After the ABFF screening, the baffled audience stuttered their questions. “What message are we supposed to take from this film, Spike? And my second . . .” one audience member said before he was cut off by the director, who exclaimed, “I don’t talk about the meaning of my films anymore, I haven’t for fifteen years, I stopped doing that.” Lee, with his trademark intimidation, stifled debate over his intentions before it even began. The director was willing, just barely, in the most canned responses, to allude to the film “being about addiction” in an ever more addiction-prone world. Perhaps these banalities hid a deeper problem — that the movie was an allegory of Lee’s own addiction to high society, his need to preserve himself above the black filmmakers whose work he wouldn’t abide. Or, perhaps, an allegory for the New York he helped turn into a luxury product he neither desires nor understands.