Leave No Child Behind

The Right Thing

The expectation is that someone, at some point in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), will do just that. Part of what accounts for the film’s interest is its relentless narrative commitment to refusing easy identification.

In Lee’s multi-ethnic Bedford-Stuyvesant the constructedness of race plays itself out in the narratives available to it. Mookie tells the hyper Italian-American Pino that Pino’s hair is kinkier, suggesting an earlier relation between the characters’ ancestries. Various people from time to time muse about when someone got off the boat. If it is unclear to whom the claim to place pertains, a tenuous commitment to community is fractured when the wrong thing, in this case violence to a boom-box, makes manifest the anger of American apartheid. The result is that Radio-Raheem is lynched (the camera shows his feet dangling) by a tree-size cop.

The question in this instance becomes what it means to do the right thing. What does it mean to fight the power? If the fight is predicated on an admixture of love and hate (each a fist-size ring worn across Radio Raheem’s knuckles), what does one do? Are these antipodes to be understood as somehow pertaining to the beliefs captured in the conjoint image of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X that Smiley peddles throughout the neighborhood–and finally gives a proper place on the wall of burnt-out Sal’s pizzeria?

The right thing is not to kill one’s brother. It is not Cain (violence, hate), but it is not Abel either. Malcolm X says self-defense is intelligent. If somebody like Mookie just stood on a garbage can and made a speech that reconciled everyone, rather than throwing the garbage can through Sal’s window, the film would become a cliche. As it is, because the right thing (to love each other?) is ineluctably obscured by a history of violence and exploitation, the right thing in the revealed face of trauma–is to mourn. As Sister Mother and Smiley do.

Lee doesn’t end with violence. The film goes on. Another hot day, a fragile reconciliation between Sal and Mookie. The note rings true: not optimism, but not quite resignation either. That there is a right thing is never in question. It’s what we can do, given our wounds, that remains undecided.

Malcolm and Martin are our heritage.

a quick idea

I’m revising my chapter on Jack London and I wanted a definition of sentiment that manages to accommodate both the bourgeois domestic variety, (i.e. “hearth and home”) and the masculine periphery variety, (i.e. lighting out for the territory) and arrived at this:

A sentimental narrative locates as authentic the privileged site of one’s self.

Any thoughts on this or varieties of sentiment more generally?

“i’m bored with you”

it’s how you land

Mathieu Kassovitz’s film, La Haine, could be labeled with several reductive plot tags: police brutality, multiracial friends, what we would call in the US, “ghetto life.” None of these tags, with their conventional associations, adequately suggest the ennui of the Parisian banlieues. In numerous scenes the friends are shown sitting around with nothing to do but talk. “Hey Vinz, did you hear the one about the Nun?”

Impotence and rage are the inflections of these conversations. They are the subtext of the banlieue that the characters take with them when they are nabbed by the police in Paris, and at home. No job. No prospects. No future.

“Hey Vinz,” Hubert asks, “you know the one about the falling man? He keeps saying as he falls, so far so good, so far so good, but it’s not how you fall. It’s how you land.” This metaphoric landing, in the context of the film, suggests the impact of the impass between the persecuted sub-proletariat, and the police.

The result is tragedy. Police who are good, a minority in the film, are injured. Some of the film’s protagonists, whom the viewer has come to care about, die. What Kassovitz manages brilliantly is the refusal to show a winner. The visual quality of the film is the only black and white on offer. Both sides lose.

And this loss is prescient without pandering for liberal restraint. Capitalism creates inevitable and relentless tragedy. Recent history has picked up where La Haine left off. The second nature of capitalist modernity is actually rent by class struggle. Hegel’s owl of minerva has yet to fly the coup. And a realistic film like La Haine, beautifully shot, cannot help but serve the project of utopia by teaching us to no longer look for a winner, or winning. What we want, all of us, is out.

Check out Raccoon’s entry on La Haine, here.

dance from Band of Outsiders