Take Me To Your Comic Book

...the boys wear medium-short hair suitable for corporate employment and most of the girls cut their tresses at shoulder-length and frost them blonde, with hedges of roots showing through...

...The snapping point involves Radio Raheem, a giant youth whose life is spent carrying an enormous boom-box through the streets...

...Reporters and reviewers will be given parties, previews, and fictionalized bios...

...Do the Right Thing Now I come to a movie the media instruct me to take seriously, because it is written and directed by an independent young artist who has something to say about race in America...

...Spike Lee has said that to point out the lack of drugs and crime on his fictive block is racist, since such omissions are not noted in white movies...

...The picture is not realistic...

...Raheem then lunges across the counter, movie-Western-style, to throttle him...

...The punk hairdos and facial mutilations of a few years ago have largely disappeared...

...The audience on opening night was composed of people under thirty-five—the target group—most of them college age or younger...

...If we deplore slick and easy Hollywood violence, we have to regret the studied melodrama of Lee's climax...

...The trouble with the movie as comedy is one that Nicholson has encountered before—when a character starts out at the highest pitch of lunacy, there's nowhere to go...

...Even the touted "expressionist" backdrops, which give an amusing view of Gotham as a cancerously polluted postmodern hive, are fully displayed early on and only repeat themselves...

...But when Lee's dialogue and camera attempt to supply the nitty gritty of ghetto streets, the lack of menace leaves his rendition laughable...

...But when the movie sets about truth-telling, it takes on an edge of glib posturing...

...I note only my belief that Batman, like most other romances, could make a fine and funny movie...

...Reagan showed—though he was not the first to show it—that if virtue could be staged and scripted, ignorance, indifference, thievery, and repression could be ignored...

...The self-conscious originality of the rap, the walk, and the look is a comic subject that transcends race and class...

...0 God of Movies, save us from one more Spielbergian cliff-hanger, where feet go up stairwells and heroes fall over ledges, only to catch themselves and get their fingers stamped on...

...As it happens, King's quotation is eloquent, and Malcolm's (out of context) unobjectionable, but if a movie hangs together and speaks for itself, it doesn't need abstract quotes...

...It is a key moment, obviously, for just then the quiet Mookie, who has up till now tried to be a peacemaker, picks up a garbage can, somberly crosses the street and throws it through the store's window, causing the pizza parlor to be wrecked, looted, and burned...

...I think Spike Lee (for the moment, at least) belongs to a long line of American directors who want to eat their cake and have it, too...

...Pretaped interviews are also included in a kit for television and newspapers...

...Mookie sneaks away to make love with her, but it's not clear how he feels about her or his son...

...The crowd screamed in bliss, like robot consumers reaching their programmed voltage peak...

...Meanwhile a stagy and repetitive conflict is building up between an Italian-American pizzeria owner, who means well toward blacks and is proud of seeing black children "grow up on my pizza," and his older son, bullying and bigoted, who wants to sell the store because he thinks they don't belong there—an idea the movie ironically validates...

...Clearly, those who get psyched for Batman are in search of other pleasures...

...Or, to turn it inside out: artists, producers, politicians, religious leaders, and all who need public support had best take lessons to make themselves and what they do comic-bookable...

...One can rent a pile of images for the weekend, run them past the whole family, and exchange them for others on Monday morning...

...Other thinkers have taken up that slack...

...Is this what is meant by "the free market...

...For a more accurate and morally complex and even funnier version of urban streets, I prefer the best episodes of the television series, Hill Street Blues...

...What was dull about She's Gotta Have It was the "she" of the title, whose motives for rotating three lovers were never clear or interesting or part of a story that amounted to more than a peg for high-spirited jive...

...560 • DISSENT As the picture ends, Lee floats quotes from Martin Luther King—for nonviolent resistance—and Malcolm X —for violence in self-defense—across the screen...

...FALL • 1989 • 561...

...The film-cult praise for Lee's low-budget shot in the dark has evidently led him to take his serious side seriously, and that's a serious mistake...

...What meaning could be intended here, other than that the Italian, though he tried to be good, could not avoid being implicated in a racist killing, and therefore Mookie "did the right thing...

...Mookie is criticized only by his sister and his foul-mouthed Puerto Rican girlfriend, the mother of his small son, who complains that he rarely sees her...

...Two white cops come, pull Raheem off in a choke-hold, and one of them strangles him to death...

...A Look at Batman Which brings me to Batman, Warner's current record setter...

...But while you're watching it, best beloved, every moment rings true, and you do not think of brilliant directors, camera angles, other movies, or the words in magazines...

...Black teenagers and the two Italian sons pile on, but no weapons are in sight...

...Mookie is a small, skinny pizza deliverer who rambles when he walks like Steppin Fetchit...

...But for this viewer, Do the Right Thing is another species of comic book, mostly an entertaining one but not worth the deadly polemics that only contribute to its advertised self-importance...

...There may be a hint of Lee's intentions in a conversation where he admonishes the Italian to say "Minister Farrakhan," instead of "Farrakhan...

...Their most thrilling moments came when the Batman logo or the Batmobile were shown upon the screen...

...Most of the time, Spike Lee tells a vaudeville fable, in which his highly stylized Brooklyn block reflects the world outside in startling, touching artificial light...

...I have a harsher opinion of those who rationalize the silly stuff by saying blacks, like whites, are entitled to their own mythology...

...Fair enough when the movie proceeds like a fable...

...Isn't that a cliché of condescension...

...For the pleasures one gets from comedy, or from farcical exaggeration, a half hour of Batman is better than the whole thing, and not worth standing in line for...

...It is, in fact, a funny movie, at least at first, when it deals with the transformation of Batman's arch-enemy, The Joker, from a nasty crook to a ludicrously vicious maniac...

...It wasn't even necessary for the magazine to be owned by the film company—but Time's new Entertainment Weekly (due in February) will be able to select material from Warner's (or Paramount's) PR kit as fast as it is put together...

...The pleasure of the film lies in its stagy brashness—its mouthing-off teenagers, say, or the chorus of three middle-aged men who sit drinking on the corner doing the dozens and downing the world in graphic, drastic irony...

...Now we have a national competition among politicians to see who can pose himself as a comic book hero—a modest, decent guy like Bruce Wayne capable of transforming himself into Batman, the relentless defender of victims and virgins...

...It occurred to me afterwards that Salaam Bambay has its own dramatic conventions, and does not even show the poorest of India's poor...

...Yet he speaks with somber seriousness, reminds blacks and whites alike of their duties, and is treated most of the time as a moral authority...

...But the Batman/Joker showdown is anticlimactic, since it fails to top an attenuated series of special effects, about which there is no reason to care...

...As he strides away, a little black boy charges after Raheem to slap hands...

...He won't have to think about, speak about, or even see the forces that create a block of BedfordStuyvesant...

...A twenty-minute feature on the glorious making of the movie will be provided to every television station...

...Next will be gross totals including dolls, caps, and bumper stickers...

...After that, the story takes him from one lame device to another, as he tries to capture Kim Basinger and the audience knows full well the lady will—with obtuse slowness— recognize that Michael Keaton is Batman only in the last possible moment of his saving her...

...Spike Lee's freshness and wit lie in his playfulness, his gently humorous depictions of the struggle for wild personal style in the black urban ghetto...

...When I thought belief was suspended, I could enjoy the scenes that worked for me...

...There will always be works of wildness, originality, refinement, and rebellion that will hit the streets in undiluted form before they can be merchandised...

...Meanwhile, the kind of art once intended to heighten the problematic sense of what it means to be human—to stir comic recognition, to purge pity and fear—is going to have a harder time getting out there...

...In some ultimate corner where I burn the candles of my faith, I don't believe American culture can succumb to complete control...

...The Flag I said earlier that politics could be repackaged as comic books, too...

...In comic book style, the most primitive identifications are repackagable as music, writing, film, T-shirts, toys, clothes, software —or even politics—taking advantage of cultural technology with a minimum of problematic content...

...Despite the rare exposé, or the elephantine pseudo-psychologizing of the Gail Sheehy/Janet Malcolm school, the "profiles" in most slick magazines are jazzed-up puff pieces based on orchestrated access to celebrities scheduled for hotness...

...George Bush lacks Reagan's acting ability, but he has thrown himself into the role with boyish abandon...

...These young people wore neat black clothes with labels on the outside or costumes based on the Batman strip...

...magazines, educational publishing, cable television) merges with Warner's (movies, tape library, paperback publishing...

...it's a musical without singers, resembling West Side Story—and like that model, it falls flat when it insists on a moral...

...What is harder is to leave the store...

...There will always be popular critics unaffected by the space for which they are purchased or the inside contacts who attempt to prime them...

...The Joker never tops his first big murder, where he gleefully prances around Jack Palance, firing behind his back and under his arm...

...A warm, amusing scene—though unbelievable...

...That will set these matters straight...

...In these scenes, Bush is not unlike Batman getting into his car, or Spike Lee, thoughtfully picking up a trash can, crossing the street, and throwing it through a plate glass window...

...Those who manage public figures grant a personal audience most readily to accomplished fawners like Barbara Walters, certain to accept the celebrity's self-description...

...In his first picture, She's Gotta Have It, Lee himself steals the show as a cheerfully narcissistic bike fanatic who wears his name in big metal letters around his chest and begs for love in a nonstop whine: "Please baby please baby please baby please...

...The trouble is, I hardly believe a moment of it...

...The conflict is resolved when Raheem is able to turn up his volume higher than theirs...

...But a summary like this slights Lee's generally lively, sympathetic talent...

...The style is more like a play (say, Our Town) than a movie, with an array of characters posed in static set pieces delivering monologues or working through long conversations that depend on verbal effects...

...Never mind that Spike Lee is the latest director to be publicized as a fearless auteur...

...Since Vogue, too, competed for that tie-in cover, Costner was given contractual approval of the photographer and the writer who wrote about him...

...Why it was right, or what it will mean to the black youth of America, most of whom will probably see this picture, I don't know...

...But at the end, he makes the film itself claim direct reality—as if he has switched to postwar Italian realism and will now expose the sources of racism and violence...

...Now I don't doubt that police have needlessly killed ghetto youths, I just can't believe the scene in which this is made to happen...

...I'd give him the benefit of his age, and say that he has a good eye, good ear, and, for now, a poor mind...

...Standing like Citizen Kane against a massive blow-up of the Iwo Jima photograph, he kicks off a drive to make burning the American flag illegal...

...And if you're looking for depth, truth, and power among the wretched of the earth, go see the Indian movie Salaam Bambay...

...The state legislatures cannot possibly process the new Bush amendments by 1992...

...Once again, Lee has trouble with his central character, only this time the actor is himself...

...For most of its footage, Do The Right Thing is a romp in the FALL • 1989 • 559 sentimental, sunny-side-of-the-street tradition of proud, comic, and idiosyncratic poor people...

...The stockholders with the right information will have their windfall, some executives will be drifting in golden parachutes, some assets will be sold or looted, and a huge new media conglomerate will be saddled with a debt structure that makes it even more imperative to invest in high-concept, mass-cult products that can be spun off into syndicated consumer goods...

...He gazes coolly upon the world, strolls at his own pace, elaborately greets his friends and takes his pleasure, but how he perceives his own situation, we don't know...

...At one point a white man drives a Caddy convertible with the top down past an open hydrant, and stops to scold black teenagers for getting his car wet...

...Posing with religious zealots, he supports the outlawing of a woman's right to have an abortion...

...How does Lee mean us to take it...

...As if he has never encountered this problem in his twenty-five years on the block, the Italian owner asserts his authority by smashing the radio with a baseball bat...

...Given this media/sales apparatus consolidating itself into ever more inclusive structures, given the alienated style and sensibility of the age of late Reaganism, what more viable communications product than a comic book...

...Yet consider the pressures on the average media outlet providing "coverage" for a film...

...One might, in fact, see the culture of the country 558 • DISSENT as an array of comic books, filling the racks of an endless supermarket, offering hi-tech simplicities of heroism and horror, fame and fortune, Ramboism triumphant, outrageous pop rock novelty...

...They thrash around and fall through the door into the street, barroom style...

...Only during the reign of Reagan did newspapers begin to print the rank of movies and records based on dollar volume week by week...

...When the subject has power, the reporter who steps out of his assigned role is shut out or treated with contempt—as George Bush was successfully coached to handle Dan Rather when Rather asked about the documents linking Bush to Oliver North and the contras...

...But no matter, he will have at least his burning flag issue on which to stage another comic book presidential campaign...

...Not long ago Vanity Fair ran a cover photo of Kevin Costner, just as the movie Field of Dreams was released in the theaters...

...In one of his daring digressions, Lee strings together hilarious close-ups in which a parade of self-intoxicated men delivers the special lines with which they think to devastate women...

...Excuse me for not offering a not only serious but profoundly serious analysis of comics as Art, or a memoir of the superhero fantasies of my childhood...

...Nor can one get involved in the love story, since the sexy Miss Basinger suffers from an unfortunate inability to change expression...

...Consider the possibilities for mass market control when a conglomerate like Time Inc...

...At one point Raheem encounters some hostile Puerto Rican teenagers who object to his music...

...The Bush push for new constitutional amendments is a comic book masterpiece...

...Just as Batman fights the forces of darkness, or Clint Eastwood snarls the code words for might makes right, so did Ronald Reagan reduce the world to a perverse and righteous cartoon...

...No one could be better than Jack Nicholson when it comes to having a ball with perversion and murder...

...But this will be no problem for the commentary industry, which will continue to debase the vocabulary of feeling by applying it to works of concocted gimmickry...

...A cultural product can be novelized, developed for film and television, taped, albumized, T-shirted— and more ominously—featured, reviewed and canonized—all under coordination of employees who work for the same company...

...Lee is trying to work in quite another style at a tense moment when Raheem enters the pizzeria with his boom-box blasting...

...There...

...It takes place on a block of Bedford-Stuyvesant where the walls are covered with fresh red paint, and there is no crime, no drugs, no violence, no guns...