11 BAKHTIN IN BROOKLYN: LANGUAGE IN SPIKE LEE'S DO THE RIGHT THING
If Mikhail Bakhtin attended the movies — and it seems unlikely that he did so with any frequency — his viewing experiences left few traces in his writings. Nonetheless, Robert Stam (1989) has shown that much of what Bakhtin wrote about the novel is directly relevant for understanding narrative film. Bakhtin would not have been surprised, for he realized that the significance of the phenomena that he described transcended literature. For Bakhtin, the emergence of the novel represented nothing less than a transformation of human consciousness, a new way of seeing ourselves and our relationship to the world. The novel's transforming power derived from the fact that it was simultaneously a compendium of previous genres and their antithesis, an anti-genre to challenge genres and generic thinking. The novel drew together and built upon epic, biography, history, journalism and much else. At the same time, by drawing these modes of representation together, it relativized them, exposing their individual gaps and deformations, inviting us to think beyond genres. It was the novel's camivalizing heterogeneity and openness that made it the dominant narrative form for the diverse and dynamic culture which emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
And yet, as we begin the twenty-first century, we sense that the novel is no longer our primary narrative form: that role has been assumed by the visual—auditory narratives of film and television. We can find an explanation of this shift in Bakhtin, for elements of his analysis of the novel can be applied, with perhaps even greater force, to film narrative. Film, it has often been remarked, is not so much a new art as an elaborate fusion of existing arts: theater, photography, prose narrative, and music are among the many resources mobilized by electronic technology to create film narratives. In effecting this unique new fusion, the cinema combines and reconfigures the many genres and subgenres of the arts it absorbs. Film, then, might be termed the ultimate carnival of the arts and of the modes of discourse they encompass.
Broadly useful as Bakhtin's ideas are for film analysis at many levels, I would like to limit myself here to discussing the function of language in film, a topic sadly neglected. A survey of film bibliographies reveals numerous titles on the language of film (film as a signifying system analogous to language) and a superfluity of titles on language and film (comparisons of literary and cinematic texts). But, with the important exception of the second chapter of Stam's book, this survey turns up very few studies of language in film.
The neglect is understandable: film scholars have emphasized the distinctive non-verbal elements of film, in part, to establish film's independence from literature. Nonetheless, this neglect is regrettable. It in no way compromises film's uniqueness or autonomy to note that the words and sentences on film's sound and image tracks function crucially alongside other codes in film's complex signifying system, and that we need to understand this function if we wish to achieve a full understanding of how films create meaning. Equally important, we also need to understand how language itself is transformed by film's distinctive form of carnival. Language, Bakhtin continually reminds us, is always situated, it comes to us from a specific context. This is nowhere more obvious than in the cinema, where words emerge from and interact with a rich combination of visual and auditory codes. This essay seeks to show what Bakhtin's insights, deployed in an extended study of natural language in a single Hollywood narrative film, can yield for a deeper understanding of that film and of the ways film and language interact.
I have selected for this purpose Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), for it is a film centrally concerned with language and its role in our moral and political lives. The film narrates twenty-four hours in the life of a one-block community in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant in August 1989. The day climaxes in the death of a young black man, a race riot and the destruction of a pizzeria. From the very beginning of the film, the threat of violence is present in the edgy irritability engendered by the summer heat. It is also latent in one of the film's first conversations. Sal, owner of the pizzeria, instructs his eldest son to sweep the walk in front of their shop and then listens as this son repeats the order to his brother. As the brothers fall to bickering, we sense that their tired recriminations echo dozens of earlier, similar conversations. Sal breaks off the exchange with phrases he has surely used many times before but which, on this day, will prove tragically prophetic. “The both of youse shaddup”, he warns, “I'm gonna kill somebody today.”
The dead language, which we hear here and elsewhere on this block, no longer communicates but merely marks the bored isolation of speaker and listener. It dramatizes the community's deeper moral and social malaise, an isolation which exists not only on the individual level but, more dangerously, on the level of different ethnic groups. Considered at the social level, the linguistic condition of this community might seem to be a radical polyglossia, for this one-block community embraces four separate languages — English, Italian, Spanish and Korean — as well as numerous dialects within English. Polyglossia is potentially fruitful for cultural dialogue and cross-fertilization, but on this block that potential is rarely realized. Quite the contrary: what we hear on this street is a tone-deaf polyglossia, where each linguistic group struggles to impose its own language and to silence all others. Mookie, Sal's black delivery man, angrily orders his child's Puerto Rican grandmother to speak English to the boy — although Mookie himself does not speak to the boy in any language — and Radio Raheem, the block bully, yells “Speak English, Motherfuck” to the Korean grocer and his wife.
The inauthentic polyglossia found here — in reality, a monologism gone mad — is brilliantly dramatized in the film's racial slur montage. In this sequence, each of five successive characters directs a stream of racial epithets at the members of another group. The racial epithet, considered as a speech genre, is perhaps the ultimate attempt to finalize the other, to freeze his or her identity in a single obscene substantive. These epithet streams push monologism to a virulent, destructive apotheosis: each speaker seeks by his uninterrupted flow of insults to pre-empt, to drown out any possible rejoinder.
It is important, however, to distinguish the language of this community — for most members, a sterile monologism — and the language of the film, which is richly carnivalized and profoundly dialogical. Spike Lee's film draws different languages, genres and values into rough contact; it forces them to interact, and to enter into dialogue. As a result, traditional hierarchies are undermined, frozen stereotypes are exploded and official ideology is decrowned. We are made to encounter the world in all its bewildering and prosaic complexity. The film's authentic polyglossia “frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language” (PND, 61). It sets individual speech genres and utterances against themselves, problematizing and relativizing them in the process.
To show how this happens, however, it is necessary to introduce some terms into our relatively poor vocabulary for discussing the way language occurs in film. I will begin with three distinctions regarding the presence of words in movies. The first distinction has to do with the presence of words in the film narrative: it distinguishes words which occur within the narrative's diegesis, or story world, from words which occur outside it. The first group, diegetic words, are words spoken, heard, written or read by characters within the story. These include dialogue or narration by characters, as well as texts read by them. The second group, extradiegetic words, are words which occur outside the story, such as title sequences at the beginning or end of the film, song lyrics which occur in these sequences, or voice-over narration by a non-dramatized narrator. This inside—outside distinction is basically between words which are available to the sight or hearing of the story's characters, and words which are not available to them. The distinction is important, because we are inclined to endow the latter category, extradiegetic words, with greater authority than the former. We tend, for instance, to give greater credibility to voice-over narration which comes from an omniscient authorial voice outside the story than we do to a voice-over narration coming from one of its characters.
The second distinction has to do with the relationship of the words to the film text. There are, first of all, words which occur in the film itself, a category which includes most of the words we will discuss and which we may call textual words. There are also words which occur outside the film but which, nonetheless, are closely related to it. These may be called intertextual words. The concept of intertextuality is very important in Bakhtin's thinking, according to which every word enters a text with an almost infinite history of prior usage. This broad definition is fruitful for understanding language in film, but I would like to limit myself here to intertextual words linked more or less explicitly to the film text: a published screenplay, the filmmaker's published or recorded commentaries, as well as other texts he or she may have quoted or pastiched within the film.
This distinction between textual and intertextual words in the cinema is important, for, as Robert Stam points out, “films are saturated by language from the beginning to the end of their existence; they come from language and ultimately return to it” (1989, 68). A film begins, most often, as a treatment, a screenplay, a novel or story to be adapted, and it ends, if it is successful, in written and spoken commentary and polemics. This is particularly relevant in the case of Spike Lee, who, more than most filmmakers, seeks to intervene in, and to direct, the discourse surrounding his films. Lee has accompanied five of his seven films with published screenplays. These texts are a good deal more than simple transcriptions, assembled after the fact by anonymous editors. In all but the first of Lee's screenplays, the texts were published simultaneously with the film's release; and in all cases, Lee assembled these books himself. Typically, they contain his planning journal, his production notes, sample story boards, commentary by colleagues, as well as the shooting script with material subsequently omitted or changed. The materials in these books are crucial adjuncts to the films: they provide a variety of different, sometimes contradictory, perspectives from which to continue the reflection the films are meant to incite.
Lee himself further stimulates that reflection by his activities as a publicist — talk-show guest, interview subject, and so on — for his films. These activities, of course, promote the films and serve Lee's financial interests, but to stop with this cynical comment is to miss something important. A film, like any significant text, is a site where various voices within a culture may enter, encounter one another, be transformed, and return to the culture. Lee understands this: he intends that the dialogue within his films should spill over into the society from which it emerged, and he exploits the language within and surrounding his films to encourage this dialogue.
My third distinction relating to words in film has to do with the presence of the words in the film medium. Some words in a film have visual presence — we read them on the screen — while others have auditory presence — we hear them on the sound track. As simple and obvious as this distinction is, it requires our attention because it discloses crucial differences between words in a film and words on a printed page. Words in a book have visual presence, but they do not have auditory presence. Novelists can try by various graphological conventions to convey accents, but they cannot match film sound recording, which, Robert Stam reminds us, “is virtually incapable of representing speech without accent” (1989, 60). The cacophony of different accents on the sound track, and with it the collision of different classes and values, is an important contributor to film's special form of carnival.
In the matter of presence, we must also remember that the presence that film words enjoy, whether visual or auditory, is at best a co-presence, a presence grudgingly shared with film's other codes: images, natural sounds, music, etc. Film words often support these other elements, but they may also challenge them or be challenged by them. Film's special form of carnival includes not merely the dialogue between different words, written and spoken, but the dialogue and conflict between words, images, sound and music.
If we wish to visualize the schema of distinctions I have been trying to design, we should see the first two distinctions — diegetic/extradiegetic and textual/intertextual — as horizontal coordinates. Let us imagine the final distinction — visual versus auditory presence — as a vertical coordinate dividing the preceding categories. For visual and auditory variants can be found in all four of the preceding groups: the diegetic and the extradiegetic, the textual and the intertextual. These distinctions are essential for the points to be made about dialogue and carnival in film. Words in film are amenable to the same crossing, mixing and reversal of linguistic boundaries as is found in literary carnival. Spike Lee's film is particularly rich in its own combination of languages, dialects and genres, but that is not my sole interest. The set of distinctions outlined above makes possible discussion of several other forms of verbal contact: the movement of words in and out of the diegesis, in and out of the text, and the dialogue between words and the film's other visual and auditory elements.
I would like now to explore the carnivalized words of Do the Right Thing, first by considering the fortunes of three utterances in the film, and then by focusing on the functions of several specific voices in the film. The framework for consideration of these utterances is provided by Bakhtin's late essay “The Problem of Speech Genres”, where he calls our attention to the way that larger genres — the novel, the narrative film — combine innumerable lesser genres, forms of familiar speech and writing. He argues that attention to the way that larger genres combined, inflected and transformed the small genres could “shed light on the nature of the utterance (and above all on the complex problem of the interrelations among language, ideology, and world view)” (PSG, 62). The social efficacy of verbal carnival derives, in large part, from the challenge posed by these new generic combinations to frozen, monological modes of thought.
The utterances I would like to consider are “Do the right thing”, “Fight the power”, and “Love” and “Hate.” The first is, of course, the film's title. Following Bakhtin, we notice that this utterance belongs to a speech genre, the moral maxim, and we recall that a genre is “a zone and field of valorized perception” (EN, 28). We note that the moral maxim has a definite social coloring: we hear in it the ideological echoes of middle-class, Protestant America. The genre assumes that life is best led in obedience to abstract moral principles, and that these principles are clear, knowable and univocal.
This phrase, like most film titles, is first presented to us visually, outside the diegesis, in the film's opening credits. Thus it comes to us with a certain authoritative weight, for literary and cinematic practice encourage us to read titles as potential keys to a text's meaning. These words first appear, however, not in conventional print but in a colorful, hand-lettered script suggesting sidewalk or subway graffiti. This genre emerges from very different social origins than the middle-class maxim and carries associations hostile to middle-class rectitude. Thus the first occurrence of the phrase, outside the story, introduces a subtle tension between the maxim's content and its visual presentation.
We next meet the phrase inside the story when Da Mayor abruptly interrupts Mookie on a pizza delivery to instruct him solemnly: “Doctor, do the right thing.” The phrase now has an author and a sponsor, but a particularly problematic one. Da Mayor has no given name, only a mocking title. For, if his title literally denotes respect and responsibility, its inflection in Black English reminds us of such buffoonish characters as Da Judge of blackout sketches or Da Kingfish of Amos and Andy. Da Mayor, who shamelessly plays the stereotypical “darkie” to earn beer money from Sal, is derided by neighborhood teenagers as an indolent alcoholic. But we should not treat him so dismissively. We hear him defend himself, describing the difficulties of a black father in racist America. We see him save a young child from an oncoming vehicle, and we watch Mother Sister, probably the most respected individual in the community, take him into her bed.
Da Mayor offers no explanation when he tells Mookie to “do the right thing”, and Mookie is not sure what he means; nor are we. Later events suggest a meaning for his injunction when Da Mayor opposes the riot and the destruction of Sal's pizzeria. He is the only black in the film to do so: even the normally pacific Mother Sister cries “Burn it down”, and Mookie, Sal's employee and friend, throws the trash can which begins the riot. Sal himself seems to give assent in a phrase which ironically echoes Da Mayor's maxim. “Do what you gotta do”, he tells Mookie seconds before Mookie begins the riot.
What, then, is the right thing in this film, and who does it? The seemingly straightforward maxim of the title becomes troubled and problematic as we follow its fortunes in the film. The problem does not become any easier to solve as we follow it into the intertext surrounding the film. We discover in the published screenplay that originally Sal was to tell Mookie, “Doctor, always try to do the right thing” the day after the riot (Lee 1989, 264). This repetition of Da Mayor's advice was dropped from the finished film, and Sal's “Do what you gotta do” was inserted at the beginning of the riot. Lee's screenplay, which gives us the earlier version, not the version he shot, offers us a chance to consider the different versions and their different implications. The dialogue on the problematic meaning of this maxim continues in the documentary The Making of “Do the Right Thing”, filmed by St. Clair Bourne with Lee's permission and encouragement. In the documentary Spike Lee and Danny Aiello, the actor playing Sal, differ vigorously and publicly on the meaning of right and wrong in the film. Lee's own interviews are equally problematic. In one he first defends the riot as “the right thing”, and then defends Sal's point of view (Glicksman 1989, 14, 15). Lee's intertext, rather than settling the question raised by his film's problematic title, seems to open it wider.
The second of our utterances, “Fight the power”, undergoes trials similar to those of the film's title. The phrase belongs to the genre of the political slogan, and it has different social associations from those of the moral maxim we have been considering: this particular slogan suggests the counter-culture and the civil-rights movement of the sixties. “Fight the power” is introduced into the film on the sound track before the story begins as the refrain of a rap song. This genre, a fusion of political rhetoric and popular music, has controversial connotations of its own. Rap artists have been celebrated as authentic voices of the underclass, and castigated as proponents of gangsterism, sexism and anti-semitism (see Horowitz 1989, 15). These contradictory associations trouble this utterance's introduction into the film.
During the title sequence these rap lyrics accompany the dancing of the actress Rosie Perez. Images seem to complement words here, for during part of the sequence, Perez, wearing boxing trunks and boxing gloves, mimes a boxer in the ring. But the interaction between image and word is more complex. In the boxing sequence, it is not clear whom Perez is fighting, for she throws her punches into the empty air. During other parts of the title sequence, Perez abandons the boxing gear and dons either a red minidress or blue dance tights to dance a sexy jerk, almost a bump and grind, in time to “Fight the power”. We are led to wonder what power the dancer is fighting here, or if she is even fighting at all. Is this sequence really about politics or erotics? Is this dancer, and is this rap song, involved in political struggle or in gratuitous stimulation?
We are set to thinking further on these questions when we recognize that, in the story, Rosie Perez portrays Tina, the film's most passive character. Tina complains, justifiably, that Mookie is a negligent companion and father; yet when Mookie wants sex from her, she gives in to him. She is one of the few characters in the film who are not present at the riot; indeed, we never see her outside her apartment. What, then, is the meaning, serious or ironic, of the fact that the actress playing this character dances to “Fight the Power” in the film's title sequence? What, in short, is the relationship of word to accompanying image at this crucial juncture in the film?
The phrase “Fight the power” is equally problematic within the diegesis. It is introduced into the story by Radio Raheem, who constantly plays the rap song on his enormous boom box. We hear the song's pounding rhythms in Radio Raheem's encounters with the black teenagers, with the children playing at the hydrant, and with the Puerto Ricans whose salsa he deliberately drowns out. Raheem's music, it is clear, is more than a form of self-expression: it is an act of aggression. The Corner Men react angrily, and black neighbors call out in frustration at the blasting music. Even Raheem's ally Buggin' Out asks why he does not play something else. In all these scenes we hear only the song's music, not its lyrics, but so powerful is the association established by the title sequence between this music and the song's refrain, “Fight the power”, that we mentally “hear” these words in these scenes. The insertion of the phrase into the story raises problems similar to those encountered with “Do the right thing”. In what sense does Radio Raheem “fight the power”? His boom box assaults other blacks and shuts off dialogue. Perhaps even more dangerously, it excuses Raheem from thinking or communicating for himself; he allows his pre-recorded, mechanically reproduced voice to do this for him.
Raheem turns his music against Sal, first when he enters the pizzeria for a slice, and again when he returns in support of Buggin' Out's boycott. In these scenes, we hear the rap lyrics as well as the music, and it is clear that Raheem feels he has found the power he must tight. It is Sal, who refuses to put Afro-Americans in his Italians-only photo gallery. Raheem's return to the pizzeria with the boom box leads to its violent destruction, his own death, and the riot.
We hear the lyrics one last time when Smiley enters the pizzeria to pin his photo of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to the Wall of Fame. Raheem's tape and boom box have been destroyed, so the music in this scene comes from outside the story as an ironic extradiegetic comment. We are made to hear, in the flames destroying Sal's Pizzeria, the “jungle music” Sal tried to silence. So, it seems, Raheem has won a victory. And yet the tone at the end of the riot is scarcely triumphant. It hardly seems that the Brooklyn pizza maker represents the power, or any significant part of it, or that anything of significance has been changed in the city's power dynamics. As Mookie points out, Sal will get his insurance money and return to business. The mayor of New York, it is true, has appointed a commission to study the riot, but that has happened before. What, then, does it mean to “fight the power”? And who in this story does so effectively?
The two utterances we have been studying share common origins and suffer similar fates. The moral maxim and the political slogan, it is true, are different speech genres, and they have, in these instances, different social and political connotations. And yet, if we look closely at the two utterances — “Do the right thing” and “Fight the power” — we note important formal similarities. They share the same trenchant brevity, the same imperative mood, the same use of the definite article. More important, the maxim and the slogan, as genres, share ideological assumptions. Both genres reflect an epistemological and ethical confidence that the world is readily available to our intellect and amenable to our will. They further assume that what we know about the world and what we must do in it can be neatly compressed into brief dicta. The maxim and the slogan are, predominantly, monological genres. The imperative mood shuts off dialogue, commanding us to act, while the definite article denies ambiguity, promising a specific target — the right thing, the power — for our action.
Spike Lee's film takes these phrases in and out of the diegesis, in and out of the text. Lee presents them visually and aurally, juxtaposing them with different images, establishing a dialogue, forcing us to see these utterances from different perspectives. His target, however, is less the specific phrases themselves than the genres and the forms of thinking they represent. These genres abound in a community which assails Mookie with maxims, slogans and injunctions. “Stay Black”, Buggin' Out tells him; “Be a man”, nags Tina; “Take care of your responsibilities”, says his sister Jade; “Get a job”, yell the kids on the street. But what shade of black, and what kind of man? To whom should Mookie be responsible? To his employer? To his people? To himself? What job are these kids talking about? Where will he find it, and where does it lead? These are the crucial questions that the retreat into formulaic speech blocks. In Lee's film, both the moral maxim and the political slogan are “decrowned”, and with them the simplistic thinking that reduces complex moral and political problems to facile formulae.
The third utterance whose fortunes I would like to trace are the words “Love” and “Hate”, which Radio Raheem introduces into the story when he recounts the following narrative to Mookie:
Let me tell you the story of Right Hand—Left Hand, the story of Good and Evil.
H A T E! It was with this hand that brother Cain iced his brother.
LOVE! See these fingers, they lead straight to the soul of man. The right hand. The right hand of LOVE.
The story of life is this … STATIC! One hand is always fighting the other. Left Hand Hate is kicking much ass and it looks like Right Hand Love is finished.
Hold up, stop the presses! Love is coming back, yes, it's Love. Love has won. Left Hand Hate KO'ed by Love.
The words “Love” and “Hate” are present on the screen as well as on the sound track, for, as Raheem narrates, he displays heavy gold jewelry bearing these words on his fists. The narrative celebrates the power of Christian love, but the meaning of Raheem's words is brutally and ironically undercut by the images which accompany them. As he speaks, Raheem mimes the struggle he describes with vicious jabs until the right fist, bearing “Love”, violently subdues its opponent. Raheem misses this irony as well as another, intertextual one. He has borrowed his speech almost entirely from Charles Laughton's 1955 film, Night of the Hunter (screenplay by James Agee). He seems oblivious or indifferent to the fact that, in repeating the speech, he is imitating the film's villain, a hypocritical and murderous white preacher.
The crucial words we are following occur on the screen again when we watch Raheem's hands, bearing the Love and Hate jewelry, strangle Sal and then tremble in death as Raheem himself is strangled by the policeman. We will hear the word “Hate” once more on the sound track: it is Mookie's one-word battle cry as he begins the riot. We will see “Love” on the screen at the end of the narrative as we watch Mister Señor Love Daddy appeal for racial understanding. As the disc jockey speaks, he is framed in his studio window above the middle word of a sign identifying his station, WE LOVE RADIO.
These important words enter the story as the key terms in a religious allegory. Allegory is the enemy of “prosaics”, “the philosophy of the ordinary”, which Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson find at the heart of Bakhtin's world-view (1990, 23). For Bakhtin, argue Morson and Emerson, the world was irreducibly chaotic, contradictory and unfinalizable. Allegory, however, radically suppresses the messy complexity of our world. Behind the confusion of our material existence, this genre posits a much simpler spiritual reality, and it instructs us to read the former in terms of the latter. The allegory of Love and Hate simplifies further by discovering in this spiritual reality a Manichean struggle between two opposed forces, a struggle Christian love is destined to win.
The actual fortunes of the words “Love” and “Hate” on the screen and on the sound track of the film tell a more complex story. There is indeed a struggle between love and hate; however, it is to be found not on some transcendent spiritual level, but in the social and political life of contemporary America. Unlike the allegory, the film makes no promises about the eventual victor; it places the responsibility for that choice very clearly in our hands. The film dramatizes that choice by the juxtaposition of two texts displayed on the screen, outside the story, as part of the final title sequence. The first text is by Martin Luther King; it repudiates violence “because it thrives on hatred rather than love”. The second, by Malcolm X, accepts violence as a necessary means for black self-defence.
The first two utterances we traced began outside the story, entered it and were changed by it. The two words of the third utterance follow a different trajectory. They begin inside the story, and then step out of the diegesis in the texts printed on the screen after the narrative conclusion. They go further still: for the words of King and Malcolm are intertextual, they are borrowed from our society and take us back into it. With these texts, we leave the fictional world of Sal and Mookie and enter the real world of historical black struggle. Contradictory juxtapositions like the final juxtaposition of Dr. King and Minister Malcolm are fundamental to this film's structure. Love and Hate; Da Mayor and Radio Raheem; “Do the right thing” and “Fight the power”. We discover here “the structural characteristics of the carnival image”, which, Bakhtin tells us, “strives to encompass and unite within itself both poles of becoming or both members of an antithesis […] opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another” (PDP, 176).
The genres we have been discussing — maxims, slogans and allegory — are all crystallizations of monological thinking: they inhibit consideration of and dialogue on the inevitable messiness and complexity of our condition. None of which, however, excuses us from that consideration or that dialogue. Quite the contrary: in this film the phrases “Do the right thing”, “Fight the power”, “Hate” and “Love” retain their moral urgency even as they acquire greater complexity. It is to emphasize this point, I believe, that Lee gives them to us one final time, outside the diegesis, in the film's final credits. The last thing we hear on the soundtrack of this film is Al Jarreau singing the song “Never Explain Love”. The last thing we see on the screen, in modest white-on-black script, is this sign off:
Fight the Power
A Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks Production
Ya-Dig Sho-Nuff
By Any Means Necessary
A Spike Lee Joint
Do the Right Thing.
The discussion so far has focused on the carnivalization of specific utterances in the film. I would now like to explore carnivalization and dialogue within specific voices — firstly the voices of the Corner Men, three black males who sit on the corner talking about the world, themselves and the day's events. Critics have likened their commentary to that of a Greek chorus (Glicksman 1989, 13) or of African griots, but while these generic comparisons are useful, they are subject to an important qualification. Sweet Dick Willie, Coconut Sid and ML, unlike the chorus or griots, enjoy no privileged position in relation to the story we watch. These voices are dialogical, firmly embedded within the narrative, and they speak from that position. The Corner Men, moreover, are distinct individuals with different personalities and different accents. ML, for instance, is serious and reflective and speaks with a Caribbean accent; his friend, the ribald and irreverent Sweet Dick Willie, speaks with a northern urban black accent.
The Corner Men's voices thus are doubly dialogical: not only do the individual voices emerge from distinct positions within the story, they do not agree. The voices of this “chorus” are in dialogue with one another: ML opposes the Koreans who have opened a grocery in the neighborhood, but Sweet Dick Willy mocks ML and ostentatiously sets off to buy a beer from the Asian-Americans. Even when the voices speak together, their comments do not represent a predictable ideological position. They scorn the white police, but they also deride Buggin' Out's boycott of Sal's pizzeria; they loudly protest Radio Raheem's music, but they join the riot at his death. It is, ironically, this inconsistency that most justifies the comparison of their comments to speech genres such as the commentaries of the chorus or of a griot representing the voice of the community. There is no consistent voice in this community — no single ideological perspective shared by all of its members — and the raucously dialogical character of the Corner Men's voices make them an apt synecdoche for the society from which they emerge.
But there is another feature, in addition to this dialogism, that makes these voices representative of the way language works in this film. We can see this feature in the words addressed by Sweet Dick Willie to ML: “Fool, You're thirty cents away from a quarter … You're ragged as a roach. You eat the holes out of donuts.” It is clear from the context that the utterance's meaning differs from its literal semantic content. The Corner Men are “playing the dozens”: they are engaged in friendly, competitive swapping of ingenious insults. In the screenplay, Lee mentions this speech genre, as well as stand-up comedy and religious testifying, in speaking of the Corner Men (1989, 30, 67). These generic labels hint at the humor, the sense of solidarity and the delight in gratuitous verbal play expressed by the Corner Men and by Lee's film in general. Thus, in these voices, as in the utterances discussed earlier, the generic hybridization described by Bakhtin contributes to Lee's particular form of verbal carnival.
The verbal play seen in the Corner Men is also a distinguishing feature of another voice, that of Mister Sefior Love Daddy. Although a minor character, this disc jockey plays a key role in the community and in the film's discourse. His is the first and the last voice we hear in the diegesis, waking the neighborhood to a day of sultry heat at its beginning and reminding his listeners to register to vote at its end. Also, at the center of the narrative, Mister Sefior Love Daddy cuts off the racial slur montage, and at its end he delivers this plea for racial understanding:
My People. My People.
What can I say?
Say what I can.
I saw it but didn't believe it.
I didn't believe it what I saw.
Are we gonna live together?
Together are we gonna live?
The meaning of the deejay's utterance is obvious and important, but it is worth contrasting its form to that of the rap lyric which begins the film. Public Enemy's “Fight the Power” and Mister Sefior Love Daddy's patter both use rhyme and popular Black speech, but there are important differences between the two utterances. The first is the posture taken towards the other. Note the attitude taken in this excerpt from “Fight the Power”:
Elvis was a hero to most
But he never meant shit to me you see
Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain
Mother fuck him and John Wayne
Public Enemy's language is harsh and obscene, their condemnation of white popular culture categorical; the truth, for them, is “simple and plain”, and they permit no discussion of their judgement. Contrast their posture with Mister Señor Love Daddy's in the passage quoted above: the disc jockey begins by addressing both blacks and whites, and he ends with a question, an invitation to dialogue.
Note also the stylistic differences between the rap lyric and the disc jockey's patter. The dominant feature of “Fight the Power” is the insistent repetition of its title refrain, which we hear more than thirty times during the opening sequence. These rappers carry the logic of the political slogan to a numbing extreme: they mean to convince us of their simple truth by dogged insistence. In contrast, the dominant feature of the deejay's appeal is chiasmus. The intricate pattern of reversals turns utterances back on themselves, and in so doing calls attention to the utterances' artificiality. The meaning of this patter is serious, but its form is playful. In the deejay's verbal play we sense the “joyful relativity” (PDP, 107) that Bakhtin celebrated in carnival: the renunciation of one-sided rhetorical seriousness, singular meaning, and dogmatism.
So far I have discussed the contrasting utterances of the rappers and of the deejay as if they were words on a page, but they are not; they are on the sound track, and it is in their auditory enactment that we hear some of their most important differences between them. “Fight the power” is chanted by the amplified voices of four black males whom we do not see; they are supported by the pounding rhythm of drum, guitar and saxophone. The musical accompaniment is so powerful that it renders all the lyrics except for the refrain difficult to understand. Mister Señor Love Daddy is alone, his voice unamplified; he is, moreover, a character whom we know in the story. The name he has chosen for himself — a combination of white English, Spanish and Black English — embodies his acceptance of the community's polyglossia and heteroglossia. His litany of black musical artists is an aural counterpart to Sal's Italian Wall of Fame. Sal and the deejay both celebrate the heroes of their respective ethnic groups, but Mister Señor Love Daddy's list is longer and more inclusive of different generations and cultural levels: Mary Lou Williams as well as Bob Marley, Janet Jackson and Charley Mingus. He also finds space in his patter to praise Sal's hero sandwiches.
Spike Lee ends his narrative with Mister Señor Love Daddy, and let this essay also end with the same character. Our discussion of this film began by our noting the tired sterility of the initial exchanges, but — true to its dialogical vision — the film also gives us a contrasting view of language. There is, in the disc jockey's and the Corner Men's playful creativity, a confidence in language's transforming and rejuvenative power. This confidence emerges from a black culture which for many years was denied almost every resource except the power to speak, recite and sing. Bakhtin has taught us that the power of language and delight in this power are forces that carnival releases, and they explain for me the feeling of exhilaration I take from viewing this film, with all its hard truths.
The disc jockey also enables me to make a point about the film's structure. Nicholas Saada, quite perceptively, notes that the similarity between this structure and rap music is like “sampling” (1989, 8), the rapster's technique of borrowing elements of pre-existing songs and integrating them into a new piece of work. I would substitute Mister Señor Love Daddy for the rappers to make the same point. This disc jockey, like Spike Lee, creates by orchestrating the voices of others. Bakhtin, Robert Stam points out, “deflates the romantic myth of artist as visionary, sage or ‘unacknowledged legislator’ […] while at the same time restoring a kind of dignity and importance to the author as the stager and metteur en scène of languages and discourses” (1989, 14). Surely this description applies to Spike Lee, stager of the carnival entitled Do the Right Thing.
Lee's film attracted immediate attention at the time of its release both for its excellence as a narrative and for its capacity to stimulate lively discussion of the problems it dramatized. Both of these strengths, I have tried to show, derive from the distinctive way this film uses language. Lee's film reminds us of the important function language can play in film, a function which the “logophobia” (Stam 1989, 60) of much film criticism has tended to obscure. Film is a crucial site where our culture's many codes, including its linguistic codes, interact and are transformed. Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of this interaction in literature can be fruitful for our understanding of film.
WORKS CITED
Glicksman, Marlaine 1989. “Spike Lee's Bed-Stuy BBQ”, Film Comment, 25/4, 12–18.
Horowitz, Mark 1989. “Public Enemy Number One”, American Film, 14/10, 15.
Lee, Spike 1989. Do the Right Thing (New York: Simon).
Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson 1990. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Saada, Nicholas 1989. “Black is Back”, Cahiers du Cinéma, 421, 6–8.
Stam, Robert 1989. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).