Spike Lee and the sympathetic racist

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 64, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 67-79

  Flory, Dan ^a  

^a MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049313776     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0021-8529.2006.00230.x     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. Plato, Phaedrus 229e-230a, in Plato: the Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 478
2. See also W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 183-184
3. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1-2
4. See Dyer, White, especially pp. 70-144
5. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), especially pp. 53-62
6. and Lewis R. Gordon, "Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness," in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004), especially pp. 175-176, 181-182
7. See, for example, Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract, especially pp. 17-19, 91-109
8. and Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 22-26, 38ff
9. Douglas Kellner, "Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in the Films of Spike Lee," in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," ed. Mark A. Reid (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 75
10. and Bertholt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. 23, 101
11. See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 34
12. Alex Neill, "Empathy and (Film) Fiction," in Post-Theory, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 179-180
13. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 235-236
14. For more on the distinction between central and acentral imagining, see Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), especially pp. 36-38
15. Richard Wollheim, On Art and the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 58ff
16. and The Thread of Life (Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 73ff
17. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 88-96
18. Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 76ff
19. The claim that modern personal identity is intimately linked to race has been argued for by philosophers at least since Frantz Fanon. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 109-140
20. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man
21. O'Connor, Oppression and Responsibility
22. Mills, The Racial Contract
23. Thomas E. Hill Jr. and Bernard Boxill, "Kant and Race," in Race and Racism, ed. Bernard Boxill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 469-470
24. Janine Jones, "The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans," in What White Looks Like, pp. 65-86
25. Smith, "Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes," p. 228
26. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1969), p. 45
27. Linda Martín Alcoff, "What Should White People Do?" Hypatia 13 (1998): 24-25
28. See Emmanuel C. Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of a Postracial Future (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 27, as well as some of the title cards in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915)! Some in the abolitionist movement might be understood in this way as well
29. see Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, ed. Mason Lowance (New York: Penguin, 2000)
30. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Temple University Press, 1993), p. 1
31. and "The Epistemology of Race and Black American Film Noir: Spike Lee's Summer of Sam as Lynching Parable," in Film and Knowledge: Essays on the Integration of Images and Ideas, ed. Kevin Stoehr (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), pp. 174-190
32. As Smith notes, the original source for the concept of the "good-bad" character is Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, The Movies: A Psychological Study (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), pp. 20ff
33. Berys Gaut, "Film Authorship and Collaboration," in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 149-174. Page numbers in this paragraph refer to this essay
34. See, for example, Vincent Canby, "Spike Lee Tackles Racism in Do the Right Thing," New York Times, June 30, 1989, sec. C16
35. "Spike Lee Raises the Movies' Black Voice," New York Times, May 28, 1989, p. 14
36. Joe Klein, "Spiked? Dinkins and Do the Right Thing," New York Magazine, June 26, 1989, 14-15
37. See, for example, Spike Lee, with Lisa Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Fireside, 1989), p. 45
38. and Marlaine Glicksman, "Spike Lee's Bed-Stuy BBQ," reprinted in Spike Lee: Interviews, ed. Cynthia Fuchs (University of Mississippi Press, 2002), pp. 18-19
39. Gaut notes that Lee also makes this point during a read through of the script with Aiello in director St. Clair Bourne's documentary Making "Do the Right Thing" (1989)
40. Gaut, "Film Authorship and Collaboration," p. 166
41. see also Thomas Doherty, review of Do the Right Thing, Film Quarterly 43 (1989): 39
42. Ed Guerrero, Do the Right Thing (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), p. 75
43. Clyde Taylor, The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract - Film and Literature (Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 269
44. See, for example, Richard Corliss, "Hot Time in Bed-Stuy Tonight," Time 134 (1989): 62
45. Murray Kempton, "The Pizza Is Burning!" New York Review of Books, September 28, 1989, 37
46. Stanley Kauffmann, "Do the Right Thing," The New Republic 201 (1989): 25
47. Eze, Achieving Our Humanity
48. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 73
49. See Hill and Boxill, "Kant and Race," pp. 469-470
50. Jones, "The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans"
51. Arnold Farr, "Whiteness Visible: Enlightenment Racism and the Structure of Racialized Consciousness," in What White Looks Like, pp. 143-158
52. See Corliss, "Hot Time in Bed-Stuy Tonight"; Kempton, "The Pizza Is Burning!"
53. For more on the viewer's need to construct characters in ways that make sense of them as fictional agents, see Smith, Engaging Characters, especially pp. 120ff
54. See, for example, Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 191-192
55. Ray Pratt, Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music (New York: Praeger, 1990), pp. 135-139
56. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: the Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), especially pp. 3-54
57. I borrow here the idea of a textual prompt from Smith's "Imagining from the Inside," in Film Theory and Philosophy, p. 417
58. Baseball bats are negatively charged symbols of anti-black racism due to incidents in the New York City neighborhoods of Bensonhurst and Howard Beach in the late 1980s. Young black men in these incidents were either beaten to death or threatened with bats in ways that led to their death. See Lee and Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint, pp. 32-33, 46
59. S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 157, 270, n.43
60. Guerrero, Do the Right Thing, p. 35
61. See, for example, David Denby, "He's Gotta Have It," New York Magazine, June 26, 1989, 53-54
62. Klein, "Spiked? Dinkins and Do the Right Thing."
63. I use the term 'mental simulation' here with some reservations because, although I think that work by Robert Gordon, Gregory Currie, and others on this concept has greatly increased our knowledge of the workings of the mind in general and empathy in particular - especially with respect to literary fiction and film - I am not yet ready to embrace the claim that when we imagine, empathize, and so on, we run our belief systems "off-line" and operate as if our brains were just like computers, as in Currie's Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially pp. 141-197. I find these descriptions of how human minds work like computers to be too literal to feel comfortable endorsing them
64. For a fuller argument detailing reservations about mental simulation, see Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), especially pp. 342-356
65. Cited in Jones, "The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans," p. 75
66. As she notes, her analysis is based on Joe R. Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Pinar Batur, White Racism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 117-151, especially pp. 141-142. (It should also be noted that the white professor of law quoted here, David B. Oppenheimer, was sharply critical of his own responses to these images. His position is actually consistent with the one I outline
67. See his "The Movement from Sympathy to Empathy, Through Fear; The Beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny Provoke Differing Emotions but Similar Racial Concerns," The Recorder June 9 (1992): 14.)
68. See Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (University of California Press, 1998), especially pp. 40, 106, 185-188
69. Noël Carroll, "Interpreting Citizen Kane," Persistence of Vision 7 (1989): 51-61
70. reprinted in Interpreting the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 163
71. For discussion of philosophy's capacities and whether film can mimic them, see Stephen Mulhall, On Film (New York: Routledge, 2002), especially pp. 1-10
72. Julian Baggini, "Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall's On Film," Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at 〈http://www.film-philosophy.com/ vol7-2003/n24baggini〉
73. Mulhall, "Ways of Thinking: A Response to Andersen and Baggini," Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at 〈http://www.film- philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n25mulhall〉