Former Salient Films Editor Brannavan Gnanalingam is writing his master’s thesis in film on the role of race in the critical reception of two texts from the late 80s, Do the Right Thing, a film by Spike Lee, and the album Straight Outta Compton by NWA.
Gnanalingam notes that almost every review (out of around 30 for each text) notes that the artist is black, and is looking into what that means.
“Spike Lee is always mentioned as a ‘black film-maker’, he’s never mentioned simply as a film-maker. Whereas [people] like Alfred Hitchcock or Martin Scorcese are just film-makers, they’re never called ‘white film-makers’. So I’m looking at the historical framework as to what ‘black’ means in America, and looking at the stereotypes that have been around since … the 15th Century, and I’m tying these reviews to the stereotypes.”
Gnanalingam observes that Do the Right Thing was criticised in relation to the final scene for the promotion of mob violence, but it was also slammed for not offering any solutions, and even for not being ‘real’ enough, with the streets being too clean and graffiti-free, and containing no mention of drugs. Gnanalingam suggests that this is because the reviewers are themselves imposing onto the film their own beliefs and biases about what it ‘means to be black’.
“Basically no matter what Spike Lee intended, he’s always going to be read within this framework of what it means to be black.”
“But I’m also arguing that Spike Lee believes the framework too, that he believes himself to be black … and identifies himself with people who are living in the so-called ‘ghetto’, despite the fact that he’s a middle-class, university-educated Hollywood film director. And so he calls himself a black filmmaker as well, and so I’m looking at what that means, and whether he’s submitting to these discourses himself.”
“It’s all very Foucault,” Gnanalingam smiles.
Gnanalingam is applying the same kind of analysis to NWA. He has noticed that there were no reviews of Straight Outta Compton from major news sources when the album was first released. There are however discussions of NWA themselves, “and how NWA are going to cause black mob riots, how they’re really violent, how the lyrics are really sexist and homophobic,” and essentially scaremongering of the effect gangsta rap would have on America. He is trying to find out to what extent these feelings dissuaded reviewers from treating Straight Outta Compton as though it were any other album, noting also that at the time hip hop was not treated as a serious musical genre.
In his analysis of race and black identity, Gnanalingam is invoking the Orientalist arguments of Edward Said – where a non-European ‘other’ comes to accept the label applied upon them by Europeans, and come to identify themselves as the other – in his analysis of black identity.
So far he has noticed extraordinary similarities in the reviews, for example every review of Do the Right Thing mentions Lee as black film-maker, and most deem his approach to race relations as very controversial, even where they are otherwise very positive reviews. Gnanalingam has been looking for common themes, what is known as ‘structural absences’ (where important information is lacking), and in particular what words are repeated in multiple reviews.
Gnanalingam has been motivated in the choice of his thesis out of an interest in minority representation. Although he chose these two texts because they exemplify the trend to associate the art with a single characteristic of the artist, he feels his work could apply equally to any minority. For example, the identification of an artist as a ‘female artist’, or an ‘Islamic artist’. He chose Do the Right Thing having tutored a blaxploitation paper and Straight Outta Compton from a love of pop-culture, knowing that both were very controversial upon their release.
“I just love popular culture,” explains Gnanalingam, “and that’s kind of the reason why I wanted to do it. It’s often neglected in academic studies. People seem to think that a particular excerpt of The Fairy Queen is deemed worthy of academic study, but something like NWA aren’t. And I’m unconvinced by that.”