The double truth, Ruth: 'Do the Right Thing' and the culture of ambiguity

Smiley's image of King and Malcolm in apparent collaborative concord speciously presents itself as the objective documentation of just such an integration. As such, the image haunts, both with mockery and hope. It constitutes a simulacrum of a longed-for yet by definition impossible resolution of the culturally inscribed binarisms central to the African-American cultural mythos: the ideological antinomies "King" and "X," the complex dialectic of "love" and "hate" (of enemies, of self) with which hooks associates them, and the logic of "double-consciousness" of which these oppositionally situated terms are a culmination.

The immanence of these oppositional terms in the African-American cultural climate is suggested by the film in its foregrounding of their symbolic presence in the actual climate of the film's Bed-Stuy locale. On the one hand there is the weather itself - New York's hottest day of the year. As the racially charged pressures of life in Bed-Stuy mount, we feel the heat bringing them to a furious boil in a series of conflicts among various members of the multi-ethnic, but primarily black, community. The hate thrives in the heat; in a certain way, the hate becomes the heat, supplanting the cement and the sun as its own autotelic source and medium. The block's precarious race relations boil over in the infamous "racial slur montage" (Lee 43), a multi-ethnic round of "the dozens," which H. Rap Brown has described as a "mean game because what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words" (Gates 6872).

The climatological antithesis of this atmosphere of anathema finds its expression on the radio. If hate, in the form of heat, is in the air, love, in the form of cool, is on the air. Mister Senor Love Daddy, the DJ who from his storefront studio at aptly named WE-LOVE Radio, monitors the street scene like a benevolent demiurge and counters the climate of hate in which his neighborhood audience is simmering with the sounds of his "Cool Out corner":

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Up ya wake! Up ya wake! Up ya wake! . . . Here I am. Am I here? Y'know it. It ya know. This is Mister Senor Love Daddy, doing the nasty to ya ears, ya ears to the nasty. I'se play only da platters dat matter da matters dey platter and That's the truth, Ruth. (Lee 1)

Senor Love Daddy's monologues, which are interspersed throughout the film as the temperature - sociological as well as meteorological - continues to rise, are far more sophisticated than the match of malicious dozens he interrupts. Their lexical and syntactical duplicity serves as a rhetorical representation of the culturally inscribed logic of "two-ness" in which Senor Love Daddy himself, even as he attempts through his art to alleviate its tensions, functions ironically as a definitive term.

The character Radio Raheem embodies singly the moral dualism "love/hate" which the heat and Senor Love Daddy mutually delineate. Radio Raheem is a one-man public-address system whose perceived social role is as a broadcaster of the music that Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy has called "Black America's CNN." Radio Raheem blasts a single song - Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," commissioned by Lee expressly for the film - from his gargantuan boom-box as he moves from place to place in the neighborhood. In a cinematic echo of the psychopathic preacher from Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, Radio Raheem sports two gold "brass-knuckle" rings: The right-hand ring spells "LOVE," the left-hand ring "HATE." He explains the significance of the words he wears in this way: