This paper examines the relationship between Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" (1989) and D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915), moving beyond surface-level racial ideology to identify deeper structural and thematic parallels. Both films function as epics concerned with moral authority and American identity, beginning with scenes of leisure that mask underlying social conflicts. The paper argues that Lee's film serves as a direct response to Griffith's marginalization of African Americans, using the microcosm of a Brooklyn pizza parlor to demonstrate how the exclusion of Black representation from spaces of cultural honor—whether on film or on restaurant walls—denies African Americans full participation in American community and identity.
How does "Do the Right Thing" constitute a response to "Birth of a Nation," without belaboring the obvious? Presumably, belaboring the obvious means pointing out that D.W. Griffith's landmark silent film is a racist piece of cinema, while "Do the Right Thing" is constructed by Spike Lee, an African American filmmaker. It is true that it is easy to imagine a young Spike Lee as a film student, perhaps seeing such a film and being horrified by Griffith's blackface, rapacious actors chasing white women, acting in buffoonish ways, and ultimately being defeated by the false heroism of Griffith's white-shrouded clansmen.
Yet both "Do the Right Thing" and "Birth of a Nation" share a deeper concern, despite their ideological polarization regarding 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. This shared structural and thematic project allows us to move beyond simple oppositional readings and examine how Lee's film engages with Griffith's work at the level of form and argument, not merely content.
The beginnings of the films are strikingly similar. Both start by setting the scene with the central protagonists at leisure, in social as well as vocational, familial, and private settings. In "Birth of a Nation," the main characters are shown on 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 shifts to an apparently happier Italian-American-run pizza parlor in the local neighborhood, an eatery where there is something resembling a tenuous state of racial harmony, as the character played by Lee works for the parlor owner Danny for something like a fair wage, not a slave wage.
These opening scenes are structurally identical: both establish a space of leisure and apparent contentment that masks underlying social and economic tensions. The plantation and the pizza parlor both function as microcosms of larger social hierarchies. By beginning with leisure rather than conflict, both films suggest that the way people live, eat, work, and entertain themselves reveals deeper truths about how they understand their place in America.
From these sites of leisure, questions about American and racial identity become manifest. What people do for fun, what they watch, how they eat and live—these are 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. Both films ask a more complex and profound question: who is an American, and how does regional identity—whether American Southern or Italian-American, rural Southern or New York urban—fit into one's larger place in America?
This concern with regional and national identity is not merely thematic background; it is the driving force of each narrative. The films insist that how Americans understand their regional belonging is inseparable from how they understand their racial identity and their claim to full participation in the nation.
The Southerners of "Birth of a Nation" obviously defend slavery as their unique and peculiar institution, enough to attempt to sever permanently from the Union. "My state, my land," Griffith's plantation owners declare—they are even willing to sever family ties to defend their way of life. The Italian-Americans of "Do the Right Thing" see themselves as righteous enough in their ownership of the neighborhood and economic stability in Brooklyn to enshrine only Italian Americans in a place of special honor within the hallowed halls of their restaurant space.
Both groups—Southern and Italian—defend their right to affirm their identity as such Americans and as property owners in a capitalist America. Yet to do so affirms their separateness as well as their social and economic status through marginalizing other groups. In Griffith's film, "Birth of a Nation" celebrates such affirmation of identity through the use of the bodies of enslaved African Americans. Lee's film acts as a response to Griffith by showing that such affirmations of American white identity through marginalizing Black people merely makes the African-American patrons of the store—who make up the majority of the pizza parlor's customers and provide the majority of its economic sustenance—feel less a part of life at what should be a local community hang-out.
"Visual representation as key to full participation in American community"
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