Highest 2 Lowest remakes Kurosawa for the DNC.
The teenage son of the black hip-hop music executive in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest keeps a giant Kamala Harris Forward poster on his bedroom wall — not Doja Cat, Beyoncé, or one of the Williams tennis sisters or even the Migos. This unlikely detail proves Lee has no interest in portraying the reality of black American economics but misreads the black bourgeoisie in terms of his own partisanship. Lee filmed the movie between March and May 2024, prior to Obama chastising black men for not supporting Harris’s presidential election campaign, yet Highest 2 Lowest fantasizes a nonexistent constituency as the basis of Lee’s ethnic ethic thriller.
Although Highest 2 Lowest was promoted as Lee’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), about a Tokyo shoe-manufacturing tycoon who is forced to pay ransom once his son is kidnapped, the resemblance and homage stop there. Lee’s film is a barely disguised analysis of black bourgeois isolation in the U.S. The Kurosawa premise forces Lee to reveal his own peculiar political allegiance to the Democrat Party plantation. The wealthy father is now the head of a music label — Stackin’ Hits Records — David King (Denzel Washington), whose workday begins with him being chauffeured in a Rivian and then a Rolls Royce.
The ransom plot exposes the distance between black-showbiz arrivistes and the black proletariat, the wealth and class gap that was transcended in the Jay Z–Kanye West music video “Otis,” of 2011. Since then, the shaky Obama-influenced illusion of black ethnic cohesion has threatened to rupture (the secret subject of the daytime TV soap opera Beyond the Gates).
For Lee’s overture sequence, the hip-hop benchmark “Otis” is substituted with “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” from the Broadway show Oklahoma. It extols the mogul’s sunrise-burnished penthouse apartment towering over the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline (the 930 Front Street structure known as Dumbo Olympia). The stair-step skyscraper symbolizes King at the top of the world.
This satirical race-baiting jest (extravagantly praised by reviewers) is one of Lee’s signature cultural aggressions. King’s takeover is sung by Norm Lewis, a black Broadway performer so bland that his distance from hip-hop, let alone R & B, matches the inauthentic ethnic identity that the DNC pinned on Kamala Harris. The fakery coincides with how Lee uses the crime-thriller premise to perpetuate racial paranoia. King is persecuted by an unsigned rap artist named Yung Felon (played by A$AP Rocky, né Rakim Athelston Mayers).
Highest 2 Lowest is pure class division. Lee doesn’t specialize in genre tension (action staging and visceral kinetics); his forte is ideological unease. He wants viewers to identify with King (Denzel’s drawn, hang-dog visage resembles Jay-Z’s), whose Basquiat and Kehinde Wiley wall paintings obviously indicate that he’s capable of paying Yung Thug’s $17.5 million in Swiss-francs ransom. Dramatic conflict doesn’t come from the wayward chase sequence intercut with Eddie Palmieri in the Puerto Rican Day Parade, or Lee’s typical racial kerfuffles with the police investigators, King and his Black Muslim aide (Jeffrey Wright, wasted) and New York sports fans spiking Larry Bird, then the Red Sox. As the narrative slowly discloses the kidnapper’s identity, the richest 2 poorest, upscale-to-ghetto contrasts become elementary. Lee and screenwriter Alan Fox apparently know nothing about how New York politics work, but their social conflicts are congruent with Democrats’ “affordability” buzzword. It’s no surprise that Spike Lee joins Zohran Mamdani, Al Sharpton, and Leticia James in promoting New York’s socialist elites.
Kurosawa’s film expressed an era of ethics. Lee’s reflects the social justice era that values caste: popularity, money, and celebrity. When King and Yung Thug face off (twice is excessive), their profanity exaggerates hip-hop bluster, as if Samuel L. Jackson suddenly showed up, based mainly on greed and envy. (“Not all money is good money. That’s all people do is ask me for stuff” is King’s mantra.)
This contest between styles of black American male energy occurs between price-tag name-dropping (Thelma Golden, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Judge, CC Sabathia, Derek Jeter, Reggie Jackson, plus Billboard, Ebony, the New Yorker, and Time magazine covers). Ultimately, Lee neglects the instructive words of the late Motown Records executive Andre Harrell, who memorably confessed, about power, “[It] allowed me to be the good guy I always wanted to be or the asshole I always was.” Lee refuses to impart that message in Highest 2 Lowest.
