SUMMER OF SAM

(July 1999, U.S.)

I was just ten years-old in the summer of 1977. My family and I were living in a rather luxurious apartment complex in the town of Floral Park in Queens and we were also renting a small beach house in the town of Westhampton Beach, Long Island. So it's pretty safe to say I was living a sheltered life away from the hell that took place in New York City that summer. However, I was not completely oblivious to what was going on outside the safety of our four walls. I was well aware of the Son of Sam, aka the ".44 Caliber Killer" murders taking place all around the city because it was just about the only story being covered on the local news stations. In fact, I remember feeling a strong degree of anxiety every time my mother decided she was going into Manhattan for the day. I was also well aware of the infamous New York City Blackout of 1977, though our lights stayed on thanks to a self-generating power plant independent of local power companies which fed the complex (I wouldn't learn of the crime and looting until later). Disco was king, the New York Yankees were having a winning season that summer and Reggie Jackson was my hero.

At the start of Spike Lee's SUMMER OF SAM, Jimmy Breslin himself of the New York Daily News says that there were many New York stories that fateful summer, and this is one of them. Although the film focuses on the many items I just mentioned, the story centers on two young men in an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx, Vinny (played by John Leguizamo) and Ritchie (played by Adrien Brody). Vinny is a man of the disco era, as well as all of the sexual opportunities that lived within that era. He cheats on his wife Dionna (played by Mira Sorvino) whenever possible (even with her cousin) despite the fact that she's hot herself and is willing to please him sexually. She also seems willing to repeatedly overlook his infidelities. Ritchie has implied "death to Disco" by embracing punk music (though his favorite band is The Who, which I would classify as classic rock, even back in the '70s) and punk fashion. It's no wonder he's considered a major freak of the neighborhood when he goes around looking like this...

Although Vinny witnesses a slain couple at the hands of the Son of Sam and is briefly terrified that he will be the killer's next victim, it's not the main point that Spike Lee chooses to focus this thriller on. Like DO THE RIGHT THING (1989), this is also a tale of a small neighborhood on the brink of implosion due to its surrounding circumstances of bigotry, prejudice and crime. These are also people, for their own reasons, that are being destroyed by sex. As a married couple with a willingness to try something different, Vinny and Dionna cannot survive an experimental evening at Plato's Retreat, where sex and all of its possibilities are free for the trying. The tough Italian hoods who protect the neighborhood from all elements they consider unwanted and unclean cannot contain their disgust and sickness when they briefly visit the punk music world of the now defunct rock club CBGB to try and find Richie, who is now believed to be the Son of Sam by many of the locals simply due to the fact that his freakish nature makes him different from everyone else, and the fact that he's also earning money as a male dancer and prostitute at a gay porno theater. Tensions continue to mount as the killings continue and the infamous 1977 blackout hits on that fateful hot night in July. Tensions lead to paranoia, which ultimately leads to betrayal of friends when Vinny lures Ritchie out of his home and into the hands of the Italian lynch mob ready to crucify him as the Son of Sam. It's literally at the moment of his beating in the streets that we learn the actual killer, David Berkowitz, has been apprehended by the police in Yonkers, though it does not resolve the dark side of human nature the neighborhood has ultimately sunk to.

SUMMER OF SAM may almost be considered Spike Lee's personal tribute to Martin Scorsese, in particular MEAN STREETS (1973), with its visual neighborhood relations, tensions and even its trash. It's depiction of 1970's pornography, perversions, pervasive language and unflattering, defamatory representations of white Italian-American ethnic culture is powerfully and harshly realistic, if not offensive to those who chose to embrace it that way. Even if you don't remember the summer of 1977, it's impossible as a witness to these events on film, not to feel the impact of the time. Lust, guilt, betrayal and fear are Spike Lee's weapons and they hit hard, even when we choose to put aside the serial killer element of it all. In SUMMER OF SAM, the so-called "innocent victims" are actually uglier than the killer, which only goes to show us the state of human nature in the '70s, or any other decade, for that matter.

Favorite line or dialogue:

Ruby: "So, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to tell you how to fuck your husband?"