University of Cape Town – FAM2004F

Fifth Précis: Douglas Kellner does the smart thing

‘Hot Day’s Journey into Plight’:

Or, why Spike Lee shouldn’t get kudos just for showing up…

“Put otherwise, Lee does not appear to understand that capitalism is a system of oppression that exploits and oppresses its underclass, particularly people of color.”

Formal Precis:

In the first part of his tract ‘Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in the Films of Spike Lee,’ included in a book of critical essays on ‘Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing’ (1997)1, Douglas Kellner provides a Marxist critique of the eponymous Bed-Stuy-bred director’s pseudo-politicized auteurism.

He frames his central argument through the revealing contrast of Lee’s oeuvre with the Modernist style of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre: Both present colourful socio- cultural diasporas as a means of didactically engaging their audiences with present- day ‘hegemonic’ politics, but Lee’s films convey ambiguous, almost compromised, directives whereas the conclusions of Brecht’s plays are always clear indictments of Capitalism. Do the Right Thing, for example, despite its great richness of dissenting messages and cultural representations, for the most part remains trapped within an unquestioning cycle of Identity consumerism wherein every individual buys into and inherits their cultural/racial profile without really broaching the subject of political difference. Nevertheless, Lee’s films remain important for not excluding the representation and address of such incendiary differences, and Black subjection in particular.

Kellner’s intention here is to bring the example of Brecht to the table in the general consideration of the ‘phenomenon’ of Spike Lee’s early career. Lee has perhaps received enough criticism from all quarters for his films’ generally problematic

1. Though its first incarnation was as a presentation “in a symposium on Malcolm X organized by Mark Reid for the 1993 Society for Cinema Studies conference [which] was then presented [again] in a workshop on contemporary film at the American Sociology Association.”

representations, but Kellner sees the essential issue here as being his failure to attain a Brechtian self-consciousness of class struggle to match his defining obsession with race.
Thus his projected audience comprises fellow academics and politically aware film students, as he means his essay not as a ‘final word’ but as one particularly incisive perspective on the root of Lee’s failings as a radical filmmaker, performed to encourage productive responses from his wised-up readers.

Application to Do the Right Thing:

Kellner does quite a bit of my job here for me, as his essay faithfully follows the Zizekian tradition of taking apart the film in question on its ‘aesthetics’ first before interpreting its ‘ethics and politics’, which is just to say he really watchedDo the Right Thing before he applied a theory to its content. Thus he shows how Lee’s unique mix of cultural solidarity and vitriol ignore the political ambiguities of such forms of pride and cant. My application here, since I mostly agree with Kellner, should therefore just be a continuation of his analysis. I would claim then that Lee’s ambiguities run even further than the exclusion of Marxist concerns; that for all Do the Right Thing’s in-your-face vitality and visceral depictions, it effectively sterilizes its audience’s will-to-action through its aestheticization (commercialization) of the politics it feigns to proclaim. That is to say Lee can not ‘provide answers’ to racism and violence because he’s far too taken up with the job of artistically portraying the impossibility of finding such solutions. Conflict looks good and Sweetdick Willie and co.’s swearing is entertaining2 and the succulent colours of Brooklyn’s walls and fashions showcase an energy that is enough in itself to sustain a faux-provocative film. The murder of Radio Raheem and the burning of Sal’s are politicized events, but they cannot, as in Epic Theatre, be detached from their places within the greater entropic visual narrative to serve as case-studies for the prevention of real- world tragedies. Likewise Mookie’s neighbourhood is typical but not

2. In this vein, Mister Senor Love Daddy’s ‘roll-call’ of a century of Black musicians should be seen as a self-contained ‘thrill’. Yes, it reinforces the breadth of Black artistic talent but it does not prove any point beyond its own enunciation, beyond the sheer enjoyment of naming and invoking one’s heroes.

synecdochal, the characters representative but never the embodiments of their socio-cultural roles. Most tellingly, the conjunction of the antiphonal quotes from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King before the end-credits remain in an impractical deadlock. This dialectic of violence is neither synthesized nor compromised, it is merely presented, and it is seemingly enough for Lee to vividly portray it without hoping to overcome its insolubility.