It’s readily apparent by now that Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is something of a Rorschach test as well as an ideological litmus test, and not only for the critics. It’s hard to think of another movie from the past several years that has elicited as much heated debate about what it says and what it means, and it’s heartening as well as significant that the picture stirring up all this talk is not a standard Hollywood feature. Because the arguments that are currently being waged about the film are in many ways as important as the film itself, and a lot more important than the issues being raised by other current releases, it seems worth looking at them again in closer detail. I don’t mean to review the movie a second time, but I do want to address some of the deeper questions being raised by it. Ultimately most of these questions have something to do with language and the way we’re accustomed to talking about certain things–race relations and violence as well as movies in general.
I don’t think that the people making these arguments automatically or necessarily assume that a pizzeria is worth more than a human life, but I do think that our everyday use of the word “violence” tends to foster such an impression. There are times when our language becomes so overloaded with ideological assumptions that, however we use certain terms, they wind up speaking more than we do.
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Stepping outside the immediate context of the film for a minute, consider the appropriateness of terms like “black” and “white”–terms that we’ve somehow managed to arrive at by default rather than through any sharpening precision in our use of language. The evidence that our senses give us is that so-called “white” people aren’t white at all, but varying gradations of brown and pink, while most so-called “black” people in the U.S. are varying gradations of brown and tan. Thus the skin tones in question aren’t nearly as oppositional as the words that we use make them out to be. (It could be argued that capitalizing “black” only increases the confusion by further validating the concept behind the term as opposed to the visual reality.) A major reason why “Negro” ceased to be an acceptable word during the 60s was the belief that it was a “white” word and concept; unfortunately, “black” is a term that makes sense in a racial context only in relation to “white,” and if “white” is itself a questionable term, “black” or “Black” only compounds the muddle. (Consider also the consequences of this metaphysical mischief when one adds to the discussion Hispanics and Orientals, who are commonly regarded as neither white nor black, and Native Americans, who are arbitrarily designated in our mythology as red.)
So far I’ve been speaking exclusively of verbal language. When it comes to the conventions of film language and what’s known as the cinematic apparatus as a whole–the institution that regulates the production, distribution, exhibition, promotion, consumption, and discussion of movies–we may be in even deeper trouble, because the movie-related conventions that we take for granted aren’t nearly as self-evident.
Rafferty claims that one must accept questionable axioms to find Do the Right Thing a great movie. I would argue, on the contrary, that the film’s distinction rests largely on its freedom from such axioms–a freedom that is part and parcel of Lee’s pluralistic view of all his characters. This view simultaneously implies that every character has his or her reasons and that none of them is simply and unequivocally right. To seize upon any of these characters or reasons and to privilege them over the others is to return us to the paradigm of cowboys and Indians, heroes and villains. We’ve lived with this either/or grid for so long, it’s probably inevitable that some spectators will apply it even on that rare occasion, such as this one, when a filmmaker has the courage and insight to do without it.
