Movie Review

Scholars have yet fully to historicize the 1970s, possibly because it was such a short decade: arguably late 1974 (post-Watergate) through 1979. Only a few good histories of the seventies have been written, and their conventional narrative centers on economic decline and its social impact. Unlike the sixties, which have been the subject of an outpouring of scholarship and reminiscence, the seventies remain largely unfixed and uncontested.	1
Spike Lee's film Summer of Sam is, of course, not scholarship. But in melding the historical events of the summer of 1977 with his usual obsessions about New York City, he offers a powerful and flawed representation of an era best left behind.	2
Summer of Sam is not primarily about David Berkowitz, the ".44 Killer" or "Son of Sam," whose random murders of young people in New York's boroughs terrorized the nation in the summer of 1977, but instead about the shadow he casts. Focusing on a group of young Italian American men in the Bronx, Lee brings together four different worlds: Studio 54 disco wannabes; the emergent punk culture of the CBGB club; the "traditional" Mafia; and the psycho-killer, Son of Sam. The film is suffused with a violent and bleak sexuality in which the killer's violence seems merely an extension of the dark world of seventies New York.	3
Lee offers the intertwined stories of Vinny (John Leguizamo) and his old neighborhood buddy, Ritchie (Adrien Brody), whose paths have diverged. Vinny, married to a neighborhood girl, is a disco-dancing, cocaine-snorting hairdresser in the tradition of Shampoo. Unable either to have a satisfying sexual relationship with his wife or to be faithful to her, he is tormented by Catholic guilt and believes the Son of Sam killings to be a personal message to him from God. Ritchie has returned to the neighborhood in full punk regalia—spiked hair, a dog collar, and bondage pants—to sponge off his mother and form a punk band called Late Term Abortion. The film crosscuts between Berkowitz's torments and killings and the crisscrossing trajectories of these two characters. In what seems an implausible plot twist, Vinny's neighborhood friends come to believe that Ritchie is the Son of Sam. They plan to capture him and deliver him to the local mob boss. Vinny, deserted by his wife and strung out on Quaaludes and cocaine, betrays Ritchie to the guys, who beat him nearly to death as Lee cuts to scenes of Berkowitz being led to jail. (In the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department, Lee claims that the "implausible" plot twist is based on the true story of punk rocker/porn star Pepe Valentine, who was badly beaten by old neighborhood buddies who thought he was the Son of Sam.)	4
The popular media's reviews of this film were mixed, with several reviewers complaining that Lee had used gratuitous sex to beef up a thin plot. In fact, sexual excess is at the heart not only of the film but also of Lee's vision of the 1970s. If, in popular culture, decades become reducible to a single element—the sixties are rebellion, the eighties are greed—then Lee's seventies are sex. Lee gives us a vision of the sexual revolution, not as freedom and fulfillment, but instead as pathology. Vinny's self-destruction occurs after he and his wife, turned away from Studio 54, are swept unknowingly into a drugged-out orgy at Plato's Retreat. Berkowitz's compulsion to kill attractive young women and parking couples is presented as less the pathology of an individual than of a sexualized culture. Even Ritchie, shown as a sweetly honorable and creative man, is enmeshed in a scummy sexual underworld, making pornographic movies with his girl friend and turning tricks with pathetic older men in the ladies room at "Male World," where he does exotic dances, disemboweling stuffed dummies with a knife.	. . .