Get on the Bus is a film wrongly described as being about the Million Man March. It's not. It's about why black men from all over America would take off work, leave their families or whatever life situations they come from for several days and travel distances of up to several thousand miles to stand in the midst of a huge crowd and listen to speeches in Washington D.C.
Lee doesn't shy away from presenting both caricatures and complexities, dilemmas and contradictions as he conveys the fractured nature of collective identity. What might read in a synopsis as broadstroke politicized allegory doesn't work out that way on the screen. This is ensemble drama that is fed by unique and precise observation. Each person on board this bus, though representative in some way of an idea or type within Black America, is not a symbolic cypher. Lee has cast the film so carefully and given each character enough moments that there is life and complexity in every one of the men on-screen.
Spike Lee is a political filmmaker. He can't help it. He thinks that way; it fascinates him. What separates Lee's film from some grand polemic about the Million Man March is his focus on individuals. But that is the heart of Lee's political solutions as well. Collective change is made up of small changes, small choices in the lives of individuals who make up a collective group. Events are nice, sometimes helpful and important. But they aren't magic cure-alls. They can articulate what has been unexpressed or give camaraderie when needed. But the change he seeks is beyond a once-a-lifetime event high.
What Spike Lee does so well is force a viewer to confront their own prejudices through the way he initially presents his characters and then subverts our expectations of them. It isn't so much about black/white, rich/poor, but the tiny assumptions we make about people based on the tiny sliver of what we can see. There is something universal about prejudice and misunderstanding. Lee sees that. No one on this bus is free from prejudice. Some of them want to be, but how can anyone be completely free of something so universally human?
film journal entry: 05.04.2013
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