Do the RightThing (1989)

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SHARON WILLIS

A Theater of Interruptions

Context

Authenticity and Audience

Upon its release in 1989, Do the Right Thing provoked intense debate among mainstream popular reviewers. In this popular context, the film's "message" became a site of struggle as numerous magazines set up the debate in terms like those of U.S. News and World Report: "Doing the Controversial Thing: A Provocative Discussion of Race Relations in the 1980s or a Racist Incitement to Riot?" (Sanoff 38). Sensationalizing the subject of race, this either / or structure also implicitly characterized African American resistance as itself racist in origin. This symmetrical structure also conflated violence against persons and violence against property, on one level, and conflated the cinematic staging of fantasy and the advocacy of violence in daily life, on another.

Those critiques that insistently focused on the burning of Sal's pizzeria also consistently related representation-which in this case these critics figured as targeting an African American audience-to reality by imagining that stable identifications shape spectator responses to both images and fantasy. To imagine that spectator identification originates in recognizable resemblances and slides into imitation, as these critics might argue, requires an impoverished theory of fantasy's relationship to agency in the world. This version of fantasy's function disallows the ways in which our access to the fantasies cinema stages is multiple, mobile, and intermittent. It ignores the ways that we invest our fantasmatic identifications in spaces, in scenes, in gestures and movements, and in the technical apparatus of cinema itself-as well as in characters and stories.

In exemplary fashion, Newsweek staged the Do the Right Thing debate under this heading '''How Hot Is Too Hot?': Spike Lee has always provoked discord-but not like this. Is his new movie irresponsible or

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vitally important? Newsweek's critics disagree" (Kroll). Representing the negative position, Jack Kroll asserted: "People are going to argue about this film for a long time. That's fine, as long as things stay on the arguing level. But this movie is dynamite under every seat. Sadly, the fuse has been lit by a filmmaker tripped up by muddled motives." Kroll locates the source of this muddle in an ambivalence that leads Lee "to substitute pizza politics for the hard realities of urban racial conflict," in an "evasion of the issues." And Kroll finds that ambivalence further reflected in the famous juxtaposed quotations about violence-one from Malcolm X and one from Martin Luther King-that conclude the film. Paradoxically enough, he has to advance his own position in a framework that is itself ambivalent, as his article faces off with a positive assessment of the film.

As in Kroll's account, Do the Right Thing often appeared as an organic extension of the director's person, in the language of much popular critique. Richard Corliss, for instance, offers this bizarre comment: "He holds the film like a can of beer in a paper bag-the cool sip of salvation on a blistering day-until it is revealed as a Molotov cocktail." Interweaving an anxiety about the film's effects in the real with a fantasy about Lee himself, this quote reminds us that one of the stunning aspects of the "Spike Lee phenomenon" in dominant popular discourse is its compulsive focus on the director as a public figure, and its utter neglect of his screen persona.

If mainstream popular culture sought to acclaim or reject Do the Right Thing in terms of the correctness of its "argument," the roots of this impulse lay in a more widespread collapsing of cinematic "real effects" with social reality, and in the corollary impulse of constructing Lee as its privileged interlocutor, speaking for a whole African American population. But in this question of the "real effect," popular journalism begins, surprisingly enough, at times to agree with African American critical reception. Wahneema Lubiano describes a pressure within African American reception that at times constructs a "realist" film as continuous with referential reality and, concomitantly, constructs its producer as a delegate for a community (176). This is the "burden of representation" that Kobena Mercer describes as the "predicament" whereby "the artistic discourse of hitherto marginalized subjects is circumscribed by the assumption that such artists speak as 'representatives' of the communities from which they come" (214).

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Under this burden of representation, the black cultural producer becomes something like an anthropological native informant, charged with providing an enthographic, documentary account of his community.

Realism, Lubiano writes, "suggests disclosure of the truth (and then closure of the representation)" (182). These lines suggest the very paradigms of reception, she goes on to argue, that operate within the dominant representational regime to confine African American film production to an arena of competing claims for realist authority, which is construed as access to sociological "truth." Such paradigms of course foreclose consideration of reality as constructed through representations that are produced within a historical context constituted by competing political interests. But they also shape the concerns of debates that are organized around "positive" and "negative" images, taken as appropriate or inappropriate models for an audience imagined to consume through imitation.

"The question of representation and what anyone should say about his/her community," Lubiano writes, "is a constant pressure under which African American cultural workers produce." "But it is a question," she further contends, "that constantly disenfranchises even as it reinforces the notion of absolutes." That is, for those critics and commentators who evaluate representations through a strict opposition of good and bad, "then 'good' or 'real' cultural production is impervious to reader or audience misbehavior (misreading)," while "'bad' or 'nonrepresentative' or 'unrealistic' cultural production" reinforces racism or "misleads African-Americans" (185).

In various contemporary debates, the failure to see cinematic realist effects as, precisely, representational strategies, elides the tensions within "black representation." Flattening this tension by conflating realism with "reality," or truth, forecloses the complexities of audience response: the critical and analytical side of people's responses to everyday entertainment. As Sasha Torres puts it in her persuasive critique of arguments that base their authority on an identification of stereotypes, such readings leave little room for the complex and "unpredictable effects" of "complex, and often resistant, spectatorship," just as they tend to "flatten textual objects" and to overlook specific textual detail (2). Failure to acknowledge these tensions reduces the cinematic text to an argument that does not allow us room to think through any relationship to fantasy structures, or to acknowledge the

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ways that hegemonic representation may be challenged at the level of other cinematic strategies, such as antirealism.

Analysis

Antirealism

Like a number of "classic" directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to JeanLuc Godard to Roman Polanski, Spike Lee frequently casts himself in his films as an ambivalent or treacherous character. Think of Lee's characters in the films whose production bookends that of Do the Right Thing. Half-Pint, the socially desperate misfit in School Daze (1988) resides at the center of the debates the film wishes to showcase: he waffles between adherence to the "jigaboo" and "wannabe" factions of fraternity culture, while conducting ongoing debates with more politically conscious classmates. Lee also plays Giant, the manipulative manager of Bleek Gilliam in Mo' Better Blues (1990), who maintains a gambling addiction that leads him to deceive his friend, eventually drawing him into a physical conflict, the aftereffects of which end his career as a trumpeter. Finally, in Jungle Fever (1991), Lee's character, Cyrus, betrays his best friend's affair to his wife. In each case, Lee portrays a shady character toward whom the film is implicitly critical. But equally important, the presence of the "real" director operates as an extradiegetic interruption within the narrative texture.

As a textual figure, Lee circulates his own image through his films as he does the images of many of his regular actors, whose roles from film to film vary dramatically. Such an effect interrupts any easy correlation between on-screen and offscreen realities. Do the Right Thing is replete with such extradiegetic effects, borne in and around the faces and bodies of its actors. The film maps and anchors its restricted arena of action, the single block of brownstones and stores in Bedford Stuyvesant, through two iconic figures: Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Ossie Davis). Marked off from the rest of the characters by a generational difference as maternal and paternal poles, they also figure the opposition between mobility and stasis that structures the film, since Da Mayor restlessly roams up and down the street, while Mother Sister, by her own account, "always watches" from a perch in her open window or on her stoop. Significantly, these distinguished actors of both stage and screen call up a whole history of African

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American characters and productions. At the same time, their longterm marriage immediately lends an ironic cast to their antagonism within the diegesis.

Likewise, by casting his real sister (joie Lee) as his fictional one, Lee ruptures the fictional space from the beginning, setting it in dialogue with an outside space, a world beyond the screen. On another level, the four-minute opening credit sequence introduces Rosie Perez in an extradiegetic role. Organized much like a music video, this sequence features Perez's "flygirl" dance moves, and her boxing poses, over the sound track of Public Enemy's "Fight the Power." Established here as the film's "theme song," "Fight the Power" will recur as localized diegetic sound that blares obtrusively into the scene, and fades again, following the movements of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and his boom box.

Meanwhile, like the song, Perez is imported into the narrative place. As the mother of Mookie's child, Hector, however, she is haunted by her initial construction as a maternal figure. She relentlessly scolds (hectors?) Mookie in stunning verbal performances of curse and insult that exceed and suspend dramatic action. Her discourse thus links her through association to the hysterical racist diatribes by men that emerge autonomously from the narrative in a later montage sequence of pure performativity. Troubling the stable and seamless fictional frame that realism requires, Lee's film consistently resists the demand to provide a documentary "window" onto African American culture.

Fundamental to Do the Right Thing's antirealist project is its plainly "classical" structure, based on the prescribed rules of classical Greek drama. It adheres strictly to the unities of time and place: set in a single-block location and transpiring within a twenty-four-hour period, the film circles thematically back to the image that introduces Mookie, counting his money on awakening. We can surely see the "Corner Men," Coconut Sid (Frankie Faison), ML (Paul Benjamin), and Sweet Dick Willy (Robin Harris) as an ironic gesture toward the chorus of classical Greek tragedy, as their running patter comments on unfolding events, while they remain strictly apart from the action until the climactic riot scene. Some of the film's funniest riffs come from the Corner Men, theatrically displayed against a solid wall of bright red and framed under umbrellas. Situated outside the zone of

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the filn:'s action, the stationary Corner Men regularly interrupt the plot. with :erbal performance. (Not insignificantly, in this regard, Robm. H~rns was primarily known as a stand-up comic.)

ThIS film coul~ not be ~ore self-conscious about the ways it sets p~rformance agamst narrative. In an early incident, the band of four fnends who move about en bloc stop to berate Da Mayor for his drunkenness: When he responds by giving them a speech about his failed p~termty an~ their disrespect, Ahmad (Steve White) responds with a direct theatncal reference, "I hope you've finished your little solilo~uy," thus commenting on the film's proliferation of soliloquies that ~terrupt dramatic action and verbal exchange. Punctuating the act~on, the Corner Men call attention to the film's violation of convenh~na~ Hollywoo~ plotting. Instead of building action and suspense, this f~lm offers VIgnettes, a series of mostly verbal confrontations of seemmgly equal weight, always unresolved, trailing off as the characters ~ander away, apparently losing interest or becoming distracted. We wI.ll see _lat~r in the essay how the camera frequently mimics their behavior, picking up and dropping characters with a kind of freefloating distracted attentiveness, like Da Mayor'S and Mother Sister's.

Throughout. the fil~, we find moments of distraction, where layers of message collide or mterfere. To take just one example, when Mookie ~as dragged Jade out of Sal's pizzeria because he interprets Sal's attentions to her as ov~rtly sexual, we see the siblings against a bright red wall under the pamted message: "Tawana Told the Truth." This reference to what were then recent news events (the disputed and subsequently retracted charges by African American teenager Tawana Brawley that she had been raped by a group of white police officers) s~ggests a resistance to the generally accepted facts of the case, and disrupts the sc~ne thoroughly to the extent that we simply don't know how to read this message. Is the film endorsing this position? Does it mea~ to suggest a connection between the Brawley case and Sal's attraction to Jade? Its ornery resistance to clear interpretation both inter~upts ou~ absorption in the sibling dispute and calls attention to the interpretive effort this film foregrounds for both the spectator and the chara~ters, who themselves are trying to work through some of these questions. Significantly, the substance of the dispute itself takes a detou,r: ~s Mo?kie insists that Jade stop coming to the pizzeria because of Sal s intentions, she retaliates: "Stop trying to play big brother. I'm a

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grown woman. You gotta lotta nerve. Mookie, you can hardly pay your rent and you're gonna tell me what to do. Come off it.". Though Mookie insists, "One has nuthin' to do with the other," the dISCUssIon

turns definitively to his meager earning history.

This veering off is completely coherent within the film's overarch-

ing cinematic strategies: the camera consistentl! picks. up c~aracters and incidents, leaving them in the middle of things to mvestIgate another conversation or event, which it will drop in order to return to a previous one. The event that serves as a catalyst = J~de a~d Mo?ki~'s argument begins just after the fil.m's tem?ora: mldpomt, WIth Sal ~ flirtatious conversation with Jade in the plzzena. As Sal (Danny AIello) speaks, the camera migrates to examine Mookie's a~d Pino's (John Turturro) reactions, captured in medium close-up as It slowly pans back and forth between their hostile looks at Sal and Jade. But before developing Mookie's reaction, the film leaves the pizzeria to pick up ~adio Raheem, just as his music beginS to distort and fade. We follow him to the Fruit-N-Veg Delight, the Korean-owned grocery store, wh~re he rudely enters into a transaction for twenty "D" Ener.gizer batter~es. As he argues with the store's owners (Ste:,e P~rk and. GinnY Yang), msu~ting their English, we see him from their point of VIew. Thr~ugh the dIStorting effects of a fish-eye lens in medium close-.up, t~e f~l:n sugges:s the couple's subjective view of Raheem as menacmg. Slgm~ICantl:, t~IS scene recalls the film's one other use of the fish-eye effect: in Sal s first

confrontation with Raheem about his music. .

As in most of its scenes of dispute and hostility, beginning WIth Da

Mayor and Mother Sister's first encounter, the film structures this sequence through canted frames, in which the chara~ters emerge on,opposing diagonals: Raheem's frame is cant~d to th~ ng~t,.the cou~l.e s to the left. Thus the film seems intent on VIsually mscnbmg hostility or opposition, but it also suggests in the sa~e ge~ture that verbal viol.en~e incites a distorting subjectification of VIew. Like so many of the ~llm s confrontations, this one ends with Raheem relenting, for no particular reason after the store owner reciprocates with the insult "Motherfucker'you!" Raheem concludes: "Motherfucker you. You're alr~g~t."

As Raheem exits the store, the film picks up Da Mayor arnvmg to purchase flowers. We see his arrival from a ?oint of view inside t~e pizzeria, one that captures Sal's silhouette as It loo~s through the window. After following Da Mayor to Mother Sister s stoop, where he

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presents the flowers, the film detours away to pick up Radio Raheem again and follow him to the Corner Men, who register their annoyance and launch into another exchange of playful insults, beginning with ML remarking, "At least my moms didn't name me Sweet Dick Willie." Sweet Dick Willie picks up on the mother reference and purports to take this as an insult to his mother. The exchange culminates in ML's pronouncing, "Negroes kill me, always holdin' onto, talkin' about their dicks." This remark leads to a back-and-forth discussion about having sex in the heat. The whole scene recalls Richard Pryor's famous comedy routines from the 1970s and 1980s, which frequently deployed racist stereotypes about black sexuality.

An ice cart moving into frame introduces the next sequence. This cart draws the little boy, Eddie (Richard Habersham), into traffic, and forces Da Mayor to knock him to safety at the curb. This, in turn, prompts Eddie's mother to launch into a scathing reprimand, first of Da Mayor and, subsequently, of her injured son. Erupting in a performance of harsh maternal disciplinarity, consonant with the feminine role in this film of judging and managing men, this mother provides a thematic match with Mookie's failed attempt to manage Jade's sexuality, to which the film returns now after some seven minutes of wandering through various vignettes.

This exemplary series of intercut episodes produces a variety of encounters among the neighborhood "types." These are hardly characters, but rather figures, who mark out areas of friction and tension in the public spaces: gender dynamics, struggles around property rights and consumerism, and competing masculine postures. Here, as throughout the film, all the women seem to speak with one voice, and to function primarily as spectators watching the diverse male figures. While mobility is reserved for men, women are confined in place. Though Tina has a job, we never see her leave her apartment. Prior to the riot scene, we see Jade emerging from her apartment only in Mookie's company. Mother Sister remains perched at home, surveying those who pass by, and consistently berating and excoriating DaMayor.

Likewise, Tina and Jade continually criticize Mookie. Jade consistently pressures him about his earning power and responsibilities, while Tina berates him with the coarsest possible attacks on his masculinity. Do the Right Thing charges its women-figured as mothers

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and sisters-with judging and disciplining masculinity. They are seen mostly castigating-and occasionally rewarding-men for conduct that lives up to the proper masculine role: as wage earners and fathers.

In their judgmental function, the women are aligned in this one respect with the police and the Corner Men; while in their mobile patrol of the borders of the community, the police serve not only as law enforcers, but as judges. In a striking scene built of sustained shot/reverse shots, the film tracks a prolonged and mutually suspicious exchange of looks between the police and the Corner Men. As Officer Ponte (Miguel Sandoval) comments, "What a waste!" one of the Corner Men reads his lips. (We might note that Lee repeats this moment, with the same actors playing the police, in Jungle Fever, when the officers make this comment in regard to the interracial couple.) In a strange ricochet effect, the Corner Men turn their attention from the police to the steady business at the Korean grocery store. Coconut Sid begins, "As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted by the finest ... ," while ML blurts out, "It's a fucking shame." We see that he means to direct their attention to the store. Though the remark might be directed toward the role and conduct of the interrupting police, it also functions to cast the Corner Men as hostile judges of the Korean entrepreneurs, and it leads to a brutal self-critique about the failure of black enterprise.

Interruption and Alienation

Lee's antirealist project in Do the Right Thing brings it closely in line with the theatrical practices of Bertolt Brecht. Walter Benjamin describes Brecht's "epic theater" as a theater that relies centrally on "alienation" effects, eschewing" empathy" in favor of "astonishment" and focusing on situation rather than plot. The two procedures are interdependent. "Instead of identifying with the characters," Benjamin writes, "the audience should be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they function" ("What Is Epic Theater?" 150). Epic theater "obtains such conditions ... by interrupting the plot" (Reflections 234). Appropriately enough to the context of film, the "principle of interruption" that Benjamin sees as epic theater's organizing function finds its analogue in montage, where "the superimposed element disrupts the context in which it is inserted" (Reflections 234). Taken in the broadest sense, montage refers not only to editing,

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but to the complex articulations of shots and sequences spliced together. In its assertive preference for interruption and vignette, parallel plotting and editing, Lee's montage is aggressive. But the film is similarly obtrusive in its camera work and framing, as these help to concatenate scenes that attract and distract our interpretive gaze. Committed to studying social boundaries and their policing as manifestations of institutionalized racism's mark on public space, this film inscribes these concerns within its visual texture: in the cinematic articulation of space, in its cuttings and framings.

While its technical means intervene to interrupt and mediate any direct identification with the characters, Do the Right Thing's camera nonetheless resembles some of its characters-it behaves like them. It is highly mobile, and given to assertive advancing and retreating. The film's opening sequence introduces its principals through an equalizing montage in which the camera obtrudes into private spaces-zooming in and zooming out. As the establishing shot pans across the city block, after a cut, the camera zeroes in on the body behind the voice of the DJ Mister Senor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), hovering in extreme close-up on his mouth. Only as it pulls back to reveal his whole face does the camera pick up the glint of light reflecting on the glass of his broadcasting booth, the screen that partitions him off from the world of the street that he surveys, as he offers the first of his many "public service" announcements: "Jheri Curl alert." When it comes to Smiley (Roger Guenver Smith), apparently the film's most unbalanced character, the camera captures him in a striking low-angle shot. In its frequent advance and retreat, the camera appears to be sneaking into apartments whose inhabitants are just arising. In Mookie's apartment, we note, the use of the handheld camera suggests amplified and invasive intimacy, as the slight movement that troubles the image signals an invisible body entering the character's space.

In this opening sequence, Do the Right Thing establishes the zooming-in and zooming-out structure that marks a strikingly stylized performance sequence that emerges about one-third of the way into the film. Mookie has indirectly entered the debate about Sal's "Wall of Fame," which seems to exclude African Americans from representation as it remains entirely dedicated to Italian American celebrities and sports figures. He questions Pino about his favorite athlete, actor, and

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rock star: Magic Johnson, Eddie Murphy, and Prince. Against the background of a cheesy wall mural figuring a Roman ruin, Mookie points to the apparent contradiction between Pino's racist pronouncements and the blackness of his favorite performers. Pino contends, "It's different. Magic, Eddie, and Prince are not niggers, I mean are not black I mean they're black, but not really black They're more than black" Mookie suggests that Pino's racism is related to a kind of "color envy":

"Deep down inside, I think you wish you were black ... Your hair is kinkier than mine." Pino erupts in an aggressive rant that mocks African American public figures like Al Sharpton ("Mr. Doo, Sharp Tone"), Jesse Jackson ("Keep hope alive"), and Louis Farrakhan ("Farraman?"). The dispute ends with a ridiculous reciprocity, as Mookie responds, "Fuck you, and fuck Frank Sinatra." To which Pino replies, "Fuck Michael Jackson."

This exchange gives way to a cut that opens a sequence marked by the actors' stationary postures, as in stand-up routines, while the camera zooms in and out dramatically to begin and end each speech. Presenting five performances composed entirely of epithets and stereotypes, the sequence shows Mookie slurring Italians, Pino attacking blacks, Latino Stevie (Luis Ramos) slandering Koreans, Officer Long (Rick Aiello) insulting Latinos, and the Korean grocery owner slurring Jews. As the camera zooms in and out on each, to dizzying effect, it also suggests a kind of equivalency and a random circulation of epithets-as if these insults were free-floating slogans to be taken up by anyone toward anyone in a moment of aggression. Significantly, this sequence is interrupted-"Time out!" -by the voice of Mister Senor Love Daddy, whose name sounds like a pileup of honorifics, or positive epithets. When Love Daddy comes into view, he is propelled toward the camera on a rolling chair, which produces the effect of a reverse zoom, as the character rushes in on the camera. This sequence of stand-up performances that do not communicate with each other clearly anticipates the incommunicative language that marks the confrontation between Radio Raheem and Sal, which begins in an explosion of racist epithets. That later moment imports the nonnarrative, racist performance directly into the plot, and may remind us of the strategies epic theater employs to enforce the spectator's critical distance from the staged events.

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Icons, Slogans, Static

This centrally pivotal sequence abruptly gives way, through a cut, to a reestablished order in the pizzeria. We hear Mookie trying to coerce Sal into paying him before closing time. Money seems to be Mookie's ~antra. ~e talks about getting paid all the time; in our final image of him, he IS collecting crumpled hundred dollar bills from the debrisstrewn sidewalk. As Mookie sets out on a delivery, we see a little girl and her cheerful sidewalk chalk drawing from directly above, and then we rejoin him as Radio Raheem comes into view. This key scene is shot with a handheld camera, coding it for intimacy by suggesting ~he felt presence of the body behind the camera, a body that brings us Into close proximity with the menacing Radio Raheem. It opens with Mookie noticing Raheem's brass knuckles, shaped (in another intertextual reference, here to Robert Mitchum's menaCing preacher in The Night of the Hunter [Charles Laughton, 1955]) to spell out "LOVE" on one hand, and "HATE" on the other. As Mookie disappears out of the lower right corner of the frame, Raheem begins to tell "the story of love and hate," boxing in front of the camera, his fists thrusting tow~rd it and withdrawing. In this image, it is as if Raheem were giving WIth one hand and taking away with the other. Raheem's performance may remind us of Pino's ambivalent love-hate relationship to blacks. '~The. story of life is this ... ," he asserts, "Static! One hand is always fIghtIng the other." But he ends enigmatically, "Brother Mookie, if I love you, I love you, but if I hate you ... " In this unfinished and inconclusive utterance, failing to generate any clear or stable meaning, we hear an echo of the film's own conclusion, seeming to weigh the words of Martin Luther King Jr. against those of Malcolm X but without ever deciding between them.

Do the Right Thing's characters regularly move forward and back, toward and away from the camera, as with an adversary. But the film complements these movements with the restless lateral mobility it grants most of its male characters, whose comings and gOings map the public space. Primary among these is, of course, Mookie, whose purposeful progress on his deliveries the camera tracks, and whose continual interruption by bystanders brings other characters into view and allows them to barrage him with free-floating slogans: "Stay black," for instance, o~ "Always do the right thing." Buggin' Out (Ciancarlo Esposito) is, like Mookie, driven by purposeful mobility as he

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campaigns to mount a boycott of Sal's because the "Wall of Fame" fails to represent blacks.

In a key scene, a white man interrupts ~uggin' Out's prog~e~s by carelessly stepping on his brand-new-vwhite+-Iordans. BuggIn. Out pursues Clifton (John Savage), who sports a green Boston Celtics Tshirt bearing Larry Bird's name and number. As the two argue ~bout rights and privilege in public space, Clifton recurs to property nghts. "I own this brownstone," he argues, while Buggin' Out contends that he does not belong in the neighborhood. When Clifton refers to his "freedom" to live where he wants, in a stunningly ironic reminder of both the contemporary gentrification and the historic segregation and redlining of neighborhoods-Buggin' Out reads off his shirt and ~ells him to go back to Massachusetts. As irony proliferates. here, a senous conflict involving public space and private property IS reduced to a war of slogans: Michael Jordan or Larry Bird, fetishized. s~oes as opposed to a brownstone. Here Buggin' Out looks as superfIc~al and .~ISguided as Clifton. Do the Right Thing's shifting and multiple critical

angles leave no one standing; no on~ is above r:proach. .

Clifton's shirt, like Buggin' Out s shoes, fits seamlessly Into the film's continual circulation of icons relating to sports, celebrity, a~d commodity-brand names. Our characters inhabit a ~orld awash In slogans whose messages are uncertain, names and Images whose meaning is unstable, and recorded sound that functions as an anthe.m or trademark. Think of the brilliantly staged standoff between Stevie, with his stationary boom box blasting Latin music, ~nd ~adio ~aheem, who interrupts Stevie by invading this space WIth ~IS blanng anthem, "Fight the Power." Here the comparative electronic volume capacity seems to stand in for masculine force, and t~us the sce.ne mocks male posturing. M_usic cons.titutes a bi~ fo~ dom~an.ce, an ~vasion a form of violent interruption, as the film s tragic climax WIll bear out. But it also highlights the discursive, as well as the social and

economic, impotence of the characters. ..

In this proliferation of icons we find another reIteratIOn. of .the film's opposition between movement and stasis, p~rhap~ this tm~e best understood as inscribed in real property versus identity, To Sal s "Wall of Fame" the film juxtaposes Smiley'S nomadic advertising of his postcard image of Malcolm X and Martin Luther K~g [r '. as a commodity for sale. Everywhere presenting this image, Smiley Interrupts

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as often as he is interrupted. He blocks Mookie's progress several times, and he interrupts Sal and Pino's intimate conversation about the pizzeria and the family, about their competing loyalties.

Smiley's postcard image is thickly iconic. First of all, this wellknown and widely reproduced photo represents the only meeting of these two leaders (Torres 127). It memorializes an encounter as a relationship, and thus it represents fantasy as much as, if not more than, reality. Since Smiley inscribes the image with his own abstract symbols-a crown for King and an X for Malcolm X-he overlays it with icons in the strictest meaning of the term. Finally, this image circulates throughout the film, ending up as the single picture on the burned and "blackened" "Wall of Fame," and it returns to close the film, following on the citations from the two leaders that Lee juxtaposes there without comment. If we consider the film's conclusion as Brechtian in its inconclusiveness, we must nonetheless also understand that, in its frozen stillness, and depicting an amity that never existed between the two men and the positions they represented, the image functions as a fetish, freezing history and presenting a forced symmetry.

Like slogans, of course, racial and ethnic epithets ricochet throughout the film, and at times they seem only tenuously anchored in conscious agency. The ready availability of epithets and people's susceptibility to resort to them in moments of violence are centrally thematized in the film's climactic sequence in Sal's. By resorting to violence and smashing Raheem's boom box, Sal precipitates Raheem's murder at the hands of the police, an act that in turn sparks a riot. This sequence presents violence as escalating organically from Sal's entirely uncharacteristic recourse to a racial slur. To judge by the shooting script, this scene was clearly improvised. And, for Lee, this improvisational scene seems to be a moment of authenticity.

In an interview with Barbara Grizzutti Harrison, Lee gave this account of shooting the film's final showdown: "We wanted Danny [Aiello] to say the word 'nigger' and he would not say it, and we all knew he had said the word many times. What finally got him to say it was when [the character named] Buggin' Out called him a fat guinea bastard." "And something snapped in Danny," Lee continued, "and he just vomited all this 'black cocksucker nigger motherfucker.' He didn't want to be perceived as being racist or prejudiced, and that's why he had trouble saying the word." To conclude, Lee asserted, "We

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all knew he had said those words many times. Once he was hit with 'fat guinea bastard,' the floodgates started opening. You have all said the word many times" (135).

When Lee credits this sequence with exposing a special psychic "truth," he seems to share a common conviction that no matter how we may repress them, all of us find racial and ethnic stereotypes readily available in the form of epithets that erupt in moments of extreme stress. This is another way of saying that we all maintain an arsenal of hate speech in the reservoir of the unconscious, which functions like a psychic septic tank. But to treat such discourse as somehow truest and most essential because it is most buried is to ignore the interaction of our psychic lives with the external social world, to ignore our tendencies to project the psychic onto the social, and to leave out of the account the truths that conscious discourse produces when it confronts unconscious effects.

As events unfold amid the assembled crowd, which has faced off across the street from Sal's, Mookie appears to be physically aligned with the three white men. Deliberately and dispassionately, Mookie breaks rank, crosses the street, and returns to hurl a trash can through the pizzeria's window, igniting the riot that culminates in the crowd's vandalizing and torching the restaurant. At this point, and even at the film's inconclusive conclusion, Mookie remains silent about this gesture. And, like him, the film leaves it inarticulate and unexplained. Significantly, while the crowd produces a cacophony in fragments of angry speech, the voice we hear most clearly in the riot is Mother Sister's, first ordering "Burn it down!" and later reduced to ragged cries. Contained within the female space of commentary and critique, she is ultimately reduced to the inarticulateness of a hysterical scream.

Conclusion

Concluding indecisively, the film circles back to where it began, as Mookie awakens to thoughts of money. Meeting Sal at the ruins of the pizzeria, he demands his weekly pay: $250. Sal crumples five onehundred-dollar bills and bounces them one by one off Mookie's chest, so that they land in the debris below. Mookie stoops to collect them, throws back two of the bills, insisting that Sal keep the extra money, but leaving him short $50. As the balled up bills volley back and forth,

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so the conversation volleys: Mookie's main concern is his pay, while Sal's is for his "place," in the sense both of his life's work and of his belonging to the neighborhood. As the exchange meanders inarticulately, like so much static, the men end up on common ground: discussing the weather. If they appear to part amicably; Mookie waffles once again, stooping to snatch the remaining bills from the debris. Thus, the film freezes Mookie in the debased posture of self-interest, leaving the higher ground to Sal. What are we to make of this?

Out of the statie and interference that has marked all verbal exchange in this film emerge first the written text citing King and Malcolm X and then the image that Smiley has circulated obsessively. No analysis mediates the juxtaposed citations about violence or their relation to the Image. The film leaves us with competing and fragmentary "messages." Since it is organized by collisions among competing discourses, Do the Right Thing presents contradictions that are highly resistant to resolution as a dear assertion or statement-precisely the inadequate form requited by a dominant discourse that seeks to restrict the film to an "argument" that fits within the binary framework mainstream culture provides for its ongoing story of contemporary race relations.

Credits

United States, 1989,40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks

Director, Producer, and Screenplay: Spike Lee Coproducer: Monty Ross

Cinematography: Ernest Dickerson

First Assistant Director: Randy Fletcher Editing: Barry Alexander Brown

Music: Bill Lee

Sound: Skip Livesay

Costume Design: Ruthe Carter Production Supervisor: Preston Holmes

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CAST:

Sal

DaMayor Mother Sister Vito

Buggin' Out Mookie

Radio Raheem Pino

ML

Coconut Sid Sweet Dick Willie Jade

Officer Ponte Officer Long Clifton

Mister Senor Love Daddy

Tina

Smiley

Ahmad

Cee

Do the RightThing

Danny Aiello

Ossie Davis

Ruby Dee

Richard Edson Giancarlo Esposito Spike Lee

Bill Nunn

John Turturro Paul Benjamin Frankie Faison Robin Harris

[oie Lee

Miguel Sandoval Rick Aiello

John Savage Samuel C Jackson Rosie Perez

Roge~ Guenver Smith Steve White

Martin Lawrence

Bibiliography

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__ . "What Is Epic Theater?" Illuminations: Essays and ReflectI9ns. Ed. Hannah

A dt Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 147-54.

C r renRi~hard. "Hot Time in Bed-SWY Tonight." Time 3 July 198;': 62.. . h

H~::~:~n, Barbara Grizzutti. "Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass. Interview Wit

S ike Lee. Esquire Oct. 1992: 132-39.

p "H Hot Is Too Hot?" Newsweek 3 July 1989: 64. .

Krol.l, Jac~ ~w a "But Compared to What? Reading Realism, Representah~n,

Lub~:oEss:nti:~:~ in School Daze, Do the Right Thing and the Spi~e CLee ~lScourse." Representing Black Men. Ed. Marcellus Blount and George . unnmg-

ham New York: Routledge, 1996. 173-204. . N

K· b Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural StudIes. ew

Mercer, 0 ena. .

York: Routledge, 1994. . I Thi "u S News and World Report 10

Sanoff, Alvin. "Doing the Controversta ng. .,

'T' JulYS198h9: 3B81-a3c9k' White and in Color: Television anI} Black Civil Rights. Princeton:

lorres, as a. , ,. .

Princeton UP, 2003.

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