(John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson),
with their Arthur Miller–esque drama of white,
ethnic, lower-middle-class disillusionment; to
the old-fashioned, vaudeville-like conflict of Da
Mayor and Mother Sister, who play out their
sparring to a scoring of antebellum strings.
These last two genres are worth thinking
about together, because if the film proposes
that the acting style of Dee and Davis is the
ancestor of Lee, Esposito, and Nunn’s, then
that of Aiello and Turturro is its antithesis.
Theirs is the still-dominant aesthetic of
American performance: psychological realism,
colloquially known as “method acting,” which
is not just a technique for creating a character,
but also a narrative form. When Aiello
suggested to Lee that he include an extra
scene between Sal and Pino and improvised
its dialogue with Turturro––as the highly
publicized story goes––it was a scene that
carefully delineated these characters’ feelings, psychology, and
backstory: how long Sal has owned the restaurant, how his son
feels about it, why he holds onto it, with each element of context
demonstrating Sal’s psychological motivations. Aiello was
nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
that year, not insignificantly because of the character depth
communicated by this scene, and its role in drawing sympathy
for his character from the Academy’s presumed audience, a white
audience. The story of Aiello’s creative role reveals not just his
importance as an actor in shaping the film, but also the ways in
which actors in general rely on particular understandings of the
content of dramatic character, and how those ideas affect the
meanings of the performances they produce.
And this particular understanding of character is entirely
related to race. Aiello is part of a lineage of American acting that
not only developed concurrently with but also played a role in
the assimilation of European ethnic groups––Jews and Italians,
most centrally––into whiteness. The black actors who succeeded
within this system (as James Baldwin, at one point close with
Elia Kazan, discovered) did so by conforming to a set of
performance standards that many black artists came to reject.
In fact, what seems to have been missed by the audience from
whom this performance style garnered so much praise is the way
in which Lee subtly critiques it throughout the film. When
Radio Raheem derisively asks of Sal, “Who the fuck he think he
is, Don Corleone and shit?” naming the character’s behavior as
an inauthentic and unsuccessful performance, his reference
encompasses both the ethnic content of Coppola’s film and the
acting style associated with it. And the priority of psychological
backstory––another key feature of psychological realism––is
called into question when Da Mayor is insulted by Ahmad
(Steve White), one of four teenagers bouncing around the
neighborhood. “What you know about me?” Da Mayor sputters.
“Unless you done stood in the door and listened to your five
hungry children crying for bread... unless you done done that,
you don’t know me, my pain, my hurt, my feelings...” “I hope you
finished your little soliloquy, man,” Ahmad spits back. “You’re
right, I don’t want to know your pain, I don’t care to know your
pain, you’re the one who put yourself in this situation, man!”
Like Radio Raheem’s put-down, Ahmad frames Da Mayor’s
confession as an unconvincing and bankrupt performance.
The way Davis plays this scene, and the way Lee constructs it,
reveal a good deal about the film’s investment in marking the
limits of psychological acting. Davis’s
performance throughout the film oscillates
between sweetness and abasement, and
sometimes the two combine, like when he
saves the child Eddie from being hit by a car,
gently chides his mother for spanking him,
then immediately withdraws from her
indignation. Here, as usual, he’s shot from
above, as he sits on a stoop, staring up at the
teenagers from a position of weakness, and
his gaze is vague, even as he defends himself.
He’s emotional, but ineffectual, subdued; his
voice wavers, but his diction is a little too
self-justifying, a little too pat. It’s both
moving and pathetic, both sincerely felt and a
shade too much. The camera slowly moves
toward his face, but as the monologue goes
on, we hear Ahmad and his friends laughing
in the background. His story comes off as a
free-floating plea for sympathy that is too
easy to wave off––the only sympathetic ear comes from Ella
(Christa Rivers), the lone girl in the group, who sets her jaw
against Ahmad’s aggression and stares at Da Mayor in silent
support. Left with the contempt of children ringing out around
him, Da Mayor watches the boys go with shaky despair. (Lest we
think, though, that this rejection of backstory spells a rejection
of realism tout court, it’s worth remembering that the realism
of Lorraine Hansberry, interpersonally nuanced as it might
be, was also critical of investing too much explanatory weight
in psychological history.)B
ut the most telling way lee interrupts psycho-
logical realism is through sound. To return to the
episodes that open the film: in each, Lee shows
characters and scenes that are both recognizable
and, more or less directly, aurally estranged. The
Southern fiddle that underscores Mother Sister and
Da Mayor’s gendered schtick ambivalently frames it as a scene
from the slave-owning South; Señor Love Daddy’s inverted
grammar creates linguistic friction within his smooth tones, in a
poetic frustration of easy comprehension; Smiley’s severe stutter
similarly breaks up and reconstructs his commercial pitch. And
throughout the film, sound interrupts the characteristic rhythms
of psychological realism—as when a scene between Pino and Vito,
sweatily fighting in the pantry of the restaurant, cuts abruptly to
the up-tempo saxophone from Radio Raheem’s boombox.
Consider the role of Radio Raheem in general, who (as his
name suggests) is wholly identified with sound. When, at the
beginning of the film’s dramatic climax in Sal’s restaurant that
leads to Radio Raheem’s murder, Sal destroys his boombox,
it’s the cessation of sound rather than a release of sound that
spells violence. To understand the significance of this gesture,
contrast it with the typical rhythm of method acting: the build
to sonic release in the form of a yell. Yelling in method acting
comes at the dramatic climax of an (Aristotelian) rising action.
Here, it’s the opposite. The climactic scene has been layered
with noise throughout, starting with the entrance of Ahmad,
Ella, and cohorts Punchy and Cee––whose cacophonous,
friendly-hostile chatter is its own kind of boombox, filling each
scene they’re in. The entrance of Radio Raheem, blaring Public
Enemy’s “Fight the Power” with Buggin’ Out and Smiley in tow,
shifts the center of the noise and instigates the conflict between
the sound of the radio (which Sal objects to) and the images on52 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019
As a couple who
frequently worked
together, Dee and
Davis 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.