A Film Canon

He Got Game brings the basketball melodrama cycle to a close, at least in its original and classical incarnation, largely by abstracting and distilling basketball into two forms of choreography. The first - hip-hop - is more familiar from Lee's earlier work, and condenses the film's narrative - in which Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington), a inmate convicted for murdering his wife, is offered a reduced sentence if he can convince his prodigious son, Jesus (Ray Allen) to sign with the governor's alma mata - into the Public Enemy song that plays over the closing credits. Like most Public Enemy tracks, 'He Got Game' recommends taking everything potentially combative about hip-hop and transforming it into something productive - and, while this is generally in keeping with tenor of Lee's films, it's a little more ambivalent here, just because Jake's continual insistence that Jesus should transform his game into a form of self-determination is itself determined by the requirements of the white governor and prison structure. From this perspective, it feels as if the film is not simply concerned with the gradual appropriation of basketball by a white demographic - the subsumption of Jesus into Jesus, a woven ankle bracelet nestling next to a pair of gleaming Jordans - but that it's this very appropriation that marks it as the last classical basketball melodrama, the point at which the genre stops being tailored towards a niche, African-American demographic. As a result, Lee's talking-heads interludes start to become whiter, seguing freestyling into commentary, while there's a kind of second-order nostalgia - Jake strikes up an odd relationship with a prostitute (Milla Jovovich), who wears a wig to make her look like Kim Novak in Vertigo - that fuses nostalgia for the blackness of basketball with a kind of prescience that nostalgia itself is something manufactured; or, rather, that the best way a white, capitalist society could reconcile a black subculture to never having had an appropriate voice is to make them feel nostalgic for it. From this perspective, it feels as if the film is trying to capture an impossibly fleeting nostalgic cusp - the moment at which a subculture becomes visible, and therefore disappears, or the moment at which African-Americans are finally a part of the present, only to be immediately forced to register that presence nostalgically - so it's appropriate that the second kind of choreography Lee invokes is ballet, setting vast segments of his extended basketball scenes to Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring trilogy. Positioning its audience between a past that never happened, and a future they can't contemplate, Copland's wilfully anchronistically score beautifully draws out Lee's strange, self-defeating nostalgic object - a basketball pastoral, an inextricably urban sport become inexplicably rural, or Cabrini Green simply become a village green, explaining the strange, sunset, slightly exurban overtones that Coney Island comes to have, as if Lee won't quite accept that it's just part of Brooklyn.