Word: blacking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Washington is in the grip of a memorial epidemic. The success of the Viet Nam Memorial has spawned demand for more. Memorials are in progress to Korean War vets, to black Revolutionary War patriots, to women in military service, to law-enforcement heroes, to women in Viet Nam, to Francis Scott Key, to Kahlil Gibran (!). The hunger for memory etched in stone is exactly what one would expect from a culture that, having just now transcended paper and entered the radically ephemeral world of video, finds itself living in an ever moving pastless present...
...hottest day of the year, good people can do bad things. Especially in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn's black ghetto where the crime rate sizzles and hopes evaporate in the summer glare. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing is the story of a day in the death of the American Dream...
...from his boom box. By day's end, though, the neighborhood has erupted. Sal and Raheem start fighting about the loud music; the cops arrive and, in the struggle, kill Raheem; Mookie throws a trash can through his employer's window; the place goes up in a puff of black rage...
With this week's U.S. release of Do the Right Thing, the furor goes Stateside. Not since the Black Panthers cowed Manhattan's glitterati 20 years ago has there been such a virulent outbreak of radical chic -- or so many political-disease detectives ready to stanch the epidemic. A single issue of the Village Voice ran eight articles on the movie, with opinions running from raves to cries of "fascist" and "racist." A political columnist for New York magazine charged that Lee's film could undermine the New York City mayoral campaign of a black candidate. Everywhere, the film...
...what is the truth of Do the Right Thing? Whose side is Lee on? Is the movie a revolutionary scream or a fatalistic shrug? Lee leaves plenty of hints -- contradictory epigrams from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, a dedication to families of blacks slain by police, graffiti proclaiming TAWANA ((Brawley)) TOLD THE TRUTH -- but no coherent clues. Lee cagily provides a litmus test for racial attitudes in 1989, but he does so by destroying the integrity of his characters, black and white. They vault from sympathetic to venomous in the wink of a whim. One minute, Sal delivers...