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Spike Lee’s latest, Chi-Raq (2015), follows Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) - girlfriend of rapper and gang leader Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) - who, inspired by the tragic accidental shooting of a child and Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace’s 2003 sex strike, organizes the women of Chicago to withhold sex from all men until the city’s warring gangs agree to end the violence tearing their community apart. While the film’s stacked roster of stars (including Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Wesley Snipes, John Cusack, and Jennifer Hudson), inventive visuals, and broad humor could make for an accessible (if pointedly political) mainstream film, Lee delivers something different. With wild tonal swings, a self-consciously artificial, rhymed screenplay, stylized performances, and frequent, didactic direct address to the audience, Chi-Raq is a striking example of cinematic epic theater.

The film is inspired by Aristophanes’ classical Greek comedy Lysistrata, written in 411 BCE, in which the eponymous heroine convinces the women of Greece to abstain from sex in order to convince their husbands and lovers to negotiate an end to the Peloponnesian War. Beyond the use of the play’s sex-strike plot, neatly summed up in the screenplay as “no peace, no piece”, Chi-Raq also rejects the realism typical of most contemporary mainstream cinema and, instead, embraces many of the aesthetic aspects typical of Greek classical theater.

The Greek Chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone

Typical classical Greek plays feature dialogue in verse and a Greek chorus to provide exposition and comment on the action of the story, techniques which Spike Lee references with a rhymed screenplay and Samuel L. Jackson as a jaunty narrator. Alongside these structural borrowings, the film is littered with winking hat-tips to classical Greece, such as the rival gangs’ allusive names of “Spartans” and “Trojans”, referring to the ancient cities of Sparta and Troy. While Lysistrata and classical Greek theater are clearly major sources of inspiration, many of the film’s stylistic choices and its effect on the audience point to the epic theater movement and the cinema inspired by it as Chi-Raq‘s true artistic lineage.

Verse monologues and direct address in Chi-Raq with Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata

Epic theater is most closely associated with the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, famous for plays like The Threepenny Opera (1928), The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), and Mother Courage and Her Children (1941). This style of theater is self-aware and intentionally alienating; it rejects the notion that audiences should identify with and invest emotionally in characters and situations, but instead draws attention to its own constructed theatricality in order to force viewers into self-reflection and critical engagement with the piece. Despite the groundbreaking aesthetic techniques that have emerged from the form, it is generally explicitly political; its primary purpose is not to revel in art for art’s sake, but to offer critique and galvanize change. With its timely anti-gun message and fiery speeches about institionalized racism and the new Jim Crow, Chi-Raq embraces the movement’s didacticism and political commitment. However, it is the film’s stylistic techniques that situate it firmly within an epic theater context.

Brecht’s anti-military, anti-imperialist “Kanonensong” from The Threepenny Opera

The plays of Brecht and the epic theater writers employ a wide range of aesthetic techniques, many of which Spike Lee adapts into cinematic terms in Chi-Raq. Throughout the film, characters speak directly to the audience, whether to make a political point (as when two gang members face the audience and describe their gun-related injuries) or to efficiently and theatrically establish a plot point and speak symbolically for large swaths of people (as when one sex-starved man screams, “PUSSY!!” directly into the camera). Moments like these call to mind the speeches in Brecht’s plays, like Mother Courage, where characters’ dialogue explicitly pontificates on the ills of the world. Even more significantly, the characters in Lee’s film function in the same way that those in the plays of Brecht do.

Rather than creating nuanced, “realistic” characters with whom the audience is simply expected to empathize and identify, the characters of Chi-Raq are archetypes that serve symbolic functions, much like the lying, violent businessmen of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera function as symbols of the brutality of capitalism. The film’s frequent musical numbers even resemble Brecht’s use of music, with songs alternately illuminating plot and character (as in Chi-Raq’s funeral performance or a song like “Surabaya Johny” from Brecht’s Happy End) and explicitly outlining the work’s political message (like the film’s opening “Pray 4 My City” or The Threepenny Opera’s “What Keeps a Man Alive”).

John Cusack in Chi-Raq, delivering a sermon that outlines the film’s primary political points

Lee is not the first filmmaker to find inspiration in the aesthetics of epic theater. Godard, particularly in his post-French New Wave years, translated the genre’s theatricality into cinematic context, and the imprint of his work can be felt clearly in Chi-Raq. For example, the film opens with sirens and the enormous, flashing words, “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY”, before playing the full song “Pray 4 My City” with the lyrics in red type on a black screen as the only accompanying image. This tactic of forcing the audience to read essential words in order to hammer home the film’s political message is a typically Godardian move, and the colors and type of Lee’s title cards specifically evoke many of Godard’s title sequences, like the one in Pierrot le fou (1965)’s or Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967). Further, the film recalls works like Tout va bien (1972) in its use of commercial film trappings to tell a radical story; where the earlier film saw Godard appropriating the set of the Jerry Lewis comedy The Ladies Man (1961) for his anti-capitalist quasi-documentary, Lee employs the bright colors, broad humor, and gender stereotypes of a sex farce to critique white supremacy, exploitation of the poor, and entrenched violence.

Godard’s Tout va bien

Mining its epic theater roots, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is bursting with didactic dialogue and alienating stylistic choices, from direct address to Lee’s famous double dolly shots. Like the film’s artistic predecessors, its message is loud and blatant - this is not a work that could be accused of moral ambiguity. However, the film’s big-ness, moral simplicity, and lack of nuance are not mistakes or failings, but deliberate artistic choices intended to force the audience to intellectually confront the catastrophe of violence in contemporary America. The film is bookended by sirens and flashing title cards trumpeting, “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.” Not exactly subtle, but, when there are bodies in the streets, there’s no time for subtlety.