About Face

Meanwhile, Hip-Hop America is bigger than Jesus and crasser than ever, with chart-topping gangstas acting out fantasies of ghetto fabulousness that would make Foxy Brown blush. The year's best-selling rapper is Eminem, a disenfranchised white guy who sells his ''blackness,'' his considerable skill at a vernacular black art form, by posing as a homicidal psychopath.

Considering these current events, a reasonable person has to admit that the 15th Spike Lee Joint is, at the very least, timely.

''Timing is everything, you know,'' Spike Lee laughs. ''We hope it's good timing.'' He knocks on the wood of his conference room table. On a Monday morning in late September, the director is at the Madison Avenue office of Spike/DDB, his joint venture with the ad giant DDB Needham Worldwide. (It's only natural that a man inflamed about media manipulation should be a media manipulator himself.)

''This movie started when I began to go to movies when I was little,'' the 43-year-old Lee says. ''And watching television... the little television my parents would let me [watch].''

Lee's first film school project, The Answer, was about a black writer-director remaking The Birth of a Nation. ''I cut some scenes from Birth of a Nation into it,'' he says, adding that he sampled one bit for Bamboozled, in which white actors, in blackface to mock Reconstruction legislators, ''are eating chicken and have their feet up on the desk, picking their feet.''

What else would you expect from a brash black film student at NYU, given that our first great film is a tribute to the sacred honor of the Ku Klux Klan? And what else could you expect from him now, given the indisputable fact that millions of media creations since have distorted and misappropriated and degraded images of his race?

''Race''? More than ever, it matters to everyone. As the novelist Toni Morrison observed in the critical piece Playing in the Dark: ''Race has become metaphorical — a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological 'race' ever was.''

So, anyway, love it or hate it. But I love it and I think it's a sad, funny essay on the state of the union, and I'm with Tommy Davidson when he weighs the film's landmark status by saying ''Look at what we're forcing everyone to talk about.''