¶ … Right Thing" constitute a response to "Birth of a Nation," without belaboring the obvious?
Presumably by belaboring the obvious, one means that the landmark of silent cinema, D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" is a racist piece of cinema, while "Do the Right Thing" is constructed by the imagination of, Spike Lee an African-American filmmaker. True, it is not difficult to imagine a young Spike Lee as a film student, perhaps seeing such a film and being horrified by Griffith's black-faced, rapacious actors. These actors are shown chasing white women, acting in buffoonish ways, and ultimately being defeated by the false heroism of Griffith's white-shrouded clansman. Yet both the film "Do the Right Thing" as well as "Birth of a Nation" share a deeper concern, despite their ideological polarization in terms of race. Both films are epics of moral as well as cinematic and plot-propelled authority. Both films make moral dilemmas about American identity and how to speak for a more complete American identity their central concern.
Even the beginnings of the film are similar. Both films begin by setting the scene by showing the central...
In "Birth of a Nation," the main characters are shown in a peaceful plantation, with 'happy' slaves sitting nearby. "Do the Right Thing" begins in a similarly hot setting, during a Brooklyn summer, beginning with potentially dangerous insults shouted by the many different ethnicities that live in the area. Then, the focus of the Lee film shifts to an apparently happier Italian-American run pizza parlor in the local neighborhood, an eatery where there is something resembling a very tenuous state of racial harmony, as the character played by Lee works for the parlor's owner Danny for something like a fair wage, not a slave wage.
But from these sites of leisure, questions about American and racial identity become manifest. What people do for fun, what they watch and how they eat and live, are still central to how they make their living and how they define themselves as people and Americans. It does not matter whether they are living on cotton plantations or selling pizza. Thus, on an even more complex and profound level both films also ask -- who is…
