The vast majority of references herein are from an essay the always thoughtful bell hooks wrote on Crooklyn and can be found here.

On with the show.

As a white guy watching Crooklyn, Spike Lee’s 1994 semi-autobiographical film focused on a family of three boys and a single girl set in – you guessed it – Brooklyn, it’s easy to gloss over the space occupied by women and simply focus on the portrayal of a black family during the seventies. One of the rare positive, or seemingly so, depictions of a black family on film.

The Carmichael family lives on a residential street that finds neighbors knowing neighbors – sometimes too well. But Woody and Carolyn hold down their household amidst the throngs of glue huffers and stinky neighbors. Woody’s a musician, composing for himself while not bringing in any money. And Carolyn’s a teacher – an overworked one at that. The pair owns the home their family lives in and rents out a room to a Vietnam veteran who occasionally hangs out with the Carmichael kids on the stoop. Everyone gets along for the most part. And yes, it took Spike Lee (along with his sister Joie and his brother Cinque who put in the assist on the script) to be the one to render a situation like this in positive terms.

As with any family, especially those counting more than just a couple of kids, there’re undoubtedly going to be fights that break loose. More often than not, it seems that the disagreements, while perhaps beginning with the kids, eventually includes Carolyn. She’s the disciplinarian to Woody’s lackadaisical cool.

Along with that, though, Carolyn finds herself contradicted on a rather frequent basis by her husband in front of her children. hooks figures part of this being a continuation of women being chastised for exerting any sort of dominance in the home or the work place. That well maybe true, but it’s just as likely that an individual possessing the wherewithal to run a household filled with people while holding down a steady job, in contrast to the out of work musician, is going to be more strict.

Compounding her odd perception of the familial situation in the Carmichael house, which I maintain is still relatively health, is the fact that of those instances when Woody undermines Carolyn’s directives, it’s frequently about food – sweets, desserts. Is there some secret meaning to all of this? hooks believes so.