Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) reenacts the story of love and hate in Do the Right Thing, reprising a memorable scene in Charles Laughton’s great melodrama The Night of the Hunter.
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THE RIGHT THING AND THE LOVE SUPREME
Moviegoers were still debating School Daze when Spike Lee completed his third feature. Still widely regarded as his most accomplished work, Do the Right Thing had its world premiere in May 1989 at the Cannes International Film Festival, where it was a prime contender for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest prize. It opened commercially in France and the United Kingdom the following month and reached American screens shortly thereafter, earning an impressive array of honors. These included Academy Award nominations for Spike’s original screenplay and supporting actor Danny Aiello; two Image Awards (from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) for actress Ruby Dee and supporting actor Ossie Davis; a New York Film Critics Circle Award for cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson; prizes from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for director Spike Lee, composer Bill Lee (Spike’s father), supporting actor Aiello, and best picture; a Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Aiello; Chicago Film Critics Association prizes for Aiello, director Lee, and best picture; and Golden Globe nominations for Aiello, director Lee, screenwriter Lee, and best drama. A decade later, in 1999, the National Film Preservation Board and the Library of Congress added Do the Right Thing to the National Film Registry of movies with special cultural significance. All of which amounted to quite a haul for a black nationalist with a camera.
Do the Right Thing represents a considerable change from School Daze in terms of filmmaking craft – no other Spike Lee joint surpasses it for visual, verbal, and musical excellence – and accessibility for racially diverse audiences; the latter goal is greatly facilitated by the inclusion of several important white characters, a first for the filmmaker. There are clear continuities of psychology and theme between the two pictures, however, beginning with their shared commitment to prompting social thought rather than promoting particular agendas. School Daze does not resolve the racial and sexual issues it raises, concluding instead on a conspicuously open-ended note as Dap forcefully says “Wake up!” to the other characters and the audience. Do the Right Thing likewise rejects the pretense of “solving” knotty problems and “answering” thorny questions that have stumped real-life America for decades and in some cases centuries. It is therefore appropriate that the last words of School Daze reappear as the first words of Do the Right Thing, spoken by the disc jockey Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson) to the neighborhood he addresses and the moviegoers who overhear him: “Wake up!”
Do the Right Thing frames a knockabout New York story in an elegant Aristotelian form, complete with a chorus of corner men who spend their days watching and commenting on current activities from the sidelines. Place: Brooklyn’s mostly black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Time: the hottest day of the year. Action: the rise of race-based animosities centering on an Italian-American business and the African-American community it serves. The business is Sal’s Famous Pizzaria (sic), owned and operated in the area for years by the eponymous entrepreneur and his sons Vito (Richard Edson), a relatively hapless and harmless young man, and Pino (John Turturro), an overt and unapologetic racist. Trouble starts when a young black man called Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) tries to organize a boycott of the pizza place because Sal (Danny Aiello) refuses to include pictures of African-American celebrities on the “Wall of Fame” that decorates his establishment. “American Italians only,” Sal explains, asserting his rights of ownership. The locals feel a right of ownership as well – they are the raison d’être of the place, after all, and without them Sal’s Famous would not exist. Tensions wax and wane as the temperature climbs through the long summer day, culminating when the neighborhood’s most resolute rap-music devotee, Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), plays his ever-present boom box too loudly for comfort in Sal’s place of business. Sal unleashes a racist tirade against Raheem; chaos breaks out around them; police barge in, escalating the turmoil; one of them holds Raheem in a chokehold that strangles him to death; Sal’s most easy going employee, the black delivery guy Mookie (Lee), abruptly hollers “Hate!” and throws a trashcan through Sal’s window; and a full-scale riot erupts, ending only when the building has gone up in flames.
The film concludes with a series of dialectical moments that can be distilled and charted:
Neither separately nor together do these images and words inform us what the right thing is supposed to be. This rich, productive uncertainty is the meaning and “message” of the film, extending from its superbly ambiguous title to a wealth of major and minor details embedded in its fabric.
Race and Rage
Do the Right Thing stirred controversy and debate long before it reached American screens. Its world premiere at the 1989 edition of the renowned and influential Cannes International Film Festival – where it lost the Palme d’Or to Sex, Lies, and Videotape, the debut film by Steven Soderbergh, another American independent director with a formidable future – elicited cheers from observers such as actress Sally Field, a member of the awards jury, who told Lee she fought hard on its behalf, and harsh criticism from others. Attributing such disputes to “the rage of race,” the Time film critic Richard Corliss summarized the “furor” that surrounded its arrival in American theaters:
Not since the Black Panthers cowed Manhattan’s glitterati 20 years ago has there been such a virulent outbreak of radical chic – or so many political-disease detectives ready to stanch the epidemic. A single issue of the Village Voice ran eight articles on the movie, with opinions running from raves to cries of “fascist” and “racist.” A political columnist for New York magazine charged that Lee’s film could undermine the New York City mayoral campaign of a black candidate. Everywhere, the film has polarized white liberals for whom Bed-Stuy is as exotic and unknowable as Burkina Faso. Some see Lee as the movies’ great black hope; others tut till they’re tuckered. A few fear that Do the Right Thing could trigger the kind of riot it dramatizes and perhaps condones. (62)
Lee has answered the latter charge many times over the years, as when he told a New York interviewer (Hill) in 2008 how “insane” he finds it that journalists
like Joe Klein and David Denby felt that this film was going to cause riots. Young black males were going to emulate Mookie and throw garbage cans through windows. Like, “How dare you release this film in summertime: You know how they get in the summertime, this is like playing with fire.” I hold no grudges against them. But that was twenty years ago and it speaks for itself.
Lee feels the film’s incendiary elements reflect not only outrage over specific injustices but also a “complete frustration withthe judicial system” in the African-American community. One day after the film’s premiere at the Cannes festival, Lee told me, “a black man was . . . strangled to death . . . in New York City, in a police precinct . . . This film is not science fiction. All this stuff is happening.”
Sesame Street
Journalists ask me, “Spike, why aren’t there any drugs in your films?” – as if African-Americans are the only people on earth who use drugs and African-American filmmakers are somehow the only filmmakers beholden to tackle that issue in their work. – Spike Lee (1990)
Lee was also accused of portraying a sanitized Bedford-Stuyvesant that amounted to a Sesame Street version of ghetto life, as clean and orderly as the well-scrubbed television series for children. Writing in the above-cited piece that he found it “maddeningly difficult” to understand the film’s point of view, Corliss went on to say,
All we know for certain is that Do the Right Thing is not naturalistic. Golden sunset hues swathe the street at 10 in the morning. The color scheme is chicly coordinated, as if Jerome Robbins’ Sharks and Jets were about to dance onscreen; the picture could be called Bed-Stuy Story, full of Officer Krupkes and kindly store owners. At first, the dilemmas are predictably pastel too: populist cliches brought to life by an attractive cast. Even the racial epithets have a jaunty tinge, as in a series of antibrotherhood jokes made by blacks, Italians, Hispanics, white cops and Korean grocers – the film’s best sequence. On this street there are no crack dealers, hookers or muggers, just a 24-hour deejay . . . . (62)1
I think this criticism has its own prejudicial tinge. On any given day in even the “worst” neighborhoods, most people are just living their lives, not slogging about in dirt, drugs, and crime. It’s true that ingrained poverty has taken a mental toll on many of Lee’s characters: the corner men and Da Mayor are the most obvious examples. The situation speaks for itself, though, and there’s no reason for Lee to exaggerate things by importing worn-down Hollywood views of inner-city misery. “If this film were done by a white filmmaker,” he told me, “it would have been all dark. There would’ve been no loud colors. It would have been raining every day, and in complete despair – with no humor but [with] rapists, crack addicts, drug dealers, pregnant teen-age mothers throwing their babies out of windows.” That, he said, is “white people’s idea of black ghettos” (Sterritt 1989). Black filmmakers have presented aspects of inner-city life in dire terms as well – including Lee in some of his later work – but his wish to set forth a corrective view is understandable and commendable.
Do the Right Thing has also been accused of downplaying Bed-Stuy’s growing diversity, focusing on conflict between blacks and whites at the expense of, for instance, the neighborhood’s Asian-American population. This criticism is justified as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far, since black–white conflict is a substantial enough subject to sustain any number of films, and other tensions are certainly noted in Do the Right Thing, especially with regard to the proprietors of the Korean deli across the street from Sal’s eatery, who have little patience for complaining customers like Da Mayor and Radio Raheem, but are quick to grab for allegiance – questionable and hypocritical allegiance – with their black neighbors when chaos breaks out at the climax of the story. The deli prompts what might be the bravest gesture of soul searching Lee has ever placed in a film. It occurs in one of the brief episodes showing the corner men – ML (Paul Benjamin), Coconut Sid (Frankie Faison), and Sweet Dick Willie (Robin Harris) – in their usual routine of idle chatter, tired jokes, and expressions of fleeting anger and frustration at their lot in life. They have just been unpleasantly distracted by the sight of two policemen cruising down the street with snarling, suspicious expressions on their faces as they survey the neighborhood. One of them mouths the words, “What a waste,” and the following ensues:
Sweet Dick Willie is greeted at the deli by Sonny (Steve Park) saying, “No more free beer,” and continues ambling down the sidewalk. Back on the corner, ML concludes, “It’s a motherfuckin’ shame,” to which Coconut Sid responds, “Man, ain’t that a bitch.” And the scene is over, having raised a problem so complicated, emotional, and seemingly intractable that Lee felt he could not sidestep or ignore it in good conscience, even though his lack of solutions is plainly in evidence. It is an extraordinarily candid, painful, and moving moment.
Polyphony
One of the most fertile sites of dialectical expression in Do the Right Thing is the music track, which manifests what film-music scholar Victoria E. Johnson identifies as Lee’s characteristic position with regard to music and story, simultaneously in tune with mainstream practices, “promoting familiar black artists for commercial reproduction and consumption on a mass scale,” and forging an oppositional practice of its own, “voicing black history within a traditionally white industrial context” (19). The film’s underscoring (background music) and source music (present in the world of the story) act out a complex dialogic pattern as different kinds of music intersect, contrast, and collide with one another and with the film’s dialogue, sound design, and visual components, echoing three kinds of consciousness that coexist in the Bed-Stuy personality mix. The two primary musical modes can be called the historic-nostalgic, composed by Bill Lee in the American style of folk-influenced romantic music scored for small orchestra and jazz combo, and the popular-commercial, itself expressed by two dialectically interacting styles: the rap and hip-hop emanating from Radio Raheem’s boom box; and the soul and rhythm-andblues numbers played by Mister Señor Love Daddy on We Love Radio 108 FM, the neighborhood’s own station. The popular-commercial mode also incorporates the interplay of music and words, since the boom box songs have lyrics and the platters spun on 108 FM are linked by the smooth obbligato of Mister Señor Love Daddy’s patter and chatter.
Hip-hop represents the street folks, as the prevalence of rap on Raheem’s boom box suggests. In this variety of hip-hop, songs are actually “incantations, chants which can correctly be seen as thematic variations on the question of power, racism, class,” in critic Wheeler Winston Dixon’s words (Dixon 229; Johnson 24). Part of rap’s subversive power comes from its challenge to the traditional bifurcation of word and music in contemporary culture; by blurring the boundaries between song and speech, and by incorporating samples from other pop-music pieces, almost any rap performance or recording is to some extent disjunctive, disruptive, and dialogical. Lee signals the importance of rap in Do the Right Thing by accompanying the opening titles with the sound of Public Enemy pumping out “Fight the Power” and the sight of Rosie Perez dancing to the music with brightly colored boxing gloves on her expressively pugnacious hands.2 The volume is loud and the message is clear: the movie you’re about to see is one that fights the power with maximum audiovisual muscle. Lee ups the ante further by celebrating the sonic power of Raheem’s boom box, as when it wins a sidewalk competition with a Latino’s less vigorous blaster and acquires near-deafening volume in the final approachto the pizza-place melee. Given that traditional ideas of movie music call for it to function “invisibly” as a mood enhancer of which the audience is hardly aware – its themes are “unheard melodies,” in Claudia Gorbman’s accurate phrase – the in-your-face booming of Raheem’s box mounts an ultra-scrappy challenge to the audience’s ears.
Radio Raheem is not the protagonist of Do the Right Thing, but in important respects he and his music are its presiding spirits. And while he generally appears to be one of the story’s less articulate figures – apart from his “Love and Hate” monologue, which I will discuss shortly – he provides the occasion for some of the film’s most subtle word-related humor. My favorite example occurs when he enters the Korean deli to buy fresh batteries for his boom box from Sonny, the clerk who always appears to be on duty:
Raheem’s face infinitesimally lightens as he says the last line of the exchange, revealing his amusement at the Korean’s imperfect mastery of “motherfucker” grammar. Nunn’s acting here is superb.
Raheem is inseparable from his boom box, the power and volume of which are sources of extreme pride for him. Discussing his stadium-wattage sound system, film scholar Thomas Doherty calls the boom box “an Ur-symbol of interracial animosity and class style wars” and therefore a “perfect radiator for black anger and white noise (and vice versa),” providing a tool for minority members “to exact vengeance and aggression” (38) on an unwary bourgeoisie. These dissonant urban vibes are definitely not toned down by the choice of Public Enemy’s brain-quivering clamor as the soundtrack’s most conspicuous component. Founded on Long Island half a dozen years before Do the Right Thing, this extremely spirited ensemble managed more successfully than many groups to evade cooptation (at least partially) by the music-industry establishment. Writing not long after the film’s first run, Doherty noted that far from being “politically engaged in the approved I-ain’t-gonna-play-Sun-City mold,3 these guys are authentically bad in the Webster Dictionary sense” (38). And so they are, using ferocious lyrics and a jackhammer beat to trash decency, decorum, and propriety at the highest decibel levels enabled by the magic of modern technology.
This is so agreeable to Raheem that he can’t imagine the whole world doesn’t share his zeal for the group. When the race-minded Buggin Out asks him if this is the only tape he has, Raheem’s reply is borderline incredulous:
Lee very much likes other kinds of music, though, and some of these also figure in the movie’s mix. The most important are romantic string tunes that evoke more conservative tastes in the community, and strains of jazz, soul, and pop that carve out an eclectic ground between middlebrow mildness and street-level aggressiveness.
The triple-pronged musical approach of Do the Right Thing – rap and hip-hop, melodious strings, time-tested jazz, soul, and pop – conjures up a virtual history of African-American entertainment, reflecting both Spike Lee’s connoisseurship of black music and Bill Lee’s experience as the composer of several folk-jazz operas and as a respected bassist who has played in sessions and combos for many jazz, folk, and pop performances. In addition to their artful clashes with Raheem’s hop-hop, moreover, the folk-orchestral and jazz-soul-pop modes constitute another dialogic cluster in the movie’s sound design. Johnson observes that the folk-opera themes, associated with such older-generation characters as Mother Sister and Da Mayor, use standard tonalities, medium dynamics, and unobtrusive entrances and exits to summon senses of nostalgia for the past and satisfaction with the current status quo, which are attitudes rooted in heritage, community, acceptance, and accommodation with white-dominated society. The black-jazz themes, again associated with Mother Sister and Da Mayor and also with Sal and the mentally disabled Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), suggest values of assertiveness, resistance, black pride, black power, and the wish for social transformation. Interspersed with these elements, the records that Mister Señor Love Daddy broadcasts on 108 FM – ballads, dance music, salsa, reggae, a cappella numbers – stand for inclusiveness, multiculturalism, and the ideal of unity among diverse peoples in a changing and complicated community.
Mister Señor Love Daddy’s roll call of African-American music stars, heard on the soundtrack against a montage of neighborhood views, is a folkloric oral counterpart to the photographic visual pride expressed by the Wall of Fame in the pizzeria. It is no less plugged into the commercial interests of consumerist America, though, and herein lies another of the film’s many dialectical ironies. Buggin Out is right about Sal’s wall: Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Robert De Niro, Liza Minnelli, Al Pacino, Luciano Pavarotti, Bobby Darin, and their ilk bedeck the gallery, but there’s not a “brother” to be found. Brothers abound on Mister Señor Love Daddy’s list, ranging from Little Richard, Chuck D, Janet Jackson, and Stevie Wonder to Thelonious Monk, Otis Redding, Dexter Gordon, Roland Kirk, and beyond.4 Their differences from Sal’s ethnic heroes are grounded in color, style, and audience, not confrontational stances or oppositional politics vis-à-vis the consumers of mass culture. In order to flourish, popular entertainers must maintain an ongoing balance between the contrapuntal values of artistic integrity and commercial bankability, and this goes as much for We Love Radio stars – even for Radio Raheem’s beloved rappers – as for Italian-American icons. Sal’s idols are gods of the big screen, the concert hall, the opera house; 108 FM’s favorites are musicians who thrive on the airwaves, in the jazz clubs, on the stages of jam-packed stadiums. Most of them won’t be heard on Raheem’s boom box, which is reserved for boom box stars – and they too, however abrasive their sounds and subversive their messages, have struck bargains with the capitalist devil in order to be in the marketplace at all. Aesthetically speaking, nobody in Sal’s gallery or on We Love Radio’s list is a radical, a revolutionary, a creative outlier, or an ideological extremist. For them as for everyone in Spike Lee’s America, artistic freedom and establishment success are like the love and hate on Raheem’s hands, forever at odds yet inextricably conjoined. And all of this applies to Spike’s brand of filmmaking, poised as it is between faith in aggressive independence and aspirations to mass-audience popularity.5
Many viewings of Do the Right Thing over many years have confirmed my early impression that the film’s most striking musical moment is one of the most striking cinematic moments as well: the extraordinary single-shot scene in which Sal and his unashamedly racist son Pino have a heart-to-heart talk across a table in the pizzeria. Their economically written, sensitively acted conversation deserves quoting at length:
As the dialogue starts, the music starts as well – a slow, descending piano melody picked up in turn by a violin, a cello, a soprano saxophone, and more violins. The mode becomes more jazzy as the saxophone, piano, and drums kick into freewheeling runs and scalar sheets of sound recalling the improvisational style pioneered by John Coltrane in the late 1950s, rising in pitch and intensity while remaining just muted enough to merge and nearly fuse with the actors’ voices rather than contend or compete with them. These aural elements are calculated to echo the scene’s visuals with unerring accuracy. Sal and Pino are in profile at the table, the pizzeria’s front plate-glass window behind them. At first the camera symmetrically frames the table and the actors from a middle distance; then it gradually tracks toward the table, which grows in proximity and scale as the dialogue becomes more emotional and the music more passionate. The camera stops on a fairly close two-shot of Sal and Pino, and stays in place as the action begins a nuanced shift to the other side of the window, where Smiley arrives with the photographs of Malcolm and King that he peddles intermittently throughout the film. Pino angrily slams his hand against the window to warn Smiley away; when this doesn’t work he gets up and goes outside the building, continuing his harassment of Smiley and verbally sparring with street people outside the camera’s range while Sal sits exhausted and powerless to intervene. The music has not changed much in character, but now its semi-anarchic runs and wails convey the dangerous, almost feral depths of feeling that surge between the characters and within the neighborhood. This scene stands with the most effective of Lee’s career, in its depth of feeling and in its lofty degree of sheer filmmaking craft. It ends with a jolting cut to the first shot of the subsequent scene: Mookie emerging from the shower, pulling back the curtain and hollering a gleeful “Whooo!” I think this is Spike’s shout of triumph at pulling off the virtuoso scene we’ve just watched – a justified burst of self-reflexive cinematic pride.
Returning to Raheem, he is central to a pair of additional scenes that deserve attention. One is the aforementioned sidewalk contest between Public Enemy on his boom box, powered by no fewer than twenty D Energizers, and Rubén Blades on that of a young Hispanic man, evidently driven by a less awesome array of batteries. As the two men pump up the volume bit by bit, Lee does not cut between them in the commonplace shot–countershot editing pattern that most filmmakers would use; instead he swings the camera between them in rapid pans, connoting that these two streetwise, music-savvy guys inhabit the same psychological and sociological world even if they establish and affirm their somewhat different positions through acts of competition and contrast. This scene’s dialectical complement arrives during the climactic confrontation between Raheem and Sal, where Lee cuts almost violently between the enraged men, one armed with a boom box, the other with a baseball bat. A vast cultural gulf now separates them, and Lee drives the point home with great visual force.
Apart from the climax, Raheem’s most memorable moment is surely the “Love and Hate” monologue that he delivers to Mookie during a brief interval in the story. Lee took the concept of the speech from James Agee’s brilliant screenplay for The Night of the Hunter, a classic of American expressionism that was directed by Charles Laughton and released in 1955. The Night of the Hunter stars Robert Mitchum as the Rev. Harry Powell, a psychopathic preacher with the words “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on the fingers of his right and left hands, respectively. Seducing a family with his preacher masquerade, he sees that the little boy has noticed his tattoos, and offers an explanation of sorts – “the story of good and evil” – that Raheem appropriates and adapts to the Brooklyn streets, displaying the keywords not with tattoos but on large rings that resemble brass knuckles. Raheem retains Powell’s message but changes the diction a bit. Samples:
Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) reenacts the story of love and hate in Do the Right Thing, reprising a memorable scene in Charles Laughton’s great melodrama The Night of the Hunter.
Rev. Powell illustrates his spiel by pitting his hands against each other in imitation of the struggle. By contrast, Radio Raheem interlaces his fingers while saying the word Static, and then enacts the conflict as a slugfest, jabbing his four-letter brass knuckles toward the camera like a prizefighter in the ring.
Broadly speaking, Raheem’s monologue accomplishes two things. One is to reaffirm the essentially good nature – the innocence, even – of this burly, lumbering, normally laconic man who appears to have no ambition in life beyond striding the Bed-Stuy streets with the blasting box and “Fight the Power” jive that will soon catalyze ruination for him and anguish for everybody else. He is clearly thrilled by the notion of Love knocking Hate off its pins, and he shares the story with the zeal of an evangelist.
The monologue’s other function is to underscore Raheem’s role as a conduit for cultural currents originating from sources far outside himself, not from a self-generated voice with worthwhile things to say about Brooklyn, or the neighborhood, or Sal’s Famous, or Buggin Out’s boycott, or even the Public Enemy song that leaps from his speakers all day long. His lack of meaningful things to say does not signal a lack of meaningful things to feel and believe and intuitively know, however. Like the Public Enemy song, the words of his monologue come from a source not encompassed by his first-hand experiences: they are spoken by a fictional character – an evil, unhinged character – in a movie made before Raheem was born, and it is anybody’s guess where Raheem first heard them, how he came to memorize them, and why he takes such joy in repeating them. But they are his words now, as much a part of his mind, heart, and spirit as the other sights, sounds, impressions, and influences that flow to him and from him in the course of his daily rounds. After reciting them he addresses Mookie in similar terms:
This exchange quietly foreshadows the paired quotations from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X that appear at the movie’s end. It is thus one of the many politically charged moments that recur throughout the story.
Da Mayor, played by Ossie Davis, is a very sweet, very lackadaisical man, capable of jumping into action when a little boy is about to get mowed down by a car, but mostly concerned with keeping up his supply of Miller High Life or whatever inferior substitute the Korean deli on the block currently stocks. The choice of Davis pays excellent dividends in terms of top-flight acting, and it enriches the film with associations stemming from his off-screen life. He was married to Ruby Dee, who plays Mother Sister, always skeptical of Da Mayor but gradually won over by him; and he was a civil-rights activist who delivered a eulogy at Malcolm X’s funeral, which is printed as an addendum in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and is repeated in part in Lee’s biopic about the leader. In addition to giving Do the Right Thing a considerable portion of its charm, Da Mayor is a walking, talking satire of the man actually reigning over New York City’s government at the time: Edward I. Koch, first elected to the office in 1978 and nearing the end of his third consecutive term. (He ran for a fourthterm in 1989 but lost the Democratic primary to David Dinkins, who then defeated Rudolph Giuliani in the general election, becoming the only African-American mayor the city has had to this day.)
Like many black people, and more than a few white people, Spike Lee had come to dislike Koch intensely, and he hoped Do the Right Thing, slated for release not long before the start of the campaign season, would help to bring him down. “In terms of the racial climate in the city at that time, Mayor Koch had really polarized a lot of New Yorkers,” he said later. “We knew that when the film came out, it would be right before the Democratic primary for mayor. We felt that we could have a little bit of influence . . . and every time we could nail Koch, we would” (Aftab 76). The presence of Da Mayor is one such gesture, and a mild one, linking “mayor” with a harmless, even likable, but clearly ineffectual and shiftless old codger. Another jibe at Koch is Sonny’s exaggerated impersonation of his thumbs-up, “How’m I doin’?” way of greeting the public during the interlude of direct-to-camera racial epithets in the film – this is one slur Spike agrees with and approves. Even the African-American cultural critic Armond White, normally a Spike Lee skeptic, calls Do the Right Thing “the movie [he] was born to make” and cites its anti-Koch activism as one of its main virtues. “Do the Right Thing didn’t just sum up frustration with Ed Koch’s legacy of neglect and implicit disdain,” White wrote in 2006, “it did groundwork for the upcoming David Dinkins term and strengthened what little resistance there would be to the hostility of the upcoming Rudy Giuliani putsch.”
Another, more controversial political gesture is the sight of “TAWANA TOLD THE TRUTH” spelled out in huge spray-painted letters on a wall in the scene where Mookie tells his sister Jade to stay away from Sal and the pizzeria. Tawana Brawley was a fifteen-year-old black girl who lived with her family in Wappingers Falls, New York, a Dutchess County town fifty miles north of New York City with a hundred black residents and five thousand white ones. After disappearing for four days in 1987, she was discovered “curled in a fetal position inside a plastic bag behind an apartment house,” in the words of a New York Times report.
Miss Brawley, who is black, had been beaten. “Nigger” and “‘KKK” had been written in charcoal or marker on her torso, feces had been smeared across her body and her hair had been chopped off, the police said. She later told her family and law-enforcement authorities that she had been abducted and sexually assaulted by six white men – one of whom wore a police badge. (Iverem)
The case stirred up enormous public outrage and curiosity, only to become an enduring and contentious mystery when Brawley took the advice of her advisers and attorneys to end cooperation withthose investigating her claims. A grand jury discredited her claims in 1988, reporting “an avalanche of evidence that [she] had fabricated her tale of abduction and sexual assault in the hands of a gang of racist white men” and had “concocted the degrading condition in which she was found . . . by smearing herself with feces, writing racial slurs on her body and faking a traumatized daze” (McFadden). This conclusion was based on hundreds of exhibits and thousands of pages’ worth of testimony to the effect that when she was found her clothing but not her body was burned; she showed no evidence of being malnourished; the racial epithets were written upside down as if she had scrawled them herself; and more along these lines.
Spike’s show of support via the prominently displayed graffiti accords with the perspective of commentators such as Patricia Williams, who wrote that the teenager “has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her – and even if she did it to herself” (169–70). The name Tawana Brawley in the film stands for all of the African-American girls and women who have been physically brutalized, psychologically traumatized, and spiritually dehumanized during centuries of enslavement and second-class citizenship. Some critics raked Lee predictably over the coals for promoting the “truth” of what they considered a manifestly false tale, but he stood by his words. “No one is ever going to find out what the true story is,” he said during a college appearance in Dutchess County in 2001, “but I still find it hard to believe that Tawana Brawley, at that age, would have covered herself with feces and thrown herself in a garbage bag” (Rush et al.). I find it hard to agree with Lee’s defense of the girl’s literal truth, and even he has hedged his bet at times, as when he said on the 2001 commentary track for The Criterion Collection’s release of Do the Right Thing on DVD that “the slogan was not a show of support” but was simply “the kind of statement he thought would be spray-painted on a wall in Brooklyn in 1989” (Aftab 75). Be this as it may, Williams’s vindication of Brawley’s story as symbolic, sociohistorical truth is valid and compelling for me. Whether or not Tawana faked her ordeal, Lee’s film unfolds a larger truth about the oppression visited on black women and men ever since their forced arrival on the North American continent.
The most meaningful and dialectical of all the political elements in Do the Right Thing are found in the four documents that appear in succession between the last scene in the story and the start of the closing credits. The first and second are texts quoted from speeches by two African-American leaders; the third is a photograph; the fourth is Lee’s dedication of the film.
The quotations from the civil-rights leaders have such weight and dignity that they deserve to be quoted in full. The first is a paragraph from the Nobel Lecture delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on December 11, 1964, during the ceremonies marking his receipt of that year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in the American civil-rights movement:
Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. (King)
The second comes from a speech by Malcolm X titled “Communication and Reality,” which he delivered to an assembly of domestic Peace Corps volunteers on December 12, 1964, a little more than three months before his assassination on February 21, 1965 at the age of thirty-nine:
I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence. (X 313)
These are characteristic statements by their respective speakers, setting forth complementary positions on the question of violence in the cause of human rights. If analysis went no further, their appearance here would represent the kind of “balanced” discourse habitually brokered by mainstream movies, public-broadcasting outlets, and the establishment press.
The statements are not neutrally presented, however. Their order on the screen frames Malcolm’s avowal as a response and a risposte to King’s declaration, signaling Lee’s greater allegiance to Malcolm’s call for “self-defense” and “intelligence” than to King’s warning about the “bitterness” and “brutality” produced by violent action. Malcolm’s words gain still more emphasis from their obvious relevance to the lengthy narrative and harrowing climax preceding them: moviegoers (especially white ones) have been asking since the film’s premiere why Mookie throws the garbage can that sparks the riot that destroys Sal’s place of business, and part of the answer lies in the film’s vivid depiction of smoldering tensions and overpowering emotions that inevitably tilt the black community’s default position toward the urgent need for self-defense rather than the time-consuming processes of dialogue and understanding across racial lines. And of course we now know that Lee would complete a massive biopic about his hero Malcolm just three years later.
The third of the film’s concluding documents is a photograph showing the two leaders sharing a warm handshake with broad smiles on their faces – the “Malcolm and Martin” photo that Smiley, representing the inarticulate masses in the film, has been peddling in their neighborhood throughout the story. From all appearances, this is public-broadcasting discourse in its purest form, setting up a contest between conflicting points of view and then offering a “balanced” and “even-handed” perspective that “resolves” the conflict in emotionally appealing pseudo-utopian terms. But once again Lee’s dialectical imagination is at work. The photo’s content is clear: two giants and rivals of the civil-rights crusade setting aside their differences in a moment of mutual respect, understanding, and goodwill. What complicates the moment, however, is the fact that Malcolm and King met and were photographed together only this single time during their careers, and the encounter itself lasted only a minute. Describing it on the occasion of Malcolm’s eighty-fifth birthday in 2010, journalist John Blake wrote that King was leaving a news conference one afternoon when Malcolm stepped out of the crowd and approached him. “Malcolm X, the African-American Muslim leader who once called King ‘Rev. Dr. Chicken-wing,’ extended his hand and smiled. ‘Well, Malcolm, good to see you,’ King said after taking Malcolm X’s hand. ‘Good to see you,’ Malcolm X replied as both men broke into huge grins while . . . photographers snapped pictures.”
Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith) displays his lovingly adorned photo of “Martin and Malcolm” in Do the Right Thing.
This information about the photo’s provenance short-circuits any interpretation putting too much stress on ideological agreement or personal closeness between the men. Yet to dismiss the image as a product of mere historical happenstance – and to dismiss its appearance in the film as a sort of dark inside joke on Lee’s part – is also a mistake, since the two leaders actually were moving toward greater agreement on strategies and tactics in the movement they both served. “Malcolm X was becoming more like King – and King was becoming more like him,” Blake wrote, citing historian David Howard-Pitney’s conclusion that Malcolm was “moderating from his earlier position” while King was becoming “more militant” in his views. Blake’s account continues,
Malcolm X was reaching out to King even before he broke away from the Nation of Islam and embraced Sunni Islam after a pilgrimage to Mecca, says Andrew Young, a member of King’s inner circle at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group King headed.
“Even before his trip to Mecca, Malcolm used to come by the SCLC’s office,” Young says. “Unfortunately, Dr. King was never there when he came.”
All of these considerations were surely on Lee’s mind when he planned the last moments of the film, and also when he prefaced the published screenplay (although not the movie itself) with words from The Autobiography of Malcolm X that again deserve quoting in full:
The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors – in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy! It is a miracle that the American Black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man’s heaven! The miracle is that the white man’s puppet Negro “leaders,” his preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees, and others who have been allowed to wax fat off their black poor brothers, have been able to hold the black masses quiet until now. (X and Haley 251; Lee with Jones 1989, 120)
In a 1993 interview, the politically concerned critics Gary Crowdus and Dan Georgakas told Lee that they saw not a contradiction but rather a “dialectical tension” between Malcolm and King, and that near the end of his life Malcolm seemed to be saying to white leaders and citizens, “You’d better deal with King, because, if you don’t, you’ll have to deal with me.” Lee readily agreed with this analysis, saying that Malcolm’s work complemented and supported King’s work, and that Malcolm wanted King to know that. Lee also looked back at the quotations that concluded Do the Right Thing four years earlier. “I wasn’t saying it was one or the other,” he remarked. “I think one can form a synthesis of both. When Malcolm was assassinated, I think they were trying to find a common ground, a plan they could both work on” (75). But time ran out, regrettably for them and for us all.
Dedication
The last text to appear in Do the Right Thing is the dedication of the film: “Dedicated to the families of Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Griffith, Arthur Miller, Edmund Perry, Yvonne Smallwood, Michael Stewart.” All were African-American residents of New York City, and all died wrongful deaths – like Radio Raheem in the film – at the hands of white people.
Eleanor Bumpurs died at age sixty-six on October 29, 1984, shot twice with a 12-gauge shotgun while authorities were evicting her from her Bronx apartment. The mentally ill woman owed about $400 in back rent. You hear her name from the crowd during the confrontation between the residents and the pizzeria guys after Raheem’s death. (Her name is misspelled “Bumpers” in the dedication.)
Michael Griffith lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant and died in the Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach on December 20, 1986, hit by a car after leaving a pizzeria and being chased onto a highway by white men chasing him and his companions with baseball bats. He was twenty-three years old, and his death sparked enormous protests in the black community. Attorneys for Griffith and the other victims included the Rev. Al Sharpton, mocked by Vito as “the Reverend Mister Do, Al Sharp-tone,” in the film, as well as Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, famously combative lawyers centrally involved in the Tawana Brawley case. Twelve people (not including the driver of the car, who wasn’t at fault) were indicted on charges related to the death; three primary defendants were convicted of second-degree manslaughter and six others were found guilty of lesser offenses. In the film, the mob trashing the pizzeria starts a chant of “Power to the people,” a phrase often heard in youth protests of the 1960s, but it soon changes to “Howard Beach! Howard Beach!”
Arthur Miller, a construction contractor and community-development leader, was choked to death by police in 1978 after a traffic stop in the Crown Heights neighborhood. The incident led a local minister, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, to establish the Black United Front, a Brooklyn political organization that has expanded in subsequent years to become the National Black United Front with headquarters in Chicago.
Edmund Perry, a seventeen-year-old graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, was preparing to attend Stanford University on a scholarship when he was shot and killed by a plainclothes police officer in the Morningside Park neighborhood of Manhattan on June 12, 1985. The policeman was cleared of wrongdoing when witnesses supported his assertion that Perry and another man were trying to mug him.
Yvonne Smallwood, twenty-eight years old, entered a dispute between a livery-cab driver and police and traffic agents that resulted in her arrest on December 3, 1987 on charges of assault, resisting arrest, obstructing government administration, and disorderly conduct. She died in custody at a Queens hospital six days later. Friends said she had been severely beaten by police. Nobody was indicted by the Bronx grand jury who considered the case, but the African-American official David Dinkins, then president of the Borough of Manhattan and soon to be the New York City mayor, called it “one in a long list of shameful incidents involving abuses against minority people by the New York City Police Department and the Transit Authority Police” (Uhlig).
Michael Stewart was twenty-five when he was arrested by Transit Police on September 15, 1983 for spray-painting graffiti on a Manhattan subway-station wall. He lay in a coma for thirteen days before dying. The city’s chief medical examiner averred that death did not result from injuries suffered while in custody; a month later he amended his report in the face of massive public uproar over the report. The new version stated that the decedent had collapsed while in police custody and died from a physical injury to the spine in the upper neck, but the medical examiner would not say what might have caused the injury. All officers involved were cleared of all charges by a grand jury in 1985. Two years later, an audit report from the city comptroller stated that Transit Police officers had acted with excessive force (Chronopoulos 113). Stewart’s name is also heard from the crowd when the neighbors confront Sal and his sons right after Raheem’s death.
This roll call stands in melancholy contrast to the list of African-American greats spoken by Mister Señor Love Daddy and the collage of Italian-American greats celebrated on Sal’s wall. None of these slain New Yorkers could be called great in a conventional sense, but in Spike Lee’s America their memory lives on.
Natural Violence
The violent climax of Do the Right Thing was directly inspired by the mournful histories of the six dedicatees along with other, less imposing factors. Spike attributed the idea that “people get crazy when it’s hot” partly to a TV episode of The Twilight Zone wherein a scientist proves that “the murder rate goes up after the temperature hits ninety-five degrees,” and Raheem’s confrontation with Sal recalls “a big incident in Brooklyn College, where black students and white students were fighting over what music was being played on the jukebox” (Aftab 76). But background details like these have not subdued the ongoing debate about the tone, appropriateness, and meaning of the melee.
Perhaps the most frequently raised question is why Mookie throws the garbage can through his employer’s window, thereby touching off a riot that might otherwise not have happened. One theory is that Mookie does it for altruistic reasons. “At the moment of Mookie’s decision,” suggests art theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, who entertains other hypotheses as well, “the mob is wavering between attacking the pizzeria and assaulting its Italian-American owners. Mookie’s act directs the violence away from persons and toward property, the only choice available in that moment. Mookie ‘does the right thing,’ saving human lives by sacrificing property” (897). That’s a nice try, but when I put the idea to Spike on a Monitor Channel broadcast in 1989, he scoffed at it. Until that moment, he said, Mookie is designed to be the nice black guy whom white people would take home for dinner, so when he shouts “Hate!” and smashes the window, white people feel more comfortable thinking he’s doing it for them.
Mitchell is on much stronger ground when he writes that on the scene’s most fundamental level, Lee does the right thing by “breaking the illusion of cinematic realism and intervening as the director of his own work of public art, taking personal responsibility for the decision to portray and perform a public act of violence against private property.” The decisive action by Lee/Mookie liberates the film’s climax from cause-and-effect logic and political-justice morality, allowing it to become “a piece of Brechtian theater,” which is to say, “a pure effect of this work of art in this moment and place.” The conclusion Mitchell draws from this strikes me as exactly right:
We may call Do the Right Thing a piece of “violent public art,” then, in all the relevant senses – as a representation, an act, and a weapon of violence. But it is a work of intelligent violence, to echo the words of Malcolm X that conclude the film. It does not repudiate the alternative of nonviolence articulated by Martin Luther King in the film’s other epigraph (this is, after all, a film, a symbolic and not a “real” act of violence); it resituates both violence and nonviolence as strategies within a struggle that is simply an ineradicable fact of American public life. . . . The film exerts a violence on its viewers, badgering us to “fight the power” and “do the right thing,” but it never underestimates the difficulty of rightly locating the power to be fought, or the right strategy for fighting it. . . . Like the Goddess of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, the film confronts the disfigured public image of legitimate power, holding out the torch of liberty with two hands, one inscribed with HATE, the other with LOVE. (897–8)
For me the scene’s violence is not only intelligent but also natural, in the sense put forth by social philosopher Paul Goodman in his essay “Natural Violence,” first published in 1945. There he distinguishes between two kinds of violence. “Natural” violence is rooted in human nature and erupts spontaneously out of deep-seated drives, as when parents use violence to defend their children against physical attack. “Unnatural” violence is artificially provoked, as when a government whips up desire for war against a country that poses no immediate threat. Natural violence sets in motion “the destruction of habits or second natures” so that contact can be regained with “primary experiences” such as “grief and mourning for death,” which are affects felt profoundly by the Bed-Stuy crowd after Raheem’s murder. “Deeper than their fears,” Goodman continues, “civilized people yearn for and welcome” catastrophes that “strip them of their possessions and touch routine to the quick.” If the rioters in Do the Right Thing are anarchic, they are so in the sense meant by Goodman when he likens an anarchistic situation to a “fertile vacuum . . . where heavy masses fall of their own weight and . . . seeds germinate.” The true anarchist, Goodman concludes, “speaks a word that heals as it violates” (26–8). I think the “word that heals as it violates” must sound very much like “intelligence.”
MO’ BETTER BLUES
Once you become aware of this force for [order in the universe and] unity in life . . . you can’t ever forget it. It becomes part of everything you do. . . . My goal on meditating on this through music, however, remains the same. And that is to uplift people, as much as I can. To inspire them to realize more and more of their capacities for living meaningful lives. Because there certainly is meaning to life. – John Coltrane, 1965 (Hentoff)
The working title for Lee’s next film was “Love Supreme,” borrowed from one of John Coltrane’s most progressive, popular, and unprecedented jazz recordings. This was changed to Mo’ Better Blues early in the film’s production process, but both titles signal the movie’s main subject: music and musicians. Spike asked Universal for a budget of $11.5 million but received only $10 million, thanks to the poor box-office performances of Bertrand Tavernier’s ’Round Midnight (1986), starring tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon as a jazz musician, and Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988), starring Forest Whitaker as Charlie Parker, the greatest sax player of them all. This was still the healthiest budget of any Spike Lee joint to date (Aftab 109), but it’s ironic that Lee, who considers jazz “the music [he feels] closest to,” intensely disliked the films that indirectly cramped his jazz movie’s funding. “Every musician I know hated Bird,” he says in his book on Mo’ Better Blues, adding, “Not only was the tone grim, but the film was so dark you couldn’t see a damn thing. . . . On all fronts, Bird just rang false.” He finds Tavernier’s film “slightly better,” but still a narrow view of a black musician through white filmmakers’ eyes (Lee with Jones 1990, 39).
The protagonist of Mo’ Better Blues is Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington), a Brooklyn jazz trumpeter who “enjoys a life of laid-back hedonism,” as Owen Gleiberman (1990) puts it in his review, which goes on to summarize the plot:
Bleek, who whiles away the afternoons practicing, leads his quintet through nightly sets at a plush local club and Ping-Pongs between two women who adore him – the modest, devoted Indigo (played by the director’s sister, Joie Lee, who bears a disarming resemblance to Prince), and Clarke (Cynda Williams), a flirtatious beauty who sees right through him ….
With a poster of legendary jazzman John Coltrane looking on, trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington) gives his little boy Miles (Zakee L. Howze) a music lesson in Mo’ Better Blues.
Onstage, the Bleek Quintet are inheritors of many decades of hipster showmanship. . . . Offstage, they’re black urban professionals (buppies) who live in sleek, expensive pads. What they’ve grown past (what, some might say, Lee wipes clean) is the fabled decadence of the jazz life: the drugs and the excess . . . .
Bleek, a control freak, needs to dominate every relationship he’s in. Now his girlfriends are getting fed up with him, and he has been drawn into an explosive rivalry with his saxophone player, Shadow Henderson (the terrific Wesley Snipes), a more flamboyant – and maybe more talented – musician than he is. Their conflict springs in part from Bleek’s loyalty to the band’s flaky manager, Giant (Spike Lee), a compulsive gambler who loses thousands betting on baseball games when he should be out negotiating a better contract for his clients ….
Bleek eventually suffers a beating that permanently damages his lip, ending his career but inducing him to reinvent himself as a dependable husband and parent. The first part of Coltrane’s composition, “Acknowledgment,” swells on the soundtrack during the last part of the film, a montage sequence that shows and celebrates Bleek’s new dedication to home and family. We are encouraged to see this as the love supreme that has hitherto been missing from his life.
The significance of this musical choice extends far beyond its connection with the main character’s profession. Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme with his classic quartet in December 1964 and Impulse! Records released it in February 1965. It is a four-part suite with a strong spiritual agenda, of which Spike was very much aware. “The album is . . . a very spiritual work,” he writes in the movie’s companion volume, “and I used it as inspiration for the film. The love in A Love Supreme goes beyond romantic love. It’s love for God and the human community” (Lee with Jones 1990, 42).
To his disappointment, however, Coltrane’s widow, Alice Coltrane, denied permission to use “Love Supreme” as the movie’s title. Lee explained in 1991 that
Mrs Coltrane, who’s a very spiritual person, felt that because of the profanity and nudity in [the film], it would not be in her late husband’s best interest to allow us to use the title of Love Supreme. She felt that Love Supreme was her husband’s most spiritual song. And she said, “Spike, any other title you could have had. But not Love Supreme.” And we obeyed her wishes. If I had the choice between the song and the title, I was just happy that she still let us use the song. (Lee and Gates 1991, 191)
Searching for a different title, Lee considered borrowing the title that jazz bassist Charles Mingus gave to his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, and then chose Variations on the Mo’ Better Blues because it “sounds like the title of a jazz composition.” This was shortened to Mo’ Better Blues at the behest of Universal Pictures and Spike’s personal advisers.
Perhaps bearing out the Coltrane estate’s misgivings, “the mo’ better” is a slang term for sex. “One day I want to write a book containing every single expression for making love,” Spike says in his book on the film. “There must be a million of them. Number one on my list is ‘the mo’ better’” (Lee with Jones 1990, 42). This said, however, Lee’s use of “making love” in this passage softens the sensual import of “the mo’ better” and implies the “spiritual” dimension that sexuality can have when love, gentleness, and humanity are also present. Music from Coltrane’s composition is heard only when those qualities are enabling Bleek to get his life back together via marriage, the birth of a son, and a sincere commitment to respectable middle-class domesticity.
Uplift
I know that I want to produce beautiful music, music that does things to people that they need. Music that will uplift, and make them happy. – John Coltrane, 1962 (Wilmer)
It is nonetheless reasonable to ask whether the finale of Mo’ Better Blues, affirming Bleek’s new allegiance to home and family, represents the kind of inspiration and “uplift” that Coltrane identified as his aspiration when creating A Love Supreme and Meditations, a 1965 recording (released in 1966) that he called an “extension” of the former piece. Since his music of this period evokes his ever-evolving conception of a “force” that brings unity and order to the cosmos (Hentoff), transplanting it into a movie should not be done casually or carelessly. My answer is that Lee’s use of A Love Supreme is wholly appropriate. Although the soaring splendor of “Acknowledgment” has (like other late Coltrane recordings) an all-embracing sublimity that only a few masterpieces of world cinema (none of them by Lee) can claim to equal, the conclusion of Mo’ Better Blues is earnest and enthralling enough to justify the superb music accompanying it.
That said, however, the word “uplift” has a history that casts ironic light on the film’s finale, if not on the music that Coltrane created in accordance with his concept of the term. The idea of uplift is “consistent with the imagery of transcendence in Coltrane’s work,” culture historian James C. Hall observes – another Coltrane album from this period is called Ascension – and it is further consistent with “a whole body of African-American folk material on ‘rising’ and ‘flying.’” Yet the word “uplift” also reflects what Hall describes as “a (black) middle-class ideology of mobility and change,” which holds that “moral perfection, entrepreneurial aptitude, and leadership” provide vehicles by means of which “the race can be raised up.” For many people, Hall continues, this ideology has been a stimulus to “getting on with the business of bourgeois acquisition,” and even its more spiritualized forms can lead toward “the (potentially) comfortable complacency” of middle-class religiosity. Hall therefore concludes that the music’s deservedly hailed aesthetic and spiritual qualities do not preclude a sense “that the recording and composition [are] just slightly behind the social relevance curve” (142). For me this recalls sociologist Todd Gitlin’s analysis of “individual subjectivity” ideologies of the 1960s, which “not only stabilized shaky selves, they had the side value of channeling devotees back to conventional middle-class existence, giving them rationales for putting aside the travails of politics” (412).
The manner in which Bleek resolves his problems and regenerates his life – which is to say, the manner in which Spike Lee resolves Bleek’s problems, ties up the narrative, and offers uplift to the audience – is to elevate and venerate precisely the conventional middle-class existence of which Gitlin speaks. The sociopolitical conservatism of this gambit is reinforced by the cautionary thrust of the story as a whole, which follows the well-established Hollywood pattern of associating jazz with decadence and instability. “Spike Lee was acting within prescribed cultural/cinematic practice,” observes Krin Gabbard, a scholar of film and jazz, “when he equated the jazz life with self-destructiveness (the attack upon Bleek’s mouth is the most gripping moment in the film) and then indicated his hero’s redeemed masculinity through the perennially effective spectacles of a wedding and the birth of a child” (57). So incompatible are jazz creativity and middle-class respectability in the eyes of mainstream cinema that Lee himself declares, “I really don’t think Bleek could have been a happily married family man if it weren’t for the accident” that ruins his embouchure and ends his musical career (Lee with Jones 1990, 68; Gabbard 57). Lee doesn’t even allow the jazz life to offer Bleek a meaningful network of professional peers; there is “no real jazz community in Mo’ Better Blues outside of Bleek and his sidemen,” Gabbard points out, and Bleek never interacts with a musical mentor or “strong poet,” in literary critic Harold Bloom’s terminology (Gabbard 56).
Lee has defended the bourgeois leanings of Mo’ Better Blues with a variation of his counterargument against the charge that Do the Right Thing presents a Sesame Street version of the African-American ghetto, garnishing it with another potshot at his jazz-movie bêtes noires, as in this exchange with the African-American cultural scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.:
I think the fairy-tale quality adduced by Gates and others is precisely what rescues Mo’ Better Blues from the quicksand of middle-class conformity and conservatism that might otherwise swallow it up. Losing touch with reality can be a salutary maneuver when the reality at hand is a matter of “didactic effect” rather than complex, conflicted social truth. The aesthetics and the ideology of Mo’ Better Blues are of a piece: conventional, comfortable, and as inescapably square as its protagonist is ostensibly hip. This is both the movie’s fatal flaw and the source of its enduring charm.
Moe and Josh
An accusation Lee has found harder to fend off centers on the anti-Semitic bigotry that numerous critics see in his treatment of the comic characters named Moe and Josh Flatbush, owners of a jazz club in Mo’ Better Blues. The case against Moe and Josh, who are played by the real-life brothers John and Nicholas Turturro, was summarized well by critic Caryn James in a New York Times article:
The Flatbush brothers [are] loaded with despicable traits typically used to disparage Jews. . . . They become rich by gouging others; they are deceitful; when challenged they threaten to sue. In thick New York-Jewish accents they accuse the underpaid black musicians of “trying to take food from my children’s mouth.”… These caricatures are wildly out of synch with the film’s other roles. The blacks . . . are flatly depicted, but unintentionally so. The other white characters . . . are relatively harmless clichés. . . . But the Flatbush brothers are the film’s villains, their greed inseparable from their Jewish identity. And because there are no other Jews to offset them, they become tokens of an entire ethnic group.
James also quoted the Anti-Defamation League, which declared that the Jewish characters “dredge up an age-old and highly dangerous form of anti-Semitic stereotyping” and expressed its disappointment “that Spike Lee – whose success is largely due to his efforts to break down racial stereotypes and prejudice – has employed the same kind of tactics that he supposedly deplores” (1990a). Among other dubious achievements, the Flatbush brothers brought forth a lot of colorful language from movie critics: David Ansen called them “shylocks” in Newsweek (1990), and James herself described them as “money-grubbing, envious, ugly stereotypes with sharks’ smiles” in her Times review (1990b).
“Many people who know [Lee] only from the pages of The New York Times,” another observer wrote, “have decided that he is a vicious and dangerous anti-Semite who panders to Black racism and allies himself with divisive people like the Reverend Al Sharpton” (Stone). Cultural critic Jerome Christensen, whose analysis of Lee’s work owes little to opinions in the Times, reached a similar conclusion via more imaginative reasoning. He regards the “crude . . . vulgar” prejudice in Mo’ Better Blues as an expression of Lee’s “dramatized opposition” to Hollywood in general and Universal Pictures in particular, using the club owners as “stand-ins for the parasitic Jewish moneymen (for example, Lew Wasserman of Universal) who run the film studios.” Through these caricatures Lee assures us that while he may be bankrolled by Universal and its ilk, this circumstance “does not soil his art or compromise his independence” any more than the vile club owners contaminate Bleek’s integrity. Lee’s opposition to the studio system is a fantasy and a fraud, however, because in Christensen’s view that system is in terminal disorder anyway, captive to corporate conglomerates whose movies are merely vehicles for image management and product plugs. It follows that Lee can both “do business with the studios and maintain his independence” because, Christensen concludes, “they share the same social ontology (in the glitzy Mo’ Better Blues every shot is either derived from or destined for a television commercial) and belong to the same corporate intertext: Forty Acres and A Mule aspires to the status of Touchstone Pictures; Spike’s Joint is a nascent Disney World” (590).
Lee refutes the anti-Semitism charge by invoking yet again his claim that black films, or at least his films, should receive a sort of educational exemption from the requirements of ordinary Hollywood practice. His most prominent statement on Moe and Josh appeared in a New York Times article titled “I Am Not an Anti-Semite” (1990), which reads in part:
There is a double standard at work in the accusations of anti-Semitism….
Negative images of black people are presented on film and television every day and there is no great uproar….
Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that Moe and Josh Flatbush are stereotypes. Let’s compare their 10 minutes of screen time with 100 years of Hollywood cinema. . . . I’ve gotten more press for being a “racist” and an “anti-Semitic” filmmaker for the 10 minutes of Moe and Josh than a slew of really racist, anti-Semitic filmmakers . . . .
[I]f critics are telling me that to avoid charges of anti-Semitism, all Jewish characters . . . have to be model citizens, . . . that’s unrealistic and unfair.
As always, Spike sticks to his guns. I have no interest in defending Moe and Josh, but they seem to me such one-dimensional cartoons that I can’t get worked up over them. On the larger issue of racial and ethnic stereotyping as an offensive weapon and a dispenser of offensiveness, I’ll give the last word to the African-American political commentator Clarence Page, who weighed in more than once on Mo’ Better Blues. After opining that the picture “stereotypes almost every group in it, including the blacks it is supposed to be about,” Page (1990) wrote that Spike’s defense reminds him of “white filmmakers who have waxed nervously defensive when accused of stereotyping blacks as clowns, Italians as criminals, Jews as greedy, homosexuals as swishy, Asian women as geishas or Native American Indians as savages, to name just a few Hollywood standards. Surely brother Spike does not think the sins of whites now allow blacks to commit the same sins.” A year later, when Newsweek ran a cover story about Lee’s just-released Jungle Fever, Page (1991) returned to the subject, noting that nineteen feature films by black directors – more than the total output of the preceding ten years – were slated for release in 1991. “But the new clout of Hollywood’s new ‘black pack’ brings with it new responsibilities and new choices,” he continued.
One hopes, for example, that the new black directors will do as Lee has done in demanding that craft union jobs and other positions be opened up to blacks. . . . And one also hopes Hollywood’s new black moguls will be sensitive enough about stereotypes to set new standards of sensitivity, if sensitivity in Hollywood is not too much of a contradiction.
Bigger-Budget Blues
Among the criticisms relating to both substance and style in Mo’ Better Blues, some of the most crisply stated come from Ed Guerrero, a practiced observer of minority cinema who understands the double bind faced by a staunchly independent filmmaker who starts plugging more directly into patterns and practices of mainstream film. “Lee’s films have grown progressively larger in budget,” Guerrero wrote in 1991, “more consonant with industry production standards and dominant cinema’s narrative and visual conventions, more persistent in seeking out the appreciation of a broad popular audience.” Like all of Lee’s films since She’s Gotta Have It, he continues, Mo’ Better Blues demonstrates that “films made about the black world from a black point of view can appeal to a heterogeneous popular audience.” Lee pays a heavy price, however, infecting the film with a “trite sense of nostalgia” that flows from its “romanticized view of black music, its slick glossy images and its opulent overripe sense of visual beauty.” More sweepingly, Guerrero finds the film guilty of flirting with temptations to convert potentially resistant modes of style, story, language, and music into specimens and servants of the “dominant cinema paradigm” (2).
It seems to me that Guerrero’s reasoning builds a double bind of its own, calling for African-American narratives to set forth “an honest, uncoopted perspective” and finding Lee wanting in this area, yet conceptualizing the “plural, multiverse experience” of “the vast social construct we call ‘blackness’” in a manner that subsumes such films as John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet (1984) and Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1985), both written, directed, and creatively controlled by white filmmakers. Guerrero even damps down his skepticism about Lee by acknowledging that Spike has succeeded in expressing an auteurist vision while mobilizing “enough money, talent and resources to make a brilliant series of diverse feature films exploring his commitment to the African American experience.” Concluding his survey of black film in the early 1990s by comparing the trope of “the young boy struggling to learn the trumpet” in Mo’ Better Blues and in Charles Burnett’s marvelous 1990 drama To Sleep with Anger, Guerrero prefers the latter for its “finely tuned independent vision,” yet winds up heaping praise upon Mo’ Better Blues as well, since it too reveals “the truth of the blues idiom so relevant to black life and cinema, that of creativity and grace shaped under pressure of limitation” (3, 2).
I cite the zigs and zags of Guerrero’s analysis not to discredit it but rather to illustrate the perils that even smart, dedicated criticism can encounter when it tries to measure values like honesty, authenticity, autonomy, and cooptation in terms of “dichotomies or dualities” determined by “black ‘independent’ cinema,” on the one hand, and “the ‘mainstream’ employment of black creativity in the dominant studio system,” on the other (2). Mo’ Better Blues and every other Spike Lee film is a work of artful synthesis, modifying Hollywood-derived elements of camera and editing style, dialogue and narrative structure, character development, and so on, with an array of inflections, mannerisms, eccentricities, and idiosyncrasies distinctive enough to be widely recognized as Spike’s personal (auteurist) signatures. Although he has never made a movie as radically individualistic as, say, Burnett’s remarkable debut feature Killer of Sheep (1979) or Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993), even a comparatively tame and well-behaved joint such as Mo’ Better Blues expresses more about contemporary African-American experience than almost any blaxploitation melodrama (e.g., Barry Shear’s Across 110th Street, 1972), black chop-socky (Jack Starrett’s Cleopatra Jones, 1973), black horror film (William Crain’s Blacula, 1972), black western (Jack Arnold’s Boss Nigger, 1975), black crime film (Larry Cohen’s Black Caesar, 1973), black pimp movie (Michael Campus’s The Mack, 1973), black vigilante picture (Jack Hill’s Coffy, 1973), black biker movie (Matt Cimber’s The Black Six, 1974), black policier (Gordon Parks’s Shaft, 1971), et cetera, ever to reach the screen.
I choose those examples from the 1970s to recall that when Spike Lee was growing up, “black movies” were almost always made by white men who unambiguously aimed to redirect African-American energies, talents, subjects, and subjectivities toward the explicitly commercial aims of an industry almost entirely dedicated to the purpose of filling white men’s pockets with money. While calculating the relative merits of a particular trope as handled by Spike Lee and Charles Burnett is a worthwhile exercise in narrative aesthetics, the baseline against which both filmmakers should be assessed is the mostly appalling state of “black movies” before they and a handful of peers gained the opportunity and wherewithal to put their skills into practice, sparking a transformative moment in black cinema. The ensuing developments were spearheaded most conspicuously by Lee in the crucial years when Do the Right Thing brought his work to the attention of a large mainstream audience and Mo’ Better Blues confirmed the staying power that has made him a unique presence in American cinema. His accomplishments are rife with impurities, but stressing these too strongly slights his distinctively progressive impact on American popular culture.
My original review of Mo ’Better Blues in The Christian Science Monitor (1990) anticipated some of the complaints leveled against the film after its release. The performances “often seem more jokey than pungent,” I wrote,
and Lee’s camera keeps cutting away, trying to work up rhythms that should grow spontaneously from the acting and dialogue. Some scenes of violence . . . are handled with a half-humorous quality that doesn’t work as comedy or irony. The whole plot wanders, moreover, to the point where you sometimes wonder where it’s going and what it has on its mind. And when you find out, it isn’t always worththe wait.
On the plus side I felt that “even its weakest moments show no evidence that Lee is ignoring his own vision or catering to mass audiences.” I wouldn’t claim today that Spike didn’t have mass audiences very much in mind, but I reaffirm my opinion that “even his second-best work has an awful lot going for it.”
