A
t the end of spike lee’s do the right thing,
after the murder of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) by
the police and the fire that destroys Sal’s Pizzeria,
we see morning return to the neighborhood
through the eyes of its elders, Da Mayor and
Mother Sister, whose roles in the film depend
on audiences’ intimate familiarity with the actors playing them:
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. The conclusion finds them in Mother
Sister’s bedroom where Da Mayor wakes up: “Hope the neighbor-
hood is still standing,” he says; “we’re still standing,” she replies.
They move toward the window, which frames them as they peer
out, surveying the wounded block, as the camera spins to
Mookie (Spike Lee) below.
So powerful is the symbolic
presence of Dee and Davis in Do the
Right Thingthat their performances
almost demand to be read allegorically.
And they have been, since the film’s
1989 release: reviewing in The New
York Times, Vincent Canby wrote
that Dee and Davis “preside over it,
as if ushering in a new era of black
filmmaking.” When their shared archive
was acquired by the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture last year,
Jennifer Schuessler implicitly cast the
film as the culmination of their lives’
work as the first couple of African-
American acting, tracing their paths
from Harlem theater in the 1940s,
through many years of lauded perfor-
mances and political activism, to
the crowning cinematic moment of
Do the Right Thing.
Lee’s film directly invites this
reading, but the focus on this one
particular allegory––the generational
allegory––has obscured something
important about the way these
performances function in the film.
Dee and Davis are not there simply to
stand in for their generation; they are,
more specifically, representatives of a
performance culture that was directly
connected to the politics of a historical
moment. Ossie Davis and Ruby
Dee, actors, writers, organizers, and
activists widely referred to as the “first
couple of the Civil Rights Movement,”
and credited by Oprah Winfrey as
forerunners to her own “crossover” success as an African-
American public figure, were everywhere in the 1960s. Already
famous for their theater work, particularly their performances in
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sunin 1959 (Dee originated
the role of Ruth; Davis took over the role of Walter Lee from
Sidney Poitier), and for their support of blacklistee Paul Robeson
(for which they were subpoenaed by the House Un-American
Activities Committee), they boast a dual biography that reads like
a timeline of progressive politics: in 1963, they were emcees at the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and formed the
Association of Artists for Freedom with James Baldwin, Odetta,
and others; in 1965, Davis gave the eulogy for Malcolm X; in
1966, they both participated in the Read-In for Peace in Vietnam;in 1967, Davis spoke at the famous meeting of the Clergy and
Laity Concerned about Vietnam, where Martin Luther King Jr.
came out against the war; in 1968, Davis spoke at his memorial.
In between, they campaigned, wrote letters, made speeches,
published articles and responses––and performed, wrote, and
produced theater and film. As a couple who frequently worked
together, they are among the rare successful married artists who
have become iconic as paragons of marriage itself; as performers
equal in stature and lauded as both artists and public figures, they
remain unmatched in American culture.
Today, in 2019, 30 years after Do the Right Thing’s release, as
more and more mid-century icons recede through natural or
unnatural attrition (people die;
histories get rewritten), it’s a good time
to reassess the film vis-à-vis Dee and
Davis, and think more deeply about
what it means that Lee presents these
two as ancestors and antecedents. It
also feels important, as mid-century
performance styles themselves recede,
to reassess how the film’s questioning
of the politics of representation
extends to acting. If the question at the
heart of Do the Right Thingis how to
conceive post–“Martin and Malcolm”
black political action, what does the
film present as post–“Ruby and Ossie”
black political acting?I
t’s rarely observed that so
many of Lee’s movies are ex-
plicitly about acting, despite
the attention given to the film-
maker’s broader critique of
cinematic representation. But just
think about the emphasis on acting––
crucially, vocal acting, a distinction I’ll
return to––in 2018’s BlacKkKlansman,
a film whose narrative follows the
creation of a character for perfor-
mance. Or think about Bamboozled,
another film that is not just about
representative images but about
embodiment. Looking at Do the Right
Thingthrough this lens, we can start
to rethink its own critique of
representation, which, again, is not
only about images of identification––
though the conflict at the center of the
narrative begins when Buggin’ Out
(Giancarlo Esposito) objects to the exclusion of black celebrities
from Sal’s “Wall of Fame”––but also about portrayals of character.
Do the Right Thingis an anthology of performance styles:
from the music-video dance number of Tina (Rosie Perez),
framed by theatrical lighting, that opens the credits, to the Greek
chorus of ML (Paul Benjamin), Coconut Sid (Frankie Faison),
and Sweet Dick Willie (Robin Harris), the film presents a collage
of theatrical genres, each character or group of characters with
their distinct theatrical mode. Running through the episodes that
open the film, we move from the smooth radio-voice tones of
Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), the deejay; to the
evangelical street hawking of Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith); to
UN the mid-century realism of Sal (Danny Aiello) and his sons Pino
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July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 51On the set ofDo the Right ThingSo powerful is the symbolic
presence of Dee and Davis in
Do the Right Thing that their
performances almost demand
to be read allegorically.