Social Commentary In Spike Lee's When The Leeves Broke

For my final paper I will be evaluating the strength of Spike Lee’s When the Leeves Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts to act as a form of social commentary that ignites true empathy through vicarious trauma of viewing Hurricane Katrina victims and therefore ignites social thought and action. I will look at how the film wears a Bretchtian hat that inserts the documentaries issues into the forefront of the viewer’s minds that they will carry with themselves even after the viewing. Lee goes against hegemonic media accounts of Hurricane Katrina and shows predominantly lower class, and racially colored neighbourhoods their resident’s turmoil in the aftermath of the Hurricane. Lee allows the residents commentary to construct the narrative of the film,

It is also an issue that perils New Orleans to this day, and Lee’s film advocates that the terrifying results of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath must not be forgotten. Continually the film has been ignored in film analyses and under valued for the work Lee is doing, and the eloquent flow of his cinema. To evaluate the film fully I will be looking at it in three main parts, and arguing for its greatness as a marker of social conversation and fuel for change. First I will look at how the film provides discourse separate from those in popular media outlets shown in the film and subsequently involves the people themselves in creating their own media. Using the voices and stories of those who’s lives were shaken by the aftermath of the storm, and who were overlooked by government resources, particularly those in the Lower Ninth Ward, gives the film a sense of authenticity and evokes true empathy for the viewer. If the viewer is able to understand the political, natural, class-based, racial and power relations that contributed to the events in New Orleans in 2005 than the viewer knows where change