Spike Lee's Joints

A discussion of "the right thing" in Spike Lee's 1989 film Do the Right Thing, focused on the moral contours of this question in the small space of a. Brooklyn neighborhood.

Show Notes

Discussion of the theme of "right" in Do the Right Thing, with particular focus on the neighborhood complexities of race, color, nation, and age. Beginning with a brief bit about the aesthetic innovations of the film - putting Black bodies on the screen - in relation to School Daze and She's Gotta Have It, I spend most of the piece exploring the relation between love, hate, and the notion of rightness. How do we measure rightness in the ambivalent, undecidable space of love mixed with hate, hate mixed with love? A response, perhaps an answer of sorts, lies in Mother Sister's two utterances in the penultimate scene, the climax of the film: stop stop and burn it all down.

What is Spike Lee's Joints?

20-30 minute reflections on particular Spike Lee films, from School Daze up through Black KkKlansman - précis for a book-length study of Lee's cinema, reflections on a course I've taught a number of times at Amherst College and University of Maryland. In these podcast pieces, I pay particular attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they emerge inside particular films and in the history-memory of African American life. How does Lee's cinema think? How does sound and image help us understand representation of Black bodies, Black people, and Black life? What are Lee's innovations, what challenges does he present us with in sound and image? And how can we see questions of masculinity, gender and racial formation, historical violence, and institutional violence evolve across his decades of filmmaking?