I can’t say with any certainty what it was like to live
through the summer of 1977 in New York City because I wasn’t born yet, but
Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam tries to
capture it, or at least some stylized and possibly fantasy version of it. It
was one of the hottest summers ever in the city with temperatures soaring above
100 degrees, leading to brown-outs and an eventual blackout. There was a serial
killer on the prowl, gunning people down as they sat in their cars at night.
Lee’s movie makes it seem like all the killings happened during those few months,
but in reality they started a year earlier and were well spread out
chronologically with only a couple of the shootings occurring that summer,
although Lee includes recreations of nearly all of them scattered throughout
the film.
