It’s a cliche at this point that when teaching, you learn as much from your students as they learn from you. But, when a learning opportunity arises from a student engaging with a film, it’s hard not to get excited. While showing my class Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing this semester, one of my students brought up Lee’s allusion to the 1955 Charles Laughton film The Night of the Hunter. Around the midpoint of Do The Right Thing Lee’s character Mookie runs into his friend Radio Raheem who gives a monologue on love and hate, which is nearly a word for word quote from Laughton’s film. Not only was I excited that my student was able to pick out the quote, but I saw it as a moment to explore Lee’s choice to include this scene in the way he did. In Laughton’s scene, the preacher-turned-serial killer gives his monologue to an audience through shot-reverse-shot camera work, speaking off frame.

Lee does something very different with his scene. It has been noted by others that Raheem’s monologue is given directly to the camera, therefore breaking the fourth wall and emphasizing the importance of the scene. However Lee doesn’t do this with a simple POV reaction shot, instead he has the camera track into Mookie’s POV without any cuts. This effect creates a strange continuity between the world of the film and the moment the illusion is broken. Rather than leaving the diegesis with a cut into Mookie’s POV and an address to the audience/Mookie, the camera slides into position, obscuring any specific moment that we step outside of the realism.

This also opened up a class discussion of Lee’s films as situating the Black experience within the larger framework of Hollywood film, while also bringing experimental techniques found in the French New Wave closer to the mainstream.

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