She’s Gotta Have It by Spike Lee - Journal Entry 20 Xiongyue Yu

She is Gotta Have It – Spike Lee

 

She's Gotta Have It is a comedy film made in 1986, written, produced, edited and directed by Spike Lee. It also brought him high acclaim as his first feature film and set his career off to a great start. The plot is about a graphic artist named Nola and her three suitors, but unlike traditional love stories, Nola is unwilling to explicitly accept the advances of any of the men, enjoying her sense of freedom in love, in sex, and in herself. Such a plot, even in contemporary times, is still an advanced interpretation and representation of women's right to sexual freedom and the awakening of self-awareness, not to mention a romance film made by an African-American woman in the United States nearly forty years ago. Although in the plot, Nola had also chosen the partner who might be truly right for her under her own torn thoughts. But at the end, her choice remains true to the film's original meaning, not compromising for anyone, but choosing her own pure freedom. It is this sense of female independence from start to finish that represents the struggle African American women faced in society at the time, both in terms of social status in terms of race and freedom of sexual partners in terms of gender. Such revolutionary elements of women's cinema became an important record of the cultural, historical or aesthetic significance of the era.

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