Spike Lee’s jersey contradicts the surprising resurrection of a film legend.
The widely reported moment of Spike Lee’s giving Pope Leo XIV a custom New York Knicks basketball jersey reveals everything you need to know about the vanity of the power elite. This wasn’t an artist’s humility, or a filmmaker’s concession that cinema has spiritual potential. It was merely one institution’s capitulation to another; Lee’s gift was a very secular, scoffer-to-believer act of one-upmanship.
The occasion was Pope Leo’s address to an audience of filmmakers, actors, and executives, including Cate Blanchett, Judd Apatow, Greta Gerwig, Spike Lee, George Miller, Kenneth Lonergan, Chris Pine, Adam Scott, and Gus Van Sant — some of the worst industry figures in Hollywood. They were invited to visit the Vatican and listen to the American pope’s new cultural mission. (Odd that expressly Catholic, conservative filmmakers Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson weren’t in attendance.)
But Lee’s faux pas, defrocking the pope, was a minor stunt (just like his grinning and hobnobbing with Jill Biden at last year’s Paris Olympics party), because the Pope, in an effort to sway Hollywood reprobates, had already delivered a shocking surprise.
Midway through his message, Pope Leo said, “Perhaps we could bear in mind the words of David W. Griffith, one of the great pioneers of the seventh art. He once said, ‘What the modern movie lacks is beauty, the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.’”
No media outlet reported how the guests reacted to this reference to Griffith, one of the very first cancel-culture victims; in the Nineties, his name was stripped from the Directors Guild of America and the National Board of Review honors. Resurrecting Griffith’s name proved that the pope is out of touch with contemporary film culture’s punitive Soviet tendencies — he’s so remote that the Vatican event itself seemed a suspicious, performative, progressive persuasion effort, a hallmark of this millennium.
According to a Vatican press release, the session in Vatican City was “promoted by the Dicastery for Culture and Education in collaboration with the Dicastery for Communication and the Vatican Museums, following on from events dedicated to the Figurative Arts (June 2023) and Humour (June 2024) and continuing on from the recent Jubilee for Artists and the World of Culture, celebrated last February.”
In Hollywood terms, the Vatican communications team set up secular hype. The pope’s speech was no mere homily. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit,” he said, quoting John 3:8. Then, pandering to the ignorant celebrity miscreants gathered, the pope linked this gospel passage to Griffith: “In this regard, dear seasoned and novice filmmakers, I invite you to make cinema an art of the Spirit.”
This encouragement comes during a year of disastrously secular, unspiritual, and politicized film releases, when Hollywood desperately needs to be reminded of spirituality.
But the pope’s airy-fairy Griffith invocation is unhelpful in the same way that recent Vatican pronouncements on immigration come across as partisan advocacy. Moral issues have become so drastically politicized — in fact, dispirited in such films as Weapons, Sinners, Eddington, One Battle After Another — that not even the pope can speak of them with informed conviction. He had to go way back to Griffith, though apparently not conversant with the familiar “D. W.” moniker.
At the beginning, he mentioned “the longing for infinity,” which is either a terrible translation from Latin or a promotion of the Toy Story franchise. He didn’t pester the Hollywood crowd with the afterlife or eternity.
Another questionable passage — “a popular art in the noblest sense, intended for and accessible to all” — descended into blather. A panegyric followed: “It is wonderful to see that when the magic light of cinema illuminates the darkness, it simultaneously ignites the eyes of the soul.” But the use of “magic” is as worrisome in a Christian context as it is trite in a movie blurb.
A more patronizing statement came next: “Through your productions, you connect with people who are looking for entertainment, as well as those who carry within their hearts a sense of restlessness and are looking for meaning, justice, and beauty.” But what does justice have to do with art? How about grace, forgiveness through understanding, and compassion? Specific examples from Griffith — the daily restlessness resolved in The Struggle; the sisters’ reunion in Orphans of the Storm; the Christlike, cross-racial sacrifice in Broken Blossoms; the cruciform of heavenly light that redeems war-torn earth in the climax of Intolerance — would have provided more powerful instruction.
Griffith’s art is still verboten to Hollywood’s diversity, inclusion, equity (DIE) liberals excited by a progressive Vatican. Some Spike Lee films explicitly condemned Griffith, to refute the canon. That irreligious obsession with power is common to the Vatican invitees and reflected in Lee’s narcissistic idolatry of the Knicks. As to sustaining cinematic tradition and respecting Griffith’s legacy as the inventor film narrative, they all remain nonbelievers.