In Spike Lee’s feature-length directorial debut, 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It, the young filmmaker also stars as Mars Blackmon, one of the three men courting Tracy Camilla Johns’s Nola Darling. Much like Spike himself, Mars is a fan of the New York Knicks and—naturally—a Boston Celtics hater. At one point, Nola hosts Thanksgiving at her apartment, bringing her trio of suitors—Mars, Greer, and Jamie—together for an awkward family dinner. Mars gets into an argument with Greer and attacks his sports fandom: “What do you know? You’re a Celtics fan!”
Later, Mars complains to Jamie about Nola’s flakiness, citing the time she missed a Knicks-Celtics playoff game at Madison Square Garden that he’d gotten them tickets to. When Jamie calls Celtics legend Larry Bird the best player in the league, Mars is shocked and disgusted.
“The best?” he replies. “He’s the ugliest motherfucker in the NBA, that’s what he is.”
In Spike’s third feature film, 1989’s Do the Right Thing, the writer-director takes aim at the Celtics and Bird once again. When Giancarlo Esposito’s Buggin Out is talking to Lee’s Mookie, someone carelessly bumps into Buggin Out while walking their bike to their brownstone, scuffing Buggin Out’s brand-new pair of Air Jordan 4s in the process. The perpetrator, who’s white and wearing a Celtics-green Larry Bird shirt, half-heartedly apologizes only after Buggin Out confronts him. And as Buggin Out accuses the guy of gentrifying the neighborhood, the Bird fan claims that it’s a “free country” with an air of entitlement. In a film about rising racial tensions amid rising temperatures during a scorching heat wave in Bed-Stuy, a Larry Legend shirt serves as a symbol for whiteness and the looming threat of gentrification.
It’s been more than 30 years since these two classic movies were first released in theaters, and Lee has cemented his legacy as an all-time great filmmaker (and the steadiest courtside presence at the Garden after Mike Breen and Walt “Clyde” Frazier). But as the 68-year-old director’s latest film, Highest 2 Lowest, demonstrates, even after all these years of success, he still hasn’t lost sight of an essential part of his filmmaking agenda: hating on Boston.
Highest 2 Lowest, which arrived on Apple TV+ on Friday following a limited release in theaters, is Lee’s first movie since 2020’s Da 5 Bloods. It’s a reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece, High and Low, and a reunion between Lee and the great Denzel Washington, who stars as New York City music mogul David King. But I’m not really here to talk about the film itself. Instead, I’m here to celebrate another remarkable piece of anti-Boston propaganda from a generational hater of Boston sports.
(Here is where I should probably disclose that I was born in New York City and live in Brooklyn, and that I’m also a lifelong Knicks fan. What, did you come to The Ringer expecting some pro-Boston bias?)
Highest 2 Lowest features four shots at Boston, peppered across the film to ensure that the hate is dispersed evenly throughout its 133-minute running time. The first arrives when King sees his son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), wearing a Celtics-green headband ahead of his upcoming basketball practice. King grills him for flaunting the colors of the enemy team in a household that supports the orange and blue. (In fairness to Trey, he does have a Jalen Brunson jersey adorning his bedroom wall.)
Later, it’s revealed that one of the coaches of Trey’s summer basketball clinic is none other than former Los Angeles Laker Rick Fox, who plays himself. After Trey goes missing in an apparent kidnapping, Coach Fox is interviewed by a pair of police officers, one of whom requests an autograph from Fox following the questioning. However, the other cop—Officer McGillicuddy—declines when Fox offers to sign one for him as well, which causes his partner to reveal McGillicuddy’s Celtics loyalty. “Ah, yeah, that figures,” Fox says with a resigned understanding.
But Spike doesn’t limit his trolling to just the Celtics this time; he lets the bitter rivals of his beloved New York Yankees, the Red Sox, have it as well. One of the most important sequences of the film finds King—who’s dressed in all black with a Yankees cap on his head, like a true New Yorker—riding the subway uptown from Brooklyn to the Bronx while he carries the ransom money for the kidnapper. As the 4 train draws closer to Yankee Stadium on East 161st Street, it progressively fills with Yankees fans, who begin to erupt in alternating, impromptu chants of “Let’s go, Yankees!” and “Boston sucks!” And Lee really leans into the moment. One particularly belligerent fan, played by Nicholas Turturro, gets one of the director’s signature direct-to-camera shots as he lets loose:
The direct-to-camera address is reminiscent of HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, another superb piece of anti-Boston media, which ended the sixth episode of its second season with the entire Lakers locker room yelling “Fuck Boston!” in unison. New York and Los Angeles might have something of an East Coast–West Coast rivalry of their own, but the two cities’ fan bases can at least unite over their transcendent hatred for Boston sports.
Lastly, soon after the initial subway cheers and jeers, Highest 2 Lowest offers a new chant to be added to the Boston hater’s lexicon. When someone working with the kidnapper pulls the emergency brake on the train, King loses the bag of ransom money, forcing the police to scramble after it. And with the train stalled, Turturro declares a scapegoat for the (very believable) subway delay: “Boston pulled the motherfuckin’ emergency brake!” It’s not exactly a phrase that rolls off the tongue, but it’s one that I now dream of hearing recited at a future Yankees–Red Sox or Knicks-Celtics matchup.
Highest 2 Lowest is brimming with New York energy. I lost count of the number of times the Brooklyn Bridge appears in the opening sequence, let alone the entire film. (Ditto the number of Yankees hats seen on the packed 4 train.) The movie’s villain, Yung Felon, is played by Harlem’s own A$AP Rocky, while the Bronx native Ice Spice makes a cameo as well. Brooklyn-born actors Rosie Perez and Anthony Ramos guest star as emcees at the Puerto Rican Day Parade in the Bronx, where they introduce the live performance of the late, great Eddie Palmieri and his salsa orchestra. Both of the film’s thrilling set pieces take place on the subway; hell, Yung Felon is even wearing a Yankees hat and a trusty pair of Timbs as he subway surfs and tries to evade King in the movie’s climactic chase scene.
The latest Spike Lee joint has New York in its heart and soul—and alongside all the famous faces, sights, and sounds of the city are a litany of digs hurled at Boston. As Bill Nunn’s Radio Raheem argued in Do the Right Thing, love and hate are intertwined in an eternal struggle. And as much love as there is for New York in Highest 2 Lowest, there’s still plenty of room for hate for Boston, too.
