In the summer of 1977, New York City was suffering after a year of young people being murdered. An unknown man – a human monster – prowled the night, looking for couples alone in their cars, and when he found them he shot them to death with a Charter Arms .44 Special Bulldog pistol. He wrote letters to people in the media and the police, in which he dubbed himself the Son of Sam. By August of the same year, the police finally found their serial killer after another spate of gruesome killings when they arrested a man named David Berkowitz.
Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (1999) is far from the typical horror or thriller based on a real life serial killer. The story looks at the inner world and psychosis of Berkowitz. At the same time, its focal point becomes the social fears and tensions of an Italian-American community swept up in the hysteria surrounding the desperate search for the Son of Sam. Lee uses Berkowitz as a method of exploring how communities can implode when living under the fear of a faceless killer, and how fear can create dangerous suspicion. The screenplay involves Vinny (John Leguizamo) and Dionna (Mira Sorvino), a couple going through marital troubles, and the former’s old friend from the neighbourhood, Richie (Adrian Brody), who’s transformed from an average Italian-American kid into a faux British punk rocker— all at the same time Berkowitz was still loose. Vinny is the closest character to the Son of Sam murders, narrowly escaping being killed in his car one night while cheating on his wife.
What these characters experience is a microcosm of New York City in the late 1970s. Disco and punk thrived, and the Yankees were headed for a World Series win, all of which was supposedly bringing the city together. In reality there already existed, and remained, vast divisions between classes, races, sexes, and cultures. The Son of Sam was pulling people further apart, the media were giving him endless publicity, and the inability of police to find the killer was making people paranoid, afraid to go out too late at night and especially to any clubs. The City that Never Sleeps became the City Unable to Sleep, under constant threat from an anonymous terror that could be anywhere at any given moment.
In a sense, Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) shares DNA with Summer of Sam in its depiction of the relationship between Italian-Americans and African-Americans in NYC. These two films are closest in an overarching sense of how insular communities treat those they see as different from themselves. Lee ironically plays a black television reporter named John Jeffries who seems to generally push the negative media narrative about African-Americans. Jeffries is significant as a character because he represents divisions amongst the members of a racial group, which is a large theme in the film. There’s also Detective Lou Petrocelli (Anthony LaPaglia), whose family connections to local mobster Luigi (Ben Gazzara) make him both an insider and outsider in the Italian-American community. Richie’s new punk rock image makes him “a freak” and “a British fag” to the traditional second generation immigrant families he lived amongst as a younger man. Lee shows a community divided across racial and cultural lines. He also doesn’t shy away from representing how those groups become further divided within themselves when wrapped up in hysteria.
The lines between who is and who isn’t acceptable in this NYC neighbourhood are fluid and, because of this, often hypocritical. Several of the Italian-American characters are openly bigoted and they make comments such as “Only the coloured and Spanish live off welfare,” and during the NYC Blackout of ‘77, when news reporters were showing footage of riots in the city, the Italian gangsters claim only “niggers and spics” are the ones looting stores. They make their hypocrisy known through their feelings about legendary Yankees ball player Reggie Jackson, who shows up at various points in the screenplay, as ‘77 coincided with his first year at the New York baseball club.
After a local heroin addict rattles off an insane conspiracy theory that Jackson is Son of Sam because he’s a Yankee who wears the number 44 – the same number as the calibre of gun used in the murders – one of the neighbourhood men, Anthony (Al Palagonia), retaliates by suggesting even if Reggie were the killer they would still need him not to get caught so he could help the Yankees win the season. To these men, Jackson is acceptable, but any other African-American is a moulinyan— an Italian racial epithet used towards black people. This is exactly the same way other characters are treated. A gay man named Bobby (Brian Tarantina) is only tolerated by drug dealer Joey T (Michael Rispoli) because he’s a “paying customer,” though even he gets treated with derision. The worst is Richie, whose character represents all the ways a person can live a secret life but remain a good person and, for this, he pays the ultimate price in the end.
Throughout the film, Lee juxtaposes a number of opposites, whether between the real figure of Berkowitz and the fictional neighbourhood of characters, or comparing the city’s widely disparate music scenes. Music plays a huge part in the story, as well as that of the real story of Berkowitz. He preyed on Queens, NY specifically, and searched for women to kill in that borough. He targeted people in the middle class, at one point planning attacks in the Hamptons and a nightclub in Riverdale, neither of which came to fruition. Despite none of Son of Sam’s victims being murdered in a nightclub, New York nightlife changed because of his presence. The film’s screenplay shows this subtly by how Vinny and Dionna – two lower-middle class regulars at upper class clubs – continue seeing less and less people out dancing at night. This concept of music as an indicator of class is something Lee returns to thematically to show the couple’s confusion— they’re barely middle class and they go out on the weekends to disco dance and act like they’re more well off than they actually are, which is one of the ways in which their marriage suffers from an identity crisis.
Disco is presented as respectable and upper class, whereas punk is full of disdain and feared by all the so-called normal people. As two of the man characters, Vinny and Richie are symbolic of disco and punk respectively. Disco comes to be seen as fake, in how the lifestyle is only a front, and in opposition punk is symbolic of honesty. In the disco clubs, people fear the Son of Sam. At CBGB, Richie’s band taunts the killer by paraphrasing some of his letters’ lines as part of their chorus: “Hello from the gutters of New York City.” Lee’s use of music in this way is never more evident than when Vinny and Dionna are supposed to go see Richie and his band play their first big gig at the influential CBGB club. The married couple arrive and upon seeing all the people lined up outside in their punk attire with foot-high mohawks they decide it’s beneath them, so they head off to Club 54. Of course this is when Vinny and Dionna end up at Plato’s Retreat, a sex club that first opened in ‘77. Plato’s is oxymoronic in its conception of freedom and sexual liberation, only catering to hetero couples and bisexual women. This is the setting for Vinny being fully revealed to Dionna for who he is truly: an adulterous, conniving, and manipulative husband. The breakdown of their marriage is symbolic of people looking in all the wrong places for the culprit or the root of their problems, refusing to see the error of their own ways— the film’s largest theme.
Lee keeps Berkowitz as a peripheral character, though his presence is never not felt. The screenplay shows Joey T and his friends reacting negatively towards anybody outside their idea of ‘normal’ despite their own drug dealing, drug use, misogyny, and racism. While they’re busy suspecting gay men, Vietnam veterans, even priests whose behaviour they assume is suspicious, their real culprit is across town writing all over his walls and shooting dogs, displaying genuinely unsettling, psychotic behaviour. Lee uses an eerie green-ish filter for these scenes, and the lens creates a distortion that puts the audience in the killer’s warped perspective. The focus on Berkowitz’s inner life shows a distinction between him and the people of the fictional Queens neighbourhood. On one hand, Berkowitz is seen as someone worthy of suspicion from his neighbours. On the other hand, there’s Joey T and his friends who nitpick the lifestyles of people they’ve known for years, whose lives may be contradictory in ways but aren’t indicative of them being a vicious killer.
Pop culture is used significantly by Lee to illustrate how the media influences and reflects society. The New York Yankees games during the summer of ‘77 are returned to on several occasions. None are more full of visual weight than a late sequence in which Berkowitz hunts a couple victims and shots of him missing his chance to kill a woman are intercut with Reggie Jackson at bat during a Yankees slump, swinging and missing. The sequence ends when #44 hits a much needed home run for his ball club and, simultaneously, Berkowitz manages to shoot two people sitting in their car. Lee’s criticism of the media is never more on display than in this scene, where baseball and murder are equated in terms of entertainment value. In real life, people were as glued to their televisions watching coverage of the Son of Sam investigation as they were when the Yankees were playing.
Another New York legend, Jimmy Breslin, acts as an epilogue and prologue to the film. His role is important due to the fact he actually received letters from Berkowitz in ‘77. Lee uses Breslin to comment on how the media allows people a distance from events but remains influential on real lives. Breslin became a specific target for the Son of Sam’s writing, indicative of an attack on the city as a whole and its various institutions. People were terrified because if Breslin – an upper class media personality seen previously as untouchable – was not out of the killer’s reach, then truly nobody was safe. Breslin’s involvement also speaks to the biased attentions of the media: when pretty young white women and a famous New Yorker are in danger, the media is at full attention, but when people of colour are dying in Harlem the cameras are nowhere to be found unless they’re pursuing negative coverage.
“Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads, from their 1977 album Talking Heads: 77, plays in the background of a scene, and though this song isn’t inspired by Berkowitz there has always been speculation the band’s frontman, David Byrne, was influenced by the serial killer’s crimes. Lee uses the song “There But for the Grace of God Go I” by Machine early on, containing the line: “Let’s find a place to stay, somewhere far away, with no blacks, no Jews, and no gays.” With its upbeat disco and pop sound, this Machine song encompasses everything Summer of Sam is about: the arbitrary divisions separating New Yorkers. The finale is ironically set to “We Won’t Get Fooled Again” by the Who, during which the story arrives at a brutal, shocking, and wholly expected conclusion.
The hysterical reactions of an insular community such as this fictional Queens neighbourhood come to a head when Richie is assumed by Joey T and his friends to be the Son of Sam. The men judge Richie because he dresses in hardcore punk fashion, as well as the fact he lives a secret life dancing at a gay club and having sex with men in order to make money. They believe he’s a deviant because he doesn’t conform to their ideas of masculinity or normativity: “Homo, pervert, degenerate— who wants something like that around here anyway?.” Joey T and the others become so wrapped up in the Son of Sam’s killings they suspect anyone they see as different from themselves, accusing many but finally deciding on Richie as their murderer. The last scene epitomises all the betrayals of people in a close-knit community turning against one another. Vinny is the one to lure Richie into a vicious beating by Joey T and his friends. Adding insult to injury, Lee cuts to and from footage of Berkowitz finally being arrested and brought through a media circus to the police station. Joey T and the other men are symbolic of a communal need to scapegoat somebody to take away the fear of an unknown, faceless killer. Sadly, they represent the real possibility of lynch mob mentality, and Richie represents those against whom irrational fears are externalized violently.
In a case of real life mirroring the bigoted attitudes of the characters in Summer of Sam, Spike Lee was left racist messages by members of the community where the film was being shot. This likely came to no surprise for a man who’s spent his filmmaking career exploring the ups and frequent downs of the black experience in contemporary New York. These messages Lee received only enforce the alternate view of New York City he’s portraying through these characters’ plots.
David Berkowitz’s reign of terror during ‘77 serves as the perfect backdrop for an examination of the class, cultural, racial, and social divisions in NYC. The sensationalism of the final reaction by the residents of Lee’s fictional neighbourhood in Queens stands in stark comparison to the banal way Berkowitz was finally captured, after getting caught by police due to a parking ticket. One of Breslin’s final lines during the film’s epilogue serve as Lee’s own statement about the city he knows so intimately, when he calls NYC “the city that I love and hate equally.”
This is not a typical serial killer film. Berkowitz isn’t at all absent, he’s simply not the sole focus of the screenplay. Lee and his co-writers, Michael Imperioli (who famously played Christopher Moltisanti on HBO’s The Sopranos) and Victor Colicchio, use the Son of Sam to get at deeper truths about the time during which his murders occurred. The fictional characters are specific to NYC, but they represent a larger reality about how people treat those different to them in extreme situations. The literal victims of murder, and their families, are obviously those directly affected by a serial killer’s crimes. This doesn’t change the fact the cities in which these crimes occur are likewise affected in major ways. NYC was terrorized by Berkowitz. Part of his terror was aided by the constant coverage of a modern 24-hour news cycle intent on sensationalizing whatever would captivate audiences most. Summer of Sam operates as a fictional imagination of how a serial killer’s crimes, compounded by the media’s fixation on true crime as a form of entertainment, can turn a city’s pre-existing divisions into a potentially violent powder keg, at the end of which are usually marginalized communities.
 to explore how paranoia, marginalization and race weave together in this story of murder.){kind=link}