Au-Cinema Films

Spike Lees Refusal Of Melodrama

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D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, like Do the Right Thing, was also a political film which intended to justify the use of violence. Griffith sought to justify the Ku Klux Klan's violence against blacks who came

to power during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. The rioting black soldiers whom the Klan rides in to subdue are melodramatically presented as purely evil in their single-minded determination to sexually possess white women. The Klansmen who demolish the power of the blacks are characterized as noble and purely good, the saviors of many damsels in distress. When the Klan triumphs, there is a clear-cut victory of good over evil within the racist terms set up by the film's narrative. In 1915, white audiences stood up and cheered at the film's climax. In Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, when the people of Bedford-Stuyvesant rise up to fight the power by destroying Sal's Pizzeria, much more complicated emotions are aroused because of Lee's refusal to divide his characters up into the categories of good and evil. Thus Sal, the "villain" of the piece, as we have seen, is depicted as both racist and tolerant, while Radio Raheem, the film's victim and martyr, is depicted as an intimidating, intrusive, even scary bully.

Lee depicts Radio Raheem as a threatening, even terrifying figure. He intimidates a group of Puerto Ricans who are obliged to turn off their salsa music in deference to his superior strength (and the superior volume on his boom box), frightens the Korean store owner, and in general seems to irritate everyone in the film (including Buggin' Out) by his unrelenting repetition of the song "Fight the Power," played at a nerve-jangling high volume on his boom box. As I mentioned above, his threatening actions are made to seem even more sinister through the extreme camera angles and distorted lenses through which he often appears. By means of subtle editing techniques, Lee makes Radio Raheem's appearances in the film seem sudden and unexpected. The best instance of this is when he appears at Sal's with Buggin' Out just before his violent clash with Sal. We never see him walk in the door. Suddenly he is just there, standing in the middle of the room like an apparition in a nightmare. His brass knuckles, which spell out the words love and hate, are scarily reminiscent of the psychotic minister played by Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) who similarly displays the words "love" and "hate" on the knuckles of his right and left hands.

Spike Lee's choice of Radio Raheem as the victim whose death sets off violence against Sal's Pizzeria is another instance of the dialectical logic which structures so much of the film. If the victim had been someone depicted more sympathetically, the reaction of the audience (to Mookie's setting off the riot in response) would have been automatically more sympathetic as well. It is easy to get audiences to react in outrage when a sympathetic character is killed, as D. W. Griffith knew well when

Figure 65. The image of Radio Raheem's feet off the ground is doubly disturbing because of its connotations of a lynching. (Do the Right Thing, 1989, Universal City Studios.)

he had the renegade ex-slave Gus cause the death of the darling of The Birth of a Nation, Flora, the little pet sister. By making a scary bully also a victim, Spike Lee makes us ponder the implications of Radio Raheem's death. Why, in the logic of the film, did he have to die? Why did Mookie have to protest his death by attacking Sal's?

Radio Raheem becomes the victim of the white police, Lee implies, not in spite but because of his intimidating strength. The white powers that be in this country, Lee suggests, are so frightened of the specter of the black man fighting back that they use unnecessary force on any black person who might do so successfully. The message repetitiously intoned on Radio Raheem's boom box, after all, is "Fight the Power," which is also the theme song and underlying message of Do the Right Thing. A motif that runs through the film is that unless people, no matter what their race, fight back against harmful power, they will be annihilated. Thus Mookie throughout the film tries to convince Vito to stand up to his abusive brother. In the scene in which Radio Raheem buys batteries at the store owned by the Korean couple, his abusive behavior to the store owner halts abruptly when the man starts screaming back, using the same expletives as Radio Raheem was shouting at him. Surprised, Radio Raheem breaks out laughing. But when Radio Raheem fights back against white power, he is killed.

Spike Lee has deliberately made the victim of the white police resem ble the black bogeyman white people fear they will meet on a dark street: Radio Raheem is a white stereotype of a black thug. Lee may even be daring members of the audience to feel secretly relieved that Radio Raheem is killed. At the same time, he clearly presents Radio Raheem's death as the result of the white policeman's rage against and fear of the strong black man. The powerful close-up of Radio Raheem's feet dangling several inches off the ground as he is being strangled to death is an unforgettable metaphor for the helplessness and vulnerability of even the most powerful black man in the face of institutionalized white power. The image is doubly disturbing because it resembles a lynching.19 (See figure 65.) Through the dialectical strategy of making the bully the victim Lee may have relinquished his ability to tap the stock responses of outrage common in political melodramas, but the end result is that he allows his audience to grapple with the meaning of Mookie's response to Radio Raheem's death on a higher level of consciousness. Though not all critics agree that Spike Lee has made a convincing case that Mookie did the right thing, much ink has been spilled in discussing the issues the film raises. Richard Sklar said of Spike Lee's film: "In the twenty-first century, the Hollywood film from 1989 most likely to be screened, discussed, argued over, is Do the Right Thing." 20 So far, he is right.