Humble Mumbles   /     35. The Spectre of Femininity in Spike Lee’s 25th Hour : a joint episode between Never Forget Radio and Humble Mumbles

25th Hour! It’s a Spike Lee joint. And we (Humble Mumbles & Never Forget Radio) once loved it. It’s the breathless epic/gritty tale/classic caper/New York torque of One Man’s Last Day of Freedom with all its existential reckoning, love, comradeship, suspicion, despair etc etc before he goes to jail (the 25th Hour). It emerged in the early post-9/11 cinema world. And it is directed by Spike Lee and features a fine cast. However, times have changed.

25th Hour, we are proposing, while ostensibly a grand opera of mythic masculinity, burns with fear and desire (to be and to have) of The Feminine. We’re here to talk about it. Via our two podcasts (Humble Mumbles & Never Forget Radio) in concert for maybe the last time. We return in 2018 to the 2015 experience of rewatching this 2002 movie in all its fiery coldness and unspoken but deeply felt desires for warmth…

America in 2002, NFR proposes, was a lot like Edward Norton in 25th Hour: dogged and beat-up and… ready to get back up again and torture and kill in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The film looks perfect and it felt perfect to watch at the time and it felt historical… ” but the overwrought bluster of male-coded ‘fight’ in this post-9/11 movie reveals an obvious ‘underscape’ of feminine ‘flight,’ fantasy and desired-and-feared alternatives to violence.

All lavish and moody blue, I as Humble Mumbles was totally won over by 25th Hour’s New York story of redemption, fathers, sons, macho shit, and the American Dream in the Wake of Catastrophe. But though Traditional Masculinity is the menacing, despairing center of this movie, failure to compete and win at this unwinnable game–Being a Man–(and thus avoid humiliation, rape and death) compelled me. “Femininity, or rather the idea of femaleness permeates this film, but no woman can be feminine the way it’s patriarchically defined. Nor can any man. For even though men and women are socialized to be all-or-nothing opposites, we still can’t help but be multifaced humans”