Spike Lee stands before a politically-decorated wall in a
promotional image for Do the Right Thing.
Foreword: "Get off My Lawn: Race and Community Relations
as Shown by Woody Allen and Spike Lee" is my second and final paper,
written for my college course cities and cinema in November 2014. It marks a
historic paper in my personal writing career, as it is the paper I've done the
most research on (working or devoting time to the piece for roughly six hours)
and the first I have ever written in an academic style other than the
traditional Modern Language Association (MLA) style of formatting. With this
paper, it was mandatory I utilized the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), a style
adopted largely by non-fiction books and newspapers, where citations for
specific quotes are linked at the base of the page of the paper where they were
used. In addition, footnotes and endnotes were utilized, making for an
occasionally frustrating, but overall, necessary, learning process for myself.
As somebody who's structure of review/blog writing would likely be condemned by
English professors and scholars, it was a pleasant change of pace to use a
method of formatting that was equal parts original and neat.
The paper had several requirements. Besides adhering to
Chicago Manual of Style guidelines, it needed to be between eight and ten pages
(which, for someone as verbose as me, was no challenge), three film reviews,
two peer-reviewed journals, and some kind of demographic data that supported
our thesis. It was a lot to take in, and the first week of November, I devoted
most of my free time on campus to this paper. I feel it came out pretty well
and sits nicely alongside Standing Tall: An examination of
verticality in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and Spike Jonze's
"Her," the first extensive research paper I had back in
October on the subject of cinematographical verticality.
[....]
Get off My Lawn: Race and Community Relations as Shown by Woody Allen and Spike Lee
It’s
obvious that the larger a particular city is, the higher the population and
human volume will be, resulting in a crowded, active environment. An element
that arises from this aspect of a city comes in terms of race and the idea of
what effect surroundings and specific neighborhood have on you as a whole. New
York City is a city composed of five different boroughs, each bearing different
demographic standing. Consisting of land stretching four-hundred and ninety-six
miles and over eight million people, New York City is the defining example of a
city where blocks, subdivisions, and boroughs are melting pots, or areas that
have a high volume of people from all different races. This kind of structure
and densely-populated environment lends itself to impending interactions and
relations by people of varying backgrounds, a topic or notion that has appeared
in many films. An intriguing time period for New York City, and America itself,
was the eighties, where community relations were surfacing and filmmakers were
holding up a metaphorical mirror to their environments to capture their own
homes. Both Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Spike Lee’s
directorial debut Do the Right Thing examine life in two
separate boroughs of New York City, showing two entirely different visions of
the city both filmmakers call home, with the former portraying Manhattan as a
cleaner, more intellectually-driven culture, fueled by the fine arts, where the
other shows the working class community of Brooklyn as a haven for unsettling
racial tension and unpredictable behavior.
To begin with, Woody
Allen’s Manhattan, released in 1979 to critical acclaim, concerns
Woody Allen’s Isaac Davis, a nebbish, squirrely forty-two-year-old comedy
writer turned author dating a precocious seventeen-year-old girl named Tracy
(Mariel Hemingway). Etching in ideas of age, ambition, and infidelity, the film
follows their relationship together, and Isaac’s deep-rooted feelings of
restlessness in his current situation.
On the
other hand, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing takes place on one
insufferably hot and humid day on a city block in Brooklyn, showing the
numerous different men and women who make up the block and how they are
combatting the heat and dealing with their day. At the center of it all is
Sal’s Pizzeria, run by Sal (Danny Aiello) and his two sons, with the help of
Mookie (Lee himself), the pizzeria’s delivery boy. The film chronicles this day
with a sense of unsettling drama, as interactions often become hostile, on the
count of bitterness and discomfort in such a brutal environment, and the
frequent brazenness of the characters at hand.
Manhattan is a film much humbler and quieter in tone
than Do the Right Thing, and focuses on characters with more subtle
traits than in the latter film as well. For example, Roger Ebert describes
Isaac as, “a man whose yearnings and insecurities are founded on a deep
immaturity. He wants, but doesn't know what he wants. He quits his job in an
attack of ethics, but has no back-up plan.”[1] Isaac’s
relationship with Tracy is a strange one partly because we can see her cling to
the relationship while he is perplexed as to why she’d want to date somebody
old enough to be her father. Nonetheless, the two have connected based on their
incorruptible love for art and literature. Even the friends of Isaac and Tracy
speak with a guided intellectualism, frequently discussing poems and other
things having to do with fine arts. Allen clearly portrays his characters as
ones academically wise but confused and unaware of how to go about making
themselves happy and comfortable. Allen’s characters bear relationships almost
entirely founded on intelligent discussion that are also deeply misguided in
terms of trying to find a particular direction to pursue with their lives. In
his essay on Manhattan, Christopher J. Knight comments on Diane
Keaton’s Mary, who is engaged in infidelity with Michael Murphy’s Yale in the
film, by surmising, “Mary, as she says, does not wish to be a 'homewrecker,'
yet at the same time she cannot seem to find the happy balance between
fulfilling one's own needs and giving way to the bona fide needs of others.”[2] Right
off the bat, we see a character struggling to make herself happy in her current
situation but the only route she can foresee taking results in her being a
cheater or a self-proclaimed “homewrecker.” These characters clearly have the
world defined in terms of what they enjoy but find difficultly in defining
their own emotions and happiness, much less a concrete direction with their
lives.
"Dago, wop, guinea, garlic-breath, pizza-slingin', spaghetti-bendin', Vic Damone, Perry Como, Luciano Pavarotti, Sole Mio, nonsingin' m**********r." - Mookie, Do the Right Thing.
On the
flipside, the characters of Do the Right Thing are far more
readable and easier to pinpoint. Ebert neatly summarizes the four main souls of
the film in his review by writing, “Sal is a tough, no-nonsense guy who
basically wants to get along and tend to business. One of his sons is a vocal
racist - in private, of course. The other is more open toward blacks. Sal's ambassador
to the community is a likable local youth named Mookie, who delivers pizzas and
also acts as a messenger of news and gossip.”[3] In
the working class neighborhood of Brooklyn, these characters don’t have time to
wander the streets, commenting on the works of Hemingway or the influence of
Ingmar Bergman in contemporary cinema, but need to get down to business and
attend to their own lives. Their discussions have resorted to momentary
gratification and what needs to be done around the shop and in their lives
rather than what is occurring with the fine arts or New York culture. They have
no time to ramble about life or question the direction they are headed; they
need to get back to work. In addition, Manhattan is a film
that is clearly scripted and mapped out scene-to-scene, with each interaction
feeling meaningful in terms of a thematic sense. Do the Right Thing is
much more liberal and wayward, focusing on characters wandering the streets of
their neighborhood and connecting by simply passing each other down the street.
Woody Allen in Manhattan.
In
addition to characters, the way the filmmakers choose to decorate and portray
their own respective borough in an aesthetic sense comes to mind when analyzed,
specifically in the vein of music. Woody Allen chose to shoot Manhattan in
black and white, emphasizing essence and environment over specific detail, and
uses the first four minutes of the film to showcase the city in its modern
beauty. Set to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Allen shows the beauty of
Manhattan extensively, utilizing the streets, buildings, architecture, and the
intoxicating environment, providing the viewer with romanticism in location
that triggers a sensory overload. Spike Lee, on the other hand, creates a
different kind of sensory overload, showing a working class block of Brooklyn
on one of its darkest days, with temperatures and humidity rising, characters
figuratively and literally fuming, waiting to be pushed over the edge, and
showcasing tension between races escalating by the minute. Even the opening of
the film shows one of the film’s characters passionately dancing to Public
Enemy’s hit song “Fight the Power,” illustrating a tone of unrest in the first
minutes of the film. While “Fight the Power” comes into play several times
during the film, more low-key, subtle compositions are used to generate a
specific mood. Writer Jennifer Radtke comments in her essay on the film that,
“Lee uses this function of music to rally sympathy for the Italians and for
communal elements of black culture. Jazzed up sentimental string orchestrations
back up all heart-to-heart talks, including those between Sal and his sons, all
scenes with Mother-Sister (Ruby Dee), and several with Mookie.”[4] Music
and photography are two key aspects in films, despite both of them showing
contrasting environments. Being that both films were made in, relatively, the
same era, only ten years apart, to show one part of a city as glamorous and the
definition of beauty in contrast to another that looks like a seamy, sweaty
haven of urban decay is astonishing, given the locational proximity isn't as if one is worlds away from the other.
This
immediately calls into question whether or not each film is trying to
accurately depict their settings. Internet film critic James Berardinelli
comments on the opening of Manhattan with implications,
writing the film “is set in 1979 - the year it was made - but the Gershwin
score and glorious black-and-white cinematography remove it from time and
displace it from reality. This isn't a New York that has ever really existed,
except in the minds of those who view it from afar.”[5] Instantaneously,
he omits any belief that the Manhattan portrayed in the film is an authentic
one, despite the fact that the characters and their situations all seem to be
taken seriously and the film occupies a tone of realism from a situational
perspective. If the characters exist to be believable, and the film’s plot
remains mostly pragmatic, it’s reasonable to believe that the setting is to be
taken seriously.
The uproariously funny trio of loiterers in Do the Right Thing.
With Do the Right Thing, Ebert doesn’t question
the setting’s authenticity so much as the realism of the community relations
that take place on that Brooklyn block and whether or not it’s reflective of
America. Ebert states, ”Do the Right Thing is not filled with
brotherly love, but it is not filled with hate, either. It comes out of a
weary, urban cynicism that has settled down around us in recent years. The good
feelings and many of the hopes of the 1960s have evaporated, and today it no
longer would be accurate to make a movie about how the races in American are
all going to love one another.”[6] This
excerpt places the film in a more time-sensitive light, recalling the peace
movement and the hippie culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s and reminding us how
the morals of that specific movement seemed to have evaporated, with
differences and racial tension resurfacing. The idea that connects both films
together in this respect is that both are attempting to break free from a
certain fantasy element, with Manhattan finding itself being
viewed as more of a utopian depiction of the city and Do the Right Thing being
a product of the post-peace movement in America, with the population asking the
question ‘where are we now?’
The
ultimate question at hand here is why are both boroughs so drastically
different? Shouldn’t their rather close locational proximity warrant more
similarities than differences? For one, Manhattan is often seen as a center
heavily erected off of culture for New York City, or a place where one can
enrich themselves in the finest cuisine and theatrical productions. With that,
it’s understandable to see how the people that live in the neighborhood have
experienced such activities and, in turn, have friendships and discussions
built off of the fine arts. Manhattan shows its characters
often hanging out at lavish nightclubs, eating at fancy restaurants, and
discussing a playwright or director’s works following one of their shows. The
culture has reflected itself onto the community and those who can afford to
enrich themselves with such events, as we saw in Manhattan, partake
in them and build a city off of the arts. Brooklyn, however, had seen rougher
times in 1980’s than Manhattan, when examining the borough from an income and
poverty standpoint. In the 1980’s, the unemployment rate was 10.6%[7],
which can immediately justify why numerous characters in Do the Right
Thing are loitering, lounging, or simply wandering waywardly around
the community. In addition, at over two million people in a borough, about a
quarter of the population was living below the poverty line[8],
undoubtedly resulting in the tensions we saw escalate in the film. During this
time, Manhattan managed to be the strongest borough in terms of educational
obtainment, with 33% of the population possessing a college degree, with
Brooklyn’s divisions scoring single-digit percentages in such fields.[9] These
statistics manage to illustrate just what kind of population the community was
dealing with at the time.
Mariel Hemingway and Woody Allen.
On one hand, Manhattan found itself cultured and
dependent on strong, stable educational facilities, resulting in numerous
college graduates despite a time when New York City, overall, had a higher
poverty rate. In contrast, Brooklyn found itself crippled by minimal
opportunities or educational advancement, a grossly high unemployment rate,
given the size of the borough, and a quarter of its residents living below the
poverty line, creating a hostile and understandably bitter environment. Being
that Brooklyn also saw itself with a high makeup of Caucasians,
African-Americans, and Hispanics during the time period as well[10],
various ways of life and a melting pot of different cultures added to the
tensions, as ethnic neighbors who were either well-off or living comfortably
enraged those who weren’t, creating an uncertain environment for everyone
involved. This is effectively summed up in Do the Right Thing,
where the end riot is over the lack of photos of African-American heroes on the
wall of Sal’s Pizzeria and because one of the restaurant’s customers, who
wouldn’t turn down his boombox after being told, was killed by a white police
officer. While the latter event is serious and unnecessary, the entire feud
started because different souls were looking for a practical reason to fight,
as every negative thing found a way to mold together and violence erupted. This
demographic divide is the identification piece as to why both boroughs of
Manhattan and Brooklyn are so different and why they are made up of entirely
different people despite existing as neighboring communities.
In
summation, both Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Spike Lee’s Do
the Right Thing, despite being showcases for the same city, have
drastically different portrayals of the same location, one being a location
predicated off of a community’s love and appreciation for fine art and culture,
the other being a working class neighborhood burdened by racial tensions. While
there is no certainty or sole blame for the existence of this divide, but
statistical data from the time period of the late 1970’s and 1980’s, when both
films were set, shows increasing poverty rates and unemployment for
Brooklyn while Manhattan was a location buoyed by a population taking advantage
of higher education. The result is two boroughs exhibiting drastically
different traits despite being very close in proximity to each other. Both
Allen and Lee have made immense careers for themselves after the release of
each of each of these films, with Allen going on to make at least one film
every year since 1986 and Lee continuing to portray urban and race relations in
his most recent films. Today, both Manhattan and Brooklyn have morphed into
something quite different than what was portrayed in either Manhattan or Do
the Right Thing, but the idea of community relations hasn’t changed in any
way; it simply has a new roster of people and an entirely new set of arguments.
Footnotes and Work Cited
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