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다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay examines the significance of ambiguity imbedded in the movie Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee. On the surface the film concentrates on the conflicts between black community and white people whose values and consciousness are based on the binary opposition implicated in the western ideology. Residents, proprietors and police officers, regardless of their skin color, dichotomize people in terms of black and white, the oppressor and the oppressed, the rich and the poor, etc. The narrative of the movie deals with the accelerating tension among racially different people until it explodes.
On a deeper level, however, the movie reveals that it is replete with polyphonic and ambiguous voices. Also the concept “signifying” from black vernacular tradition refers to “a strategy of black figurative language use.” “Signifying” enables black people to traverse oppositional or contradictory discourses. Residents in Bed-Stuy are diverse in terms of race and ethnicity. When people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds cast racial slurs to each other, their voices are equally heard. Further, the picture of smiling Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. problematizes the dualism that the two leaders evoke. The image liberates black residents from the dualistic logics the prominent leaders pursue and lets them respond to these ideas multifariously.
In addition, black people’s economic situation is a concern which detracts attention from the racial issue based on binarism. Trapped in the impoverished Bed-Stuy black residents consume themselves with hate, anger, and frustration without doing work. The main character Mookie, however, is a worker for a white proprietor. Through signifying he negotiates black and white’s binary political relationship and mediates the diverse and different voices coming from heterogeneous and irreconcilable cultures. He does not choose one culture or unify them. He just navigates the divergent cultures and societies. In so doing he becomes ‘internally dialogic’ and at the same time the deconstructive figure to the dominant ideology which imposes the binary opposition on the society.

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참고문헌 (Reference)

1 hooks, bell, "Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics" South and Press 1989

2 Cooper, Brenda, "The White-Black Fault Line’: Relevancy of Race and Racism in Spectators’ Experiences of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing" 9 : 205-228, 1998

3 Mitchell, W. J. T, "The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing"

4 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, "The Signifying Monkey" Oxford UP 1988

5 McKelly, James C, "The Double Truth, Ruth: Do the Right Thing and the Culture of Ambiguity, In The Spike Lee Reader" Temple UP 58-76, 2007

6 Pouzoulet, Catherine, "The Cinema of Spike Lee: Images of a Mozaic City"

7 Sullivan, Dennis, "Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing: Filmmaking in the American Grain" 6 (6): 143-167, 2003

8 Reid, Mark, "Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing" Cambridge UP 1997

9 Carr, Jay, "Spike Lee Spotlights Race Relations, In Mark Reid" Mark Reid 134-137,

10 Reid, Mark, "Redefining Black Film" U of California P 1993