Go Ahead, Punk: Re-animate the Public Sphere. |
Bibliography
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing Ed Mark Reid. Cambridge University Press. 1997
The New Hollywood Jim Hillier. Continuum Publishing, New York. 1992 [Ch 8]
"A Circus of Dreams and Lies: The Black Film Wave at Middle Age." Ed Guerrero [in The New American Cinema ed. Jon Lewis. Duke University Press. 1998.]
"Hollywood and Independent Black Cinema" Tommy L. Lott. [in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema ed. Neale & Murray-Smith. Routledge. 1998]
The rise of Hollywood signals the rise of an ideology of exclusion in the public sphere. That is to say; each stage in the development of the American film industry marks a shift of the means of production away from the affordable reach of the ordinary punter. Unlike still photography, which had developed over the 19th century rather like the computer industry of our own time, the apparatus of moving pictures constructed a social context of consumption accessible to all (a public sphere), while its production became more complex and expensive, attaching itself to industrial practices which were highly specialised. With the rise of the star after 1910, photoplayers became the most expensive ingredient. But even if they were able to be persuaded to work for less initially, the rise of the feature length film after about 1913, meant that capital outlay for stock became prohibitive for the small operator. This was exacerbated by the growing expectation of spectacular sets or special effects. And if a lack of these found compensation in decent story-lines, the coming of sound finally cut out not only the small producer but also some of the studios themselves. The anti was upped with the coming of sound, increasingly complex special effects, screen ratios etc.
Each technical development of the film industry thus concentrated power in the hands of a narrower few. A history of Hollywood could be a history of an increasing lack of expression – a history of missing voices. Hollywood’s history makes visible only the victors: for all the diegetic sentimentality - the wringing of hands and playing on heart-strings to mark the suffering of an underdog - it disguises the trampling underfoot of anything that smacks of didacticism.
The standardisation that Bordwell identifies in the Hollywood paradigm applies to more than narrative structure or production processes: it means the systematic and ideological control of ethnic, religious and political representation. The Hays code and other pressures meant more than the imposition of moral structures. And even today the interests of political ideology are usually subservient to the interests of profit.
Nevertheless the 1980’s and 90’s saw a speedy and much-publicised growth in the number of black as well as women film-makers in Hollywood. Black struggles in the 1960’s and 1970’s certainly changed the social awareness of audiences. And much of the motivation was driven by a desire in black film-makers to have greater control over the images of black life shown on screen.
Ever since Birth of a Nation, the challenge has been there for black Americans. Defenders of D.W. Griffith protest that the great man was not racist: that he had earlier depicted the KKK as villains: that we should value his work for the techniques he developed. But recently the Director’s Guild withdrew the Griffith Award… sparking off a furious argument on the web:
"I have always admired the Directors Guild for acknowledging the importance of D.W. Griffith with their award, and I am dismayed to hear they are withdrawing it. A sign of maturity is the ability to acknowledge greatness while not being blind to faults -- Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, but his name remains on the Peace Prize."
"It seems that there are some who feel that because a person does something that can be considered technically innovative, his use of that technique to advance racism and hatred should not only be excused, but ignored, if not ultimately rewarded! I suppose after hearing Hitler speak, Germans should have reasoned, "Okay, he did say some hateful things, but he was so eloquent in saying them, that it would just be so PC of us not to name a speech award in his honor."
But the point for us here is that – in the first blockbuster of the cinema age – it was not the KKK being depicted as the villains, or as stupid, or as venal. It was black people. Or rather whites in blackface. As if they could not be trusted to play the parts themselves. Thank God we have come a long way to get to even the likes of "Lethal Weapon" or "Seven".
Revisionist histories have attempted to reconstruct the Jewish voice in Hollywood (the silence from which group was particularly ironic, since they ran the studios), claiming that it is subsumed under a sort of American-ness. Black representation has, by contrast (ironically), been rather more visible – and perhaps as a consequence, more carefully controlled.
It would be tempting to trace the representation of African Americans in the Hollywood mainstream by looking at films like "Gone with the Wind", "Mildred Pierce" and the like. But such a history would at worst trace a trajectory of white oppression – a shameful catalogue of evidence showing black people confirming a submissive stereotype – and at best, delineate a rising awareness, on the part of white people, of their oppression. At least here, blacks might be seen to have been given an increasingly independent voice as we moved through the 1960's and 70's..
But the truth is more complex. Both these versions assume that all black people are the same by dint of their colour and would ignore the issues arising from personality, class or the effects of repression. A true history of black cinema would, in other words, have to uncover the texts of all those neglected films that had been trampled underfoot by the dominant white industry, and which have been forgotten because they were enjoyed by black audiences. Thankfully some research into the work of directors like Oscar Micheaux has begun to bring such texts to light. I wish to suggest that a direct lineage can be traced the real black cinema of Oscar Micheaux and that of Spike Lee.
Of course Lee has his detractors. If you want a negative critique of "Do the Right Thing", you can read a feminist essay by Julia Chan. However, I want to examine W.J.T. Mitchell’s claim (made in his excellent essay The Violence of Public Art) that "Do the Right Thing" is an important work of art because it is in agreement with (but is not dependent on) its theme of race.
As Mitchell points out, the film hit a raw nerve in 1989 and elicited disapproval from critics and viewers alike, who claimed that it was an incitement to violence because of its so-called demeaning representations of racial types. However, the film’s content was much more than this. Mitchell outlines its exploration of both a familiar commercial sphere of public art, and its engagement with a cultural debate about the private sphere of art and the freedom (or at least the opportunities) for cultural expression in contemporary America. As Mitchell states, "The film tells a story of multiple ethnic public spheres, the violence that circulates among and within these partial publics, and the tendency of this violence to fixate on specific images - symbolic objects, fetishes, and public icons or idols."
The public sensation caused by exhibition of the film itself, for example, meant that it entered the public sphere on the same level as those symbolic objects presented in the film. Its position was then thrown into an oppositional stance when it was ignored by the Oscars in favour of the white, middle-class pre-occupations of Soderburgh's "sex, lies and videotape" in 1989.
The specific public image at the centre of its diegetic debate is the collection of photographs of Italian-Americans in Sal’s pizzeria, which is thus made to represent a contradiction: a private sphere of public art. Later Sal is assaulted by a form of art (Public Enemy) emanating from Radio Raheem’s boom box. This embodiment of (private?) black culture conflicts with Sal, forcing him into a comparable position to that experienced by the dominant black clientele if his establishment. The imposing lone figure of Radio Raheem is linked with a cinematic icon through a bible-inspired speech lifted word for word from Night of the Hunter. Like Robert Mitchum's character in that film, Radio Raheem will bring change to this community - though in Lee's text it will require his death.
A sense of history is provided by the presence of well respected black actor, Ossie Davis and (real life wife) Ruby Dee, who bring irony in their roles as Da Mayor (a drunk) and Mother Sister (a disapproving matriach). These names themselves refer to the types of roles both actors have endured in the past and their narrative function .
There is also an aspect of this movie that places it squarely in the category of a postmodern text. This is its free tendency to puncture the narrative diegesis with the direct address to the camera. While this mode of address is present in Radio Raheem's delivery of the above mentioned speech, this nevertheless uses a radical camera movement that places us in the position of Mookie. Thus it can be interpreted as a POV shot. Later we cut to an almost documentary style sequence of expressions of ethnic hatred from the panoply of groups represented in the film, which break both the classical conventions of linearity and the address to the camera.
It is this element of the film that proclaims most clearly its function as a self-conscious contribution to the discourse on race in America, and also supports Mitchell's claim that the film represents an intellegent 'violent public art'.