If I had to pick one rock band to invite over for dinner, it’d be the B-52′s without question. I’d even drink sweet tea if it was spiked. They formed after getting drunk in a Chinese restaurant, so I know good things can happen with them while they’re eating. Maybe they’d bring over the plastic fruit Keith Haring gifted them. I hope Kate Pierson brings her girlfriend too.
Obviously these people would spike the sweet tea with something (L to R, top row: Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson; bottom row: Ricky Wilson, Keith Strickland, Cindy Wilson); image courtesy of last.fm
I love the B-52′s without any trace of irony. I requested a cassette copy of Cosmic Thing for my tenth birthday because I saw Stephanie Tanner do a dance routine to “Love Shack” on Full House and heard the Mickey Mouse Club cover “Roam” and was sold, only to find that “Dry County” was my favorite track on the album.
What actually endeared the B-52′s to me was the video to “Love Shack,” which looked like the most fun shoot ever–way more fun than Sinéad O’Connor’s devastating “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The club in that video was what I wanted the parties in Dirty Dancing to be, though as an adult, I’ve come to love it, appreciate its distinctly Jewish purview, and recognize its feminist potential. But no one was risking back-alley abortions after getting knocked up by slumming waiters at the Love Shack, perhaps because of all the same-sex hook-ups going on.
I didn’t recognize it as such at the time but, with RuPaul in tow, “Love Shack” one of the queerest clips I’d seen at that age. Along with the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Freddie Mercury, and family friends Ken and Dennis, the B-52′s were a big part of my LGBT sensitivity training growing up. Later, I found out that Cosmic Thing was released after an extended hiatus. It was their first record after guitarist Ricky Wilson died of AIDS. Frankly, I still marvel that Cindy was able to record after losing her brother so tragically. Perhaps taking cues from kindred spirit Pee-Wee Herman, the B-52′s recognized children’s need for queer visibility and ingratiated themselves into kids’ programming, with members providing the theme song to Rocko’s Modern Life and the group coming together as the BC-52′s for The Flintstones. Actually, I’ll count Rosie O’Donnell as part of my education too. Even though she wasn’t out yet, she pinged my ‘dar big time.
Actually, Rosie O'Donnell's career before she came out is fascinating to me. She replaced Sharon Stone in Exit to Eden! All I'm saying is that O'Donnell had more chemistry with Elizabeth Perkins than Rick Moranis and that Katy Perry would play Betty Rubble today; image courtesy of jonathanrosenbaum.com
I’m thinking about queer visibility and alliance because Wisconsin Capitol Pride is going on this weekend. But the B-52′s expanded my mind in other ways. Of their peers, Devo and the Talking Heads get branded as the eggheads. I’m not disputing that they made esoteric pop music that legitimized “graduate student” as a cool vocation. But the brains behind Blondie and the B-52′s are often discredited because they made fun records and trafficked in thrift-store kitsch. Yet, as the documentary Athens, GA: Inside/Out makes clear, the B-52′s avant-garde pop was just as intellectually rigorous as R.E.M.’s mumblecore and at home with Pylon and the Bar-B-Que Killers. And David Byrne identified with the B-52′s enough to produce Mesopotamia. Maybe they’re dismissed because Fred Schneider professes cultural ignorance on “Mesopotamia” by stating “I ain’t no student of ancient culture–before I talk, I should read a book!” Frankly, I wish more people were that honest. I’m sure a lot of people can’t abide the group because Schneider’s defiantly gay vocal mannerisms trigger latent homophobia. That or “Rock Lobster.”
I’ve always loved “Rock Lobster”–so much so that a college friend gave me a 45 copy for Christmas one year. I’m not alone, either. Apparently Haring used to paint to it for hours, to the ire of his flat mate and neighbors. But it’s terrible for karaoke because it’s seven minutes long and most people can’t commit to Schneider’s campy narration and the ladies’ Ono-esque sea creature noises. That’s why I suggested Karaoke Underground replace “Rock Lobster” with “52 Girls,” because drunk people enjoy screaming people’s names and pointing to their friends.
Somewhere I read that the B-52′s’ read on paper like an American Studies thesis but sounded like a dance party. That’s pretty right on. Like artist Kenny Scharf and filmmaker John Waters, the group was obsessed with queering retro futurism and Cold War Americana. Their name references the bomber that streamlined modern warfare and the bee-hive hairdos preferred by teenyboppers and girl groups. During the Reagan Administration, the threat of Soviet revolution and nuclear fallout held relevance. The easy solution was to retreat to a time when xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia (all synonyms for “paranoia”) seethed under shiny, vinyl surfaces. Folks like the B-52′s thought this was a punchline with horrifying ramifications, and responded by regressing. I almost wrote on this for my Cold War Media Culture class but wrote about West Side Story instead for some reason. When Ruth La Ferla’s considered the economic ramifications of retro-futurism’s escapist pleasures for the New York Times, I kicked myself.
For me, it’s easy to pore over any B-52′s album cover. What are they wearing? Where can I find those wigs? But the one that captured my imagination was Whammy!Though obviously on a set, the composition of William Wegman’s shot suggests that the group is in an abyss, staring above at an uncertain future. Vikki Warren’s costuming is amazing. Kate and Cindy’s outfits are vivid bursts of red and yellow against the men’s black-and-white ensembles. I especially love the silhouette of Kate’s dress, bringing to mind Judy Jetson and the hula hoop. Released a year before Reagan was re-elected and thus fulfilled an Orwellian prophesy, Whammy! was the group’s most forward-looking record to date. As a result, it was underappreciated. But songs like “Legal Tender,” “Song for a Future Generation,” and a cover version of Yoko Ono’s “Don’t Worry” (later replaced by “Moon 83″ for legal reasons) were and remain relevant.
Gabourey Sidibe as Precious; image courtesy of moviedearest.blogspot.com
Before going into my thoughts on a movie that I already feel I’ll need to qualify and back into when composing my analysis, let me stress a few things.
1. I haven’t read Sapphire’s Push, which is the movie’s source material. Thus I can’t say how faithful an adaptation Precious is. I intend to read it, and welcome anyone who has a copy they’d be willing to lend to expedite the process. As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a copy at any of the local libraries right now.
Cover to "Push"; image courtesy of speaksista.com
2. I am a middle-class white lady, so I know I have some biases and blind spots. They may affect my analysis of the story about an abused, illiterate, fat, dark-skinned, HIV-positive black girl named Claireece Precious Jones living in 1987 Harlem during the height of the AIDS and crack epidemics who is placed into an alternative school called Each One Teach One after being impregnated by her father with their second child.
3. Regardless of the criticisms I’ll detail later in the post, I think you should see this movie. Yes, you. Especially those of you who are scared that its content will be too overwhelming, exploitative, or another cinematic example of poverty porn. If you care about the tenuous presence of African Americans in media culture, you should see this movie. If you care about the plight of marginalized groups, you should see this movie. If you are willing to back up these concerns with volunteerism, monetary contributions, or your industry, you should see this movie. And if you think that these kinds of personal and systemic hardships don’t actually happen to young people, you should definitely see this movie. While I agree with Teresa Wiltz and thus don’t abide by Oprah’s line that “everyone is Precious,” I’ve had too many friends and family members recount traumatic personal and professional experiences weathered by themselves, loved ones, peers, neighbors, and students to think otherwise.
I always like to enumerate the positives first.
1. Gabourey Sidibe is an awesome find as the lead. And I know it belabors a perhaps insulting point that actors are not their characters, especially in a role author Sapphire intimated to Katie Couric would have been near impossible for any survivor to play, but I find it comforting that Sidibe is happy, proudly fat, and confident. It’s evident in her talk show appearances on Conan O’Brien that she’s got the approachable star power of an A-list celebrity.
Here’s hoping that Sidibe’s performance will lead to further opportunities. I’d be so sad if she won an Oscar for this role, only to be sidelined by tokenistic casting practices. I already saw Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson light up the screen in Dreamgirls, only to play Carrie Bradshaw’s personal assistant (and imaginary friend?) in the Sex in the City movie.
Hudson's Louise never mingles with Carrie's established friend group; image courtesy of nypost.com
2. Mo’Nique deserves the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Precious’s mother Mary, who neglects, emotionally bullies, and physically abuses her daughter.
In addition to also allowing her partner (who we never fully see on-screen) to sexually abuse and twice impregnate their daughter, she also forces her daughter to engage in sexual activity with her, largely out of punishment for a gross, patriarchal misinterpretation of what consensual partnership is and should be. It’s a challenging, potentially damaging role that many actresses shied away from out of an inability to plumb terrifying emotional depths or out of an uneasy feeling that taking on this part could be misconstrued as promoting the idea that black women are sub-human.
To me, Mo’Nique does a superlative job negotiating how this woman is considerably flawed, morally compromised, and victimized by a system that encourages women of oppressed racial and economic groups to stay marginalized by over-relying on men, competing with other women and girls to keep undeserving men, keeping them bracketed off from educational and professional advancement, and convincing them that they don’t deserve better and neither do their children. While many people may gesture toward Mary’s knockdown fights with her daughter or her transparently fake show of domestic stability for visiting social workers as evidence of Mo’Nique’s powerful performance, I’d offer up scenes where Mary sits comatose for hours in front of the television or gives her profound confession about her daughter’s home life to social worker Ms. Weiss (played by Mariah Carey) at the end of the movie. These moments are informed by a series of photographs kept in a scrapbook that show Mary as a happy young woman in high school, with her partner, and her baby girl, and later distant and resentful of her, suggesting how mother and daughter came to their destructive relationship. In these moments, whether conveyed with glazed eyes, frozen in damning snapshot, or through a bewildered face made paler by make-up, we see a woman depressed and trapped. It becomes suggested that she is perhaps haunted by the same cycle of domestic abuse her daughter has lived through and at times as much victim as victimizer.
Screen shot from Mary's final scene; image courtesy of accesshollywood.com
3. As this was a concern for many skittish filmgoers of my acquaintance, I’ll say that from my perspective, I didn’t find this movie to be exploitative. Though I had issues with how director Lee Daniels would abruptly shift aesthetics and cinematic style, I appreciated that this movie wasn’t, say, all Dogme all the time. For one, surrealist flights of fancy is part of Precious’s coping strategy. For another, I think a movie that dwelt so much of the horror of the protagonist’s situation and environment would have veered the movie into exploitation, and may have also suggested that an authentic poor, black experience (whatever that is) necessitates aesthetic ugliness over compositional beauty. I found the unsettling moments to be handled sparingly, oftentimes providing a necessary jolt while also suggesting that Precious isn’t only her pain. The most effective moment for me was when Precious is given a reading tutorial by her teacher and, in a her embarrassment and frustration, returns to a particularly explicit memory of her father attacking her. Another noteworthy moment occurs when Precious is getting ready for school and sees a slim, blonde white girl staring back at her in the mirror — a chilling example of how girls of color may internalize normative standards of feminine beauty.
4. Man, did I ache for Ruby, Precious’s young, inquisitive neighbor who is clearly another abused child and is seeking comfort and friendship with a girl who is too damaged to see a kindred spirit. Some people laughed at Ruby in the screening I attended, especially in one scene when Precious is running away from Mary with her newborn in hand and knocks the girl over. Fuck you, I say. My only hope is that somewhere, later, off the page and reel, Precious and Ruby reconnect.
5. I’m assuming this is lifted from the book, but I was struck by how Precious is a proud and protective mother to children who, due to incest, are also technically her siblings. Watching her hold her mentally disabled daughter or breast-feed her infant son, I found myself confronted by how my own feelings about reproductive rights are informed by racial and class privilege and how the notion of “choice” is subjective. While I might personally be horrified at the thought of giving birth to children formed from prolonged familial abuse and would thus potentially remove our relationship, Precious views these children as her own. Mercifully, the movie does not judge her for feeling this way, and forced at least one (middle-class, white, female) spectator to think more critically about her politics.
6. As this is a music blog, I found the incorporation of music culture to be applied to interesting effect here. For one, there’s Daniels’s decision to cast successful recording artists like Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz, drawing out believable and unassuming performances that belie their celebrity and attendant glamor.
Mariah Carey un-glams it up for Ms. Weiss; image courtesy of createdintheattic.files.wordpress.com
For another, there’s the soundtrack’s song selection, which emphasizes contributions from jazz, soul, and R&B artists, many of whom are women of color, perhaps a reflection on the majority of the movie’s cast (thanks for the link, Kristen!). Some of the songs listed here are not period-appropriate and thus not heard in the movie, perhaps serving as inspiration and putting the movie and its source material in dialogue with generations of female artists. However, Mary J. Blige’s stirring “I Can See In Color” serves as the movie’s theme and is even featured in the scene when Precious finally flees her mother’s apartment. I hope she wins an Oscar too.
Then there was stuff that made me itchy in a bad way.
1. The opening credits are written in Precious’s semi-literate hand, then clarified through parenthetical notation. I don’t know if it was the result of studio meddling, but I found this borderline insulting. For one, it seems to imply that potential audience members can’t do basic decoding. For another, it undermines the protagonist’s particular system of written language, suggesting that it is improper, inscrutable, and in need of intervention from more literate, unseen sources.
2. As suggested earlier, this movie is visually beautiful, but stylistically uneven. At times, this is a blessing. Other times, Daniels’ heightened visuals were annoying, making me think more about how the director executed a shot than what the protagonist was going through in the moment. While I’d have to read the book to determine whether this is true to the source material, I found the most distracting moment to be when Mary visits Precious in a half-way house after leaving home and reveals that her daughter’s father has AIDS. This news and its personal implications hit Precious instantly, but the movie detours into another fantasy sequence where the lead imagines herself at a glitzy premiere. While this may be true to how Precious processes this in the book, the scene in the movie seems to suggest more about the director’s power over the camera than the protagonist’s complex emotional responses to trauma. I would have preferred to stay with Precious in that moment, but maybe some feelings are off-limits to the viewer. It just registered to me as an icky moment of authorial control.
3. As others have noted, the variance of African American skin tones and how certain shades align with class positioning is a source of contention here. As Precious is a dark-skinned black girl, it would stand to reason that her family would match her skin tone. This potentially sets up a binary wherein all dark-skinned characters are poor and uneducated. While this is challenged by the presence of Precious’s classmates, who vary in terms of racial and ethnic categories, the binary is evident with the social workers, who are educated, middle-class, light-skinned (often-multiracial) African Americans.
While Precious speculates about Mrs. Weiss’s background, the movie portrays her writing teacher, Blue Rain (played by Paula Patton), as a light-skinned, gay but somewhat desexualized, savior. If this isn’t clear within the narrative, the movie’s compositional elements make it explicit. How better to frame a middle-class, college-educated, light-skinned black woman teaching systemically disadvantaged girls than to cast a saintly glow around her through back-lighting? In this way, as well as how Precious navigates intersectional identity politics, A.O. Scott makes a case for how the movie is similar to The Blind Side, the Michael Oher biopic starring Sandra Bullock as his affluent and plucky adoptive mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy.
Patton's Blue Rain is Precious's light-skinned savior; image courtesy of nickelforathought.files.wordpress.com
3A. I felt like Precious’s Each One Teach One classmates could have been better developed. Perhaps this is a limitation of the format, as feature films don’t have the time to flesh out characters the way that television can. The Wire devoted an entire season to four pre-teen boys navigating the Baltimore public school system, following them until the end of the series’ run. If only more time and resources were given in movies and television to create complex, multidimensional characters who are girls of color.
Precious with classmates Rhonda (Chyna Layne), Consuelo (Angelic Zambrana), and Rita (Stephanie Andujar); image courtesy of thankgodimfamous.com
3B. I’m curious as to how viewers might interpret the dearth of male characters. I know that Ralph Wiley voiced his concern about with the lack of sympathetic men in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in “Purple With a Purpose,” an essay from Why Black People Tend To Shout: Cold Facts and Wry Views From a Black Man’s World. I wonder if similar criticisms can be made here. We only see Precious’s dad during traumatic flashbacks, and even then he’s almost entirely obscured by shadows (something I’m sure Richard Dyer would take issue with). Other than that, we have a nurse named John McFadden, played by Lenny Kravitz, who came across to me as kind of a jerk who thinks he can fix any problem with a serving of organic fruit or a greeting card filled with money.
Kravitz's McFadden is well-meaning, if not a bit aloof; image courtesy of tapeworthy.blogspot.com
4. There’s also some characters who are left unexplained. One is a classmate of Precious’s in the Each One Teach One who breaks down for Precious the difference between the word “insect” and “incest,” supposedly for comic effect. That she’s one of a few white characters and coded as queer should be given more context.
Of greater concern to me is Precious’s grandmother, who takes care of her firstborn, Mongo, who has Down Syndrome. At no point is it made clear how she feels or what she knows about her granddaughter’s home life or even what side of the family she’s on. I really wanted to know more about her and the relationships she’s cultivated within this extended family.
5. Finally, the movie suggests that Precious’s final scene is triumphant, again suggesting further similarity with The Blind Side. But it’s also a bit of a lie. The odds are still very much against her, as they would be for most semi-literate, economically disadvantaged, HIV-positive, teenage single mothers. Not impossible odds, and certainly better odds if her love of math was further nurtured, but long-shot odds that don’t often reflect statistically-supported realities.
Taking all of this into account, I’m heartened that movies like Precious are being made and hope that more media texts grapple with such subject matter and fund more projects with African American directors, actors, producers, and other personnel across racial and ethnic categories. The movie apparently broke $30 million domestically at the box office, which is no small thing for a $10 million indie covering such sensitive subject matter with or without Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry’s producer credits. While movie-going can hardly rectify systemic oppression, it can get us thinking about it and maybe (hopefully) work together toward fixing it.
All together now with the Huxtables; image courtesy of brixpicks.com
So, The Root is covering The Cosby Show and its cultural influence to celebrate the NBC series’ 25th anniversary, in a manner similar to how they reflected on Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. Now, once again aware of the problematics of my identity with regard to fandom, I will admit that growing up a white girl in the rural suburbs of Houston, I totes wanted to be in the Huxtable family. I would have been fine being one of Rudy’s friends (I was probably closest to the shy, chubby white boy). Specifically though, I aspired to be like Clair. Admittedly a glib comparison, but maybe young women and girls of many different racial and ethnic identities have ascribed a similar aspirational status to our first lady.
Many folks have rightly critiqued the show for its idyllic, comforting, and unrealistic depiction of the charmed Huxtable clan against the racially charged climate informed the social dimensions of AIDS, drug addiction, incarceration, wage gaps, single-family incomes, education, and other major issues that many believe were ignored, if not outright caused, by the Reagan administration. And these are, for the most part, valid critiques. Indeed, Kanye West spoke and continues to speak for many people when he says “I ain’t one of the Cosbys, I didn’t go to Hillman” in “Can’t Tell Me Nothin’.” I’d even go so far as to point out that this was true for many prime time families by the end 0f the 1980s: there’s not a college degree between the Connors, the Bundys, and the Simpsons. Assuredly, the classed dimensions of racial inequality were in Bill Cosby’s mind, even going so far as to originally conceptualize Clair as being a plumber of Dominican descent and later, pairing up again with Phylicia Rashād on Cosby, making their characters decidedly more working class.
And I don’t think we can talk about The Cosby Show‘s influence without mentioning how no other show with an African American principle cast has since followed its legacy. Fledgling networks like FOX and, later, the WB and UPN, would incorporate a wide range of prime time programming featuring African Americans, though often met with middling to low ratings, short life cycles, and diminished corporate interests in representational politics as networks began to flourish.
And of course, we can’t discuss The Cosby Show without mentioning Dr. Cosby’s troubling history with partiarchy and sometimes limited view of what is considered respectable mediated representations from/of African Americans. That said, while I empathize with Lisa Bonet’s reported run-ins with Cosby, I’ll hedge thatAngel Heartdoes look fucking terrible.
That said, The Cosby Show was a considerable cultural milestone and a damn entertaining sitcom that did an admirable job widening the scope and depth of representation for African Americans on prime time network television. And they were really funny.
I’d also like to add, echoing Erin Evans’s piece on the show’s theme song, that The Cosby Show broadened the scope and depth of African Americans’ contribution to music. Jazz, blues, rock and roll, hip hop, gospel, classical, Afrocuban, Broadway. It’s all there. “Kiss Me” was discursive and malleable, changing arrangements, historical moments, and generic arrangements from season to season.
Sometimes these contributions were peripheral, much like many of the paintings that hung on the home’s walls — Vanessa’s Michael Jackson poster most immediately comes to mind.
In the Huxtable home, Ellis Wilson's "Funeral Procession" co-existed with posters of Michael Jackson; image courtesy of stylecourt.blogspot.com
Sometimes these contributions dialoged with other musical forms associated with traditionally coded “white” culture (my mother would always giggle when opera tenor Placido Domingo sang to Clair; I’m always reminded of my mother in episodes involving Rudy’s teacher, played by Broadway’s salty Elaine Stritch, now recognizeable to many as Mother Donaghy on 30 Rock).
And sometimes music’s shifting racial dynamics back-and-forthed within one body, a point I’d argue is evident in Olivia’s Village coffeehouse performance of Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes.” This is a noteworthy song selection, as punk legend Legs McNeil argues in Don Letts‘s documentary Punk: Attitude that it is one of rock’s most political songs and an influence to punk’s stripped-down, anti-hippie, confrontation style, as it’s a song about personal freedom (to single in on McNeil’s comment, start the clip at 7:33). That said, I’d like for none of to step on Olivia’s face. Thanks.
Let’s close with Olivia, and extend this discussion of musical moments to focus on the ladies, both within the Huxtable family and within music culture writ large. In addition to Olivia’s performance, let’s remember Vanessa’s struggle with the clarinet, enforcing that not all black people are inherently musical. Let’s remember Clair singing with Stevie Wonder. Let’s remember Lena Horne and Miriam Makeba. Let’s remember Rudy jubilant lip-synced performance of Margie Hendricks’s part in Ray Charles’s version of “Night Time Is the Right Time” for her grandparents anniversary. And let’s not forget: don’t step on their blue suede shoes.
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but it’s been cooling off and getting overcast in Austin as we head into the fall. I for one, could not be happier. We’ve had months of three-digit temperatures, the heat forming itself into my nifty foot tan and bleaching the plush Garfield on my car window. I celebrated by frequenting Cheapo Discs after work, adding some key titles from Daft Punk, Ariel Pink, Kate Bush, and Black Dice to my collection, along with snagging Air’s 10,000 Hz Legend, one of the funniest albums by a French pop group that boasts one of the prettiest songs Beck ever recorded (“Vagabond”) and my favorite song by the Gallic duo (“Radio #1″).
The punks of Jubilee; image courtesy of stephanievegh.ca
The electrically depressive weather and investment in discarding and collecting our culture’s trash recalls the late Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, a movie I watched last night with Kristen and Curran (we missed Susan, who also usually watches movies with us). I credit Curran, a future queer punk PhD, for introducing me to the movie in the first place and can’t wait to read about it in his dissertation. Released in 1977, it was Jarman’s second movie, and my first viewing of his feature work. I had a passing familiarity of Jarman, as he also made music videos for acts like Suede, The Smiths, and The Pet Shop Boys. For example:
In addition, apparently he and Tilda Swinton were good friends and often worked together, so I think I’ll start with Edward II. You can read Swinton’s touching, lengthy tribute to Jarman.
So, I kinda can’t get over Jubilee. It was kind of amazing, but I don’t think I have a real handle on its plot. I can tell you these things. Queen Elizabeth I is transported to 1977 England, around the time of Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee and the country’s considerable economic downturn. From there, the movie preoccupies itself with mixed-gender group of punks linked in varying degrees to one another. They’re played by real British punks of the era (Jordan, Adam Ant, Toyah Wilcox), real queer British punks of the era (Linda Spurrier, Ian Charleson), and one quintessential American queer punk icon (the inimitable Wayne/Jayne County). They live in squalor. They steal cars. They play board games. They quote from historical tomes. They attempt to have pop careers, if only to destroy The Top of the Pops. They love each other, sometimes; that is, when they aren’t killing or getting killed by police.
As a document of its era, the movie is pretty significant. Brian Eno composed the score. Siouxsie and The Banshees appear on the telly. Adam and the Ants audition for a record company. While a bunch of kids attend a disco orgy, The Slits smash up a car. And Jayne County sings to herself in one amazing green room.
And yet it had a theatrical release in the UK, which I can’t imagine how that happened but can fully believe people’s non-plussed response to it. I mean, how do you process the scene where Amyl Nitrate (Jordan) performs her pop “hit” “Rule Britannia” for record mogul/madman Borgia Ginz, played by the phenomenal Orlando?
That said, I found the movie constructively, at times rapturously, difficult. How else to feel but to gape at all of the strong female punks, many of whom abide by defiantly non-normative beauty standards who take pride in their pock marks, acne, fleshy thighs, and cellulite dimples? Or Adam Ant’s feminine beauty? Or the sculpted, smoothed, Greco-Roman-bodied men who one imagines Jarman cast with a loving eye? Or the romantic impulses of the mixed-gender queer trio — two of whom identify each other as brothers? Or the upsetting deaths of the movie’s queer characters (including a particularly brutal, seemingly pointless murder of County — talk about killing your idols!)? Or the blinding whiteness, which, by absence, brings to mind England’s issues with nationalist, segregational racial politics? Or the fast-and-loose timeline? Or the preoccupation with classic art and literature amid and outside London’s urban decay? Or queering up the interactions in such a way so as to trigger punk’s oft-obscured homophobia (apparently Sex proprietrix/designer Vivienne Westwood issued a homophobic missive in response to the movie).
But if punk taught us anything, messy can be beautiful, good, and constructive. This is a movie that revels in this idea. Do make time for it. Just presume that you’ll need to see it twice.
As many people noted late last month, Spike Lee’s seminal Do The Right Thing celebrated its 20th anniversary. The Root did an exceptional job weaving together the various discourses surrounding the movie, its release, its historical relevance, its cultural significance, its politics, its views and influence on race-relations in contemporary America, the identificatory practices of aligning the Obamas with this movie (during election season, much was made of the now First Couple seeing it on their first date) as well as the assimilationist practices at work in distancing President and First Lady Obama from it once he was elected President, and its limitations in terms of representational politics (particularly gender). I do wish there was more discussion of its controversial Oscar nomination shut-out for Best Picture, but perhaps this is something my Hollywood industrial analysis smartie friends can re-coup.
One thing that was particularly heartening for me in The Root’s coverage of the movie’s 20th anniversary was Mark Anthony Neal’s piece on how important music is to Lee’s movies and the cultivation of racial discourse, particularly in his early work. He even went into an analysis of the cultural significance of Rosie Perez’s dance in the opening credits of the movie and how she is ”alternately adorned in boxing garb and Lycra bodysuits, performing a visual archive of black dance. Moving against the backdrop of Brooklyn brownstones, Perez’s performance—jagged, angular, forceful, masculine and sexy—mapped contradictions of a new generation.”
I’ll tip my hand. As a scholar, I’ve been thinking about Lee’s use of music and dance for some time. I put together a similar analysis to Neal’s in graduate school and am still working through with what to do with it. For me, in his first three movies especially (She’s Gotta Have It, School Daze, Do The Right Thing) dance serves as a site of multiple discourses. It is at once as a marker of authorship, a means of challenging traditional storytelling, an iteration of African American identity, a challenge to the notion of a singular racial identity for African Americans (and other racial and ethnic minorities, most notably Puerto Rican Americans), a critique against the supposed “naturalness” of dance for the African American body, and an indictment of race relations in contemporary society and film history.
These discursive practices are further enforced through Lee’s conscious lack of adherence to one particular dance genre, opting instead for heterogeneity, in effect breaking up the ways in which a black director can use dance and the ways in which primarily black dancers can use their bodies, as well as circulating the idea that black culture aligns with various kinds of music (many of which were self-created, thus becoming a process of reclamation). Thus, through dance, Lee creates a definitively black presence in contemporary film, but at the same time avers that there’s no such thing as a definitively black presence.
Tricky stuff. Problematic for sure (perhaps especially being theorized by a white lady like me), and I don’t think I’ve pieced it altogether, but I feel that the use of dance in Lee’s movies is not to be overlooked. If we are to celebrate Lee’s Do The Right Thing, we should do so with an acknowledgement of its larger context. I feel like dance is key to mapping that context.
And, with that, some clips. Now, seeing the movies they exist in is crucial. For brevity, I’ll simply list the movie, the dance genre, and the dance’s narrative function.
She’s Gotta Have It
Dance genre: Concert jazz
Narrative function: Fantasy and narrative rupture. This is the only scene shot in color in this movie and cuts jarringly from a scene where protagonist Nola Darling is given a present by Jamie Overstreet, one of her three boyfriends.
School Daze (Note: The clip has since been taken off YouTube)
Dance genre: Musical dance
Narrative function: Integrated musical. Uses traditional modes of musical spectacle — a film genre plagued with white exnomination and racism during – to critique race relations between light- and dark-skinned African Americans.
Note: Last year, the music video came out for Alicia Keys’s “Teenage Love Affair” which recreates much of the narrative of School Daze. However, in the process, the music video amalgates many of the female characters into one being, and recasts the movie’s then-timely preoccupation with Apartheid with a small bit encouraing AIDS outreach and prevention in Africa — one of Keys’s primary humanitarian efforts. Conveniently, and significantly, it removes the movie’s troubling gender relations, particularly a key scene in which the female lead is raped by a college fraternity pledge, played by Lee in the movie.
Do The Right Thing
Dance genre: Hip hop dance
Narrative function: Non-narrative introduction of the film. The dance serves at once as an advocation of female presence in hip hop and public life, reclaims the role women and girls had in the formation of hip hop dance, aligns Perez’s physical participation with Public Enemy’s sonic participation via their song “Fight the Power” – which I think challenge the notion of Lee’s monolithic authorial presence, and acknowledges the allied relationship African Americans and Puerto Rican Americans have developed.
