Appraising Summer of Sam

Abstract Although nominally about the Son of Sam killings, Spike Lee's 1999 film Summer of Sam is typically interpreted as an auteurist allegory for racial scapegoating. Such allegorical reading raises a question about the nature the film's textual properties vis-à-vis the textual nature of intellectual property in American jurisprudence. This essay argues that Summer of Sam poses an immanent critique of the concept of property, as refracted through the more capacious concept of arbitrage capture: the speculative positing of difference and the subsequent appropriation of that difference via identification. Through its narrative and aesthetic form, the film systematically, reflexively, and critically stages processes of capture between characters, their personal properties, and the semiotic and phenomenal properties of the image as such, consequently aligning the protocols of allegorical interpretation with those of capture. Implicit in the film's immanent critique of capture are critiques of intellectual property and allegorical reading, ultimately staged as problematically isomorphic within the film. At stake is the possibility of reading for fugitivity, rather than for property.