The first time we saw each other after seeing Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing, my sister and I had a fight over lunch. It was one of those things you do with a lover, or sometimes with a close friend about politics, where the terms you disagree on are too buried to perceive or even to guess, at the time, that they're there. You can be agreeing about all the superficial details and about the largest of generalizations all along--my sister and I both found the film powerfully moving--and still wind up fighting about ... something--one of those disagreements that leave you dissatisfied and unexplainably angry.
Her arguments weren't unfamiliar. I had run into very similar concerns, interpretations, and vocabulary in some of the mainstream criticism on the film. But it was only after stewing about our lunch for a couple of days that I began to figure out how completely at odds with the movie I saw was the one she--and those critics--had seen. The more I thought about it, the more I could see that these were no idiosyncratic subjective responses. Rather, our differences were bound up with Spike Lee's mix of styles of representation, which my sister and I responded to selectively and from very different perspectives. While Lee's representation of the Italians was moving and meaningful to her, she could find nothing in his portrayal of the black community that would provide for the same feelings. For, I came to see, while Lee uses to elaborate his white characters methods and narrative and cinematic techniques that have been broadly popularized by Hollywood and are familiar to just about every American, he uses traditionally black methods to generate his black scene--broader than just "characterization" because it extends to a representation of a diverse totality of a black community, with importance lying more in complex relationships and the material conditions that