Rewriting the queer potential of She’s Gotta Have It

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the 2017–2019 comedy-drama Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It attempts to rewrite the past represented within the 1986 feature-length film of the same name through its portrayal of Black women’s sexuality. While lauded, the film was met with criticism of Spike Lee’s portrayal of women in the film as ultimately misogynist and homophobic, evidenced by Lee’s decision to show protagonist Nola Darling being punitively raped by one of her sexual partners as well as by the flat and stereotypical construction of the Black lesbian character, Opal Gilstrap. In contrast, the 2017 series introduces us to Nola Darling as a pansexual and polyamorous Black visual artist in a rapidly gentrifying Fort Greene, Brooklyn. This paper identifies sexual politics and self-representational strategies as two sites of nostalgic re-construction in which elements of the past are both reproduced and revised. For instance, Nola’s self-identification as pansexual and her sustained relationship with a reimagined and more robustly characterized Opal illustrate that Nola’s sexual desires are not bound by heteronormativity. At the same time, the series echoes the film in that the primary sexual and romantic conflicts revolve around the ways Nola’s Black femininity is juxtaposed with the Black cis masculinity of her three primary suitors. The use of self-representational strategies, primarily Lee’s signature 4th wall breaking, provides a sense of continuity through its nostalgic callback to Lee’s earlier works, while also allowing Nola to articulate the ‘new’ identities of polyamory and pansexuality which depart from the language used in the ‘86 portrayal. Relatedly, Nola’s work as a visual artist allows the show to prioritize Nola’s perceptions of her lovers and herself. Overall, this paper mobilizes Black feminist, lesbian, and queer analyses in service of identifying and complicating Lee’s efforts to recuperate misogynist and heteronormative gendered portrayals in a contemporary medium.

KEYWORDS:

• Black film and TV
• feminist film analysis
• pansexuality
• Spike Lee
• Black nostalgia
• Nola Darling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An article in The Hollywood Reporter briefly frames the Netflix series as an opportunity for Lee to ‘[get] his do-over’ of the She’s Gotta Have It rape scene which Lee acknowledges regretting. (Barboza 2017). In an interview with Deadline in 2014 Lee names the She’s Gotta Have It rape scene as ‘stupid,’ ‘immature,’ and ‘his biggest regret.’ He promises, three years before the series’ Netflix debut, that ‘there will be nothing like that in She’s Gotta Have It, the TV show, that’s for sure.’ (Fleming 2014)

2 The Black femme function, with Ursula as its signal example, refers to how the presence of Black femme characters and figures within cinematic images can allow audiences to see and imagine liberatory possibilities beyond the constraints of normative ‘common sense’ (Keeling 119).

3 The framework of the cinematic is based on film technology and extends into digital visual technology, like TV and streaming (Keeling 3). Keeling introduces the terms cinematic perception and cinematic processes, building on how they are used by Deleuze, grouped within the notion of the cinematic, or cinematic matter (Keeling 11).

4 I focus exclusively on season one because of its increased emphasis on Nola’s romantic relationships. The second season of the show transitions to centring questions of gentrification, diasporic Black identities, and spirituality—ripe for future considerations of the forms of diasporic imagining found across Lee’s body of work (Giorgis 2019).

5 Wimbley (2018) names a ‘symbiotic relationship between self-reflexive parody and stereotypy’ (144). Wimbley illustrates how self-reflexive parody, what she calls ‘parodic reflexivity’ is put to use in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (146-147, 158).

6 For instance, much of the comedic effect of Mars’ character in the series is derived from his callbacks to the character Mars played by Lee in the film thirty years prior.

7 Nola’s character receives a similarly self-reflexive treatment in the show: in the sixth episode of the first season Tracy Camilla Johns, who played Nola in the original film, has a cameo as an unnamed admirer of Nola’s work at her group show opening. The scene of their encounter features four jump cuts to different angles of this first moment of Johns hugging DeWanda Wise, the two Nolas united across multiple decades. Wise as Nola says that it is ‘wonderful to meet’ Johns’ unnamed character and tells her that she looks familiar, which Johns laughs off (She’s Gotta Have It, 2017d).

8 For a consideration of the necessary inadequacy of even ‘alternative’ modes of representation and a simultaneous emphasis on the work that representation performs in constructing and imagining worlds, see Jackson 2016.

9 ‘Although gay male and lesbian identities are often perceived to have essentialist moorings (even in the eyes of those of disapprove of them), bisexuality is considered to have less rigid boundaries, seems to lack a core and is often seen as a matter of choice’ (Klesse 237).

10 It is worth noting that the show omits the scene in which Jamie Overstreet rapes Nola, a scene which is arguably one of the key markers of the film’s gender and sexual politics. This choice reflects what is perhaps the series’ most obvious effort to revise, if primarily superficially, the sexual and gendered politics present in the film. The punitive and possessive nature of Jamie’s assault is made manifest as he, after mockingly inquiring about Mars’ and Greer’s sexual performance, asks Nola ‘Whose pussy is this?’ This act of nonconsensual sexual domination is intended to communicate to Nola and the viewer that Nola’s sexual choices are unacceptable. While Jamie’s rape of Nola is not reproduced in the series, a dialogue about consent and consent violations is broached when Greer, who has asked Nola if he can photograph her, continues photographing her after she repeatedly tells him to stop.

11 This episode was directed by Spike Lee, as are all episodes of the show, though it was written by Radha Blank, a Black actress and writer who wrote, directed, and starred in The Forty-Year-Old Version, also on Netflix.

12 See Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet, Rutgers University Press 2012 and Tina Campt, Listening to Images, Duke University Press 2017.

13 For a discussion of the ways film can be used to engage senses beyond the visual, see Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Duke University Press 2000.