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July-August 2019|FILMCOMMENT| 53the wall (which Buggin’ Out does). Soon,
everyone is yelling over the music; the release
of Sal’s anger, as he smashes the radio, is the
end of the music and the end of the yelling.
As the camera pulls back to watch the fight
that follows, we see a billboard on the side
of Sal’s building: “Maximum Performance
for Audio Devices.”
Sound, separated from dialogue or
linear action—the aural interruption of
what performance theorist and Black
Studies scholar Fred Moten, in his poetic-
philosophical trilogy consent not to be a
single being, calls a “political radiophonics”—
is also the content of Mother Sister’s key
moment in the film: her scream. After the
police arrive at the scene of the fire and
begin beating and arresting people, we hear
the sound of a woman screaming “No!” over
and over again, and watch Da Mayor discover Mother Sister
keening, her arms raised in anguish. The scream goes on for
close to a minute, and for more than half of that time we hear
but don’t see her; the discovery of her body as the origin of her
voice is the beginning of its subduing, as Da Mayor encases her
in an embrace. It’s an ambivalent moment, a bookend with Da
Mayor’s earlier efforts to diffuse the rising conflict after Radio
Raheem’s death: comforting her, but muffling her expression.
Moten writes about the famous scream of Frederick Douglass’s
Aunt Hester, described in his autobiography, as “diffused in
but not diluted by black music in particular and black art in
general”; for him, black performance “seeks after what the
scream contains (and pours out),” a resistance of the object––of
the black person as object––that constitutes an alternative to a
visually defined representation. This is what sound does in theblack performances of Do the Right Thing:
offer an alternative to visual representation,
instilling a mode of performance that evades
geographic capture.
The scream, the embrace, the move
toward the window: Da Mayor and Mother
Sister’s final actions, taken as tableaux, form
a response––not a resolution––to racist
violence and black oppression, one that
symbolically holds not only the continuously
resonating core of Lee’s film but also the
resonance of Dee and Davis’s own politics.
The words many used to describe Davis after
his death in 2005 were “a bridge,” someone
who brought people of great differences
in political and social outlook together.
The metaphor is apt for Dee and Davis’s
portrayals in Do the Right Thing as well: a
bridge between performance styles, from
the nostalgic routine of their banter at the beginning of the
film, to the ambivalent psychology of Da Mayor’s soliloquy,
and finally to the screaming embrace. This is to say that the
work their performances do formally is what enables Lee as
Mookie to do what he does narratively: engaging with all but
not absorbing any single perspective of the neighborhood,
moving between and (to borrow a phrase from Moten) not-in-
between differences while maintaining the limitless potential
that the film calls love. And that, in fact, might be the most
profound symbolic work that Dee and Davis do in Do the Right
Thing––theirs is the love we can both hear and see. Shonni Enelowis the author of Method Acting and Its Discon-
tents: On American Psycho-drama(Northwestern University Press).
She is an associate professor of English at Fordham University.Do the Right ThingDa Mayor and Mother
Sister’s final actions,
taken as tableaux,
form a response—not
a resolution—to racist
violence and black
oppression, one that
symbolically holds not
only the continuously
resonating core of
Lee’s film but also the
resonance of Dee and
Davis’s own politics.