SOURCE: "A World without Whole Notes: The Intellectual Subtext of Spike Lee's Blues," in Boundary 2, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 238-51.

In the following essay, Merod analyzes Lee's portrayal of jazz in his Mo' Better Blues, and includes a discussion with other scholars about the importance of jazz in the film.

The depiction of jazz musicians and of jazz-related subjects in the history of North American film has suffered from the chronic neglect and misunderstanding that still marks this culture's pathological abuse of creative energy. The inventory of that abuse is poised to expand with another dramatic adventure in applied techno-sadism as computer-operated tanks and planes prepare to fertilize the Saudi desert with human blood. In the history of North American cinema, war, murder, violence, and destruction of every imaginable kind have archetypal predominance above the ordinary uses of human capacities. When we turn to a film that explores...