artfully cathartic, much like how his burlesque show transmutes his bisexual conflict into art), and later by joining him in making porn films together in which they fuck each other on screen (again, contra to Vinny: Ritchie embraces his sexuality and his sex with his partner so vociferously that he allows everyone in the world to see it).

Everyone except the old neighborhood gang.

2
“GOING MOBILE”

Lurking behind every scene, under every surface, on seemingly every street of Summer of Sam, is not just a killer, but killers, plural. Would-be killers, waiting for the excuse, hearts so full of fear and hate and self-fear and self-hate—and maybe there isn’t any difference, looking for the moment, for the person, that will spark all that rage and fear into a braid of flame that burns the whole terrifying world down and leaves in its place a ruin that they can understand and control.

In Summer of Sam, those would-be killers—whose numbers and reach in power are commensurate to the Son of Sam’s body count—are the men of the neighborhood. Joey T. Anthony. Brian. Woodstock. “Bobby the Fairy.” Small men whose inner worlds are a comportment of cliché and hate, of an intensely smoldering tribalism in which women are whores, the Black population is made of animals, and oddballs whose ethos rejects their own—like Ritchie, with his jagged hair and edgy fashion—are to be alienated and removed. They are men of hypocrisy: while Joey T. recoils in horror at Ritchie’s “degenerate” lifestyle and the fact that he lives at home with his mother, he simultaneously deals drugs in the neighborhood in front of his young daughter and her friends, and lives at home with his own mother since his wife left him. He is horrified by rumors that Ritchie might be in some way involved with Male World, despite tolerating one of the joint’s patrons—the flamboyant “Bobby the Fairy”—because Bobby pays well for his drugs.

So when the New York City blackout of ’77 occurs one night that fatestruck summer, and the entire city explodes into a nightmare carnival of crime and looting, these Men of the Neighborhood are catalyzed into action, going mobile with their hate and taking it to the streets, flooding the neighborhood in a mob of clenched hairy-knuckled rage, gripping their stiff, long, and hard wooden baseball bats, an armada of terrified masculinity lashing back at all that terrifies them in the world, and calling that terror “the Son of Sam.”

Emboldened, Joey T. begins making a list of the possible Son of Sam suspects among the neighborhood fellas, haphazardly adding anyone who simply makes him feel uncomfortable or small or afraid. It’s only a matter of time before Joey T. draws Ritchie’s trademark spiked hair atop the artist’s conception of the Son of Sam in a local newspaper, and creates in Ritchie a locus for all his fears, which he and the boys whisper to an unconvinced Vinny in an effort to turn him against his only remaining friend now that Dionna has left him:

“Killer. Fag. Pimp. Punk Rocker.”

“Queer. Pervert. Homo. Degenerate. Whatever the fuck he is. Who wants something like that around here anyway,” one muses, distinctively downgrading Ritche to a “something,” a “that.”

As in Do the Right Thing, a baking neighborhood is pushed to its breaking point, and a sacrificial urban slaughter is made inevitable.

Vinny, woozily out of his mind on Quaaludes and coke and grief, agrees that the drawing looks an awful lot like his friend. Pressed by slights to his already bleeding manhood (“…if you acted like you had balls…”), he agrees to help the Men of Neighborhood have “a talk” with Ritchie.

Joey T. is pleased. “You’re doin’ the right thing, Vin.”

3
“BEHIND BLUE EYES”

Summer of Sam is not a Son of Sam movie. Like David Fincher’s Zodiac release nearly a decade later, it instead traces the course of lives lived in the shadow of organized death, and their response to it.

Vinny, in his final conversation with Dionna as she packs her bags to leave him for good, tells her that the Son of Sam is Ritchie, and that Ritchie is a cult leader who has brainwashed Vinny into cheating, into creating a world of victims and victimized around him.

Joey T. and the boys see the name ‘Son of Sam’ as a shifting target with which to clean up their neighborhood, to eliminate anyone who frightens them, who makes their world feel as small as it truly is.

Ritchie and Ruby use the Son of Sam as an inspiration for their punk art, which rejects the tenets of a world in which programmed minions hold sway over those who accept themselves for who they are.

Dionna uses the Son of Sam as a hopeful attempt to connect with her husband, donning platinum wigs and fake names to spark a desire long-since made dormant by Ritchie’s tortured masculinity.

The film Summer of Sam uses the Son of Sam as a kind of roving metaphor, the face of the toxicity that beats in Vinny’s heart and the conflict that troubles Ritchie’s soul, the name of the lusts and fears that well within each man in equal measure, with the killer himself alternately writing that to kill is his “programming,” while elsewhere scribbling that it is his “love.” His strangulated version of masculinity haunts the characters—and the city—of this film, just as he reflects them.

And David Berkowitz of Yonkers, New York City, uses the Son of Sam as a persona, a device, a wall of excuses to separate himself from his hatred of women and the resultant urge to kill them. Like Vinny, in his letters to the world under names as various as Mr. Murder, the .44. Caliber Killer and, finally, the Son of Sam, he blames cults, he blames Satan, he blames a fucking dog named Harvey.

Berkowitz is just a sick fuck from Yonkers, and behind his startling blue eyes is a mind as frightening as it is familiar. And his arrest on August 10, 1977—just one week before the death of Elvis Presley, a counter-image of perfect, vital, virile American masculinity the likes of which men would never have again—will change nothing that happens next in this film, because David Berkowitz was never truly the monster at this film’s heart.

4
“WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN”

This is the staccato-keyboard-programming meets guitar-rock intro to the song “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” the final track on The Who’s 1971 album, Who’s Next, a loose nine-song narrative cycle taken from a rock opera about a people split into two tribes—those who live deeply-programmed, socially-repressed lives, and the libidinal punks who live life as their authentic selves.

It’s also the finale soundtrack to Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, playing in its real-time entirety in the film’s ending, exploding forth like a matching chorus to the “Baba O’Riley” sequence in the film’s middle. And like that earlier song, it knots the film’s heady, troubling themes to pop music, building the story, a tune we know by heart but keep on singing anyway, the story of a tribe that succumbs to its programming and swarms a figure of authenticity it cannot abide.

In a climax that’s as dizzyingly enthralling as it is sickeningly dispiriting, Lee crosscuts between the NYPD marching the man who was the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, into a police station while a crowd of angry New Yorkers screams and mobs around the building. Lee himself, as if to underline his point, plays a news broadcaster covering the scene, and when he shouts directly to the camera the arrival of the killer (“here he comes… Son of Sam!”) the film pointedly cuts to Vinny, Joey T., and the rest approaching Ritchie’s home.

It’s Vinny who lures Ritchie out into the street, it’s Vinny who somehow manages, even in this moment, to twist the event into his own narcissistic tragedy, lamenting his loss of Dionna, and his inability to process his own sexuality.

And it’s Ritchie who, in his love for Vinny, willingly follows him into the street, who offers advice, who listens.

And it’s Vinny who, only at the last moment, when it’s far, far too late, finally tells Ritchie to run.

Because Vinny will always be too late.

When the beating comes, it’s both operatic and brutal, cinematic and ugly, a scene of fricative opposites of the kind that has defined the entire film. The chest-swelling scream of Who singer Roger Daltrey roars over the muffled moan that slips from Ritche’s bloodmushed and bonemealed mouth. The film lashes from Berkowitz’s wide-eyed and smiling arrest on the news (“It’s a great outpouring of relief, rage, and vengeance!”) to this final act of anarchy in the Bronx.

When the beating ends because news of Berkowitz’s arrest finally descends upon the neighborhood, it’s of little consequence—the damage has been done. Ritchie’s broken body lies in the street, burbling blood. He’s alive, but the consequences of this day, of his friend’s actions, will be carried with him for as long as he lives. Vinnie’s eyes glass over with a wordless sorrow, as if he only now finally grasps the heft of what flitted through his mind so many months ago, when he found the victims left behind by a killer, when this long hot summer began: that his actions carry consequences, and that those consequences make victims of those he betrays, and those he betrays are those he loves, and that is all he has to give them…because he is too afraid to give them anything else. A man so at war with his own base urges and the programming to deny them that he couldn’t save his marriage, or his friend, or himself. And all of this—this story, these people, these events, this night, the entire Summer of Sam—has been his own private rock opera of fear, played at maximum volume.

So he hides beneath his excuses of programming, armed with his fear and his self-loathing, the songs he knows by heart but keeps singing anyway, nowhere to go but to an entire neighborhood, a city, a world full of victims, with the only question left being that of his final friend’s favorite album title.

Daltrey screams a final time on the soundtrack as Ritchie looks up at the monster standing above him, the monster at the heart of this summer, pleading with Vinny for an explanation for it all.

“Meet the new boss,” Daltry answers with his song. “Same as the old boss.”