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The common theme Ive seen present in both Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee and Fires in the Mirror by Anna Smith is that racial tensions are more complicated than black and white. Cops beating up colored people for no reason and teenage girls throwing eggs at the elderly Chinese as seen in Do the Right Thing or the black and Jewish community’s reaction to a colored boy being killed by a Hasidic Student in Fires in the Mirror . These films demonstrate how much racism is beneath the surface and that it is not between just two sides, white and black. Both of these films use similar and completely different storytelling devices to reach the same theme/message.
What makes Fires in the Mirrors: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other identities storytelling unique, is that it’s entirely a one-person play by Anna Deavere Smith, an African American playwright, actress, and author. The entire play is based on the actress’s reaction to the tensions of the colored and Jewish people in Brooklyn and the Crown Heights revolts that occurred in August 1991. The play is four acts with each act named after a theme it speaks too.
The story unfolds on August 19, when a car driven by a Hasidic Jewish Student swerved wildly on a road in the Crown Heights segment of Brooklyn, incidentally killing a 7-year-old boy, Gavin Cato, and injuring his cousin Angela. When the Jewish Hatzolah ambulance arrived, they decided to completely ignore the colored children under the car in favor of its Jewish occupant.
After three hours, in another piece of the region, a gathering of colored young people decided to avenge the boy’s death by stabbing an Australian rabbinical understudy, Yankel Rosenbaum, who leaked to death awaiting help at a neighborhood clinic.
In the days after, Crown Heights had hostile tension between the two gatherings, as each side blamed the other for bias, benefiting from extraordinary treatment, and murder.
Smith begins her storytelling by interviewing a considerable amount of the population involved, including such prominent identities as the Rev. Al Sharpton, dark investigations educator Leonard Jeffries, Jewish feminist creator Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Rosenbaum’s brother, Norman. She likewise spent numerous days among individuals, Jewish and colored, from the zone, recording their records, observations, fears, and expectations.
She created the playwright with the idea that each interviewee was the author by telling their stories and answering her questions. This idea of giving the voice to the characters directly is an important and unique form of storytelling. Although Smith is credited as the playwright, the voice was true of the interviewees. Smith would change clothes, background, voice, and posture for every character, creating distinct people in the audience’s mind. Smith never added any external people or an interviewer, instead, she interviewed herself while portraying the characters. I found this approach to be unique in that you don’t see the people she is portraying, you just see an African American woman portraying them, so your judgment of these people and characters is based solely on their testimonies and experiences. This made a deeper impact personally because it allowed my mind to be distracted from the races involved and more occupied by the story and experience.
Her method of storytelling had mixed reactions from audiences, some were pleased with how diverse yet connected the characters were, while others thought she was stereotyping and stigmatizing the cultures. The same could be interpreted from Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing, he uses distant races to portray thoughts on race and racial tensions.
Spike Lee uses a common method of storytelling by having actors play the characters but just as Smith does, he delivers his message. Spike Lee plays the character, Mookie, a lazy pizza boy who is concerned more about ‘getting paid’ than anything else. He works for Sal, a white Italian guy who’s owned a pizzeria in the neighborhood for years. As the day heats up, racial tensions do the same. A neighborhood groupie, Buggin Out, helps start the burning fires with his concern that Sal has been in the neighborhood for years and won’t hang up a single picture of a black man in his store. As the day progresses, we see a white man harassed for moving in, several shop owners and residents of various races complaining about each other, and a violent event that leads to the destruction of Sal’s pizzeria.
Another common practice we see in the films is that they let the actors portray characters with good and bad traits. When Smith played a character regardless if they were her race, she showed their bad traits and wrong views. This is what gives both of these films/playwrights their strength. For example, Sal’s character is not a bad guy. In a sense, he likes the neighborhood and many of the people in it. But he can’t escape frustrations that come from clashing cultures. On one hand, we can understand why his neighbors are upset that he doesn’t make any concessions to decorating his store in a manner that reflects the neighborhood. On the other, we can understand why Sal resents the implication that he is a racist because he’s proud to display his heritage. In Fires in the Mirror when Smith plays both families that lost innocent loved ones, the boy Gavin and Jewish man Yankal, we see that neither could escape frustrations from the clashing cultures. These balanced portrayals in both films went a long way toward me accepting both Smith and Lee had more on their mind than a simple-minded criticism of racist. Instead, they both show us the prejudices that all of us seem hard-pressed to escape. No one remains unscathed in either film. Spike Lee chooses to portray himself as the poorest character, Mookie, and Smith portrays most types of racist. While the directors and actors are trying to convey a message using the characters they remain with some form of neutrality, we still see Mookie destroying Sal’s pizzeria and asking for his paycheck while sifting through the ashes. We see Smith justify to herself the interviewer as to why the Jewish man deserved to get stabbed and why the young boy deserved to get hit.
Both Do the Right Thing and Fires in the Mirror are iconic titles. In the end, nobody is right or chooses to do the right thing in both films, Spike Lee’s ending shows us figuratively what we end up with. Nothing but destruction and a never-ending cycle unless we address the real underlying problem, that equality should be universal for every race. What you would not want to be done to yourself, don’t allow to be done to others because they are a different race.
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