Safundi The Journal of South African and American Studies

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Do the write-up: unpacking critics’ responses to Do the Right Thing

Ajay Gehlawat

To cite this article: Ajay Gehlawat (2019) Do the write-up: unpacking critics’ responses to Do￿the Right￿Thing, Safundi, 20:4, 399-403, DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2019.1672421 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2019.1672421

Published online: 26 Nov 2019.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsaf20 SAFUNDI: THE JOURNAL OF SOUTH AFRICAN AND AMERICAN STUDIES 2019, VOL. 20, NO. 4, 399–403 https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2019.1672421

ROUNDTABLE ON DO THE RIGHT THING Do the write-up: unpacking critics’ responses to Do the Right Thing Ajay Gehlawat

Hutchins School of Liberal Studies, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA, USA

Spike Lee has made a compelling critique of some of the critics’ responses to Do the Right Thing (1989, hereafter DTRT)1, but I would like to delve a bit deeper. Before doing so, I would first like to supplement Lee’s critique of some of the contempora- neous reviewers of his film. While Lee has critiqued Jack Kroll’s and Joe Klein’s reviews, equally relevant to this discussion is David Denby’s, also published in New York magazine (the same outlet running Klein’s scathing review). In his review, Denby argues that “if some audiences go wild, [Spike Lee is] partly responsible.”2 As Lee himself has noted, Denby’s suggestion (that certain audiences might “go wild”)is “racially coded language that presumes younger black viewers will become violent after watching the movie’s conclusion.”3 Such a view is also maintained by Klein, who feared the reactions of African American viewers to the film, arguing that a violent reaction on their part “can’t be ruled out.”4 Further, it was not just Denby, Klein, and Kroll espousing such a view – as Catherine Pouzoulet notes, “most critics interpreted the movie’s conclusion as an irresponsible encouragement to enact violence”;5 as WJT Mitchell has noted, “the film has routinely been denounced as an incitement to violence.”6 It is precisely this adverb – routinely – that leads to a deeper, more fundamental problem with such critiques of the film, stemming from an era of colonialism in which, as Aimé Césaire has observed, “you know the old refrain: ‘The- Negroes-are-big-children.’”7 In other words, the same colonialist logic that maintained an essential difference between the civilized (white) Europeans and their primitive, savage (black) charges is alive and well in contemporary American film criticism, replete with its underlying logic. Let me explain. The “old refrain” Césaire references (in his famous Discourse on Colonialism, first published in 1955) is the premise upon which such “routine” denunciations (of blacks) are based, i.e., DTRT is irresponsible because it will make “the natives run amok,” or “go crazy,” as Lee puts it in his “Last Word.” This “subtext,” as Lee calls it, is in turn premised upon the assumption that black audiences are indeed “mental midgets” who will react accordingly, i.e. as credulous viewers (who “can’t tell the difference between

CONTACT Ajay Gehlawat [email protected] 1See Lee, “Spike’s Last Word.” 2Vest, Spike Lee, 30. 3Ibid. 4Ibid., 31. 5Pouzoulet, “The Cinema of Spike Lee,” 43. 6Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art,” 114 (emphasis added). 7Césaire, Discourse, 60. © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 400 A. GEHLAWAT what’s on screen and what’s real life,” as Lee puts it).8 Such a belittling view (of nonwhite film viewers) is unfortunately neither limited to black viewers nor to the implied (black) viewers of DTRT but indeed has a long and shared history among several if not all of the colonized populations of the world who have subsequently been “theorized” by their European superiors (as “inferiors”). Such a process in turn becomes, as several postcolonial scholars, including Edward Said, have noted, the basis for the ensuing colonial operation – if the natives are just “big children,” then naturally they need someone to take care of them or, at the very least, to provide a guiding (counter)example. Césaire aptly notes this paternalistic/colonialist viewpoint in describing one such colonial-era European writer’s views of the “Madagascan” (which, as you will no doubt infer, is being used here as a synecdoche for all colonized people, that is, all essentially different and inferior races). He quotes the French writer Octave Mannoni at length in his views on the “essential” differences between colonizer and colonized:

It is the destiny of the Occidental to face the obligation laid down by the commandment Thou shalt leave thy father and thy mother. This obligation is incomprehensible to the Madagascan. At a given time in his development, every European discovers in himself the desire . . . to break the bonds of dependency, to become the equal of his father. The Madagascan, never! He does not experience rivalry with paternal authority, ‘manly pro- test’, or Adlerian inferiority – ordeals through which the European must pass and which are like civilized forms . . . of the initiation rites by which one achieves manhood.9

Given such a “regressive” nature, naturally the cinema would provide problems for one so (under)theorized. Interestingly enough, Mannoni surfaces in film theorist Christian Metz’s discussion of the cinema as well, in ways that intriguingly correspond to the contemporary controversies surrounding DTRT and its (implied, black) viewers. In his landmark book about psychoanalysis and the cinema, The Imaginary Signifier, Metz writes, “I shall say very little about the problem of belief in the cinema . . . because the subject has already been largely dealt with by Octave Mannoni in his remarkable studies of the theatrical illusion.”10 Paraphrasing Mannoni, Metz asks, “Since it is ‘accepted’ that the [film] audience is incredulous, who is it who is credulous?”11 The answer is, “of course, another part of ourselves”–“he” who is “still seated beneath the incredulous one.”12 While within the parameters of Occidental psychology, this “other part of himself” (the credulous) is disavowed by the Western (European) subject, when one grafts Mannoni’s earlier views of the “Madagascan” onto his subsequent theorization of the in/credulous (film) spectator, one begins to see how “the one seated beneath” (the one to whom all this is “incomprehensible”) literally becomes a necessary foil to the disavowing incredulity of the Western/European viewer. This foil – the implied, credulous “Madagascan” viewer – is needed, in all his credulity (which must be maintained), for the “perfect organization of the machinery,”13 namely, the colonial

8Lee, “Spike’s Last Word.” 9Césaire, Discourse, 60. 10Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 72. The book Metz refers to is Mannoni’s L’Illusion comique ou le theatre du point de vue de l’imaginaire (1969). 11Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 72. 12Ibid. 13Ibid. SAFUNDI: THE JOURNAL OF SOUTH AFRICAN AND AMERICAN STUDIES 401 discourse underlying Mannoni’s claims (and reifying the “essential differences” between civilized and not-so-civilized people). If we, in turn, cross-apply these colonial-era paradigms to the (neocolonial) context in which DTRT was released, we can begin to see how the responses of critics like Denby, Klein, and Kroll to the film have themselves been informed (and overdetermined) by these earlier discourses. Implicit in their fears of (black) audiences “running amok” and rioting due to Lee’s film is the same underlying view of such viewers, who in turn become essentialized cogs in a larger (neo/colonial) operation. Yet problems with such a view immediately emerge, both at the theoretical and empirical levels. To begin with the former, even as Lee’s film was frequently, even “routinely,” viewed as an “incitement to violence,”14 other, more academically inclined scholars have framed the film as engaging in modernist and Brechtian discourses.15 The “active” nature of the implied viewer in such a (modernist) reading presents the first of many problems for the neocolonialist views of critics such as Denby, Klein, and Kroll. To be clear: being “active” in this context does not mean, as these latter critics would have it, “running amok” or starting a riot; rather, it entails active engagement as a viewer with the cinema and, implicit in such active spectatorship, an understanding of the basic tenets of the cinematic apparatus. In other words, to be an active viewer is to be an incredulous viewer, one who grasps and retains the fundamental premise of the cinema (as, e.g. articulated by Metz), that what is onscreen is not actually there, not actually taking place. Film historian and theorist Tom Gunning, in his discussion of early cinema audiences, concludes that “cinema’s first audiences can no longer serve as a founding myth for the theoreticalization of the enthralled spectator.”16 To displace onto the implied (black) spectators of DTRT all that the so-called “incredulous spectator” disavows, however, is akin to the frequent and complacent evocations of earlier “credulous spectators at the Grand Café in 1895.”17 Yet, as Lee asks, “Do white audiences go crazy when they’re going to see Terminator 1 or Terminator 2?”18 African American critic Stanley Crouch, while also critical of Lee, dismisses Denby and company’s notion that black audiences would react violently after viewing the film and provides an interesting corollary to this point concerning credulity and incredulity among film viewers, noting that

it wasn’t so much that white people were threatened by Spike; they just liked to think that they were. So the Negro kind of functions like what Dracula and the werewolf are all about. People get frightened, then they leave the theater and they know that it’s only a film, there’s no Dracula.19

Thus the notion of the enraged black audience “running amok” after viewing DTRT becomes, in many ways, a racial fantasy of both white audiences and critics and perhaps

14Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art,” 114. 15By “modernist,” as Jason Vest notes, “I refer . . . to aesthetic strategies of producing texts that are open and polyvocal, that disseminate a wealth of meanings rather than a central univocal meaning or message, and that require an active reader [or viewer in this case] to produce the meanings” (42, emphasis added). 16Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 129. 17Metz, Imaginary Signifier,72–3. Here Metz is referring to the now (in)famous “original” spectators of the Lumiere Bros.’ film featuring a train entering La Ciotat station, who “fled their seats in terror . . . because they were afraid it [the filmed train] would run them down” (ibid.). 18Lee, “Spike’s Last Word.” 19Aftab, Spike Lee, 96. 402 A. GEHLAWAT one, to somewhat contradict Crouch’s claim, that did end up hurting the film’s box office success, as Lee himself has noted.20 Further problematizing such theorizations of (implied) audiences of color (and, in turn, of “irresponsible,”“dangerous” films like DTRT) are two interesting historical occurrences with which I would like to conclude, the first taking place in 1915 and the other in 1989. As Lee himself noted while attending NYU Film school, the original showing of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), a film that notoriously glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and which Lee includes footage of in his most recent film BlacKkKlansman (2018), was followed by the lynching of hundreds of blacks.21 At the same time, and contrary to the (hoped for?) predictions of Denby and company, rather than riots, what frequently followed screenings of DTRT were . . . discussions. Pamela Reynolds, for instance, in her review of the film, cites one viewer who claimed, “People sat in the theater afterwards because they were so affected.”22 Such a reaction also corresponds with Lee’s own stated intentions, namely, “to generate discussion,” rather than actual riots. So, in an interesting twist (and returning to a point underlying the colonial discourse analysis of Césaire and Fanon), it was actually white audiences of Birth of a Nation who acted out, in 1915, the racialized horror fantasies they projected onto blacks – running amok and lynching – while black audiences in 1989, in turn, despite the (wishful?) predictions of mainstream white critics, remained seated and chose to engage in civilized discussion, much like our roundtable today.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References

Aftab, Kaleem. Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005. Birth of a Nation, The. Directed by D.W. Griffith. Hollywood, CA: Epoch, 1915. BlacKkKlansman. Directed by Spike Lee. New York: Focus Features, 2018. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 4th ed. New York: Continuum, 2007. Breskin, David. Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation. Expanded ed. New York: De Capo Press, 1997. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1955]. Do the Right Thing. Directed by Spike Lee. New York: Universal, 1989. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (in)credulous Spectator.” In Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams, 114–33. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Lee, Spike. “Interview: Spike’s Last Word.” Disc 2. Do the Right Thing, special ed. DVD. Directed by Spike Lee. New York: Criterion Collection, 2000 [1999].

20As Lee mentions in an interview with David Breskin (and in his “Last Word” interview), “A lot of white people told me they were scared for their safety because of what they read, so they waited until it [DTRT] came out on videotape” (Inner Views, 175). 21Reid, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, 148. Film historian Donald Bogle also notes that “in the South, the film [Birth] was often advertised as calculated to ‘work [white] audiences into a frenzy’,” and that “lynchings and other forms of violence increased” (Toms, Coons, 15). 22Reid, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, 140. SAFUNDI: THE JOURNAL OF SOUTH AFRICAN AND AMERICAN STUDIES 403

Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982 [1975]. Mitchell, W.J.T. “The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing.” In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, ed. Mark A. Reid, 107–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pouzoulet, Catherine. “The Cinema of Spike Lee: Images of a Mosaic City.” In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, ed. Mark A. Reid, 31–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Reid, Mark A., ed. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Vest, Jason P. Spike Lee: Finding the Story and Forcing the Issue. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2014.