Here is the space where you respond to the films of Lee and/or Beyonce (preferably both). Remember: Lee’s film was released in 1989. Please also consider both films in relation to recent conversations about Cane and Citizen.
You may be interested in these supplementary materials at some point:
Spike Lee Interview: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/02/spike-lee-amazing-rant-against-gentrification.html?gtm=top>m=top
Kiese Laymon: “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America”—http://gawker.com/5927452/how-to-slowly-kill-yourself-and-others-in-america-a-remembrance
The play that I usually teach in addition to Citizen and “Do the Right Thing” is Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles, 1992 and its adaption into the film of the same name…for future reading/viewing if you’re interested in learning more about the Rodney King riots.
Both Lemonade and Do the Right Thing remind me of Citizen, in that they both approach racial issues through unconventional cultural scapes. In her visual album, Beyonce expresses herself through movement, hair and costume, and poetry. She is lyrical in her approaches to conveying a scorned woman’s journey. I was most drawn to the denial scene, specifically Beyonce’s use of water. The bedroom is insulated with water, acting as a barrier between hope and reality. Similarly, the water shooting out of the fire hydrant represents the purging of emotion, as Beyonce transitions into her scene of anger. Water is an element of liberation, showering children of color. Beyonce points to the human oppression, as community members, presumed to be socially oppressed, dance freely in the water. Beyonce herself dances with a baseball bat, a common object that contrasts with her extravagant dress, while she sings “No, they used to hide from you, lie to you.” Like Claudia Rankine, she supports her words with symbolic visual imagery.
Do the Right Thing is more blatant in demonstrating its cultural messages. The dialogue between the characters is particularly resemblant of the social inequalities that Rankine portrays. After Mookie hears Pino say, “well, they’re black, but not really, they’re more than black. It’s different” he serves as the voice of reason, contrasting the racial prejudice that plague so many Americans. Spike matches the goals of Rankine by capitalizing on dialogue. They use dialogue as a method, since conversations like Mookie and Pino’s are central ways in which racism is integrated into society. By utilizing simple moments in urban society, Beyonce and Spike address social discrepancies and racial biases. Their scenes could seamlessly be integrated into Citizen, as hallmarks of pop culture and avante garde art forms.
In my film history class, we watched a 1960s French film called Breathless; French cinema at the time was known for its deviation from Hollywood standard and for it’s search for realism in it’s films through the use of documentary and long shot style of filming. Breathless was known for some unconventional style of filming, including scenes where the actors and actresses broke the fourth wall by talking directly into the camera. Do the Right Thing incorporates this unconventional method of filming in a number of scenes.
One example includes when Mookie and Pino look into the camera and verbally attacks the other based off of their race as they look into the camera. This continues on with other characters of different backgrounds looking into the camera and attacking an unspecified person of a specified ethnicity. This decision to break the fourth wall in this scene effectively incorporates the audience with the scene; it is as though they are the ones being addressed. Similarly, Rankine is able to include the reader in the events occurring in Citizen by using the second person narrative.
The film is about fight for power of one group over another. The camera angle alone—with the characters almost being in the camera’s “face”—instills a feeling of intimidation, and along with the derogatory language, the entire exchange is aggressive and confrontational, and these hostile emotions are physically directed to the viewer. Though Citizen does not use aggressive language, the second person narrative does confront the reader of their own discomfort by placing them in unpleasant situations that black American citizens experience.
Both Lemonade and Do The Right Thing left me speechless and in tears at first; however, I soon remembered that the progressive nature of the films is meant to initiate a conversation as opposed to leaving one speechless. I was particularly moved by the aggression in Do The Right Thing and by the reconciliation in Lemonade, because it reinforced Rankine’s belief that we are never going to move forward without conversation. Beyoncé showed her audience that she was able to overcome and work through her marriage despite her husband’s disrespect, concluding her video by saying, “My torturer became my remedy, so we’re gonna heal.” Beyoncé’s range of emotions throughout Lemonade reminded me of the rings on Radio Raheem’s fingers; love on the right hand, and hate on the left. We forget how these emotions are so closely linked and how one is able to transcend the other. It is possible to heal and to transcend from hate to love, we just have to be willing to communicate. Lemonade is a video of confrontation – although there are many other layers – and if Beyoncé can stand up to her husband in front of the world, then we can start to be at least a little uncomfortable in our everyday actions. This is exactly what Claudia Rankine brings forward in Citizen; we can confront others, and it doesn’t have to end up with an unnecessary death. When Radio Raheem is killed by the police in Do The Right Thing, I was particularly saddened not only because I was upset about a life ending in useless violence, but because this movie was released in 1989. 29 years have gone by, yet similar events are still happening regularly. When I ask myself why nothing has changed, I am reminded again of Rankine’s argument that the lack of confrontation prevents change, and the reason similar events are still happening today is because often we are afraid of the discomfort associated with an honest discussion. Rankine, Lee, and Beyoncé present progressive and experimental works of art that highlight the need to foster confrontational discussions on a regular basis. They have started the conversation that we need to continue.
In both Lemonade and Do The Right Thing, hair is used as a means of empowerment. In Lemonade, black women’s hair is braided in intricate designs, almost all of which have African roots. This stood out to me because both within the black community and outside of it, black hair is a constant topic of conversation. In Lemonade, all types of hair and hairstyles are shown on all shades of black people. Women walk proudly with their wigs, weaves, extensions, and natural hair.
In Lemonade’s fire hydrant scene, Beyoncé spins as the water hits her face and young children follow her lead, letting their hair get wet. There is even a beautiful shot of a young boy with uncut curls dancing proudly to the beat of “Hold Up”. In Do The Right Thing, there are also women and men running in and out of the water unbothered by the state of their hair. This is iconic because black hair has a history of being handled, specifically straightened, thus, it does not often mix with well with water. However, in both of these scenes, black hair and water meet and black people are carefree, laughing, and at their most beautiful. Here, water relieves them from the physical temperature, but it also works to liberate them from traditional beauty standards. This marriage of two entities that, at least in the United States, are often sworn enemies, is at the base of reclamation and the relearning of beauty.
To me the fact that Beyoncé is doing the redefining is very interesting. In many people’s eyes, she is the stereotypical epitome of a beautiful black women, as uncomfortable as it might be to admit. She has light skin and long natural hair. Many men look to her to define what a beautiful black woman is, and many women look to her as a definition of beauty in general. In Lemonade, Beyoncé’s decision to add women of all shades and stature standing with her works to say that we are all strong, beautiful women. I was, and still am, amazed by the visuals and would consider myself grateful have it be both so accessible and relevant in my life, but I can’t help but wonder- how much of an impact a work like this would have if Beyoncé didn’t look the way she does?
There’s a saddening continuity between Do The Right Thing and Lemonade. In Do The Right Thing, before the end credits roll, a list of names appears. It’s a list of black people who died from police brutality or from hate crimes in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. And in Lemonade, we see a series of women holding pictures of young black men. As it turns out, those images are Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. Has anything changed?
There’s a lot of other moments in Do The Right Thing Where I see an issue that’s still just as relevant today as it was in 1989. At one point, the camera passed over a newspaper that had a headline about abortion. In the last scene of the movie, the radio DJ reminds all the listeners to register to vote for the upcoming elections. (To be fair, registering to vote isn’t really an issue, it’s more of a function of society. It just feels like registering to vote is suddenly relevant again in this age. I wonder if it was as relevant back then as it is now.) Of course, the issue of police brutality is just as front-and-center today as it was in this movie. If this movie was filmed today, the chants of “Howard Beach!” could be replaced with chants of “Charleston!” (referencing another hate crime). The list at the end of the movie could be replaced with another list ripped straight from Claudia Rankine’s book.
There are certainly moments in Do The Right Thing that create an avante-garde feel. The head-and-shoulders interview-style shots of various characters talking into the camera isn’t something not normally seen in movies, and it creates a feeling of intimacy, a feeling that we’re truly going inside the character’s heads, getting a window into their inner thoughts. It works well for a movie that covers the course of just 24 hours. Such a small window of time for a story to be told requires the movie to carry an intense intimacy with the characters.
I thought it was an amazing coincidence that Serena Williams had a cameo in Lemonade after we spent so much time talking about her in class. Then again, maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. Beyonce would’ve been aware of the controversies that have surrounded Serena’s tennis stardom throughout the years. It’s more likely that Beyonce knew exactly what she was doing when she brought in Serena and had her dancing next to her, proudly showing off the body that so many people in the tennis world seem to have a problem with. I found this article from the Washington Post that contains some quotes from Williams about her appearance in Lemonade, and she says this: “[Beyoncé] told me that she just wants me to dance, like just be really free and just dance like nobody’s looking and go all out” (Boren). In her tennis incidents, Serena was kept from going free—people didn’t want her to wear a bodysuit. People ridiculed her body and accused her of not being a real woman. Beyonce recognized that lack of freedom and subverted those expectations with her inclusion of Serena in the movie, letting her dance with pride.
Boren, Cindy. “Serena Williams Explains How She Ended up Twerking in Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 9 May 2016, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2016/05/09/serena-williams-explains-how-she-ended-up-twerking-in-beyonces-lemonade/?utm_term=.346111e1e754.
Though two drastically different films, Beyonce’s Lemonade and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, had some common overlap. I was paying particular attention to the usage of water throughout the films. Do the Right Thing featured the water as both a relief from the heat of the sun and a weapon against the oppressive whiteness. The scene with the fire hydrant was interesting because it showed how the black people in the neighborhood were able to gain power over the white man with water as their tool. But by the end of the film the white firefighters use the hose to prevent the black people from getting inside the pizzeria. This transition of power through the symbol of water is not only unique to Do the Right Thing but is also applicable to Lemonade. Beyonce portrayed several scenes with water. In the most earliest scene she falls from a building into a body of water as an attempt to escape her thoughts. In the later scenes she gracefully walks through the water with several women lined up behind her, as a reclamation of her strength. Water is violent and fluid. It’s literal use for survival manifests itself in Lemonade to represent Beyonce’s journey to regaining her life after heartbreak.
In comparing these two films to Cane and Citizen I immediately thought of the notion of silence. Do the Right Thing featured characters with very distinct speech abilities. The most obvious was Smiley. Throughout the film he struggled to clearly get a sentence across. Smiley was never identified as either white or black, making me question who assigns silence and how? The character Cee also had a lisp in the film. This was a less obvious mark of silence, but it’s important to note considering the parallel it draws to his minor role in the film. Music was also a technique for silence in Do the Right Thing. Often times it overpowered the dialogue between the characters and took up the majority of the film. The constant repetition of “fight the power” was a sarcastic spin on the films actually climax. Lemonade’s silence mostly appeared as transitions between the various songs. It was actually uncomfortable to sit through the segues for the songs because there was simply nature sounds and Beyonce’s monotone speaking voice. There was also no other voices other than Beyonce’s which is interesting considering the large number of woman in the footage. Perhaps this was Beyonce’s own stylistic choice. But I am wondering then, is Beyonce’s empowerment an individual act or an act for and of the community?
Both Do the Right Thing and Lemonade are prime examples of how the avant-garde can be used as a means to explore issues for black people living in the United States. Much like the texts we have been reading in class, both films serve as a, somewhat nebulous, exploration of the issues facing many black people, as opposed to a more logical and linear narrative. Moreover, Lemonade, which as an album is somewhat episodic in nature, mirrors Do the Right Thing, in its own episodic nature. I personally love Lee’s work because, unlike many mainstream films, it doesn’t try to wrap things into a neat and palatable package for the viewer, like, say, Invictus. Lee’s characters are forced to interact as they become increasingly uncomfortable in the sweltering heat, as Lee works to build tension for his audience. Lee is also able to expertly weave some tongue in cheek comedy into Do the Right Thing. One of my favorite scenes is the scene where the white man wearing the Larry Bird jersey scuffs Buggin’ Out’s shoe. First off, the subtle costume details of Larry Bird, a white man in a traditionally black sport, is incredibly, especially when compared to Mookie’s Jackie Robinson and Michael Jordan jerseys. Much like Toomer’s characters in Cane, the characters in Do the Right Thing are very much caught in their own small world in Brooklyn, their racial differences thrust together into this small world just outside of Manhattan. Much like Citizen, Lemonade tracks the oppression of black people through history up to modern times, and how, while over time things have definitely improved, they are far from good. There seems to be two dialogues existing within Lemonade that play off of each other. One, which only occurs at times, seems to be Beyonce’s way to confront her husband about his infidelity. On the other hand is, as mentioned earlier, the exploration into the current status of black people in modern American society. One thing that is particularly striking throughout Lemonade is the power that Beyonce and black women are imbued with by virtue of their struggle.
I can’t count the amount of times I’ve seen Lemonade. My sister and I went through a phase right after it came out where we would watch it and call each other immediately after. I’d guess we did that around five or ten weekends in a row. I figured we’d uncovered pretty much every secret in the conceptual album. I knew the Malcolm X quotes and the visual references to Igbo Landing.
We both failed to notice the reference to Do the Right Thing, because neither of us had ever seen it. It’s obvious now, of course—kids dancing in the broken fire hydrant, the fifties-style car, Beyonce’s bat and the destruction of storefronts—but I have to wonder: what else am I missing? How much else is there to discover? I’m generally good at ignoring the gap between my knowledge and all the knowledge available to me. I take life as it comes, and do my best to better myself without panicking. But the little realization about the director of Lemonade’s reference to Do the Right Thing freaked me out. I have to have such a larger background than I do if I’m ever going to fully grasp these works. Before reading Cane and Citizen, I never put much thought into what it might mean to combine music with spoken word poetry, especially if Beyonce had no hand in writing that poetry herself. Why take someone else’s work instead of creating? How does that outside influence affect the work as a whole? I don’t have answers, obviously, I’m just wondering.
That line of thought also led me to consider what it means to continue the black intellectual tradition. The song “Fight the Power” references such important figures as James Brown and Bobby Byrd, and Tupac continues that tradition into the ‘90s. But there’s also an important anti-intellectual movement in music today that I can’t discount. Kanye West is too easy of an example, but he’s still worth noting. His mother was a professor at a university, yet he spent several albums discussing what a waste college and learning are. Similarly, Earl Sweatshirt, whom I love, is the son of another university professor and an acclaimed South African poet, but he also actively ignores the black intellectual tradition. These rappers are creating a new tradition, although I don’t know to what end. I just think it’s worth noting that for every artist that embraces their cultural history, there’s another who rejects it, as consciously as they can.
On another unrelated note, these discussions about crossing genres remind me of Oreo by Fran Ross which is a hilarious book, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet read it.
Both Lemonade and Do the Right Thing are great examples of avant-garde works. Both explore racial and class divides similar to those in Citizen and Cane. Lemonade also goes on to explore sexism in a hyper-masculine society. Lemonade, similar to Citizen, traces oppression of African American people throughout history starting with the middle passage and ending in the present. Lemonade can be considered avant-garde because of the lack of linearity of time throughout the visual album. The historic aspects Beyonce presents are intermingled with modern aspects of racism to create a compounding idea that racism permeates and goes beyond time and space. By presenting these ideas in a compounding way, Lemonade synthesizes many eras of the same topic. Like Citizen, racism is presented as something that may have improved over the course of the last four hundred years but is still extremely relevant and violent. Both of these works prove that although time has passed, the violence is just as horrible, yet exists in a different form. For example, the violence slaveholders placed on their slaves is similar to the violence police exhibit on innocent black people.
Do the Right Thing and Cane are similar in the sense that there is a huge racial divide in the neighborhood in the film and assumptions about race in the text. Some stories in Cane were specific to white assumptions of black people and in the film, the violence that occurs toward the end is directly tied to the assumptions of white people on people of other races. Do the Right Thing is not necessarily avant-garde in the sense that it does not follow a plot or explores new filmmaking techniques, but in the story it presents. Especially for the time, it was produced in, Do the Right Thing explores a topic almost untouched by the film industry and brings many issues regarding race to the public eye.
One of the aspects of Lemonade that I found most interesting was the intensely personal quality to it. Citizen, Cane, and Do the Right Thing, in their use of personal vignettes, were crafting a larger world and making larger statements on universal themes. Lemonade, in my viewing, contrasted itself sharply with these in its focus on an individual experience of a romantic relationship, and the frankness and vulnerability sitting just beneath the surface of the intensely beautiful visual and musical production. Rather than using vignettes of her life to tell a larger story about black culture, I saw her using larger cultural imagery to make a statement about her own life, and how she has been directly impacted by the larger cultures around her: urban and rural black culture, female empowerment, toxic masculinity, religion. Beyonce uses the imagery of these contexts to fuel the personal nature of the story she intends to tell. Imagery of floods, reminiscent of the racist devastation of Katrina, connects to personal emotions of drowning in doubt and conflict in a relationship. Southern and Northern connections relate to Beyoncé’s own Houston heritage and her subsequent metropolitan fame in New York and Los Angeles. Her depictions of motherhood and fatherhood bring up her own ideas of accountability and responsibility in relationships. “Formation” combines a call for black female empowerment with Beyoncé’s own success, ambition, and apparent self-love. Because of this broader tactic of the cultural moving towards the personal, rather than the other way around, I thought the moments when she does depict her own family to be incredibly powerful moments, especially in the “Sandcastles” section. Based on the direct, accusatory, and frequently angry tone of the film before this point, the first shot of Jay-Z was a really effective tactic towards the reconciliatory moment being depicted, especially with the vulnerability of the visual depiction of the music being created, with Beyoncé at the piano.
I thought that Do the Right Thing was an incredibly effective film in its use of personal vignettes and small-scale interactions between people to build up to a larger cultural commentary, and the movie certainly impacted me viscerally and emotionally, but in terms of the actual vignette technique I did not feel as though the film was on the avant-garde. Certainly the production design and cinematographic techniques were very effective and contributed a great deal to the emotional impact of the film, but the narrative technique, as in Cane, of personal expanding to cultural, did not excite me in the way that its reveral in Lemonade did. Perhaps this is because I have seen similar tactics used in plenty of other works. I connected more strongly with Lemonade because of its focus on a single human experience.
The visual album “Lemonade” is beautiful. Beautiful like Cane. The artful progression of events, the rhythm created by the speaking, storytelling segments that border the songs echo the poems within Cane. Both in Cane and in “Lemonade,” these borders take the themes of the story songs to a broader context. The songs mark the individual journey of love, hatred, and redemption that Beyoncé herself travels, while the dialogue looks at the collective voices of her family and of the history of the South. The rural and urban settings throughout, such as the plantation house, the ocean, versus the scenes in the parking garage are integral to the album. Beyoncé is reclaiming these pieces of her heritage; her own journey from Texas to fame and the resulting transition to the city parallel the Great Migration of African Americans to the North. It is here in this urban setting that Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing takes place. Do The Right Thing also utilizes little vignettes and Lee weaves them together to culminate in the burning of Sal’s pizza parlor. Like Cane and Lemonade, Lee uses Do The Right Thing to speak for the collective – both the community and the prejudices that still exist today. He calls out the stereotypes that all people have towards each other, specifically based on race. The Asian shopkeepers only stop being “the other” to the black community when both are pitted against white police brutality. While Beyonce’ s “Lemonade” examines these conflicts through the lens of a single relationship, Lee’s Do The Right Thing, examines all different stories which he artfully weaves together into a scene of protest. Just as in Citizen, the stories are from many different people yet they all coalesce into the same story of discrimination, micro-aggression and violence.
Lemonade and Do the Right Thing were wonderful complements to our examination of the avant-garde through Citizen and Cane. Lemonade was extremely reminiscent of the cycling return to the South in Toomer’s novel. Similar to the point made by Acadia, Beyoncé’s repossession of her relationship with her husband portrays the larger reclamation of her black identity. Footage from more modern settings, suggestive of the North featured in Cane, is interjected by images of southern plantations; however, these scenes are dominated by powerful black women, as opposed to the white slave owners of the past. Just as she is mending the wounds of her broken marriage, through reflection upon this healing process she demonstrates the reckoning of difficulties endured by black women throughout history. This strength is portrayed throughout the film, transforming Beyoncé’s personal suffering into a message of hope within female solidarity.
An interesting connection between Citizen and Do the Right Thing is the racial divides within the neighborhood. Similar to our class discussion of Rankine’s World Cup Situation video and what constitutes blackness, Spike Lee’s work features characters of various ethnic backgrounds; however, they display solidarity through collective marginalized identify. Any individual not conforming to white standards of normalcy, constituting the “sharp white background,” was labeled as a racial other. This was captured by the Korean shop owner in his assertion that, despite their difference in skin tone, he was the same as other members of the community. Anyone that was not explicitly white, both in appearance or behavior, was classified as black, leading to the acceptance of Latinx individuals, the storeowners, and even Smiley. Just as Toomer was frustrated by the limitations placed by strictly black or white racial categories, Spike Lee and Rankine demonstrate that these identities are not strictly related to physical appearance, but also social acceptance.
Both films, Lemonade and Do the Right Thing, had many experimental elements to them. I’m not sure what makes a film officially avant-garde, but Beyoncé’s visual effects to her album and the jazz/ hip-hop music always in the background of Do The Right Thing makes it seem like we could categorize them as so. Can a film be avant-garde?
A similarity between Lemonade and Cane was the imagery of the American south. The women’s colonial clothing seemed to be a repossession of American history- images of these black females in large white houses was reminiscent of slavery in the south- but today the black women are the wealthy. I found the use of water to be interesting, how Beyoncé floats in a house in the beginning, opens the door and propels her into her next song, uses water from the fire hydrant for kids to play in, and ends with her lying on a sinking New Orleans police car. I’m still trying to figure out what this means… The use of color was also similar to Toomer’s use in Cane; many times in Lemonade, the women do not even appear to be African-American, sometimes appearing to have white, green, yellow, or red skin tones. A major theme of Lemonade, tying into Citizen, is the beauty of the black female body, also connecting to the magazine cover of Serena Williams. However, I think more of the underlying message in Lemonade is, like Aidan said, about feminine empowerment, possibly more so than black empowerment.
Something I found really interesting in Do The Right Thing was ML’s discussion of the melting icebergs- referring to climate change. The hot temperature in Do The Right Thing, symbolizing the growing tension in between race and ethnic groups within the Brooklyn neighborhood, reminded me of the root causes of racial and climate injustice- something I have been learning a lot about in some other classes. Effects of climate change not only disproportionately affect certain racial communities but stem from the same cause of not respecting the “Other,” whether that “Other” is an Asian man, an African-American, a Latino, the white male, or the natural environment.
Do The Right Thing also highlighted the uselessness of racial violence, best summed up in the quote at the end by MLK Jr., but then qualified by ending the film with Malcolm X. The jazz music underlying this film connects to Toomer’s mirroring jazz in Cane. Although in the film, riddled with hip hop music from Radio’s stereo, the “fight the power” lyric indicates the methods of music to protest power, specifically in the black community, which also connects back to Beyoncé’s Lemonade.
Do the Right Thing and Lemonade were prime examples of avant-garde art in conjunction with Cane and Citizen that we read — they both addressed themes of blackness and belonging. Do the Right Thing reminded me of the second section of Cane that is based in the city. Especially when it became night, the movie was imbued in yellows and oranges and there seemed to be a sharp, violent edge. It struck me that Spike Lee’s movie could be adapted to a play: it has a limited scope in a single day and also limited locations/sets, mostly in the pizza shop or on very specific street corners where certain characters are static and other move. I found this aspect fascinating — how Radio Raheem and Da Mayor are constantly wandering around in contrast to the three older men on the street corner and Mother Sister, who was oracle-like. Mother Sister having the static, constant qualities and wisdom of an oracle made one of the final scenes where she is standing in front of the burning pizza shop lamenting incredibly powerful and striking. The “Talking Heads” scene in the middle of the film was brilliant avant-garde filmwork. The racial stereotypes and vitriol that the characters were spitting at each other is indicative of how they each want the other to go away; how some don’t look at the others as members of the same nation as them, as citizens. Spike Lee used the closeness of the camera to their faces to unsettle the audience and make these inner monologues painfully audible. Beyonce’s Lemonade was more similar to Cane and Citizen because of its nonlinear narrative and episodical format. Each song and poem transitioned into each other but without clear connection in narrative. There were connections in theme, as in Cane — the southern plantation type house and the sunlight through the trees there, the white dresses typically worn during the dialogue and the revealing, empowering outfits worn during the songs. All underlined oppression or black/feminine empowerment, but not explicitly — the audience has to make the connection themselves.