- .4.
V. Anmuum
3 "1%....
If...
.
.

a I
5.. .3:
agar

.

VIN" 4. . P:
8““. .43
3.”. L9...
twain. an... 3.3?»

:Mwmxk‘
w; v
n.» . f.

Jo.

.. . .
.. :64: .90

, lqmnu‘mmm3érui.
in? e

. .... uh“
fianmwu

T

will

 

 

 

“millilillmllm

 

 

 

 

93 5 0140
finesse:
3 “1
LIB RARY
Michigan State
University
This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

IMAGES OF COMMUNITY: CONSTRUCTIONS OF ETHNICITY
AND IDENTITY IN LATE 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN FILM

presented by

Joel R. Brouwer

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

 

 

Ph.D. degree in English

    

Major professor

Date January 7, 1997

MS U i: an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity Institution 0—12771

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. A

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IMAGES OF COMMUNITY: CONSTRUCTIONS OF ETHNICITY
AND IDENTITY IN LATE 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN FILM

BY

Joel R. Brouwer

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1997

 

 

ABSTRACT

IMAGES OF COMMUNITY: CONSTRUCTIONS OF ETHNICITY AND IDENTITY
IN LATE 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN FILM

BY

Joel R. Brouwer

Recent studies of the signs of ethnicity and race in
film stress political and cultural dimensions, emphasizing
liminality as a trope of ethnic sensibility. Such studies
tend to conflate auteur with film text, and foreground
sociology rather than style. The present study takes a
different path, reading images of ethnicity and community
by analyzing the way these images affect viewers pre-
perceptually in films directed by Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese
and Wayne Wang.

Postmodern interdependence, multiculturalism, and
technological change complicate the concept of community.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes of "imagined communities"
forming around spectacle, style, or temporary allegiance.
The communities constructed in the films considered here
demonstrate this temporary, constructed quality, even while
invoking images of ethnic identification. The tools used to
analyze the images of community in these films are those
provided by Gilles Deleuze in his cinema_1 and cinema_2,

Ethnic communities are geographically represented by
neighborhoods, or public space, in School Daze, Do the Right

Thing, Mean Streets, and Chan is Missing. Conceptual and

stylistic differences amongst these films are analyzed in

 

terms of their use of the action-image: Lee's images of
confrontation, Scorsese's images of ostentatious display and
Wang's images of inquiry and indeterminacy. The films'
image structures are read as inquiries into structures of
ethnic identity, depicting the way temporary communities
form around these inquiries.

The affection-image is the primary point Of comparison
for images of family as community in The Joy Luck Club,
GoodFellas, and crooklyn. Crystal-images, and spaces of
pure affect (Deleuze's "any-space-whatevers"), visually
transmit a sense of Chinese American identity in The JOy
Luck Club. crooklyn conveys experiences of nuclear family
and African American identity through affection-images,
crystal-images, and variations of dream-image. In
GoodFEllas the moving camera creates what Deleuze calls a
reume, a type of perception-image where subject flows
through frame. These any-instants-whatever undercut the
illusion of stability which the imagined community of
mobsters claims. Finally, the presentation of eating as a

communal gesture is compared in the three films, using

Deleuze's concept of the noosign, the thinking camera.

 

Copyright by
Joel Roelof Brouwer

1997

 

DEDICATION

My mid-career foray into scholarship has been an adventure
that would not have been possible without the strong
encouragement, support, and love of my children, Joel, David
and Sharon, my mother, Wilma Brouwer, my parents-in-law,

Bill and Wilma DuBois, and most of all my wife, Dr. Rosanne

DuBois Brouwer. I dedicate this volume to them.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study would not exist without the encouragement,
advice, and wisdom of my dissertation committee chair,
Dr. Larry Landrum. He introduced me to the works of Gilles
Deleuze, and provided invaluable assistance as I worked out
the design for this study and carried it through. I am very
grateful. I also appreciate the support of my dissertation
committee members: Dr. Gretchen Barbatsis, Dr. Linda Susan
Beard, Dr. Barry Gross, and Dr. William Vincent. Their
friendship, encouragement, and thoughtful responses to my
work were of great value to me as I labored to complete this

project.

vi

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, THE PHILOSOPHY OF
GILLES DELEUZE, AND THEIR APPLICABILITY TO THE STUDY

OF LATE 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN FILM ................... 1
CHAPTER 2
COMMUNITIES IN PUBLIC SPACE ......................... 27
CHAPTER 3
CONSTRUCTIONS OF FAMILY AS COMMUNITY ............... 101
CHAPTER 4
CONCLUSION ......................................... 199
WORKS CITED ........................................ 238

vii

 

CHAPTER 1
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, THE PHILOSOPHY OF GILLES
DELEUZE, AND THEIR APPLICABILITY TO THE STUDY OF LATE 20TH

CENTURY AMERICAN FILM

In a world where simulations create a reality all their
own, film stands out as a primary example of virtual
experience which shapes perceptions of lived experience.
Though a narrative film is a constructed artifact, it
appears to represent a depiction of "the way things are," or
were, in some imaginary or historical time and place. The
psychological and emotional responses that this portrayal
evokes may create the illusion that the portrayal is real,
or an image of reality.

Just as the filmmaker constructs a milieu that is meant
to be read as real, he or she constructs images that affect
our understanding of concepts. When Spike Lee, in grggklyn,
depicts a noisy, squabbling crew of brothers and sisters
living in a cramped Brooklyn flat with their mother, and
sometimes their father, the images construct a sense of
family different from that depicted by Wayne Wang in The Joy

Luck Club, where a group of adults gather in a nicely

appointed San Francisco apartment to tell stories which

 

 

2
spark a variety of memories. Because no essential concept
of family exists, neither filmmaker can tell a story that
absolutely defines it. But each tells a story and presents
images that contribute to a concept of family.

As with the concept of family, there is no essential
concept of community. The three filmmakers I will consider,
Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Wayne Wang, cannot define
community, nor do they attempt to try. But their films are
replete with images which represent community, and
communities, either images which are physical structures and
icons depicted visually, or images which are metaphors.
Their films also recognize the interplay between
ethnic/racial identification and the sense of "belonging"
which may be construed as a constituent element of the sense
of community. As overdetermined and problematized as issues
of race and ethnicity are in late 20th Century American
society, an inquiry into these three filmmakers affords the
possibility of examining the way issues of ethnicity and
race impinge on understandings of community as communicated
in these films.

As mainstream contemporary American filmmakers, Lee,
Scorsese and Wang work within a common filmic tradition, and
use similar sets of tools for constructing the films they
make. They also work under similar financial constraints.
In some ways, their films may appear to be similar. Yet the

distinctiveness of their films asserts itself as well. My

project here is to discover and employ a set of critical and

 

3

theoretical tools which will be productive in reading the
images each filmmaker creates of the concept of community,
and in accounting for the differences among the films of
these directors as they construct the concept of community.

The choice of three filmmakers foregrounds the fact that
this study is not first of all focused on the antenna
themselves, nor even on a direct and closed comparison of
two of them; rather, my purpose is to use these three as
subjects of a study aimed at discovering communicative
structures within the films, and probing the way those
communicative structures operate. In this respect, my study
is different from those which foreground the filmmaker's
intentions in constructing the images under consideration,
comparing the intentions with the execution. In a sense,
the filmmaker's intentions are immaterial. What is
important for this study is the filmic image itself, and the
effect it creates. For this reason, unlike most studies of
antenna, this study will pay little attention to the
testimony of the filmmaker.

I have chosen to focus this study on the works of
specific auteurs, however, because I suspect that the
structures I find in a specific film will also be
characteristic of other films by the same filmmaker. If
this consistency is indeed evident, it provides a point of
departure for comparison with films by other filmmakers.

The element of comparison is valuable as a control factor:

since all three work within the Hollywood milieu, it might

 

 

4
be reasonable to expect that there would be similarities in
their methods of structuring films which could be considered
standard. The differences among them, though, will provide
the clue to what is individual about each filmmaker, and his
portrayal of the concept of community. Consequently it is
important to this study that more than one filmmaker be
considered.

These three particular filmmakers participate in the
techniques and structures characteristic of American
filmmaking at the end of the 20th Century. Yet each has a
distinctive style and approach, making it posSible for me to
discern differences as well as similarities displayed by the
three. Wang, Scorsese, and Lee are appropriate subjects for
this study because their careful, consistent construction of
film texts repays the effort it takes to analyze them.
Further, each participates consciously in a particular
culture within the multicultured American society: Lee an
African American, Scorsese an Italian American, and Wang a
Chinese American. Their films resist being classified as
ethnically representative, yet their portrayals of community
are conflated with constructions of ethnic experience.

Finally, Lee, Scorsese and Wang have returned to the
idea of community over the course of a number of films,
exploring its dimensions thematically and conceptually.
Since my purpose is to connect these thematic manifestations

of the concept with the iconographic communicative

structures from which the films are constructed, the choice

 

S
of filmmakers who deal thematically with the concept of
community is a logical one. My focus, then, will be on the
construction of images of community in the films, and the
relationship that these structures bear to the thematic

treatment of the concept of community.

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN ON COMMUNITY

A necessary first step toward a consideration of the
way Lee, Scorsese and Wang present community in their films
is to consider various possibilities for what the term
means, how it is used, and how it might be conceptualized.
Meanings change, and the meaning of community is complicated
by new developments of interdependence, multiculturalism,
and technological change characterized as "postmodern." My
lens for considering the meaning of community will be the
theoretical perspective of Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist who
recognizes the complexity of conducting sociological study
in a postmodern world. Bauman seeks not to categorize and
explain human behavior, as he explains in the introduction
to Thinking Sociologicaliy, but to view "human actions as
elements of wider figurations,...webs of mutual dependence"
(7-8). In exploring these relationships, Bauman seeks to
defamiliarize "common sense" conceptions of society:

"Suddenly, the daily way of 1ife...appears to be just one of

the possible ways, not the one and only, not the 'natural',

way of life" (Thinking 15).

 

 

6

The subjects which interest Bauman are many, but the
concern which unifies virtually all of them is his
interrogation of culture as ongoing creative process. This
dynamic view of culture informs his understanding of the way
the concept of culture must be understood in the postmodern
age. As Bauman explains in Tngimagigng g: Egfiimgggrnigy,
"...the postmodern setting...invalidate[s] many an essential
constituent of the cultural discourse. Central precepts of
that discourse, like dominant culture, or cultural hegemony,
seem to have lost much of their meaning, or (as far as their
missionary, crusading stance is concerned) run out of
energy. The contemporary world is, rather, a site where
cultures (this plural form is itself a postmodern symptom!)
coexist alongside each other, resisting ordering along
axiological or temporal axes...Like postmodern art--
postmodern culture seems doomed to remain disorderly, to wit
plural, rhizomically growing, devoid of direction" (35).
This disorderly, decentralized, authority-less (postmodern)
world provides impetus towards the search for community, as
both a refuge against disorderliness and directionlessness,
yet also an alternative to discredited authoritarianism and
totalizing systems or philosophies.

Bauman characterizes postmodernity as a state in
contrast to modernity, with its belief in universality and

foundation: "the moral thought and practice of modernity was

animated by the belief in the possibility of a non;
WWMMHJt is thediebelief

 

’7
in such a possibility that is pgstmodern--'post' not in the
'chronological' sense..., but in the sense of
implying...that the long and earnest efforts of modernity
have been misguided, undertaken under false pretences and
bound to--sooner or later--run their course..." (Eggimgggrn
Eggigs 9-10). Modernist thought looks to rational and
potentially universal structures, such as laws and codes, or
scientific inquiries and advances, to create movement toward
overarching clarity, and certainty. From the post-modern
perspective, such expectations are misguided. That is not
to say that the postmodern does not recognize claims to
certainty or meaning; rather, the postmodern recognizes the
existence of many such competing claims, acknowledging the
primacy of none of them. "Postmodernity is marked by a view
of the human world as irreducibly and irrevocably
pluralistic, split into a multitude of sovereign units and
sites of authority, with no horizontal or vertical order,
either in actuality or in potency" (Intimagigns 34).

The condition of plurality, of multiple sites of
authority, leaves individuals in a state of ambivalence,
ethically speaking. As Bauman says in Egfigmgggxn Egnigg,
"with the pluralism of rules...the moral choices (and the
moral conscience left in their wake) appear to us
intrinsically and irreparably ambiyaient. Ours are the

times of enough: felt moral ambiguity" (20-21)- This state
of ambiguity, and perhaps fear engendered by loss of

certainty, are factors creating impetus toward community.

 

8
"If the modern world-view theorized (both reflected and
legitimized) the unificatory tendencies and uniformizing
ambitions of state societies, the postmodern view shifts the
focus on to the (admittedly underdefined) agency of
community. More precisely, the focus shifts to communities;
the most seminal distinction of the new framework of
perception and analysis is precisely its plurality"

(We 36).

THE DESIRE FOR COMMUNITY

The desire for community is a desire for an ideal
situation in which individuals are safe, protected by the
collective strength and wisdom of the community, yet free,
recognized as individuals whose rights and opinions are
respected. This constructed vision of community has little
relationship with the actual workings of particular
communities, but this wished-for alliance appears to provide
a site of allegiance, cohesion, and safety for individuals
threatened by loss of certainty and recognition of
contingency. "Thus postmodernity, the age of contingency
in; sigh, of self-conscious contingency, is for the thinking
person also the age of community; of the lust for community,
search for community, invention of community, imagining
community...Community--ethnic or otherwise--is thought of as
the uncanny (and in the end incongruous and unviable)

mixture of difference and company: as uniqueness that is not

paid for with loneliness, as contingency with roots, as

 

9

freedom with certainty; its image, its allurement are as
incongruous as that world of universal ambivalence from
which--one hopes--it would provide a shelter" (Tneimeeiene
134-135). For individuals who experience the uncertainty
which accompanies postmodern ambivalence, some sites of
comfort and identification seem close at hand: ethnicity,
nationality, traditional religious affiliation. Others may
be more ephemeral, shifting, and provisionally constructed,
such as affiliations built around suburban neighborhoods or
professional sports teams. In a society marked by
postmodern isolation and estrangement, "community" is more a
manifestation of the desire of the community-seeker to find
solace despite the postmodern absence of absolutes than it
is of any objectively existent entity. Thus, Bauman
asserts, ours is "an age of imagined eemmnnieiee. For the
philosophers and the ordinary folk alike, community is now
expected to bring the succour previously sought in the
pronouncements of universal reason..." (Tneimeeiene xviii-
xix).

Of course, not every community is entirely imagined.
But "real" communities, while based on commonalities of
geography, race, social class, ethnicity, or religion, still
participate in the constructed nature of the "imagined"
community. Qualities and characteristics imputed to the
community, while perhaps based on actual events and

empirically demonstrable assertions, are often extrapolated

and abstracted from these specific events into statements of

 

 

10
certainty about the nature of the community which have
little empirical warrant. In this sense, the neighborhood,
or extended family, or social club are constructed entities,
communities both actual and imagined. They share
characteristics with communities far more ephemeral and
temporary--communities such as those created by moments of
shared stress, as when dealing with widespread disaster, or
moments of shared joy, as when celebrating a sports team's
victory.

Regardless of its place on this continuum of
permanence, an imagined community gains strength,
appropriately enough, in the imaginations of its constituent
members. The strongest sense of a community's robustness
and immutability occurs when community members see the
community as a natural, self-engendered and self-
perpetuating phenomenon. In this view, community "need not
be laboriously constructed, maintained and serviced. The
community type of belonging is at its strongest and most
secure when we believe just this: that we have not chosen it
on purpose, have done nothing to make it exist and can do
nothing to undo it..." (Thinning Seeieiegieeliy 72). This
perception may be extremely distorted with regard to any
particular community, but to the extent that community
members hold and share this perception, the community will
be robust.

The sense of the inevitability of community is

reinforced by the perception that factors "beyond human

 

 

 

11

power" are catalysts of its existence. When individuals
perceive "immutable links" between themselves and others, a
sense of community more readily forms. Bauman cites links
such as common ancestry, common connection to the land,
common historical heritage, common belief--in short, factors
of race, nation and religion, as points of coalescence for
community feeling. These factors, Bauman asserts, are
particularly conducive to community-building because "the
invoked facts remain steadfastly beyond the control of the
people to whom the appeal is being made. The reference to
such facts effectively hides the element of choice and
arbitrariness involved in the choice...Under such
circumstances unwillingness to join forces cannot but be
treated as an act of treason" (Thinking 74). Another
manifestation of behavior which appears treasonous in the
context of community is disagreement. Or, to put it
positively, a sense that community members are in agreement,
or at least ready to agree, "is assumed to be the primary,
natural reality of all community members. A community is a
group in which factors which unite people are stronger and
more important than anything which may divide it; the
differences between members are minor or secondary by
comparison with their essential--one is tempted to say
overwhelming--similarity" (Thinking 72).

Yet, when this sense of similarity is deconstructed, it

proves to be a chimera. The postmodern multiplicity of

sites of authority and claims on allegiance undermines such

 

 

12
simple solidarity. So an activity correlative to the
assertion of community agreement occurs: the shoring up of
the sense of similarity, the sparking of the imagination to
reengender the ever-failing sense of the (imaginary)
community. "When we use a phrase like 'As we all agree...‘
we attempt, therefore, to bring to life, or keep alive, or
resuscitate a community of meanings and beliefs which has
never existed 'naturally', or is already about to fall
apart, or is to rise again from the ashes. We do it under
conditions admittedly unfavourable for the existence and
survival of 'natural' communities—-in a world in which
contradictory beliefs coexist, different descriptions of
reality compete with each other, and each view has to defend
itself against the arguments of the other side" (Thinking
73).

Perceptions of commonality, and stimuli toward
agreement, are primary signs upon which communities base
their sense of communal identity. Imagined communities
which form in the absence of these signs may be more
tenuous, but can still be perceived to provide a refuge
against postmodern contingency. The signs around which
these more tenuous communities form are signs of action.
Spectacle, and style, translate to symbols which assert

communal identity.1 Outrageous acts, or destructive ones,

 

1 As Bauman explains, "To exist is to be enacted; I am
seen, therefore I exist--this might have been the imagined
community's own version of the engine. Having no other (and
above all no objectified, supra—individual) anchors except

 

 

 

13
or spectacular displays are all equally effective assertions

of identity for imagined communities.

IDENTITY FORMATION: US AND THEM

Imagined communities from as small as nuclear families
to as large as nations or ethnicities all develop corporate
identities in the minds of the individuals who comprise
them. As the identity of the imagined community is created
and reinforced, its members create and reinforce their
individual identities in concert with their conception of
their communities. Paradoxically, this process of
individual identity formation occurs in a context which
often encourages submersion of individual identity into the
wider community identity. Imagined agreement and expected
conformity are norms of behavior which reinforce the sense

of community existence and cohesion, seemingly at the

 

the affections of their 'members', imagined communities
exist solely through their manifestations: through
occasional spectacular outbursts of togetherness
(demonstrations, marches, festivals, riots)-—sudden
materializations of the idea, all the more effective and
convincing for blatantly violating the routine of
quotidianity. In the postmodern habitat of diffuse offers
and free choices, public attention is the scarcest of all
commodities (one can say that the political economy of
postmodernity is concerned mostly with the production and
distribution of public attention). The right of an imagined
community to arbitrate is established (though for a time
only; and always merely until further notice) in proportion
to the amount and intensity of public attention forced to
focus on its presence; 'reality', and hence also the power
and authority of an imagined community, is the function of
that attention" (Tneimeniene xix-xx).

 

14
expense of the autonomy and agency of the individuals who
affiliate with the community.

This seeming paradox can be accounted for by the
existence of competing communities, large and small. The
individual may concurrently identify or sympathize with a
nuclear family, a neighborhood, an ethnicity, a nationality,
a profession, an interest group, a political party, and
numerous other organized or ephemeral communities.
According to Bauman, one of the most powerful means of
creating community identity is to define the community in
terms of what it is not: "...an out-group is precisely that
imaginary opposition to itself which the in-group needs for
its self-identity, for its cohesiveness, for its inner
solidarity and emotional security" (Thinking 41-42). Thus,
the sense of belonging which the individual feels about
being a part of a community, which is brought into sharper
focus by contrast with the dissimilar appearance and
behavior of members of other communities, also serves,
through the same contrast, to impart a sense of
individuality. When the alliance with the community
requires action, again as an assertion of community
uniqueness, the sense of individuality becomes a sense of
agency as well. While this impetus toward action in defense
of the community against perceived enemies may operate most
clearly on the large scale of nations, it also operates on

smaller scales such as ethnic enclaves, neighborhoods, even

families.

 

15

This sense of community solidarity in contrast with
competing communities offers a basis for making easy ethical
or political decisions. Though community members may frame
constructions of community in positive terms, those
constructions are often politically charged, and can become
tools of violence and Oppression. According to Bauman,
"the idea of community as 'spiritual unity' serves as a tool
for drawing as yet non-existent boundaries between 'us' and
'them'; it is an instrument of mehiiizeeien, of convincing
the group to which the appeal is made of its common fate and
shared interests, in order to solicit a unified action"
(Thinking 73). Such "unified actions" can certainly be
positive, but they can also be destructive as well,
particularly when they are born of an imagined community's
sense of its own tenuousness, and need to assert its
importance in competition with alternate manifestations of
community: "Seeking an authority powerful enough to relieve
them of their fears, individuals have no other means of
reaching their aim except by trying to make the communities
they imagine more authoritative than the communities
imagined by others--and this by heaving them into the centre
of public attention. This can be achieved by spectacular
display--so spectacular and so obtrusive as to prevent the
public from turning their eyes the other way. Since no
imagined community is alone in its struggle for public

attention, a fierce competition results that forces upwards

the stakes of the game. What was sufficiently spectacular

 

16

yesterday loses its force of attraction today, unless it
lifts to new heights its shocking power. Constantly
bombarded, the absorptive powers of the public are unable to
cling to any of the competing allurements for longer than a
fleeting moment. To catch the attention, displays must be
ever more bizarre, condensed and (yes!) disturbing; perhaps
ever more brutal, gory and threatening" (Inhimeeiene xx).

An alternate reading of the phenomenon of competing
communities is to read this as evidence of the postmodern
multiplicity of sites of authority. Every community is a
locus of power and authority, recognized as such by
individuals who identify with the community. Individuals
may or may not accede to the authority of the community, but
the choice and the imperative are always there, explicitly
or implicitly. The degree of the individual's complicity
with the political, social or ethical agenda of the
community will be more or less consonant with the
individual's willingness to recognize community authority,
but that complicity may be challenged by the individual's
sense of alliance with other communities which are directly
or indirectly in competition with the first community.
Individuals who look to community norms, or rules, for
guidance find that there are "too many rules for comfort:
they speak in different voices, one praising what the other
condemns. They lash and contradict each other, each

claiming the authority the others deny" (Eeeenegenn 20).

This ambivalence, this confusion, symptomatic of the

 

 

17
postmodern, raises the necessity of choice, a form of agent
behavior discouraged by affiliation with a single community,
but necessary where multiplicity exists. In order to
exercise choice, the individual needs at least some degree
of freedom, another attribute which is restricted and
constricted by community standards and norms. This tension
seems irresolvable: "The need for freedom and the need for
social interaction--inseparable, though often at odds with
each other--seem to be a permanent feature of the human
condition" (Bauman Exeegem 53).

This tension may, however, be less irresolvable than it
seems. If Bauman's assertion is accurate that postmodern
"community" is less likely to describe actual, extended
social interaction between a particular group of
individuals, and more likely consists of a "virtual" or
"imagined" community which is as much a manifestation of the
community member's conception of the community as it is a
description of any existing reality, the conflict between
group and individual dissolves into the "free agent" status
of the individual. The multiplicity of communities, which
calls for a choice on the part of individuals as to the
communities they will identify with, leaves the ultimate
power of definition, both of the community and the self, to
the individual. These definitions may in all likelihood not
be self-generated, and indeed may be no more than choices

from an almost infinite menu of possibilities which bombard

the individual, yet under conditions of the multiplicity of

 

18
communities, the power to define is nonetheless ultimately
within the province of the individual. This possibility of
shifting allegiances amongst multiple communities, or sites
of authority, creates a fragmented sense of self at the same
moment that it seems to validate the autonomous self through
the act of choosing. Individuals who choose this route (a
condition endemic to the postmodern) become border dwellers,
participants in various overlapping or neighboring
communities who are entirely at home in none of them.
Bauman calls them "strangers;" though they may actually be
familiar to other community members, the impermanence of
their allegiance to the community makes them unreliable, and
sources of anxiety. At one moment, they may be one of "us,"
at the next, one of "them." Because they are neither friend
nor foe, they cause anxiety (Thinking 54-58).

Bauman's perspective on the concept of community
recognizes its complexities and ambiguities. These
complexities and ambiguities resist easy analysis or
categorization; they also open rich, though inconclusive,
lines of thought and exploration. In this respect, Bauman's
theoretical approach to the concept of community mirrors the
postmodern communities which he considers. They may be
fragmented, shifting, virtual-—but they do function as loci
for allegiance and action, with varying degrees of
impermanence and commitment. This consonance with late 20th

Century experience makes Bauman's approach a productive

frame through which to view late 20th Century films, and an

 

19
appropriate complement to Gilles Deleuze's poststructural

approach to cinema.

THE CINEMATIC PERSPECTIVE OF GILLES DELEUZE

Gilles Deleuze was primarily a philosopher whose
philosophical interests involved him heavily in questions of
psychology. A long-term project, shared with Felix
Guattari, was to develop a philosophical framework for
psychological inquiry in a manner alternative to that of
Sigmund Freud. It may seem strange, then, that the Deleuze
canon includes one book, in two volumes, on the topic of
filmginemalllheuoxementlmaseandszinemazllhefime
Image. Deleuze's purpose was not to serve as a cinema
critic, though his knowledge of European film, and some
American film, was broad. Rather, Deleuze constructs a
theory of cinema which "is not 'about' cinema, but about the
concepts that cinema gives rise to... " (cinema 2 280). In
ginema, Deleuze grounds his analysis of the structures of
cinema in the philosophical and psychological insights of
Henri Bergson, and the semiotic taxonomy of C.S. Peirce.
Deleuze reworks, refines, sometimes recreates and redefines
concepts from Bergson and Peirce, then demonstrates how the
images of cinema are visual and aural analogues of these
concepts. But while it may have been written as a
philosophical exploration, Cinema provides a fresh way to

read the images produced in film, an alternative to the

psychoanalytic perspective in cinematic interpretation.

 

 

20

Instead of beginning with the psychological concepts which
originate with the viewer, or the theorist, then finding
their analogues in the themes depicted or the structures
employed in cinema, Deleuze begins with the structures
themselves. These structures are initially apprehended as
sensation, pre-perceptually. That is, the phenomenon of
film is a physical stimulus which we first experience as
sensation, then process perceptually to arrive at cognitive
understanding. In Deleuze's analysis, recognition of this
initial, pre-perceptual instant opens a site for analysis
which has not been previously explored, allowing the critic
to begin with the phenomena of cinema itself, rather than
with a theory extraneous to it. Light, color, sound, moving
and changing images-~these are the basic constituents of
film as a physical, sensation-producing artifact. A way in
to the analysis of film, then, is to consider the structures
through which these elements operate. In doing so, Deleuze
provides not only a new starting point, but a new language
for analysis of film. His is a philosophical project, with
practical applications. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam assert that "Deleuze is engaged in the work of
concept creation 'alongside' the cinema. New concepts are
invented, on the basis of some well-known philosophical
themes, and then put to work in the cinema" (xi).

The starting point for the consideration of cinema is

the image. And the starting point for the cinema-image is

movement--not movement added to image, but movement-image

 

 

21
(Cinema i 2). In contrast to a painting, or sculpture, the
cinema image moves. Furthermore, the pose in a painting or
a sculpture is consciously chosen and produced; Deleuze
refers to such poses as "privileged instants" (Cinema 1 4).
Consciously chosen and reproduced images in cinem --
closeups, or figures haloed by lighting, for example--
display the qualities of privileged instants. But most
moments in cinema are "any-instant-whatevers." Deleuze
draws on Henri Bergson's Creanixe Eyeineien to contrast the
"privileged instant" with the "any-instant-whatever", the
random moment frozen into an image by the mechanical
operation of the camera (Cinema 1 3-4). These images, "any-
instant-whatevers," linked with other images and
mechanically projected, create the movement-image. Or, more
properly, the movement occurs in the intervals between these
static images; movement cannot be a property of any one of
the images, but is the effect of their 1inking--not movement
added to image, but movement-image. The cartoon provides a
readily recognizable example, as each cell in itself "no
longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the
description of a figure which is always in the process of
being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and
points taken at any-instant-whatevers of their course...It
does not give us a figure described in a unique moment, but

the continuity of the movement which describes the figure"

(CinemaIS).

 

 

 

22

This relationship of any-instant-whatevers to each
other, constantly breaking down and reconstituting the
cinematic image, is the first half of the understanding of
the movement-image. The second half introduces the
relationship of the movement-image to its wider context, and
to time. These are concepts which Bergson explored in his
attempt to understand the relationship between matter,
image, movement and time. Deleuze first explains Bergson,
then demonstrates how Bergson's concepts, or adaptations of
Bergson's concepts, are consistent with the specific case of
the cinematic image. The seen cinematic image exists in
relationship with a wider, unseen whole, and exists through
time. "If we tried to reduce it to a bare formula, it would
be this: not only is the instant an immobile section of
movement, but movement is a mobile section of duration, that
is, of the Whole, or of a whole. Which implies that
movement expresses something more profound, which is the
change in duration or in the whole" (Cinema i 8).:2 The
whole and "wholes" are not synonymous with the concept of a
set. Sets are closed entities, existing in space (they may,
for example, comprise the physical elements within the
frame). Wholes are in duration, and are synonymous with
duration (Cinema i 10-11).

"Thus in a sense movement has two aspects. On one

hand, that which happens between objects or parts; on the

 

2 This lays the groundwork for the concept which
Deleuze foregrounds in Cinema_g: the time-image.

 

 

23
other hand that which expresses the duration or the whole"
(Cinema 1 11). On this primary concept, the nature of the
movement-image, Deleuze builds the subsequent concepts which
comprise Cinema. 1.; The W Image-

The second half of Deleuze's project is taken up in
Cinema z; The Time image. Though Cinema is not a history of
film, Deleuze does connect his project with the historical
development of cinema. While duration through time was an
integral part of cinematic experience from the beginning of
film art, an element which filmmakers learned early to
manipulate by compressing, extending or resequencing to fit
their dramatic purposes, its underlying progression in
concert with dramatic action came to be a staple element of
film art and audience expectation. The important factor
here, though, is that in cinematic art this reproduction of
duration and temporal continuity is not an inherent feature
of the medium, but is constructed and manipulable.

In the constructedness of the cinematic image lies also
the possibility of dissociating cinematic movement and
duration. The cinematic image may be a representation of
movement, with time as an element of its representation, but
it may also be a representation of time itself. This
phenomenon of the time-image, in Deleuze's analysis, did not
arise until a particular historical moment: the aftermath of
World War II. As Deleuze explains in the preface to the
English Edition of Cinema T1, "...in Europe, the post-war

period has greatly increased the situations which we no

24
longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer
know how to describe. These were 'any spaces whatever,‘
deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground,
cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction"
(Cinema TT, xi). These blasted and war-ruined spaces, both
in real life and in cinematic depictions, were sites of
confusion, shell-shock, wandering, aimlessness, enervation,
and other states and behaviors divorced from purposeful
action, if not sites devoid entirely of human action.
Particularly as represented in film (Deleuze cites
especially the Italian Neo-Realists), these any spaces
whatever were and are sites where "what tends to collapse,
or at least to lose its position, is the sensory-motor
schema which constituted the action-image of the old cinema.
And thanks to this loosening of the sensory-motor linkage,
it is time, 'a little time in the pure state,' which rises
up to the surface of the screen" (Cinema 11, xi). Images
which pre-war audiences might have expected to become part
of a meaningful narrative and chronological progression were
experienced by post-war audiences in new cinematic
surroundings: "the images are no longer linked by rational
cuts and continuity, but are relinked by means of false
continuity and irrational cuts. Even the body is no longer
exactly what moves; subject of movement or the instrument of
action, it becomes rather the developer...of time, it shows

time through its tirednesses and waitings [as in AntonioniJ"

(Cinema IL xi).

 

 

25

The significance of Deleuze's framework for
considering the operation of cinema goes beyond his insight
into historical progression and structural issues. As noted
earlier, Deleuze is first a philosopher, and his project in
considering the operation of cinema links with his wider
philosophical inquiries. As Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta observe, "The time-image which Deleuze releases from
modern cinema gives him a new line of approach to a number
of important problems of modern thought: the undecidability
of truth and falsity, the relation of inside and outside,
the nature of 'the people,‘ the relation between brain and
body" (xvi). These inquiries by Deleuze find a wider
context as he explores them in such works as "Rhizome" and A
Thousand Elateauel oaoioalian and Schizophrenia (both co-
Authored with Felix Guattari), and consequently these other
works will be useful reference points in this study. It is
in Cinema, though, that Deleuze gives his fullest picture of
the relationship between the time-image in cinema and the
conditions of late 20th Century life, the conditions which
both Deleuze and Zygmunt Bauman characterize and describe as
"postmodern."

As artifacts of postmodern cultural production, film
texts both are comprised of and generate images of social
concepts such as community. When the concept of community
is explored within a specific body of films, such as those

of Lee, Scorsese and Wang, Bauman's sociological insight

into the pressures which postmodern conditions bring against

 

 

 

 

 

26
the concept of community is useful for examining the
contours of community within this set of films. To the
extent that different filmmakers have different visions of
the concept of community, however, the images that they
create are not simply conceptual, but physical. The films
do not simply say things differently, or say different
things, about the concept of community. They consist of
images, and those images resonate differently. Deleuze's
inquiry into the relationship between the physical
structures of the images in films provides a taxonomy for
analyzing those images, allowing for the possibility of
distinguishing the images of community created by one
filmmaker from those created by another. Beyond taxonomy,
however, Deleuze's inquiry provides a basis for relating the
actual structure of the images to the concepts which the
images convey. All of these uses for Bauman's theories and
Deleuze's theories, classifications, and connections I wish
to demonstrate and explore in the following chapters on the

images of community in the films of Spike Lee, Martin

Scorsese, and Wayne Wang.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2

COMMUNITIES IN PUBLIC SPACE

Harlem, Chinatown, and Little Italy have been the
settings for numerous films. Many of those films, not
surprisingly, have been mysteries or other variations of the
crime film. The locations offer both the mystery of the
Other and the familiarity of the American city. The
physical, readable nature of these communities makes them
public spaces which are simultaneously accessible and
inaccessible to film audiences, just as the actual locations
may be accessible to outsiders in search of an ethnic meal,
but closed to any meaningful interaction between the
interlopers and the occupants of these communities.

Whether a community is viewed as exotic or banal,
however, depends on who is doing the viewing. What is
exotic to the outsider is quotidian to the resident. That
such neighborhood locations are presented as exotic in
traditional Hollywood films says more about the filmmakers
and their conception of their audience than it says about
the location itself. Traditionally, the perspective of
Hollywood films on places like Harlem, Chinatown, and Little
Italy has been a stereotypical one. As Norman K. Denzin

observes about the depiction of Asian Americans in film, the

27

 

28
Hollywood infrastructure has functioned "as an institutional
apparatus which described, taught, and authorized a
particular view of Asian culture, Asian men, women, and
Asian family life. It created a system of discourse which
constituted the 'Orient' and the Asian as 'imaginary others'
who were simultaneously categorized, exteriorized, excluded
and included within the Western framework" (Denzin,
Cinematio 90)-

The question of representation of ethnic groups in
Hollywood film has a long and problematic history,3 rendered
problematic to a great extent by the "otherness" of the
actors, producers, and directors in relation to the people
they were depicting. This situation has changed somewhat in
recent years. Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese and Wayne Wang are
all examples of filmmakers whose identification is to some
degree ethnic, and who also make "Hollywood" films. While
all three have acknowledged that their work is sometimes
situated within and often affected by their own ethnicity,
none claims to speak for anyone other than himself in making
his films. All three, however, have claimed that when

making films about others who share their ethnicity, they

 

3 For a historical overview of the representation of
Asian Americans, see Richard A. Oehling' s "The Yellow
Menace: Asian Images in American Film," in Randall M.
Miller. ed Ihe_Kaleidoaoonio_Lene1_Hou_Holl¥nood;Yiene
Eehnie_gnenne, Jerome S. Ozer (1980) 182- 206. For a broader
context on the depiction of ethnicity in film, see Lester D.
Friedman, ed.

Ameniean_Cinema, Urbana: U of Illinois P (1991).

 

29
speak from an insider's position of knowledge, and
privilege.‘

A more interesting question than how the directors
claim to construct images of ethnicity, though, is the
question of how the films themselves construct images of the
communities they depict, communities which are often but not
always ethnically identified. These are images of
communities which exist and interact within public spaces.
In the films of Wang, Scorsese and Lee, the public spaces
are almost always urban, and technically open to use by
anyone, yet communities of varying degrees of permanence and
stability employ various overt and implicit strategies to
mark out territories and define themselves through territory
as well as other means.

One of the means of territorial definition and
demarcation which occurs in a number of the films in
question is the means of ritualistic display through
gatherings such as demonstrations and parades. Communities
which define themselves in these ways may be temporary and
shifting entities, but for a time these ritualistic
displays, carried out publicly, serve the function of
defining the community both for itself and for onlookers.

In Zygmunt Bauman's analysis, "imagined communities exist
solely through their manifestations: through occasional

spectacular outbursts of togetherness (demonstrations,

 

‘ See Wang, "A Delicate Balance;" Scorsese, "The
Martin Scorsese Interview;" Lee, Cniiih_nhe_kaee.

 

30
marches, festivals, riots)--sudden materializations of the
idea, all the more effective and convincing for blatantly
violating the routine of quotidianity. In the postmodern
habitat of diffuse offers and free choices, public attention
is the scarcest of all commodities...the right of an
imagined community to arbitrate is established (though for a
time only; and always merely until further notice) in
proportion to the amount and intensity of public attention
forced to focus on its presence" (Intimations xix-xx).

This assertive use of public space seems to be most
characteristic of the films of Spike Lee. His earliest film
Sheie QQLLB Haze Te, shows the early signs of a general
pattern: the characters are not often seen in public spaces
such as streets, parks, and subways, but when they are,
interesting patterns emerge. Public spaces are places of
display, or of confrontation. The public location which is
referred to more than any other is a park. Two noteworthy
scenes take place here. In one, on the occasion of Nola
Darling's birthday, two dancers perform for Nola in front of
a large monument in the park. The fact that this scene is
presented in color in an otherwise black-and-white film
signals that the scene, while not literally a fantasy (Nola
and Jamie, the boyfriend who arranges the performance for
Nola, are actually in attendance) has overtones of the
fantastic, beginning with the fact that they are alone in

the park during the performance. Here is an example of a

public place used for display, though it appears to be

 

31
display for private purposes, in the absence of any other
audience than Jamie and Nola.

The other important scene in the park takes place
between Nola and Jamie, at a park bench which has appeared
numerous times in the film as a place of contemplation or
conversation for Jamie. Visually, though the space is
public, it is a confined, bounded space. The bench has a
fence directly behind it, and in the earlier scenes, Jamie
has been seated on the bench while the camera holds him in
place with tight shots that allow minimal views of the
physical context. The any-space-whatever which surrounds
the close-up of Jamie's face shows the cross-hatched pattern
of the chain-link fence, a visual suggestion of the
limitations Jamie faces in his relationship with Nola
Darling. In these scenes, Jamie talks directly to the
camera about his problems with Nola, and in one case
discusses these problems with Mars Blackmon, one of his
rivals for Nola's affections. In the final scene at the
park bench, however, Nola herself confronts Jamie and tries
to persuade him to maintain their relationship without
commitment. When Jamie refuses, Nola turns her back on him
and walks slowly, almost in slow motion, toward the camera.
In one of the few deep-focus shots in the film, Jamie stays
in focus behind her while Nola walks away. When Nola is
about 20 feet away from Jamie she turns toward him, but he

doesn't follow. She continues to walk away. Though the

deep focus shot reduces the sense of confinement present in

 

 

 

 

32
the previous scenes at the park bench, it also emphasizes
the distance between Nola and Jamie which results from their
inability to agree about the nature of their relationship.
Again, Lee's use of public space in Sheie Ceeea game 1;
draws attention to the park as a locus of conflict, in this
case conflict of an interpersonal nature.

Because the issues in Sheie Ceeha Haze T; are largely
interpersonal, rather than social or political, it is not
surprising that the use of public space is not particularly
social or political. Yet the confrontation between Jamie
and Nola, even though it is over the personal matter of
commitment in relationship, is predictive of the use of
public space in subsequent Spike Lee films. Public space is
a space of tension, a place of confrontation, a place where
conflicts surface but are not resolved.

This construction of public space as a place of
uncertainty and confrontation is a stronger motif in the
musical seheei page. Here the issues are more public and
social, though still largely proscribed by the imagined
community of African Americans. The public space in Seheei
Daze consists of the public areas on the campus of fictional
Mission College, patterned after Spike Lee's alma mater, the
historically black Morehouse College. The conflicts in
fieheei Daze are almost entirely conflicts between groups of
students over issues ranging from jealousy over skin tone to

whether the school should divest itself of investments in

South Africa. As Lee himself remarks, "the entire film is

 

 

 

 

33

jammed with conflict and confrontations" (Cniiie 177). Some
of the confrontations seem to be the product of youthful
swagger,song which the women sing take note of and
interrogate the desire of some African Americans to have
"good hair," defined as hair which is not kinky and is
capable of being styled in a "white"" manner. The public
space of the beauty shop becomes a site of confrontation
between African Americans who self-define into two different
groups, forming community around physical characteristics,
and confronting each other through dance, song, and other
forms of ritual expression. That their confrontation is
ultimately a conflict over the power of self-definition in
regard to concepts of beauty is a concept brought into focus
by Clyde Taylor, whose comment in a different context
applies equally as well to Seheei Daze: "The effectiveness
of repressed people in the communications struggle, either
as senders or receivers through systems influenced by this
hierarchy, depends on their realisation of the obsolescence
of the contest over the nature of truth beside the contest
over the control of truth, and the irrelevance of 'beauty'
beside the power to choose and name beauty" ("Black Cinema"
90).

A parallel scene between males occurs at a fraternity-
sponsored "step-show." Each female group has a male group
counterpart: the "Wannabes" are sorority members, aligned

with the Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity, which exercises its

campus dominance through intimidation and ritualized

 

 

 

 

34
aggression. The "Jigaboos" are a more loosely organized
group, and are aligned with a group of campus men, led by
Dap and known as "the Fellas," whose allegiance to each
other is based simply on friendship, rather than on the
formalized bonds of obligation which characterize the
fraternity. The step-show, a public competition of dance
and rhythm between fraternities, is nominally presented as
part of Mission College's homecoming weekend entertainment.
It goes beyond entertainment, though, in that the
competition is read by its participants and its spectators
as an assertion of social dominance, the "power to choose
and name beauty," which reflects not only on the groups
themselves, but also on the definitional values which they
actively or implicitly advocate. Thus the fraternity
dancers are aligned with values of a hierarchical social
structure and economic stratification within the African
American community, with power belonging to light-skinned,
"good haired," well-educated blacks. The non-fraternity
men, whose uninvited contribution to the step-show is a
direct attack on the fraternity men in general and the
Gammas in particular, are identified with a more democratic
ideal for social structure, both within the college and
within the African American community at large. The sites
of confrontation between these two dogmas are various
throughout the film, but are always public places, and often

involve ritualized display through dance, song, and chant,

as in the "straight and nappy" and the "Step-Show" segments.

 

 

 

 

 

35

Lee's visual realization of these two scenes in fieheei
gaze conforms broadly to patterns typical of those described
by Deleuze as action-images. The action-image is the image
of twoness, of confrontation. It occurs in "determinate,
geographical, historical and social space-times" (Cinema 1
141). It is the site of realism in cinema, explained as
"milieux and modes of behaviour, milieux which actualise and
modes of behaviour which embody. The action-image is the
relation between the two and all the varieties of this
relation" (Cinema 1 141). The action-image, unlike
affection-images and perception-images, is not a matter so
much of individual shots as it is of sequences of shots,
extending to the point of the shape of the trajectory of the
film in its entirety. This is in keeping, broadly, with
Lee's visual style; individual shots are typically on-screen
for short durations, and the meaning of the scene results
less from the composition of any particular shot or camera
movement than it does from the accumulation of shots and
framings from different perspectives and angles, and their
relation to each other. That which is dynamic becomes so
because of editing and montage, rather than because of
composition or camera movement.

Deleuze distinguishes two broad types of action image:
the large form, where a situation produces an action which
alters the situation (SAS'), and the small form, where an

action reveals a situation which then results in a new or

altered action (ASA'). Both the "Straight and Nappy" and

 

 

36
the "step show" sequences exhibit the characteristics of the
large form, as does the narrative trajectory of Seheei page
in its entirety. The situation is one of disunity amongst
the students at Mission College, a disunity which arises
from their having different "missions." Dap's, and
consequently that of the Fellas as well as Rachel and the
women who surround her, is to instill a greater sense of
Black solidarity and Black pride within the college
community. The mission of the Gammas, mirrored by Jane and
the Gamma Ray sorority members, is much more self-serving:
to garner and maintain status within the college social
system, and to use it for personal gratification and gain.
This broadly painted conflict becomes evident shortly after
the film begins, and drives the behavior of students who are
aligned with one group or another. Secondary conflicts
arise over related issues, such as definitions of Black
beauty, as in the "straight and nappy" sequence.

There is one significant contextual difference between
"straight and nappy" and "step show," which is that
"straight and nappy" is presented as a fantasy sequence.
The sequence shot which precedes "straight and nappy"
depicts Jane, the Gamma Ray leader and girlfriend of Gamma
Phi Gamma President Julian, striding down a dormitory
hallway at the head of a group of Gamma women. They
encounter Rachel, Dap's girlfriend, at the head of a group

of non-sorority women. Rachel's group members are dark-

skinned, the Gammas light-skinned. They trade insults,

 

37
reminiscent of the "Dog Parade" section of Sheie Cehha flame
in, and prefiguring the racial insults scene in he ehe nigh;
Thing. The sorority women, mocked for their straightened
hair and blue contact lenses, reply with "Pickaninny," "Tar
Baby," and "Jigaboo." In response they hear "Barbie Doll"
and "High yellow heifer." With Rachel and Jane facing each
other down in the middle of the group, the scene cuts to the
beginning of "straight and nappy," where the camera tilts
down from the Madame Re-Re sign to the entrance of the
beauty shop, as the Jigaboos and Wannabes run through the
doors to the site of their dancing and singing
confrontation. The shot which directly follows the
"straight and nappy" sequence returns us to Jane and Rachel,
still facing each other down, telling each other "watch it."
This sequential suggestion of the fantasy nature of the
"straight and nappy" production number is reinforced by the
location, which is nominally decorated to resemble a beauty
salon, but in a very stylized fashion; it is obviously a set
on a sound stage, in the manner of sets for production
numbers in other musicals.

Despite these markers of the non-literal, the "straight
and nappy" sequence still fits comfortably within Deleuze's
definition of the action-image. Even though Madame Re-Re's
may seem outside the province of the "determined milieu,"
("determinate, geographical, historical and social space-
times" [Cinema 1 141]), it is not the physical milieu which

is of paramount importance. Rather, the wider milieu of the

38
film, the campus with its tensions between students with
different definitions of "progress" for African Americans,
is decidedly determinate, geographical, historical and
social, as Lee is at pains to establish at the beginning of
the film through a series of still photographs that situate
"Mission College" and its students within the history of
African American struggle. The photographs depict slave
ships, slavery, Marcus Garvey, and other images of
oppression or "the other" which contextualize the importance
of self-definition and of community solidarity, issues
around which the film revolves. According to Deleuze,
realism "does not exclude fiction nor even the dream. It
can include the fantastic, the extraordinary, the
heroic..."(Cinema i 141).

The situation of disunity which gives rise to conflicts
between individuals, such as Julian and Dap, or Rachel and
Jane, also produces the conflicts between groups that are
acted out in the "straight and nappy" and "step show"
sequences. The action which is produced as a result of the
situation is a physical acting-out of the "duel of
forces"(Cinema i 142) which according to Deleuze typifies
the action image. These duels may be inconclusive
throughout the story or film, but at some point the
protagonist and antagonist must appear together in the same
frame as the duel comes to a climax. In fieheei Daze, these

sorts of climaxes appear throughout the film, including in

the two sequences under discussion here. Ultimately,

 

39
though, they do not result in a clear sense of a changed
situation (the final moment in the SAS' equation). The film
ends with Dap assembling the Mission College community in a
public space, in front of the chapel, at sunrise on the day
after the homecoming weekend. His cries of "Wake Up!" seem
to signal his realization that, despite his efforts to
unify, the community is about as fragmented as when it
began. The situation produced action, but no discernable
change in situation.

A more complete realization of the action-image occurs
in he ehe nigh; Thing, another Spike Lee film in which the
action-image is the medium for the use of public space as a
site of confrontation, spectacle, and display. After the
title and opening credits, he hhe high; Thing begins where
Seheei Daze left off: with the disc jockey Senor Love Daddy
telling the neighborhood to "Wake Up!," a signal that this
film will also explore issues of identity and consciousness
raised in fieheei page.

ahe;e_Ceeea Haze T; explores primarily interpersonal

issues, and is located primarily in private spaces, such as
Nola Darling's apartment. The issues of African American
community and solidarity in Seheei Daze are explored in
settings both private and public. The settings and spaces
in De ehe nigh; Thing are almost entirely public: a pizza
parlor, the street in front of it, and the front steps of

buildings on the block. The only interiors we see for any

length of time are the interiors of apartments: the one

 

 

4O
Mookie shares with his sister Jade, and the one Mookie's
girlfriend Tina and son share with Tina's mother.
Appropriately, the issues and conflicts presented in DQ.Lh§
high; Thing are more far-reaching than those in the previous
two films: issues of racism, both personal and structural,
and economic struggle, as well as the community and identity
issues broached in Seheei haze. These more public issues
and the conflicts that highlight them are played out in the
public spaces of De ehe nigh; Thing.

The first visual images in he ehe nigh; Thing appear to
suggest that this film will not, in fact, follow the classic
pattern of the action-image. The opening credits sequence
operates in the area that Deleuze identifies as beyond the
action-image, the state where the link between environment
and action is tenuous as "the synsigns disperse and the
indices become confused" (Cinema 1 206-7). The opening
credits sequence presents Rosie Perez dancing to Public
Enemy's "Fight the Power."5 The sequence consists of 29
shots. Apart from a few shots with slight tilts or zooms,
the only camera movement in the sequence is one crane shot
where the camera begins in a position above Perez, then
booms down to a front view. About a quarter of the shots
are close-ups of Perez's face; the rest are medium long

shots. The sequence is obviously shot on a sound stage,

 

5 Though Perez plays the part of Tina, Mookie's
girlfriend and mother of his child, this sequence bears no
relationship to her role within the film.

 

 

41

with three backdrops suggesting exterior locations in the
film to follow--a storefront, a brownstone, and a covered
entryway set into a blank wall. The sequence also features
three costumes on the dancer: a red dress, a blue jumpsuit,
and white boxer's trunks with black top and red boxing
gloves. Though the costumes and backdrops change, the
manner of dancing remains constant: frenetic, and jerky.
Even in the close-up shots, the dancer's face reflects
intensity, even anger, and obliviousness to the camera.

Whatever situation there might be which would motivate
such dancing is entirely disconnected from its presentation.
Consequently, these shots move toward the condition of being
opsigns, pure optical situations which evince no sensory-
motor link, and which exist in any-space-whatever'.6 This
sense of disconnectedness is enhanced by the seemingly
random order of presentation of backdrops, costumes, and
shot distances, and by the use of lighting with red and
yellow filters. The sequence is a montage which creates
effect through its cumulative nature, rather than through
the meanings of constituent parts. The sequence does have
more continuity than does the typical music video, however,
in that location, character, character movement, and for the
most part camera placement remain constant, or oscillate
within parameters defined by the sequence itself. Visually,

the sequence gives only the slightest hint about conflicts

 

6 The representational quality of the backdrops
mitigates this classification.

 

 

 

42
in the film, and that metaphorically, in the shots where
Perez wears boxing gear and modifies her dancing to include
feints and jabs.

The driving beat of the Public Enemy rap song to which
Perez dances might allow the sequence to operate as a
sonsign as well, the beat making it possible to tune out the
lyrics, at least initially. But the explosive utterance of
the phrase "fight the power," and the repeated use of "fuck"
and "motherfuck" draw attention to the confrontational
nature of the song, and compel attention to the lyrics. As
other than a "pure sound situation," the soundtrack is in
tension with the visual images, or perhaps overrides the
visual images, compelling a sense of sensory-motor
connection which the visual images themselves do not
suggest. The visual images, tending toward opsigns, suggest
a non-linearity which is at odds with the linearity and
message-driven nature of "Fight the Power." This
ambivalence about its own identity seems to characterize he
ehe nigh; Thing in a variety of ways, right down to the
didactic ambivalence of the two quotations with which it
ends, the advocacy of violence when necessary in the Malcolm
X quotation seeming to cancel out the nonviolent thrust of
the Martin Luther King Jr. quotation.

Despite the credit sequence's visual suggestion that he
aha nigh; Thing will break with the action-image, the

narrative trajectory of the film does not do so. "Fight the

Power" suggests that the situation which obtains at the

M114

43
beginning of the film is the situation of institutionalized
racism. Visually, the situation which obtains on this block
in Brooklyn is that it's summer, and it's hot. Dominant
colors, as in the credit sequence, are red and yellow; fans
turn, and people sweat, despite attempts to cool off with
showers. The visual and atmospheric situation suggests the
volatility of the structural presence of racism. The
development of conflict and confrontation in the film's
public spaces occurs in a dispersed manner which is gathered
in the riot at the end, but the thread that ties it together
is the general air of volatility.

Though the film's audience may see and understand both
the structural racism and the atmospheric volatility, Mookie
only realizes that it's hot. His primary objective is
stated throughout the film in economic terms: "I gotta get
paid." To the extent that Mookie gives evidence of any
awareness of the existence of racism in his environment, he
conceptualizes it on a personal level only. When Pino,
Sal's son, asks Mookie "How come you niggers are so stupid?"
Mookie confronts Pino with his personal racism by asking
"Who's your favorite basketball player? Movie star? Rock
artist?" Pino names Black performers in every instance,
prompting Mookie to reply "Pino, I think secretly that you
wish you were Black."

While Mookie recognizes racism on a personal level, his

dim understanding of structural racism is evident in his

response to Buggin' Out's efforts to organize a boycott of

 

44
Sal's because Sal refuses to put pictures of African
Americans on the "Wall of Fame." Mookie reads Sal's refusal
purely in personal terms:

Buggin' Out: Mookie, How come you ain't got no brothers

up?

Mookie: Ask Sal.

Though Mookie never reacts directly to Buggin' Out's
political response to the "Wall of Fame" issue, his reaction
is presumably similar to that of his sister Jade: "Buggin'
Out, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but you can really
direct your energies in a more useful way."

The clearest signifiers of structural racism on the
block are conveyed visually through the organization of the
public space of Sal's Famous Pizzeria, and through modes of
transportation. Sal's choice of pictures for the Wall of
Fame may be a relatively inconsequential indicator of
structural racism, but it visually signifies Sal's
dissonance with the Bed-Stuy block where his pizzeria is
located, a dissonance reinforced by numerous indicators of
his colonializing presence, and that of other whites in the
film. Sal asserts his authority in his pizzeria in
numerous ways, invoking the hierarchy which puts him at the
top ("This is my pizzeria. I'm the boss.") Within its
walls his wishes rule, as he demonstrates in conflicts with
Buggin' Out and Radio Raheem, but also in his dictatorial

orders to his son and to Mookie. While Pino and Vito may

work in the back room, and Vito may accompany Mookie on one

 

45
of Mookie's many delivery forays into the neighborhood, Sal
remains firmly planted behind the counter37'visually
asserting his dominance over his domain.

Modes of transportation are the clearest signal of the
transient, colonial presence of whites in this neighborhood
of color. In he ehe nigh; Thing, only whites drive cars.
Sal and his sons arrive for work in a Cadillac. At the end
of the day, they propose to leave the pizzeria for home,
which is elsewhere (probably Bensonhurst). The police drive
through the neighborhood repeatedly, sometimes menacingly.
In the incident involving the driver of the Cadillac
convertible and the youths at the fire hydrant, the white
driver is clearly just passing through the neighborhood.
His confrontation with the youths who spray his car, and his
subsequent complaint to the police, make it clear that he
has no sympathy for or affinity with the residents of the
block. Even the one white person who lives on the block,
and asserts his right to do so by virtue of his having been
born in Brooklyn, arrives by bicycle. In contrast with all
these images of white choice by reason of mobility, and
white colonializing presence, every person of color in the
film walks, and stays on the block.

Mookie's blindness to this situation of structural

racism is itself a situation which will change at the climax

 

7 In two instances, Sal takes a seat in the customer
area of the pizzeria, once to talk with his son Pino, once
to talk with Mookie's sister Jade.

 

 

 

[(7

46
of the film. It is not, however, a blindness shared by all
the residents of the block. Like a Greek chorus, the three
corner men (Coconut Sid, ML, and Sweet Dick Willie) comment
extensively on matters such as the disparity between Korean
and African American opportunities to start small
businesses. When two white policemen drive by the corner
men, stare menacingly, and comment "What a waste" as they
drive away, they highlight the tension which exists on a
structural level. The cornermen reinforce the perception of
a structural gulf between Black resident and white
colonizers with their identical, reciprocating comment:
"What a waste."

The exchange between the cops and the corner men is
typical of shot/reverse shot strategies used throughout De
ehe Bight; Thim. As in The gen Lnek Clan", most of these
affection-image close-ups frame only the individual, as
opposed to shot/reverse shot strategies which contain the
interlocutor's shoulder in the foreground of the frame. In
The Joy Lnek Cinh, however, these affection-images are
typically close-ups held on-screen for a fairly long
duration; they are not typically part of a shot/reverse-shot
strategy. Thus, in that film, the affection-image serves to
make present the emotional state or the memory function of
the character in close-up, focusing attention on the

character as character by abstracting the character from

 

8 See chapter 3, where affection-images in The gay Lnek
Cinh are considered in some detail.

 

47
environment, presenting the character stripped from context.
As Deleuze puts it, the affection-image, the close-up, "
abstracts [its subject] from all spatio-temporal
coordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of
Entity" (Cinema 1 96). Though the close-ups in the
shot/reverse shot sequence between the corner men and the
cops are, in themselves, affection-images, and do make
present the character's emotional state, they are not
stripped of context; the juxtaposition of affection-images
in the shot/reverse-shot sequence contextualizes each image
in two ways. First, since the images do not contain the
shoulder of the other they are at least potentially POV
shots from the other's point of view. The stare of the
camera replicates the stare of the other from whose POV the
shot is created; the reciprocating stare of the shot's
subject creates a direct bond between other and subject. In
The gay Lnek Cinh the wider context of the film suggests
that this relationship translates into community, since the
context of such sequences are occurrences such as a mah-
jongg game between friends. Here, however, the stare-down
between cops and corner men, carried visually through
alternating affection-images, makes visual the relationship
of tension and distrust. This leads to the second, more
abstract way in which context is created around the
juxtaposition of affection-images: this shot/reverse shot

sequence, juxtaposing potential combatants, forms the basic

building block of the action image, the duel. This is an

 

48
example of what Deleuze calls the binomial, which
"designate[s] every duel, that is to say, what is properly
active in the action-image. There is a binomial as soon as
the state of a force relates back to an antagonistic force,
and particularly when--one or both of the forces being
'spontaneous'—-it involves in its very exercise an effort to
foresee the exercise of the other force: the agent acts as a
function of what he thinks the other is going to do" (Cinema
1 142). he Che nigh; Thing is full of such face-offs, all
ripe with the possibility of conflict: between Sal and
Mookie, Sal and Pino, Sal and Buggin' Out, Sal and Radio
Raheem, Buggin' Out and Clifton (the gentrifying yuppie),
Radio Raheem and the Puerto Ricans. All of these incipient
action-images begin the process of bringing the constituents
of the binomial into frictional contact, but they all are
aborted or averted before moving from the stage of situation
to the stage of action. This frictional contact is evidence
of the wider presence of what Deleuze calls the synsign, a
term modified from Peirce's eineign, referring to "a set of
power-qualities as actualised in a milieu, in a state of
things or a determinate space-time" (Cinema i 142). In
constructing the broader situation on one city block on this
day around these multiple binomials, the film creates the
macro-situation, or synsign, which will indeed lead to

explosive action at the climax of the film.

This structure in De hhe nigh; Thing departs from

Deleuze's analysis of the classic progression of the action

 

49
image in one respect: in the classic action-image film, the
protagonist has a clear antagonist, the relationship between
them forming the binomial within which the tension of the
synsign increases as they are repeatedly brought into
contact with each other. In he ;he high; Thing, by
contrast, the antagonisms are dispersed throughout the space
and the time of the film, and across a variety of
characters, so that the tension is a characteristic not of
the relationship between classic hero and villain, but
rather of the community as a whole. Further, the tension
does not build in a direct chronological or spatial
progression, but rather according to a complex pattern by
which individual characters are revisited in a loosely
circular fashion, their stories and conflicts elaborated
upon each revisiting.’ In this respect, the construction of
he ;he high; Thing does not proceed directly toward the
climax, but in a roundabout fashion similar to the
circularity of which Julie Dash speaks when she describes
the narrative strategy of her 1992 film, hangh;ene e1 ;he
hne;, as being that of a West African griot, or storyteller.
Dash tells her story "the way an old relative would retell
it, not linear but always coming back around. It's all
connected, but how you get to the information is different"

(qtd. in Rule C17). This narrative dispersal, while

 

9 Deleuze says that the powers of the synsign are
brought to bear upon each other in "a spiral of development
which includes spatial and temporal caesuras" (Cinema_i
151).

 

50
supporting the binomial development of the action-image,
does so in a way that presages the beyond of the action-
image, where pure affect (in this case, tension, and anger)
operates.

The diffuse anger latent in all these community members
coalesces and erupts in the penultimate scene, the murder of
Raheem by the police and the subsequent riotous destruction
of Sal's Famous Pizzeria. The operative synsign here is the
atmosphere of racial tension which has been building
throughout the day. Because the synsign is atmospheric
rather than located in any particular character, or for
that matter in any binomial created between a pair of
characters, the riot could theoretically erupt as a
consequence of any of the many frictions the day has
produced. The friction from which it develops is an
appropriate one on many levels, though, as it is Raheem's
boombox which has carried through the theme of "Fight the
Power," and apart from the police, Sal is the most obvious
locus of power, both the hierarchical power he asserts in
his relationship with Mookie and his sons, and the economic
and culturally imperialistic power he asserts in denying
Buggin' Out's request to "put some brothers on the wall."

As the scene develops, the duel is joined in the binomials
circulating around Sal and Raheem.lo The shot/reverse shot

method noted earlier is again used as Sal and Raheem

 

m "the synsign must contract into a binomial or

duel. . ." (Cinema; 152).

 

Sl
confront each other in the pizzeria, though it is not
immediately clear that the duel will coalesce in these two
figures.

The scene in the pizzeria begins at the end of the
business day, when Sal and his employees have already locked
the front door. In a gesture of magnanimity, Sal opens the
door when a group of four neighborhood youths (Ahmad, Cee,
Punchy, and Ella) knock, and ask to be served. Shortly
after they enter, Buggin' Out enters with Raheem at his side
and Smiley in tow. Raheem sets his boombox on the counter,
"Fight the Power" blaring. Sal and Buggin' Out trade
demands and insults, Buggin' Out referencing his attempted
boycott and demanding that Sal include African Americans on
the Wall of Fame, Sal referencing his earlier assertion to
Raheem that he turn off the boombox before entering the
pizzeria.

The development of the scene proceeds in exactly the
manner that Deleuze explains the joining of the action in
the action-image. A series of shots follow the shot/reverse
shot pattern. Shots of Sal are from the POV of Buggin' Out
and Raheem; shots of Raheem and Buggin' Out are from Sal's
POV. As with earlier shot/reverse shot sequences, they are
not over-the-shoulder shots, but are medium close-ups of the

subject or subjects alone. The sense of strain is

heightened by the fact that they are consistently low-angle,

 

 

52
dutch-angle shots.11 Occasional cut-ins of close-ups of
Mookie, Vito, Pino, and the four neighborhood youths
increase the tension, as they shout at one or the other of
the arguers. After 25 shots of this montage of heightening
tension, a shot finally occurs which frames both Sal and one
of his adversaries: not Buggin' Out, but Raheem. As Deleuze
observes, while montage may be an effective or necessary
instrument for bringing the forces of the synsign to the
point of convergence, there must also be "a moment where two
terms confront each other face to face and must be seized in
an irreducible simultaneity, without the possibility of
resorting to a montage, or even to a shot-reverse shot"
(Cinema 1 153). This moment is the essence of action, and
requires that both forces be contained within the same
frame. Sal, bat in hand, stares in the direction of Raheem,
whose arm we see in the foreground, resting on his boombox.
In the next shot Sal lifts the bat and bashes the boombox,
as Raheem, Smiley, and Buggin' Out back quickly away.
Another quick montage of twelve shots intersperses images of
Sal bashing the boombox with reaction shots of Raheem,
Buggin' Out, Mookie, Pino, Vito, and Ella. The last shot in
this sequence is a low-angle shot of Raheem, glaring down,
from Sal's POV, as Sal has finished the demolition. This

shot is followed by a second two-shot, initially very

 

n The sense of strain is also heightened by the fact
that Buggin' Out and Sal scream their demands at each other,
in order to be heard over the incessant beat of the boombox.

 

53
similar to the one that preceded Sal's rampage. Raheem
again is in the foreground, Sal across the counter. Raheem
picks up the boombox and throws it to the floor behind him,
then lunges across the counter to grab Sal by the shirt,
drag him across the counter, and throw him to the floor,
where they wrestle. In a succession of shots, the others
either pile on, or attempt to separate Raheem and Sal.
Shortly, Raheem picks Sal up and pushes him out the door
into the street, where the wrestling match continues.

In this sequence, the sensory-motor link which is basic
to the action-image is expressed as Sal, through the
gripping of his baseball bat, actualizes his anger in
smashing Raheem's boombox. Raheem, in turn, actualizes his
anger in first handling the smashed boombox, then grabbing

2 But this scene,

Sal and pulling him across the counter.1
while it constitutes an action which leads to a new
situation, is not the culmination of the action-image in he
;he high; Thing. Instead, it creates a new situation--the
arrival of the police--which leads to a new action, the

murder of Raheem by the police. This in turn creates a new

situation, the realization by Mookie that he has been

 

” Deleuze, in discussing the sensory-motor link,
observes that the Actors Studio actors practiced a "cinema
of behaviour" where "a sensory contact must be established
with the objects adjacent to the situation: even an
imaginary contact with a material [a glass, a fabric, an
instrument, etc.]...the object must, in this way, awaken an
affective memory, reactualise an emotion which is not
necessarily identical, but is analogous to that which the
role calls up" (Cinema_1 158).

54
aligned with Sal for economic reasons only (Mookie's
constant refrain is "gotta get paid"), but this has made him
complicit with the colonialism and structural racism which
Sal represents, and which has just been manifested in the
murder of Raheem as an act protecting Sal's property. This
realization of Mookie's constitutes a new situation, which
leads to the new action which is also the climax--the moment
when Mookie throws the garbage can through Sal's window.

The realization is conveyed through a powerful
noosign“, where in successive frames the camera reveals
that Mookie is initially aligned with Sal, realizes the
import of this alignment, and consciously chooses to
disassociate with Sal and align instead with the crowd. The
context for this scene is set earlier, just before Sal opens
the pizzeria for the group of four youths, when he talks
about the satisfactions of owning a family business and
tells Mookie that there will always be a place for him at
Sal's Famous Pizzeria--that Mookie is like a son to Sal.

This family alignment, and Mookie's complicity with Sal, is

 

” The noosign offers us entry into a process whereby
the camera emulates thought. The camera "subordinates
description of a space to the functions of thought. This is
not the simple distinction between the subjective and the
objective, the real and the imaginary, it is on the contrary
their indiscernibility which will endow the camera with a
rich array of functions, and entail a new conception of the
frame and reframings...it becomes questioning, responding,
objecting, provoking, theorematizing, hypothesizing,
experimenting, in accordance with the open list of logical
conjunctions ('or,‘ 'therefore,' 'if,' 'because,'

'actually,‘ 'although...'), or in accordance with the
functions of thought in a cinema-verite..."(Cinema_g_23).

 

55
demonstrated visually in a sequence of shots that occur just
after Raheem and Buggin' Out are hauled off in police cars,
and the crowd gathers in front of the pizzeria, shouting
their anger. Following the tracking shot of the crowd,
where individuals are each momentarily framed in close-ups
as they say such things as "he was killed because he had a
radio," and "they didn't have to kill the boy," we see a
close-up of Mookie, who with Sal, Pino and Vito, is the
recipient of the comments. Mookie turns his head to the
right of the frame; the succeeding shot is a close-up of
Sal, turning his head to the frame left to meet Mookie's
gaze. The next shot is the key, a low angle four-shot of
Mookie at the left, then Sal, Vito, and Pino, standing in
front of the pizzeria, an image visually conveying the
relationship of familial alignment which Sal asserted as
Mookie's prerogative in perpetuity. As the shot progresses
Mookie turns his gaze away from Sal and toward the crowd.
Next is a shot from Mookie's POV of six of the young men in
the crowd, at intervals of depth.

The camera shows, in this series of shots, a situation
which follows the action of the cops' murder of Raheem:
Mookie's awakening to his position of alignment with Sal and
consequent complicity in the actions that followed from
Sal's destruction of Raheem's boombox, the actions
culminating in Raheem's death. The shot which follows the
Mookie POV shot is an objective long, high angle shot from

behind the crowd, reinforcing Mookie's alignment with Sal

56
and sons, confronting the crowd. Mookie leaves the line and
walks toward the crowd, completing the sequence of noosigns
which visually depict his realization and consequent
decision. The action which follows the decision, of course,
occurs fourteen shots later when Mookie picks up the trash
barrel, walks past the crowd with it, and hurls it through
the front window of the pizzeria, precipitating the looting
and subsequent arson of the building. The gathering of the
crowd, facing off against Sal and his sons (no longer
including Mookie) is the final binomial situation of the
film, the context in which the final explosive action
occurs.

This final explosive action, occurring in the public
space of the street before the pizzeria, and in the public
space of the pizzeria itself, is an image of self-validation
for the temporary, or "imagined" community which Mookie
joins when he leaves the hierarchically defined, familial

community of Sal's work force.“ This anarchically

 

“ Norman Denzin also notes how the action of the riot
serves as a self-validation for the temporary community,
identifying the riot as a political act: "In this moment of
violence and its aftermath, Lee projects a political economy
of signs which make a difference; for now the signs of the
self are connected to real political action. The personal
becomes political, and the political is personal. In a
single motion Lee politicizes semiotics, and suddenly gives
a real force to the blurred, evocative, floating signifiers
[the messages on
characters' t-shirts] that, in another world--the
postmodern--drift by, are gazed at for a moment, and then
read as fleeting markers of the self. For Lee what you wear
is who you are. who you are is marked by your politics and
whether or not you will take a stand against the 'power'
that rules, the 'power' that is, that 'power' who is the

 

 

57
organized temporary community defines itself through its
anger and its actions. Thus public space in he ;he high;
Thing becomes a space of community self-definition, even if
the community is short-lived. The next morning, when Mookie
confronts Sal on the front steps of the burned-out pizzeria
to ask for his weekly pay, no one else is in evidence. The
two conflicting communities--the temporary, "imagined" one
forming around the anger and action which followed in the
wake of Raheem's murder, and the familial one which formed
around the father-figure of Sal--are absent. Only
protagonist and antagonist remain to confront each other.
The final confrontation takes place once again in public
space, as Sal throws twice Mookie's salary at him. Mookie,
initially standing on principle, refuses to take more than
his due. In perhaps a signal that the economics of survival
are still a stronger motivator than the fellow-feeling of
the imagined community that coalesced around his action of
the night before, Mookie eventually scoops the extra money
off the sidewalk.

As they are in Spike Lee's films, public spaces in the
films of Martin Scorsese are also often places of tension,
confrontation, and danger. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is
pursued through the streets of lower Manhattan in the dead
of night by an angry mob in hi;e; henna. Jake La Motta

(Robert DeNiro), in haging hell, enters a public arena

 

white man" (Images 134-5).

 

58

dedicated to confrontation and violence every time he steps
into a boxing ring. Though the most powerful sites of
danger in Cane Eean are the Bowden family home and
houseboat, Sam Bowden's confrontational encounters with Max
Cady (Robert DeNiro) take place in a bar, a parking lot, and
a crowd gathered along a street for a parade, among other
public sites. This acknowledgment within Scorsese's ouvre
of the potential for danger inherent in public places
reaches its visual apex in the opening scene of Canine,
where Ace Rothstein (DeNiro again), clad in a pastel suit
that screams for attention, crosses the parking lot in front
of his casino toward his Cadillac. As he settles in behind
the wheel and turns the key, the image explodes into a
fireball which presumably ends Rothstein's life. The
sequence introduces a story told in flashback about a
violent and dangerous life, lived largely in the public
spaces of Las Vegas casinos.

~Though Lee and Scorsese share this sense of public
space as a place with the potential for confrontation and
danger, their presentation differs in some respects. For
one, while Lee's characters may form temporary and shifting
alliances with other characters which would constitute
loose, imagined communities, for the most part they operate
largely on their own.15 Even in Maleelm x, the title

character (Denzel Washington) operates quite autonomously,

 

H gzggklyn, with its location within a nuclear family,
is the exception.

 

59
with this individualistic propensity leading to his ultimate
assassination by operatives of the Nation of Islam, with
which he had previously been affiliated. While such forms
of betrayal are not foreign to characters in Scorsese films,
the affiliations in Scorsese films are often buttressed by a
layer of community solidarity lacking in the experiences of
the characters in Lee's films. This layer of community
solidarity is expressed in ritual and ceremony, the visual
and choreographed signifiers of an individual's connection
with a wider community in both space and time. Ritual and
ceremony, in Scorsese's films, serve the same solidifying
purpose for his characters that the riot does in he ;he
high; Thing--they provide a point of coalescence for an
imagined community. The difference in the way the imagined
community coalesces in a Scorsese film as compared with a
Lee film, which translates to a different sense of the
permanence or impermanence of community, is that ritual
behavior in Scorsese's films is not spontaneous, is not the
action which eventuates from a situation according to the
pattern of the action-image. Rather, ritual is a part of
the environment, is one of the "givens" of a character's
situation. Though the character may still be brought into
danger in the determined milieu of a public place, where a
synsign-engendered conflict may be brought binomially to the

point of action, the element of ritual not only affects the

visual presentation of these actions, but indeed is an

 

nnw.\ 1M

60
elemental constituent of the milieu which affects the very
way these actions unfold.

Elements of ceremony and ritual enter a Scorsese film
in many ways, but always visually, with signifiers as large
as church interiors or as small as a pair of boxing gloves.
Lesley Stern, in comparing haging hell to Michael Powell's
The hen Sheen, remarks on the ceremonial quality of the
totemic objects of shoes and boxing gloves as they are
employed in public spaces in both films: "The totemic
object, in so far as it implies an ordinary object invested
with extraordinary qualities, summons a context of ritual,
of ceremony, of theatre-~a context realised in sharp
opposition to the everyday. The gloves and the shoes both
indicate an arena of performance, an arena in which the
ordinary body is transformed. On the stage, in the rin --
boxing, dancing--for an audience, the body is
ceremonialised" (Cennee;ien 14).16 In addition to boxing
gloves, religious icons permeate the milieu of haging hell,
reinforcing the sense that Jake LaMotta's suffering is
somehow a religious tribulation. As Morris Dickstein puts
it, "Scorsese the Italian Catholic turns a boxer's story
into a Stations of the Cross movie" (661).

This Italian Catholicism also permeates Mean $;1ee;e,

both visually and metaphorically. It is a strange companion,

 

“ The religious iconography of Max Cady's tattoos in
Caee_hea; are another striking example of the ceremonialized
body.

 

61

much remarked upon, to the sometimes calculated, sometimes
irrational violence which also pervades the film.17 Both
the Catholicism and the violence are played out in Mean
§;Tee;e ceremonially and ritualistically, largely in public
spaces. They are not the spaces, though, of Bauman's
"spectacular outbursts of togetherness" which spontaneously
and temporarily define the imagined community. Rather, they
are spaces within which the Italian American community of
Mean fi;zee;e identifies itself through rituals of inclusion
and exclusion, spaces which are nominally public, but in
reality only open to those who belong, by virtue of family
or nationality.18

The motif of festival and celebration is introduced
moments into Mean $;;ee;e, when the home movies that begin

the film depict rituals of the church.19 These rituals are

 

“ See especially Scorsese's interview with Anthony
DeCurtis, as well as discussions in Kolker, henelineee, and
Librach, "Temptation. "

“ Scorsese claims ethnic authenticity for Mean
fi;nee;e, as he told Anthony DeCurtis: "That's the whole
story of Mean_§;nee;e. I mean, I put it on the screen. It
took me years to get it going--I never thought the film
would be released. I just wanted to make, like, an
anthropological study; it was about myself and my friends.
And I figured even if it was on a shelf, some years later
people would take it and say that's what Italian Americans
on the everyday scale--not the Godfather, not big bosses,
but the everyday scale, the everyday level--this is what
they really talked like and looked like and what they did in
the early seventies and late sixties. Early sixties even.
This was the life-style" (434).

B As Hosney et. al. observe, the home movies at the
beginning of Mean_§;zee;e may actually be the end of the
story. Hosney et. al. assert that the home movies depict the
wedding of Charlie and Theresa, and the baptism of their

 

62
the church's means of including and excluding, offering a
vehicle of self-definition to those who participate. They
are recorded, though, on a movie within a movie--Scorsese's
self-reflexive and ritualistic acknowledgment that self-
definition consists in part of the images of ourselves which
we create, in this case literally.20 The home movie

displays the self-conscious creation of the characters'

 

child. While alternate readings of the home movie
introduction are certainly possible, Hosney et. a1.

see them as evidence that, despite the bloody gunplay and
car crash at the end of the film, "Charlie and Theresa
survive to become the happy parents in the home movie"
(413).

“ Zygmunt Bauman discusses this phenomenon of self-
definition through identification in discussing the
formation of "neo-tribes" (a term he borrows from Michel
Maffesoli). "The neo-tribes--the tribes of [the]
contemporary world, are...formed--as concepts rather than
integrated social bodies--by the multitude of individual
acts of self-identification. Such agencies as might from
time to time emerge to hold the faithful together have
limited executive power and little control over co-option or
banishment. More often than not, 'tribes' are oblivious of
their following, and the following itself is cryptic and
fickle. It dissipates as fast as it appears. 'Membership'
is relatively easily revokable, and it is divorced from
long-term obligations; this is a kind of 'membership' that
does not require an admission procedure or authoritative
rulings, and that can be dissolved without permission or
warning. Neo-tribes 'exist' solely by individual decisions
to sport the symbolic tags of tribal allegiance"
(Intimatione 136-7).

Of course, the Catholic Church does not fit Bauman's
criteria for a neo-tribe; it deee have control over co-
option or banishment, does keep track of its adherents, and
does impose obligations. But decisions by individuals to
participate in the rituals of the church serve the same sort
of self-defining purposes as the more nebulous "individual
decisions to sport the symbolic tags of tribal allegiance"
which Bauman identifies as nee-tribal affiliation.

 

63
identity, framed in terms of religious ritual.21 Mean
SLLeete self-consciously displays the identity formation of
its characters, and by extension of the community which they
both.inhabit and create through their presence and
interaction, a community which bears strong resemblances to
the community in which Scorsese himself grew up.22
The motif of festival and celebration is carried out in

public places through the parades of celebration of the
feast of San Gennaro, a yearly festival which attracts
crowds of tourists to New York's Little Italy section. The
parades and crowds which mark this festival become an ironic
backdrop for the action of Mean 5;:ee;e. For the thousands
who attend the celebration, it signifies an ethnically and
religiously authentic event in which they can participate,
yet even while it happens in the neighborhood inhabited by

the main characters of Mean S;;ee;e, it is entirely

 

” Lee Lourdeaux notes that "Sacramentality appears in
his [Scorsese's] films not just in intimate close-ups of
hold statues, but also in lively color shots of church
festivals; public rituals of community are as sacramental
for Scorsese as traditional church icons. Scorsese views
his work as part of a popular religious tradition in which
sacramental symbolism is an
integral part of everyday life (228).

” Scorsese takes pride in this seeming verisimilitude.
In his 1990 interview with Scorsese, Gavin Smith asked "Did
you ever get feedback from the underworld after Mean
$;nee;e? In answer, Scorsese told a story he'd heard about
a mob boss who usually didn't see movies, but whose
associates "just grabbed him and threw him in the car and
took him to see the film. It was Mean_$;xee;e. They loved
it. So that was like the highest compliment, because I
really try to be accurate about attitude and about way of
life" (69).

 

64
peripheral to their lives. They don't participate; they
don't even stop to watch the festivities.23 At most, the
crowds on the sidewalk watching the parades are simply an
impediment to Charlie as he walks to a meeting in a
restaurant. Like the rituals recorded in the home movies,
the festival is so much a part of the environment of the
characters in Mean fi;:ee;e that its nature or function as
ceremony and ritual is not thought about nor remarked upon.
Visually, its presentation in Mean S;;ee;e is appropriately
fragmented; one shot of the parade is a bird's eye view,
held for only a moment. Other shots follow Charlie's
progress as he fights his way through the crowd on the
sidewalk. In each case, the festivities are simply a
feature of the environment.

In addition to self-definition through ritual, Mean
$;;ee;e also features the characters' self-definition
through physical environment, or neighborhood, and through
contrast with all forms of otherness. The title of the film
suggests that location is important, and while it suggests
that the streets may be mean for the protagonists, they are
even meaner for those who appear not to belong in this
neighborhood. Ian Penman remarks on both identifying
factors, neighborhood and the sense of us/them: "Mean

fienee;e is the anti-road movie. Pinned into their plush red

 

” At one point, while riding to the pool hall with
Charlie and Tony in Tony's car, Johnny Boy remarks "I hate
this fucking festival. You can't even move through the
streets in your own neighborhood."

 

——-r

65
maze, these guys are all flying centrifugal gestural
movement...The boys live in the midst of a rich patchwork
culture, but are in every sense abusive of it. In the
middle of a capital city, they can't get their compound
tight enough: Chinese, Jews, blacks, gays all stray in from
their own encampments and are swiftly ejected" (10-11). The
characters' attachment to their neighborhood is so great
that the simple act of leaving it is fraught with peril. A
sign of the menace which Michael holds for Johnny Boy at the
end of the film is the fact that Charlie persuades Johnny
Boy to go to Brooklyn. They might just as well have gone to
Indiana.

Little Italy, with the Festival of San Gennaro as one
of its identifying features, forms what Gilles Deleuze calls
the "determined milieu" of the film. The neighborhood is a
concrete locale in space and time, a public space, and the
festival flavors that locale both ethnically and
religiously. Though the characters in the film use this
public space of the neighborhood, and encounter the
festival, they pay no more attention to these environmental
phenomena than a fish pays to water. Yet the physical and
ritual environments are critical to their (and our) sense of
who they are. In this respect, the neighborhood and the
ethnic identity of the characters function similarly to race
and place in he ;he high; Thing, as cultural identifiers and

geographic delimiters. Scorsese, like Lee, visually creates

a determined milieu within which the action-image functions.

 

66

Beyond this point, though, the presentation of milieu
in Mean fi;;ee;e diverges from its presentation in he ;he
high; Thing. As explained earlier, the narrative structure
of he ;he high; Thing is not only enacted in public space,
but builds through incidents of friction to the moment of
climax in the pattern of the classic action-image. The
characters of Mean 3;;ee;e do pass through public space, and
identify with and are identified by the ceremonies and
rituals performed there, but the determined milieu of the
film is only a surface upon which many of the significant
actions of the film occur. Other significant events occur
in a place of refuge and release, intimacy and danger:
Tony's bar, where the indirect lighting combines with the
red-filtered cinematography to produce a gaudy, hellish
atmosphere.“

Tony's bar functions in Mean $;mee;e as the location of
an "originary world," Gilles Deleuze's term for a milieu in
which impulses, rather than affections or actions, are at
the fore. It is here that the impulse-image is formed, just
as the affection-image exists in the any-space-whatever and
the action-image exists in a determined milieu. Between the
action-image and the affection-image lies the impulse

image.25 Like the action-image, the impulse-image is not so

 

“ Jim Hosney et. al. (411) and Penman (10), among
others, remark on the hellish visual quality of the red-
tinted scenes in the bar.

5 "...between the two, between firstness and
secondness, there is something which is like the

 

 

67
much a matter of a particular shot, with its characteristics
of composition creating its effect, or even of a montage, or
series of shots, the effect created by the accumulation or
juxtaposition of shots. Rather, the effect of the impulse-
image follows from the nature of the milieu in interaction
with the impulses enacted there. Analogously, just as
"Modes of Behaviour" are enacted in "Determined Milieux"
(specific, realistic locales) to create the action-image, so
"Elementary Impulses" are enacted in "Originary Worlds" to
create the impulse-image (Cinema 1 123). These originary
worlds are not autonomous, or disconnected; they exist in
relationship with determined milieux. The impulses
generated in the orginary world may or may not lead to
actions in determined milieux.

What Deleuze posits here is that impulses can be
visually depicted, just as can affections or actions. Since
impulses are pre-rational, the visual depiction of an
impulse will be located in a milieu which suggests pre-
rationality: "...pure background, or rather a
without-background, composed of unformed matter, sketches or
fragments, crossed by non-formal functions, acts, or energy

dynamisms which do not even refer to the constituted

 

'degenerate' affect, or the 'embryonic' action. It is no
longer the affection-image, but is not yet the action-image.
As we have seen, the former is developed in the
Any-Space-Whatevers/Affects pair. The second will be
developed in the Determined Milieux/Modes of Behaviour pair.
But, between the two, we come across a strange pair:
Originary Worlds/Elementary Impulses." (Cinema_l 123).

 

68
subjects. Here the characters are like...human animals. And
this indeed is the impulse: the energy which seizes
fragments in the originary world" (Cinema 1 123-4).

Perhaps the most powerful originary world scene which
Scorsese has created is the scene between Danielle Bowden
(Juliette Lewis) and Max Cady (Robert De Niro) in Cane hean,
when Cady lures Danielle to the deserted high school
auditorium by posing as her new drama coach. The setting
meets Deleuze's criteria for the physical presentation of an
originary world. It is at a distance from Danielle's normal
sphere; she walks through pipe-lined corridors to reach the
auditorium. Once there, to approach the stage, she must
descend. The stage itself contains sets that emphasize the
apartness of the milieu: a fairy-tale hut, surrounded by
cut-out trees and large candy canes.

The scene is one of innocence violated. Danielle's
innocence is suggested as she leaves her friend in the
school's hallway, saying "I have to go downstairs for
drama." In her eagerness, she skips as she leaves the
friend and enters the door to the pipe-filled hallway. Her
trip through the hall is depicted in three shots: a long
shot from the opposite end as she enters the hallway,
showing its length and cave-like quality; a close-up of
Danielle's face as sinister music comes up, showing her
apprehension, and a shot from Danielle's POV as she walks

slowly through the hall, the sinister music rising. Once

Danielle reaches the stage, her hesitant answers to Cady's

 

Che

69
questions, and her fluttering hands as she nervously plays
with her hair or strokes her own cheek intensify this sense
of her innocence.

Cady, by contrast, represents malevolence and
temptation. Danielle approaches him as he sits in the
doorway of the hut, either backlit or lit from the side, so
that his face isn't clearly visible. He's smoking
marijuana, and offers Danielle a hit. She smiles as she
says "You can't smoke grass in school," but she takes the
reefer from him and takes a puff. While Cady functions here
as a tempter, it is also evident that Danielle's innocence
is interlaced with a certain amount of experience, both with
marijuana and, vicariously, with sexuality. When Cady asks
if she's read any Henry Miller, she says that she sneaked
T;eeie,efi Canee; off her parents' bookshelf and read parts
of it. When Cady mentions a passage where Miller "describes
an erection as a piece of lead with wings on it," Danielle
replies "I didn't read that part."

The most viscerally powerful part of the scene, the one
most consistent with its identification as an interaction
within an originary world, comes at the scene's climax.
Having gained Danielle's confidence, even though she knows
that Cady is the man who has been hanging around their home
because he dislikes Danielle's father, Cady asks "Do you
mind if I put my arm around you?" After hesitating,

Danielle agrees. Instead, Cady begins to stroke Danielle's

cheek, as she smiles uncertainly through her braces. Cady's

 

 

70

caresses Danielle's lip with his thumb, then pushes the
‘thumb gently between her lips. Startled, Danielle reaches
for Cady's hand, at the same time beginning to suck the
thumb. Cady withdraws his thumb, then reinserts it;
lJanielle sucks it once more. Cady withdraws the thumb, then
aabruptly turns and walks away in a medium-long shot taken
‘with a wide-angle lens, accentuating the abruptness of his
departure. The set decoration towards which he walks is a
gnarled tree, with a medusa-like entanglement of roots.
This is the first long shot in minutes, the entire
conversation between Danielle and Cady having been presented
in shot/reverse shot medium close-ups and close-ups. It is
followed by a close-up of Danielle, her hand still at her
face, her bewilderment evident. In the next shot, a long
shot, she turns and runs up the stairs toward the
auditorium's exit, and begins to cry. The following shot is
of an angry Sam Bowden, Danielle's father, on the telephone
with the private detective who was supposed to have been
following Cady.

The scene on the stage can and has been read in a
variety of ways,26 but the concern here is with its
presentation in an originary world. These are not actions

being depicted, or emotions being explored, so much as they

 

“ Pam Cook asserts that "...Danielle is far from
innocent. She is the one who forms an alliance with Cady
and, in a sense, 'employs' him to violate her mother and
destroy her father" (15). J. Hoberman emphasizes the exotic
setting by calling this a "fairy-tale sequence in the make-
believe gingerbread house..." (11).

 

71
are a revelation or a bringing to consciousness of the
impulses of both Cady and Danielle, Cady's impulse toward
seduction and defilement tempered only by his realization
that he ultimately wants revenge on Sam Bowden, not on his
daughter, and Danielle's impulses toward rebellious drug
usage and sexual excitement ultimately tempered by her
realization that she's been a victim, not a participant.
The impulses brought to consciousness in the originary world
of the auditorium do lead to actions of consequence in the
determined milieu, however. When Danielle finds a copy of
Henry Miller's Senna under a potato-chip can on the front
porch of the Bowden family home a few days later, it is a
clear sign that Cady has penetrated their defenses. She
hides the book under her shirt and tells no one, an act of
collusion in Cady's eventual penetration of the home itself
and his murder of the maid and the private detective. On
Cady's side, his physical violation of Danielle presages the
murders of the maid and the private detective, and more
directly, his rape of Danielle's mother on their houseboat.
While Danielle's impulses are juvenile and unformed, Cady's
impulses toward revenge and violation fit Deleuze's
observation that "The impulse is an act which tears away,
ruptures, dislocates...The law or destiny of the impulse is
to take possession through guile, but violently, of

everything that it can in a given milieu...The impulse must

be exhaustive" (Cinema 1 128-9).

t:

99

*1.

SD

72

The necessity of exhaustion, of playing out the impulse
until the extremities of the consequent behavior have been
reached, is also characteristic of the impulses showcased in
the originary world in Mean §;;ee;a. They ultimately lead
to the death of the most impulsive of the characters, Johnny
Boy, whose unbridled disposition toward impulsive behavior
is typified in his entirely unmotivated decision to climb to
a rooftop and shoot at the Empire State Building. Johnny
Boy's thoughtlessness in borrowing money from Michael, then
insulting Michael instead of repaying him, are events which
occur in the locale of Tony's bar but which lead to Johnny
Boy's death at the hands of a hired shooter in the
determined milieu of the street. Concurrently, Michael's
impulse toward revenge for Johnny Boy's lack of respect in
the bar is dampened by the fact that Johnny Boy is armed,
but is carried toward the point of exhaustion as Michael
contracts with the gunman and drives the shooter's car.

»Other behaviors enacted in Tony's bar are just as
impulsive and pre-rational. While Johnny Boy's and
Michael's impulses serve as precursors of deeds enacted in
the determined milieu of the neighborhood, Charlie's
impulses surface in the originary world, then wither there.
One such impulse is Charlie's sexual energy with Diane, the
black dancer. Charlie's attraction is presented early in

Mean 5;;ee;a through his approach and faux strip-tease as he

removes his coat and takes the stage to dance with Diane.

\

Though they never touch, Charlie's moves mimic hers in a

 

(t1

ir.

Ev

73

performance that is sexually charged, at least for him.
Later, he acts on this impulse by going to Diane's dressing
room to tell her of his plans to take over a restaurant, and
his desire to have her serve as hostess. He makes a date
with her to discuss the possibilities, but as he sits in a
cab and sees Diane waiting for him, he tells the driver to
drive on, saying, "I can't be seen with her. She's black."

Deleuze's observation that the characters in an
originary world "are like animals...because their acts are
prior to all differentiation between the human and the
animal" (Cinema 1 123-4) is particularly illuminative in the
case of Mean 3;;ee;a, where Scorsese obliquely suggests the
same continuum between animal impulse and rationality by
including a scene in the back room at Tony's bar, where Tony
shows off two cats, a lion cub and a leopard cub. He tells
Charlie and Johnny Boy, "I really wanted to get a tiger,
y'know...like in William Blake and all that." Commenting on
this scene's allusion to Blake's tyger, Jim Hosney et. al.
conclude that "the viewer realizes that Johnny Boy is
Scorsese's symbol of fierce strength, both terrifying in his
possibilities, yet impressive and admirable" ("Passion"
415). They also notice the impulsive unpredictability of
Johnny Boy's behavior: "Like the unanswered questions of
Blake's "The Tyger,"...Johnny Boy's behavior remains
unexplained. Why does he blow up a mailbox in his

introductory sequence? Why does he borrow money from

everyone? Why does he fire a gun from the rooftop? Why

 

74
does he purposely spend the money Charlie has given him for
Michael's payment? These unanswered questions yield an
explosive enigma--Johnny Boy" ("Passion" 416). Hosney et.
a1. don't have any satisfactory answers for these questions,
and Scorsese doesn't either. Nor does Johnny Boy. By
beginning so much of Johnny Boy's behavior in the milieu of
the originary world, where impulsive, pre-rational behavior
is expected, Scorsese visually suggests that Johnny Boy
could no more explain his behavior than Tony's lion cubs
could explain theirs. As Robert Kolker says, "De Niro's
Johnny Boy is all nervous energy and self-delight...The
character makes himself from moment to moment, almost speaks
himself into being" (Kolker Lenelineaa 220).

Though Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese both explore the
tensions, confrontations, and dangers that are present in
public space, and though both explore the way that
communities, both temporary and stable, coalesce in public
spaces around acts of display (either the violence of he ;he
high; Thing or the ritual and celebration of Mean 3;;ee;a),
another point of difference between the two is Lee's
exploration of these concepts at the level of the action-
image, while Scorsese employs both the action-image and the
impulse-image, using the latter and its generation within an
originary world to interrogate the impulses which lie
beneath the actions depicted. Scorsese himself asserts that

his films are cumulative, examining characters' interior

lives (motivations, codes of honor, ways of constructing

 

 

anti:

\

75

reality) within specific locations and through specific
actions: "I usually am attracted to characters that have
similar attributes to characters in my other films....I'm
fascinated by history and anthropology. I'm fascinated by
the idea of people in history, and history having been shown
to us in such a way that people always come off as fake--not
fake but one-dimensional. And I'm interested in exploring
what they felt and making them three-dimensional. To show
that they're very similar to us. I mean, they're human
beings. So just because the society around them and the
world around them is very different, it doesn't mean that
they didn't have the same feelings and the same desires, the
same goals and the same things that haunt us..." (DeCurtis
443).27

Though Lee and Scorsese may differ in their choice of
rubric through which to present their characters' coming or
failing to come to self-awareness, Mean $;nee;a and he ;he
high; Thing both employ the action-image in the determined
milieu of public space as one visual means for this inquiry.
Wayne Wang's Chan ia Miaaing, by contrast, appears at the
beginning of the film to employ the action-image trajectory,

but it is incomplete. The film opens with a situation which

 

” Scorsese claims an autobiographical component for
Mean_a;;ee;a, as well as a broader inquiry into human nature
and motivation: "Mean_S;;ee;a was an attempt to put myself
and my old friends on the screen, to show how we lived, what
life was like in Little Italy. It was really an
anthropological or a sociological tract" (EQQI§§S§_QE

Sooreeee.48).

 

'r1

In

"'

9-O-

*r1

("3

f)

76
produces action, but the action produces no change in the
situation. Public space, the determined milieu of San
Francisco's Chinatown, is prominent as the milieu within
which the events of the film take place, but this determined
milieu is the site of events which can only be labelled
actions in the broadest sense, since in the specific sense
of actions which produce results, or a changed situation,
they do not qualify. Chan is a mystery story, as might be
expected both from the title directly, and from the title's
oblique reference to the "Charlie Chan" mystery films of the
19308 and 1940s. Unlike the Charlie Chan films, though,
which created a veneer of inscrutability around their
oriental-other title character but always ended with a clear
resolution of the mystery, Chan ia Miaaing provides a
thorough explication of the mystery (situation), and a
thorough examination of it (action), but no resolution.
When the film ends, the mystery is intact.

.As with Wang's later work in The hey Leek Clnh, Chinese
American identity is at the heart of Chan ia Miaaing. The
film's narrative premise has the main character, a San
Francisco Chinese American cabby named Jo, searching for
Chan Hung, a friend of Jo's who has disappeared. Jo's
assistant, mimicking the "number-one son" figure in the
Charlie Chan films, is his Americanized nephew Steve. These
allusions to the Charlie Chan films serve as a constant

reminder that Wang is reclaiming the imagery of the Chinese

American from a film series which helped create the image of

 

77

the exotic Asian. Wang's reclamation is in tacit harmony
with Edward Said's assertion that representations such as
the Chan films, or for that matter Chan ia Miaaing, while
culturally formative of the image of a particular community,
are nevertheless only representations, not "truth."28

Wang's reclamation of Chinese American representation
foregrounds its complexity. Jo's search for Chan is the
pretext for extensive conversations with a variety of
Chinatown inhabitants, as well as recurring conversations
with his nephew Steve. As each interlocutor offers his or
her own perspective on the possible reasons for Chan's
disappearance, each also reveals differing perspectives on
Chan's Chinese Americanness, as well as their own. This
polyphonic aggregation of perceptions serves a variety of
structural purposes in Chan ia Miaaing: through contrast, it
calls into question the straightforward narrative

construction of the original "Charlie Chan" films, it de-

 

” Though Said's assertions make reference to written
language, they apply equally well to filmic representations.
According to Said, "it needs to be made clear about cultural
discourse and exchange within a culture that what is
commonly circulated by it is not 'truth' but
representations. It hardly
needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a
highly organized and encoded system, which employs many
devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and
information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at
least written language, there is no such thing as a
delivered presence, but a ;e;n;eaenee, or a representation.
The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a
statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and
cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. On the
contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader
by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made
supererogatory any such ;eal_;hing as 'the Orient'" (21).

 

78
centers the narrative voice of the film, making it episodic
and multi-vocalic, and it constructs a complex and
ultimately irreconcilable portrait of Chan Hung, by
implication calling into question the very idea that
"Chinese American" is a meaningful category, or that
representations of "Chinese Americans" can ever be accurate
or complete.

The initial sequence in Chan ia Miaaing, through the
use of a handheld camera and POV shooting, places us as
viewers in the position of a passenger who enters Jo's cab.
As Jo drives, we hear his thoughts in voiceover: "1000,
2000, 3000--." The passenger says, "Hey, uh, where's a good
place to eat in Chinatown?" Again, we hear Jo's thoughts in
voiceover: "Under three seconds. That question comes up
under three seconds 90% of the time. I usually give them my
routine on the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese
food, and get a good tip." The exchange suggests that Jo
feels both resentful of and resigned to the passenger's
flattening of Jo's identity into a stereotyped image that
only identifies Chinese Americans with Chinese restaurants.
Yet recognizing the futility of confronting the passenger
with the absurdity of his perception, Jo simply turns it to
his own advantage by employing a routine that results in a
good tip. In doing so, Jo mirrors the double-consciousness
which W.E.B. DuBois articulated as being part of the
constant experience of the African American: "The Negro

is...gifted with second-sight in this American world,-- a

79
world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only
lets him see himself through the revelation of the other
world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-
consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the
tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
One ever feels his two-ness..." (8). DuBois's succinct
explanation connects with Jo's sense of what it means to be
cast as Other, or marginalized by a dominant group in
society.

Ironically, though Jo both resents his Othering by the
passenger and simultaneously turns it to his advantage, he
is himself subject to the temptation to essentialism in his
own notion of what it means to be Chinese American. Jo's
very act of trying to find Chan Hung, and in the process
trying to determine Chan Hung's "real" identity, becomes a
metaphor for the attempt to absolutize the definition of
"Chinese American". In a later conversation with Steve, Jo
says: "It's hard enough for guys like me who've been here so
long to find an identity. I can imagine Chan Hung's
problem, somebody from China coming over here and trying to
find himself." Despite Jo's resentment of being stereotyped
by the cab passenger, Jo himself implicitly believes that
"Chinese American identity" exists in some essential form,
to be found by people like himself and Chan Hung. Steve

provides a historical perspective on Jo's essentializing by

80

replying: "That's a bunch of bullshit, man. That identity
shit. That's old news. Man, that happened ten years ago!"

The process of tracking down Chan Hung, and
concurrently exploring his identity, serves both to
undermine Jo's sense of himself as a Chinese American and to
problematize Jo's insistence that "Chinese American" is a
meaningful category. Untidy, unruly information of this
sort, information which resists being tamed by or
incorporated into a particular system, fits the description
of what Gilles Deleuze calls "lines of flight."” Jo
constructs Chinese Americanness as an orderly web of
information, and sets himself the task of learning its

pattern. Many of the perspectives he hears, however, are

 

” As Todd G. May explains, the concept of "lines of
flight" is an element of Deleuze's analysis of the way
systems function: "The idea of lines of flight is
inseparable from that of molecularity, a notion Deleuze
opposes to the molar...Most political analysis is concerned
with molar organizations: the great unities of state,
economy, and military. For Deleuze, these molar unities are
the intersection of smaller, molecular lines, upon which
they often react back, suppressing or destroying those lines
that could prove threatening to them. In hialegnea Deleuze
divides these lines into three types: segmentary, which
occur on the register of already constituted identities and
thus involve molar terms like state, family, profession, and
the like; supple, which constitute segments in a segmentary
line but which alone are without a constituted identity; and
lines of flight, which are nomadic, irreducible, creative,
and always the object of molar unities which try to harness
their productivity for their own anti-productive
ends...Lines of flight, then, are not escapes from the
social field in which they arise, but rather escapes within
it." (5).

 

81
lines of flight, contradictory and irreconcilable, resisting
his essentializing impulse rather than confirming it.

At the end of the film, Jo reflects on all the
different "identities" which Chan Hung has in the minds of
the people he has interviewed:

I've already given up on finding out what happened to

Chan Hung. What bothers me is that I no longer know

who Chan Hung really is. Mr. Lee says Chan Hung and

immigrants like him need to be taught everything as if
they were children. Mr. Fong thinks anyone who can

invent a word-processing system in Chinese must be a

genius. Steve thinks that Chan Hung is slow-witted, or

sly when it comes to money; Jenny thinks that her
father is honest and trustworthy. Mrs. Chan thinks her
husband is a failure because he isn't rich. Amy thinks
he's a hot-headed political activist. The old man
thinks Chan Hung is just a paranoid person. Henry
thinks Chan Hung is patriotic, and has gone back to the
mainland to serve the people. Frankie thinks Chan Hung
worries a lot about money and his inheritance. He
thinks Chan Hung's back in Taiwan fighting with his
brother over the partition of some property. George
thinks Chan Hung's too Chinese, and unwilling to
change. Presco thinks he's an eccentric who likes‘
mariachi music. The problem with me is that I believe

what I see and hear. If I did that with Chan Hung I'll

know nothing because everything is so contradictory.

 

82

Here's a picture of Chan Hung, and I still can't see

him.

These different identities are analogues for the different
identities of "Chinese Americans," which is to say that
there is no essential "Chinese American" identity at all. To
the extent that any meaningful information attaches to the
term, it is a function of what Werner Sollors calls "the
invention of ethnicity," in his book of that name.

According to Sollors, "the interpretation of previously
'essentialist' categories (childhood, generations, romantic
love, mental health, gender, region, history, biography, and
so on) as 'inventions' has resulted in the recognition of
the general cultural constructedness of the modern world"
(x). There may be a construction called "Chinese American,"
but it is a complex, shifting entity, sounding very
different coming from the mouth of one speaker than another,
paralleling the mystery of the identity of Chan Hung.

In Chan ia Miaaing Wang represents this mystery
verbally and structurally; the visual construction of the
film reinforces the dispersed quality of the narrative and
the multiplicity of meanings for the term "Chinese
American."

The initial image in Chan ia Miaaing deserves notice,
particularly since it recurs at various points in the film.
The image is confusing, and not immediately identifiable.

It is a tight shot from the outside of the windshield of

Jo's cab. The left half of the screen is effectively blank,

 

83
blocking a view of the interior, creating a sense of
inscrutability. The left half of the screen shows the
windshield's reflection of the blankness of the sky; the
right half shows the windshield's reflection of the
buildings Jo passes as he drives down the street. These
darker reflections allow us to see Jo through the
windshield, partially and intermittently. The effect is one
of multiple signifiers, all of them obscure, or cloudy. The
film's main character is driving, but he cannot be clearly
seen. Because of the movement of the cab, he is completely
obliterated at some points, partially obscured at others.
The method of obscuring him is a reflection, and at the same
time an overlay of one image upon another, dispersing our
attention by providing simultaneous images. Finally, as
this effect is created through the movement of the cab, the
nomadic, shifting quality of the shot is a visual analogue
to the nomadic, shifting quality of Chan's identity, and by
extension the very concept of the construction "Chinese
American".

As a shot which does not provide much rational
information, if any, or advance the narrative, the cab
windshield shot is an example of an affection-image, an
image where affect is primary. More precisely, it is an
any-space-whatever, where "space is no longer a particular,
determined space", but "a space of virtual conjunction,
grasped as pure locus of the possible" (Cinema 1 109). Any-

space-whatevers appear either as frames within which the

fh

*J.

C)

an

O)

84
visual information does not link up, or frames which are in
some sense empty. Thus shadows, or light, or pure color,
when they fill or partially fill the frame, create any-
space-whatevers. Within these spaces, pure affect
functions. Intellectual constructs such as "Chinese American
identity" do not function there, but instead are broken down
and dispersed effectively. Sensibility takes precedence
over rationality. This foregrounding of sensibility in Chan
ia Miaaing is underlined, as in Wang's The hey Leek Cleh, by
a preponderance of close-ups of faces, creating a milieu of
affection-images within the determined milieu of San
Francisco's Chinatown.

The opening cab-windshield shot also introduces a
primary motif in Chan ia Miaaing, the motif of nomadic
movement. In his quest to find Chan, and to solve the
mystery of Chan's identity, Jo drives his cab to the
Manilatown Senior Center, to Chan's ex-wife's home, to the
flophouse hotel where Chan has been staying, to the English
language school of his friend George, to Henry's Golden
Dragon Restaurant, and to other locations. He walks the
streets alone, and with Steve, searching for clues. This
motif of constant movement functions on at least two levels:
narratively as Jo's (unsuccessful) method for solving the

mystery”, and metaphorically as a comment on the nature of

 

” John Cawelti suggests that nomadic movement such as
Jo's is characteristic of the hard-boiled detective: "The
ratiocinative English detectives of authors like Dorothy
Sayers, Agatha Christie, or Ngaio Marsh investigate crimes

 

. btdtCAdnup

85
Jo's quest to find Chan, and ultimately some sense of
Chinese American identity. As much as Jo might desire
clear-cut results, it is not a straightforward search. In
fact, there are numerous false starts, dead ends, and clues
which come up empty. There is nothing particularly
systematic about Jo's search; he simply goes next to any
place which presents itself as a possible site of fruitful
inquiry. This wandering, while not exactly aimless, does
give the film the quality of a road movie which never leaves
town.

If plotted on a map of Chinatown, Jo's criss-crossing
of the territory would form a web with no particular
pattern, yet one where each point is related to the other by
the nature of his search. As such, it takes on a rhizomatic
quality“, in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari use the
term to describe an organic whole which does not organize
itself hierarchically, or genealogically, or arboreally, but
in a manner without beginning or end, without primacy, yet
with a systemic connectedness that has integrity without

consistency, and logic without linearity: "A rhizome has no

 

by examining clues, questioning witnesses, and then using
their intellectual powers of insight and deduction to arrive
at the solution. The hard-boiled detective investigates
through movement and encounter; he collides with the web of
conspiracy until he has exposed its outlines" (229).

Another mark of the hard-boiled

detective story in Chan is Wang's use of voice-over
narration, in which Jo explains and comments upon the
progress of his investigation.

“ See also Chapter 3, where I discuss the rhizomatic
quality of Scorsese's camerawork in Ceeehellaa.

 

5/.

.1

FE

86
beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between
things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but
the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree
imposes the verb 'to be,‘ but the fabric of the rhizome is
the conjunction 'and...and...and.' This conjunction carries
enough force to shake and uproot the verb 'to be.‘ Where
are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you
heading for? These are totally useless questions" (Theeaane
25). In Jo's rhizomatic search for Chan, he adds
information without ruling out; he encounters people whose
perceptions contradict each other's without cancelling each
other; he discovers lines of flight which make resolution of
the mystery impossible, yet which are incorporated into his
understanding in ways that satisfy him. Jo's attitude is
one that his nephew Steve cannot understand, since it seems
contradictory. Steve would like to turn the mystery over to
the police, yet Jo won't allow that because "it's none of
their business," signifying that whatever the nature of the
mystery is, it is one which occurs within the rhizome which
is Jo's understanding of his community and his circle of
friends, and which is not amenable to the investigatory
techniques or attitude of those who are outside this
community, this rhizome. Jo realizes that their
investigation may seem to be at a dead-end, yet unlike
Steve, he understands the operation of the rhizome, which,
in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, "may be broken,

shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one

87

of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of
ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound
time and again after most of it has been destroyed. Every
rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it
is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified,
attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization
down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the
rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of
flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome.
These lines always tie back to one another" (Theeaand 9).

The public space of Chinatown which Jo traverses in his
rhizomatic search for Chan is itself a rhizome, a community
which is "stratified, territorialized, organized, signified,
attributed, etc." geographically and ethnically, but, like
(the identity and idea of) Chan himself, is ruptured by
"segmentary lines [which] explode into a line of flight,"
understood and interpreted differently by different
observers, and thus is ultimately uninterpretable. This
public space is claimed by at least two different groups for
political purposes, as we learn through Jo's explanation of
the "flag-waving incident" in connection with his suspicion
that Chan had something to do with this occurrence. The
flag-waving incident consisted of a public clash between a
group of demonstrators sympathetic with Communist China
(PRC) and a group sympathetic with Taiwan (ROC). Though we
briefly see a blurry newspaper photograph of this incident,

our only other knowledge of it is through the filter of Jo's

 

88
conversation with various people. Political themes sprinkle
Jo's conversation with various interlocutors (Steve, Amy,
Henry, George), but these uses of public space are only
discussed, not depicted. In this respect, Wang's focus is
different from Spike Lee's, where confrontations in the
public spaces of Seheel haze, he ;he high; Thing, and
Maleelm k directly involve the film's major characters, and
is also different from Martin Scorsese's, where even though
the major characters of Mean 5;;ee;a are not directly
involved in the ritual use of public space in the Feast of
San Gennaro, they encounter it directly as part of their
milieu. Public space in Chan ia Miaaing, and to an extent
in Wang's Slamdanee, is not filled with confrontation or
ritual or political display. Nor is it a place of
ownership, danger, or contestation. Rather, in the spirit
of the rhizome”, it is a matrix of inquiry and encounter
which Chan traverses unimpeded by political or religious
alliances, or by threat of harm. Its openness signifies a
site of possibility, rather than the closed-off quality
suggested by the binomial of confrontation or the truth-

claims of politics or ritual. This rhizomatic understanding

 

” "Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose
arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There
is not unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to
divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort
in the object or 'return' in the subject. A multiplicity
has neither subject nor object, only determinations,
magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number
without the multiplicity changing in nature..." (Theeaane
8).

 

89
of community, in both its geographic and psychic
manifestations, contests the more traditional notion of
ethnic identity and community which Jo foregrounds as he
searches for Chan. Jo's search for Chan becomes Jo's
encounter with a paradigm which competes with his notion of
community, ethnicity and identity; ultimately, he enters
into the spirit of the rhizome himself when he acknowledges
that "The problem with me is that I believe what I see and
hear. If I did that with Chan Hung I'll know nothing
because everything is so contradictory. Here's a picture of
Chan Hung, and I still can't see him."

Wang's camera reinforces the rhizomatic quality of the
Chinatown location and the narrative of Jo's quest for
Chan's whereabouts and identity. Whereas Spike Lee's use of
affection-image close-ups privileges the use of shot/reverse
shot juxtapositions in he ;he high; Thing, emphasizing the
confrontational nature of the characters depicted in these
sequences, Wang's use of affection-images in Chan privileges
the single character more than the relationship. Affection-
image close-ups in Chan are held for greater duration,
creating more of a sense of identification with the
character and his affections or thought processes rather
than placing the character in relationship with a single
other, thus opening a multitude of relational possibilities
rather than specifying a single one. Further, like Martin
Scorsese in Ceeehellaa, Wang makes extensive use of the

reume, the form of perception-image which Deleuze calls

-C

mc

in

ti

tC

SE

IE

 

9O
"liquid perception." There is a key difference, though,
between Scorsese's framing of the reume and Wang's, even
though both foreground rhizomatic qualities. In Scorsese's
Ceedhellaa, the reume consists of shots of specific and
significant characters, the members of Henry Hill's "crime
family." The reume is created with a moving camera, so that
the images within the frame flow through it because of the
movement of the camera. As will be explained more fully in
chapter 3, Scorsese's moving camera serves to place the
characters contextually within a matrix of characters which
is continually in flux, and while functioning as a "family,"
also poses potential harm for the characters involved. The
moving camera's composing, decomposing and recomposing of
images accentuates the constructedness and the mutability of
the "family," undercutting Henry Hill's sense of belonging
to something solid and secure. The images also suggest the
rhizomatic "lines of flight" which Deleuze and Guattari
characterize as a component in the growth of organisms
(Deleuze and Guattari "Rhizome" 16-18), in that the tendency
toward hierarchy and ossification is constantly disrupted by
seemingly spontaneous lines of flight which rupture and
reformulate the system, while still being a part of the
system. In Scorsese's presentation, the tracking shot which
is the reume is an image of insubstantiality, but this
insubstantiality is dangerous, because it is an image of
known characters which suggests their unknowability, or

their potential for treachery. Like the confrontational

C.

r1:

n)

In

I"?

 

 

91
binaries of Lee's shot/reverse shot affection-images,
Scorsese's reume is a vehicle of danger because of its
contextual placement within a known and circumscribed
community which is nevertheless in transition or flux in
ways impossible to chart.

In contrast with Scorsese's use of reume-images, Wang's
reume-images are signifiers of complexity, ambiguity, and
anonymity. Physically, the composition of the reume in each
instance reinforces the signification. Whereas Scorsese's
reume is created dynamically, through the use of the moving
camera, and signifies danger, Wang's reumes are composed '
with a stationary camera creating a frame-field through
which movement occurs.

Chan ia Miaaing is replete with examples. Early in the
film, within the first four minutes, Jo (in voiceover) talks
about beginning his search for Chan at a restaurant named
Chester's. As he talks we see a long shot of the restaurant.
The camera placement is across the street from the
restaurant, an eye-level shot. A single man stands in the
street, in front of the restaurant. A streetcar enters the
frame on the right, moving diagonally from lower right to
upper left of the frame, filling the frame for just a
moment. As the streetcar passes out of the frame, we see
that the man has disappeared. Our POV, dictated by the
placement of the camera, keeps us at a safe distance from
this mystery, and Jo is at an affectively safe distance from

it as well, in that he fails to notice or comment on the

sui-
shc
Sta
Jo'

whe

shc

SO;

92
disappearance. This movement through the reume from one
composition (with man) to another (without) in a single shot
serves notice not of danger, but of mystery and
insubstantiality. Events occur without notice, without
comment, without motivation, without explanation.

Wang links this visual exposition of the rhizomatic
quality of the community under consideration with a verbal
one as well. The following shot is a close-up at eye-level
of the head and shoulders of a young woman, dressed in a
suit and tie. The any-space-whatever which surrounds her
shows fragments of a picture hanging on a wall and a serving
station, elements of the interior of Chester's Restaurant.
Jo's voiceover continues, in introduction: "This morning
when Steve and I were having breakfast at Chester's, a woman
showed up looking for Chan Hung. It was about a car
accident he was in." The soundtrack then switches to synch-
sound as the woman expounds to Jo and Steve:

You see I'm doing a paper on the legal implications of

cross-cultural misunderstanding. Mr. Chan's case is a

perfect example of what I'm trying to expose here. The

policeman and Mr. Chan had completely different
culturally related assumptions about what kind of
communication about communication each one was using.

For instance, the policeman, in an English-speaking

mode, asks a direct factual question; there are just to

be facts, and that's all: 'did you stop at the stop

sign?' He expected a 'yes or no' answer. Mr. Chan,

 

93
however, rather than giving him a yes or a no answer
began to go into his past driving record--how good it
was, the number of years he had been in the States, all
the people that he knew--trying to relate different
events, or objects or situations to what was happening
then, to the action at hand. Now this is very typical,
as I'm sure you know, of most Chinese speakers--trying
to relate possibly unrelated objects or seemingly
unrelated objects to the matter at hand. The Chinese
try to relate points, or events or objects that they
feel are pertinent to the situation, which may not to
anyone else seem directly relevant at the time. At any
rate, at this the policeman became rather impatient,
restated the question, 'Did you or did you not stop at
the stop sign?' in a rather hostile tone, which in turn
flustered Mr. Chan, which caused him to hesitate
answering the question, which further enraged the
policeman, so that he asked the question again: 'You
didn't stop at the stop sign, did you?‘ in a negative
tone, to which Mr. Chan automatically answered 'No.'
Now, to any native speaker of English 'No' would mean
'No I didn't stop at the stop sign.' However to Mr.
Chan 'No I didn't stop at the stop sign' was not 'No I
didn't stop at the stop sign.' It was No, I didn't not
stop at the stop sign.' In other words, 'Yes I did
stop at the stop sign.' Do you see what I'm saying?

He was correct in the Chinese because the answer has to

com

dif

EXP
wit

flj

the
pr:
in:

W01

 

 

94

match the truth of the action. However, native

American speakers tend to work more from a grammatical

mode. To put it in layman's language, English language

emphasizes the relationship between grammatical
structures, and the Chinese language tends to emphasize
the relationship between the listener, the speaker, and
the action involved. Well, at any rate, Mr. Chan has
to appear in court so we can get this all straightened
out, so he can explain everything. He missed his court
date...
In the young woman's explanation, the system of
communication through language is complicated by the
differing cultural assumptions and communication styles of
Mr. Chan and the policeman. This complication, as
explained, could be considered rhizomatic, in that it deals
with a system (language) which contains within it lines of
flight which alter the system and its functioning without
rupturing it. Yet Wang doubles the rhizomatic quality of
the scene. Cut-in affection-image close-ups of Jo and Steve
provide an ironic counterpoint because they appear to
indicate that Jo and Steve either do not understand the
woman, or do not respect her analysis.

As the woman talks, we experience the quality of
faceicity, where "micromovements of expression" within the
affection-image demonstrate intensity and desire (on a
continuum of love-hate), rather than wonder (Cinema 1.90).

The animation of this affection-image is matched, even

 

95
exceeded, by the animation of the affection-images of Steve
and Jo which are cut in to this sequence as the woman talks.
They also exhibit faceicity rather than faceification--
changing expressions rather than immutable ones. In one
instance, Steve's facial expression is augmented by a sigh,
and the movement of his running his hand over the back of
his head. In each of these cut-in reaction shots, the
expression on Steve's or Jo's face undercuts the sense that
the woman is making rational sense in her exposition toward
them. Ironically, even as she discourses on the nature of
communication, she fails to communicate to Steve and Jo.
The verbal signifiers clash with the visual signifiers,
leaving as indeterminate and unresolved the question of
whether the woman's explanation of Chan's behavior is
sufficient. In a sense, the two levels of communication
form a matrix over one another, with the rhizomatic escape
of lines of flight occurring at each level.

The reume created by the passage of the streetcar
through the frame in front of Chester's Restaurant is brief,
but it prefigures Wang's use of this type of fluid motion,
flowing into and out of the frame, throughout Chan ia
Miaaing. .A typical instance occurs when Steve and Jo visit
the Manilatown Senior Center, a place Chan Hung frequented.
As they interview the attendant, Frankie, the elderly
habitués of Manilatown are surveyed with a moving camera.
Later they dance, or walk, through the frame. They are

never known to us by name, but are briefly part of our

 

 

96
experience through the reumes which constitute these shots.
This reume-pattern comes to a head at the end of the film,
where Wang uses a series of reumes to visually reinforce
what Jo says about the lack of resolution to the mystery of
Chan's identity, and more broadly, about the indeterminacy
and insubstantiality of all such issues as agency and
identity. The shot which introduces this sequence is a
"pure" reume--a shot with no visual information other than
flowing water.33 Jo's voice-over of this shot stresses the
indeterminacy which the reume suggests: "This mystery is
appropriately Chinese. What's not there seems to have just
as much meaning as what is there. The murder article is not
there. The photograph is not there. The other woman is not
there. Chan Hung is not there. Nothing is what it seems to
be. I guess I'm not Chinese enough. I can't accept a

mystery without a solution." Even at the end of the film,

 

” "Finally, what the French school found in water was
the promise or implication of another state of perception: a
more than human perception, a perception not tailored to
solids, which no longer had the solid as object, as
condition, as milieu. A more delicate and vaster perception,
a molecular perception,
peculiar to a 'cine-eye'. This was the result of starting
from a real definition of the two poles of perception: the
perception-image was not to be reflected in a formal
consciousness, but was to be split into two states, one
molecular and the other molar, one liquid and the other
solid, one drawing along and effacing the other. The sign of
perception would not
therefore be a 'dicisign', but a reume. While the dicisign
set up a frame which isolated and solidified the image, the
reume referred to an image in the process of becoming
liquid, which passed through or under the frame. The
camera-consciousness became a reume since it was actualised
in a flowing perception and thus arrived at a material
determination, at a flowing-matter" (Cinema_l 80).

 

 

97
J0 seems to be missing (or not accepting) the point, still
essentializing "Chinese" identity.

Jo's further reflections lead him back to the comment
of Frankie, the attendant at the Manilatown Senior Center:
"If you want to solve the mystery, you got to look in the
puddle. I been down here too long. I see regular things,
everyday things, and for years people do normal things.

Then all of a sudden something happens. This guy [Chan
Hung] disappears without a trace, without a reason.
Nothing." As Jo remembers Frankie's words, the shot is one
of Jo sitting in a cafe, a bottle of beer on the table
before him. Behind him, through the window, pedestrians
pass on the street--a reume-flow which presages the next
sequence of shots, where Wang visually comments on Frankie's
statement about the tenuousness of the difference between
normalcy and abnormality, and about the insubstantiality of
agency and presence: "this guy disappears without a
trace...."

The next sequence is a variation on the earlier
streetcar shot, but this time it is unmistakably a series of
reume images which problematize Jo's insistence on clarity
in determining agency and identity. For this instance the
camera is positioned across the street from a bus stop on a
busy, commercial Chinatown street. Six long shots from a
fixed position at eye level show some people standing at the

bus stop while others walk through the frame in both

 

 

98
directions.34 Traffic flows through the frame in both
directions. Cuts between shots are difficult to detect,
being cut on the momentary obliterations caused by passing
traffic. The anonymous subjects included in the shots
appear and disappear because of their passing through the
frame, but also because new sets of characters appear with
new shots (though others remain from one shot to another).
The montage is not accompanied by Jo's voiceover any longer,
but for the only time in the film, the soundtrack is
comprised only of non-diegetic instrumental music. Most,
though not all, of the anonymous people depicted in the
sequence are apparently Chinese; what is as interesting as
their evident ethnicity, however, is their appearing and
disappearing, both through the flow of the reume and through
the manipulative cutting of the filmmaker. The one seems a
comment on the other: that questions of agency, ethnicity,
and identity are fluid, and sometimes mysterious. Each of
these people is a character in a narrative which is totally
closed to us except for a momentary physical glimpse as they

go about what apparently are their normal routines. Then,

 

“ Wang uses an intriguing variation on this technique
in ameke, where Augie the cigar shop owner (Harvey Keitel)
crosses the street once a day to take a still photograph of
his
cigar shop promptly at 8:00 AM. His collection of hundreds
of these photographs depict identical infrastructure, just
as the planters and storefronts behind the anonymous
characters in the sequence in Chan_ia_Miaaing remain the
same from shot to shot. Yet Augie's still photographs
capture a diversity of vehicles, pedestrians, and weather
conditions, making each photo unique at the same time that
it is a close copy of every other.

 

99
as Frankie says, they "disappear without a trace, without a
reason."

The bus stop sequence is followed by a short sequence
which sums up, both verbally and visibly, the tenuous and
rhizomatic conclusions of Jo's inquiry into questions of
Chan's identity, Chinese American ethnicity, and the
insubstantiality of agency. It consists of three shots: a
reprise of the reume shot of water, a reprise of the film's
signature shot, the cab windshield shot, and a photograph of
three people, only one of them distinct enough to be
identified. The sound track for these three shots consists
of the lengthy quotation cited earlier ("What bothers me is
that I no longer know who Chan Hung really is. Mr. Lee says
Chan Hung and immigrants like him need to be taught
everything as if they were children..."), in which Jo
reflects on the way that the many "identities" of Chan Hung
ultimately suggest that an "essential" Chan Hung is
unknowable and may not even exist. The image of the reume
of water unmistakably reinforces the import of Jo's words,
suggesting the inscrutability of Chan's identity and by
implication the shifting, constructed quality of the notion
of Chinese, or Chinese American identity. The cab
windshield shot ties the reume of inscrutability to the
ambiguity of nomadic movement, the lines of flight of the
rhizome. The third shot, the still shot of the indistinct
photograph, directly illustrates and confirms the

suggestions of the two previous images. In voiceover, Jo

 

 

100

says "Here's a picture of Chan Hung, and I still can't see
‘him." The sequence which follows, and which ends the film,
is a montage of Chinatown scenes, accompanied by an extra-
diegetic rendition of "Grant Avenue" sung by Pat Suzuki.
The sequence begins with static shots of locations;
subsequent shots show people, all anonymous, passing through
the frame, or passing into and out of the frame by virtue of
camera movement. Other shots show reflections in windows.
These images of indeterminacy depict the community at the
same time that they suggest it can never be fully depicted.

Chinatown, Little Italy, and Bed-Stuy are existing
communities defined by geography and ethnicity. As
constructed cinematically in the images created by Wayne
Wang, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, these communities
exhibit some common characteristics--concerns with questions
of ethnicity, awareness of their status on the border
between ethnic identity and assimilation, use of ritual,
display, and public space as means and arenas of self and
group definition. The three directors, however, show
conceptual and stylistic differences in their depictions of
communities and the use of public space, most particularly
in their differing uses of the action-image: Scorsese in
images of ostentatious display, Lee in images of

confrontation, and Wang in images of indeterminacy.

CHAPTER 3

CONSTRUCTIONS OF FAMILY AS COMMUNITY

Images and constructions of "family", as an
abstraction, tend to be idealized. Ideal families are
places where individuals are accepted and loved for who they
are, unconditionally. Ideal families are groups which
provide physical protection and emotional encouragement. As
Zygmunt Bauman notes, "It is the family (not necessarily the
one we know from our own, not always happy, experience, but
one like we imagine 'an ideal family' to be...) which serves
most often as a model for that mutual sympathy and
assistance which we tend to ascribe to, or demand from, or
hope to obtain from, an in-group" (Thinking 42). As Bauman
implies, though, such "ideal families" are a prototype which
seems to have few analogues in late 20th Century western
lived experience.

The societal forces which make the existence of "ideal"
families tenuous are many, including those Bauman identifies
which were discussed in chapter 1: pluralism, individual
isolation, interdependence, technological change, multiple
sites of authority, and contingency, to re-name some. But
these very forces, as Bauman notes, intensify the desire for

community, even as they undermine the possibility of

101

 

 

102
community. If real "ideal" families do not exist, we create
simulated ones to take their place. The signs which we read
as "family" are ascribed to groups of people who may be
unrelated, but nevertheless fulfill the functions we expect
families to fulfill. Or, more accurately, we read our
relationship with them as fulfilling those functions,
whether they actually do or not. In this sense, these
groups which are read by their members as families are what
Bauman calls imaginee communities. Though themselves
tenuous and impermanent, they appear to provide their
members with solace against the tension and confusion and
competing allegiances of postmodern existence. Thus their
members will them into existence, and show allegiance to
them for at least as long as the "family" fulfills the
functions expected of it. Even families which are
biological entities, rather than temporary alliances, share
in the constructed quality of the imagined community, to the
extent that the relationships within the family are imagined
to be something different than they really are.

Filmic images of families, whether nuclear or
constructed, are always representations which can and should
be read as signs, paying attention to the manner of the
representation as well as to the representations selected
for display. In this chapter I will read the images of
families presented in three films: The Ten Leek Cleh,
gneeklyn, and Ceedhellaa. The lens through which I will

read them is the analytic framework provided by Gilles

 

 

103
Deleuze in Cinema T and Cinema Tl, paying special attention
to the lines of analysis which open from the use of
Deleuze's construct of the opsign, and its particular
manifestation as affection-image, located in or connected
with the any-space-whatever, and sometimes in circulation
with the recollection—image. These filmic constructs will
be the means of differentiating the uses of the opsign by
Wang, Lee, and Scorsese, uses which are not only marks of
style but also methods of encoding meaning.

As a Hollywood convention, the close-up forces our
attention to its subject. The decision to use a close-up,
though, belongs to director and editor, with a variety of
factors affecting the way the close-up is read: the
placement of the close-up within the continuity, the manner
in which the close-up is framed, and the visual information
presented within the close-up, to name the most obvious.
While some effects of the use of the close-up may be
universal, and attributable to conventional use and
reception, other effects may provide a means of
comparatively reading directors' influences, styles, and
messages. It also is an appropriate window through which
to examine constructions of the family community, since the
"tight shot," or close-up, is itself visually suggestive of
the bonds, real or imagined, which hold these constructions

together.

 

the

$61

rei

104

IheMLuolsQliIb

According to Zygmunt Bauman, "the community type of
belonging is at its strongest and most secure when we
believe just this: that we have not chosen it on purpose,
have done nothing to make it exist and can do nothing to
undo it" (Ibinhinfi 74). Ironically, this sense of the
inevitability of community connections seems to permeate The
hey Leek Cleh, Wayne Wang's 1993 film adaptation of Amy
Tan's novel. The irony is that the "family" represented is
actually an aggregation of friends and relatives who
function like an extended family, even though only some of
them are biologically related. Nevertheless, the film's
sense of family is very strong and, along with its focus on
relationships of mothers and daughters, led many reviewers
to dismiss the film with comments such as Leslie Felperin
Sharman's: "at heart The Jey Leek Cleh remains an old-
fashioned Hollywood woman's picture, the kind I'd go see
with my mother and a big box of hankies" (45). As a
representation, however, of life along the emotional border
of Chinese ethnicity, American identity, and personal
autonomy, the film is considerably more subtle and complex
than Sharman's comment suggests.

In a literal sense, the "family" depicted in The hey
Leek Cleh is a constructed entity, formed against the
backdrop of the traumatic experiences of four Chinese women
separated from their biological families by events occurring

during and after World War II. The narrative constitutes an

 

105
example of Zygmunt Bauman's assertion that, in the face of
the chaotic, disorderly condition of postmodern existence,
individuals seek some semblance of refuge and order in
community, and form communities to achieve that goal
(Tn;ima;iena 134-35). Both the chaos of the women's past
and the refuge they seek in community are represented in the
shape of the narration, and in its visual realization.

The narration is shaped around a party which, in
filmic "current time," takes place almost entirely during
the course of a single afternoon and evening in a spacious
San Francisco apartment shared by June and her father.
June's recently deceased mother, Suyuan, was one of the four
members of the Joy Luck Club, a group formed initially to
play mah-jongg, but which became their "family" in place of
the families lost in China. The Joy Luck Club was the place
for them to tell and retell the stories of their similarly
difficult experiences, and share both their pride in and
their bewilderment with their daughters. In her mother's
absence June's "aunties," Lindo, Ying Ying, and An Mei, and
their daughters Waverly, Lena, and Rose, host the party in
June's honor, as June is about to journey to China to meet
her recently rediscovered step-sisters. Structurally, the
party serves as the departure point for episodes in
flashback chronicling portions of the histories of the four
members of the Joy Luck Club, and their sometimes strained
relationships with their Chinese American daughters. As a

narrative device, the current-time party provides a

 

106

touchstone, a point of commonality to which to return, tying
together stories that are thematically related but only
haphazardly connected in character or chronology. The
device of the party reinforces the sense of refuge
represented by the "imagined community" of the Joy Luck
Club; the stories in flashback reveal why the sense of
refuge is needed. The stories are of two types: stories of
chaos and family sorrow in China, and stories of tension and
misunderstanding with Americanized daughters. Each member
is the primary character in at least one story of each type.

The visual realization of the film reinforces
the sense that the "current time" Joy Luck Club is a locus
of comfort and security, while the flashback scenes depict
incidents and events which are disquieting, disruptive, or
chaotic. The relationship between the two sets of visual
information, the party and the flashbacks, is a relationship
of memory (current experience vs. recollection) and of
circumstance (comfort vs. peril), as well as a relationship
of time (present vs. past). In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze
offers a method for understanding how these relationships
are represented visually, as well as conceptually.

The first thing to notice is the visual quality of the
party. Many shots foreground the connectedness of the
people in attendance by such devices as slow-panning across
the table where they eat, or including groupings of people

within wide angle shots. In each of these examples the use

 

107
or position of the camera creates the sense that the people
at the party do not simply share space; they exist in
relationship with each other. These relationships, though,
are not relationships of action. In the few instances where
the people at the party actually he anything, the actions
are relatively inconsequential, and serve the purpose of
community-building. The most typical action is
conversation; others are the playing of a game and the
serving of food. In a sense, nothing happens at the party.
And intuitively, we understand that a circumstance where
"nothing happens," where there is little or no action, may
constitute an appropriate circumstance for building and
maintaining relationships.

The images at the party where "nothing happens" most
obviously are the close-ups which occur just before a
flashback. They are close-ups which exhibit the traits
Deleuze calls those of "faceification"--close-ups
emphasizing the outline of the face, or the face taken as a
whole. Close-ups of this type Deleuze associates with the
sense of wonder, or thought or inscrutability, as opposed to
close-ups where the parts of the face are mobile, and convey
more active affect, such as fear or desire. In one such
shot, An Mei separates herself from the crowd, leans against
a doorjamb, puts her hand to her face, and stares absently
at nothing in particular. The camera pans to follow her
movement, then zooms slowly toward her face. This is an

image of thought, of recollection, forming a smooth

 

108
conceptual transition by straight cut to the next image,
which is from An Mei's childhood in China.

Gilles Deleuze offers more precise language for
describing this situation. In Deleuze's terms, film images
where nothing happens are "pure optical and sound
situations," or "opsigns" and "sonsigns" (Cinema 2 6).
These images do not share the sensory-motor link which
characterizes the action-image; rather, by existing apart
from a logic of cause and effect, they open possibilities
for filmic expression in a realm beyond the action-image.
Opsigns and sonsigns "become established in what we might
call 'any-space-whatever,' whether disconnected, or
emptied..." (Cinema 2 5); they "sometimes [consist of]
everyday banality, sometimes exceptional or limit-
circumstances--but, above all, subjective images, memories
of childhood, sound and visual dreams or fantasies, where
the character does not act without seeing himself acting,
complicit viewer of the role he himself is playing..."
(Cinema 2 6) .

Deleuze's assertion here is that some images or
sequences in film do have a sensory-motor connection, where
a perception is followed by a resulting action in cause and
effect manner, while other images are not elements of this
connection. As Deleuze schematizes the relationship between
image and time, "the relation, sensoryzmotor situation ->
indirect image of time is replaced by a non-localizable

relation, pure optical and sound situation -> direct time

 

109
image. Opsigns and sonsigns are direct presentations of
time" (Cinema 1 41). Certain images in film are in fact
Opsigns which, lacking the sensory-motor connection, are
direct points of entry into the representation of time by an
image.

The specific type of opsign which characterizes the
close-ups under consideration in The hey Leek Cleh is one
which Deleuze calls the "recollection image," a name he
borrows from Henri Bergson: "With recollection images, a
whole new sense of subjectivity appears...which is no longer
motor or material, but temporal and spiritual: that which
'is added' to matter, not what distends it; recollection
image, not movement-image" (Cinema 2 47). These opsigns,
the close-ups which connect the current-time thinkers with
the recollections subsequently represented in the sequences
which follow the close-ups, are images of time rather than
action, since they form a circuit not with a subsequent
action, as an action-image would, but with themselves, the
image of the recaller and the image of the recalled.35 The
filmic representations of the recollections of the thinker
portrayed in the opsign are "recollection-images."

Deleuze's consideration of the recollection-image is a
step toward completion of his project in Cinema 2 of

identifying the image "which is sufficient to define the new

 

” Within these circuits, however, fragments of action-
image will sometimes occur, as when the recalled incidents
follow a trajectory of conflict and resolution.

llO
<dimension of subjectivity" (54); that is, the image which
completes the circuit of the time-image which the opsign
'begins. In other words, with what image does the opsign
link up in order to form an image of time? Opsigns such as
the close-ups in The hey Leek Cleh do indeed link up with
recollection-images, but this kind of circuit, Deleuze
concludes, is not a direct time-image; in order to be so, it
would have to link up with a virtual image“, not with a
"former present," as Deleuze calls it: "We asked: when a
present, actual image has lost its motor extension, with
what virtual image does it enter into relation, the two
images forming a circuit where they run after each other and
each is reflected in the other? Now the recollection-image
is not virtual, it actualized a virtuality (which Bergson

calls 'pure recollection') on its own account. This is why

 

“ The virtual image is not a specifically defined
member of Deleuze's taxonomy of cinematic images (note the
lack of hyphen). Rather, Deleuze uses this more general
term in discussing the implications of Bergson's theory of
dreams as Deleuze extends that theory in his consideration
of cinematic images. The virtual image is not a reflection
or recollection of an image experienced in real time or
space; rather, it is the dreamer's re-constitution of those
images as images which may reflect the shape or form of
actual images, but are drawn from imagination, not
experience. An example is found in "Bunuel's Uh chien
andalou [where] the image of the thinning cloud which
bisects the moon is actualized, but by passing into that of
the razor which bisects the eye, thus maintain[s] the role
of virtual image in
relation to the next one" (Cinema_II 57). After working
through the concept, Deleuze arrives at a definition of
sorts: "we can say that the actual image itself has a
virtual image which corresponds to it like a double or a
reflection" (Cinema_II 68).

111

the recollection-image does not deliver the past to us, but
only represents the former present that the past 'was'"
(54).37

The extensive occurrence of recollection-images in The
hey Leek Cleh can to some degree be ascribed to the
structure of the novel by Amy Tan, which also journeys
between present and past through flashback. The flashback
itself is a Hollywood convention. But the manner of
introducing and structuring the recollection-image is a
matter of choice, and affects our reception of the film.
Wang's choices for representing the relationship between the
present and "the former present that the past 'was'" are
consistent with the sense of the Joy Luck Club as a family-
like community which functions as a refuge from the
isolation and anxiety brought about by the chaotic
conditions which each woman has experienced. The chaos, of
course, is represented in the recollection-images; the
manner of their introduction, in close-up, removes the
thinker from her surroundings at the party, most
significantly from her friends and the other guests,
isolating her in a pose which suggests temporary aloneness,
while the proximity of the out-of-frame friends balances
that with the possibility of community.

The close-ups discussed above are opsigns, pure optical

situations which do not link up with subsequent actions, but

 

” Deleuze next considers "dream-images" and "world-

images," neither of which occurs in The_hey_Leek_Cleh.

 

112
with recollections. Opsigns exist in "any-space-whatever,"
a form of affection-image where cinematic space has "lost
its homogeneity, that is the principle of its metric
relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the
linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways" (Cinema
1 109). Any-space-whatevers may consist of the space within
the frame which surrounds a close-up, or they may consist of
shots where what is framed is deconnection, or emptiness
(Cinema 1 120). The occurrence of both types is of interest
in Ihelox Lnois Club.

The opening shots of the film, over which the opening
credits and title are superimposed, are abstract frames,
first a trail of white crossing the screen, then an all-
black frame, into which a white feather drops. June's
voice, as a voice-over, accompanies the feather as she tells
the tale of a swan, a story passed down from her mother.
Even though the narration imposes meaning on the image, the
image itself takes place in a disconnected "any-space-
whatever," a harbinger of Wang's use of the technique
throughout the film.

The China-stories of the four members of the Joy Luck
Club, told in recollection-image, are stories of abandonment
and loss. In each case, the sense of desolation is visually
intensified by the occurrence of any-space-whatever images.
Suyuan's story is the first, introduced as June's
recollection of her deceased mother's story. Suyuan's war-

time experience included separation from her husband, and an

 

——

113
arduous refugee trek with her infant twin daughters. On
this trek, she realizes that she cannot continue to carry
the children and still save her own life. Knowing that if
she dies her daughters will die too, she leaves them at the
foot of a tree. She leaves with them all of her valuables,
and a note imploring the finder to care for them.

The physical milieu in which these actions occur is a
scene of desolation. Other refugees plod along the same
road, but the terrain is isolated, mountainous, and generic.
No distinguishing features, such as homes or signs, mark
this road as any road in particular; it is simply a refugee
escape route, littered with broken carts and abandoned
possessions. There are mountains in the distance, but they
stand simply as a sign of the difficulty of the refugees'
escape. The only distinct features are the people,
wandering through the blasted terrain. Two particular shots
of the babies reinforce this sense of disconnectedness; in
one, the camera is above them, looking into their faces from
the POV of their mother, as they are wheeled along the road
on a flat wheelbarrow. The babies fill the screen, with
only the fragments of road, any-space-whatever, passing by
around the edges of the frame. They are disconnected from
any stable environment, in motion, connected only
implicitly, by the placement of the camera, to their mother.
A subsequent shot is quite similar, with the babies again
filling the screen. But this time they are stationary, at

the foot of the tree where their mother abandons them.

 

114
Again, the edges of the frame show the fragments of
surroundings, any-space-whatever, a generic tree base. The
babies' only connection, to their mother, is broken in the
next shot as she leaves.

This fusion between a story of loss and an any—space-
whatever as the location for it is also played out in
Lindo's story. Her childhood trauma revolves around the
promise made by her poor parents when she was five to give
her in marriage at age 15 to the son of a somewhat wealthier
family. .As Lindo reports in a voice-over comment, "For next
10 years, my mother treated me as if I already belonged to
Huang Tai Tai." A few years later, the family becomes even
more severely impoverished, and they decide to move to a
distant part of China. Because of her promised marriage,
however, Lindo must be left behind. The scene of her
abandonment is largely shot from a distance, in medium-long
shots. The frame is rarefied; the locale is a forest, but
with only a few trees obscured by drifting fog. Lindo's
family loads their possessions into a cart, and the cart
begins driving away, right to left across the screen, with
Lindo standing at the right of the screen, watching. The
sense of desolation and abandonment is conveyed by the space
on the screen, and reinforced by the placement of the scene
within an any-space-whatever.

The next cut is to billowing red fabric, a saturation
of the frame with color, which proves to be the backdrop to

Lindo's wedding ceremony to Huang Tai Tai. The initial

 

115
effect of the cut is one of disorientation. The billowing
red fabric fills the screen, creating an any-space-whatever
of the type to which Deleuze refers when he says "It is
therefore shadows, whites and colours which are capable of
producing and constituting any-space-whatevers, deconnected
or empty spaces" (Cinema 1 120). This effect also occurs
when a subsequent frame is filled with the yellow and red
curtains which drape Lindo's marriage bed. In voiceover,
she says, "That night, I met my husband for the first time."

These shots are spaces of pure affect, though Deleuze
specifies no particular affect which is necessarily
connected with an any-space-whatever; it is simply a screen-
space which operates affectively, rather than rationally.

In this second case, affective reaction is channelled by
Lindo's voiceover, which gives rise to feelings of
apprehension, and sympathy. Whatever feelings are
generated, though, are visually allowed free rein by their
association with the any-space-whatever, the locus of the
affection-image.

.A more directed, or specific means of generating affect
is through a technique strongly associated with the any-
space-whatever: the close-up. The sequence chronicling
Lindo's wedding is short, and constructed almost entirely of
close-ups: of Lindo's veiled face, and of Lindo's husband's
face, obscured by wedding costume. Like the close-ups which
introduce the recollections, these close-ups exhibit the

traits of "faceification," signifying wonder or amazement.

 

116

The close-ups in the Lindo-wedding sequence follow from and
exist within the affective context established in the any-
space-whatever shots discussed earlier. We read the close-
ups of the two children's faces as signs of bewilderment and
lack of understanding. Though the POV is indeterminate, and
they may or may not be looking at each other, each close-up
is of-Lindo or Huang Tai Tai alone, rather than being an
over-the-shoulder, shot/reverse shot-sequence. This editing
pattern suggests that the children may both be naive and
puzzled, but they do not form a bond, or linkage. Each
remains a separate entity throughout the scene. The visual
images in.close-up reinforce the confusion and dismay I.
suggested by Lindo's voiceover revelation that she met her
husband, Huang Tai Tai, for the first time on their wedding
night. Interior states achieve presence through screen
imagery.

The interiority of recollection and emotion function on
a personal level. At the intersection of personal and
corporate concerns is the issue of identity, framed in this
film as the tension between personal identity and identity
as a Chinese American. Wang himself typifies this duality,
claiming this position as qualification to explore-its
dimensions in The hey Leek Cleh when he says "I understand
the Chinese culture. It's part of my consciousness, part of
my history. If anybody else had wanted to do this [film],

he would have had to spend a lot of time researching the

 

117

subject, and even then the subtleties of the culture would
have been too confusing" (Wang 3).

The self-consciously Chinese character of The hey Leek
Cleh is evident in many ways. The action shuttles back and
forth between a family party in San Francisco and flashbacks
to remembered events in China. The dialogue in the sections
set in China is spoken in Chinese, with subtitles in
English. This use of language as a marker of ethnicity is
underlined by the English speech patterns of Suyuan, Lindo,
An Mei and Ying Ying, which are characterized by the
truncated and grammatically imperfect constructions that
signal the characters' position between two cultures.

Another mark of the self-conscious connection between
the characters' Chinese heritage and their current status as
Americans is the dispersed, generational nature of the
narrative structure. Through recollections in flashback,
each mother connects her perception of her daughter's
problems with a problem of confidence or identity or self-
worth suffered by the daughter's Chinese grandmother. This
generational connection suggests that the daughters, though
quite thoroughly Americanized and in each instance but one
married to Caucasians, still carry the sign of their Chinese
heritage.

All of these observations about The hey Leek Cleh
suggest that questions of agency, subjectivity, and
identity, particularly identity as Chinese Americans, are

central themes in the film. Wang's choices of physical

 

118
structures and screen images reinforce those thematic
concerns. Affection-image close-ups, as noted earlier,
serve to make present the emotional state or the memory
function of the character in close-up; but they also focus
attention on the character as character by abstracting the
character from environment, presenting the character
stripped from context. As Deleuze puts it, the affection-
image, the close-up, " abstracts [its subject] from all
spatio-temporal coordinates, that is to say it raises it to
the state of Entity" (Cinema 1 96).

Admittedly, the close-up is a staple convention of
film. What is unconventional here is its excessive use to
visually underscore the thematic concern with issues of
agency and identity which are carried through the
conversations between mothers and daughters, by connecting
the theme with the physical images of individuals. The type
of close-up Wang employs is of interest here: instead of
over-the-shoulder shots where the camera faces the woman yet
holds her interlocutor in the frame as well, Wang typically
uses close-ups of the woman alone, even when she is engaged
in conversation or social situations. For example, in the
early scene at the party where June sits down to play mah-
jongg with her aunties, taking her mother's place in the Joy
Luck Club, a series of close-ups shows us each of the women
at the table. Each shot is from the perspective of the
woman across the table, but the shot only includes the woman

being seen. The POV makes the community of the Joy Luck

 

119
Club implicit, but the entity in these close-ups is the
‘woman herself, without the supporting context which would
confine or describe her. Agency is implied in this
isolation, and the development of the film reinforces that
visual cue, as each woman subsequently tells her story. But
identity is not simply a matter of self-definition. The
arrangement around the table, and the device of each woman
being seen by the camera from the POV of another of the
women, suggests a web of interconnection, a family-like
community, within which each woman functions. In this way,
the issues of individual identity and group identification
which are intertwined as primary themes in the film are
connected visually, through Wang's use of close-ups, as
well.

Another conscious choice which foregrounds issues of
identity is a particular type of close-up, the frame within
frame. In each of the recollection-narratives, a primary
character is featured in a close-up which draws attention to
her face by framing it through a window, or in a mirror, or
some other frame-within-frame device. The most striking of
these are shots where the face is reflected within a mirror,
a type of shot which occurs a number of times in the film.
In each instance, the accompanying dialogue or voice-over
raises issues of identity. As a literal reflection, both to
the character and to the viewer, these mirror shots visually
foreground the film's preoccupation with the construction of

identity.

 

120

These mirror shots are examples of what Deleuze calls
crystal images: examples of the opsign in which "the actual
optical image crystallizes with its own virtual image, on
the small internal circuit" (Cinema 2 69). According to
Deleuze, the crystal image "gives us the key, or rather the
'heart,' of opsigns and their compositions" (Cinema.2 69),
because here the separation from the sensory-motor logic is
complete: the image no longer portrays movement, but time
itself. It does so by visually representing the split which
occurs in time, where the instant is present, but
immediately also past. Time splits itself in two at each
moment; the time crystal propels both back into the past and
forward into the future. "Time consists of this split, and
it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal. The
crystal-image was not time, but we see time in the crystal"
(Cinemaz 81)-

A shot with a mirror is the most obvious visual example
of this representation of the splitting of time, and
connects with one of the categories of crystal-image which
Deleuze posits: the crystal image which represents the
"actual/virtual" dichotomy. Often, in a film image, it is
impossible to tell which is the actual and which is the
virtual. The crystal-image is a representation of a circuit
of indiscernibility which "constitutes an objective
illusion; it does not suppress the distinction between the
two sides,-but makes it unattributable, each side taking the

other's role in a relation which we must describe as

121
reciprocal presupposition, or reversibility. In fact, there
is no virtual which does not become actual in relation to
the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same
relation: it is a place and its obverse which are totally
reversible...The indiscernibility of the real and the
imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and
the virtual, is definitely not produced in the head or the
mind, it is the objective characteristic of certain existing
images which are by nature double" (Cinema 2 69). In
mimicking this function of time, the crystal-image shots are
representations of time, not of movement.

Crystal-images occur throughout The hey Leek Cleh, but
most of all in the final story, where frame-within-frame
closeups foreground identity consciousness. The story's
central character is An Mei's daughter Rose, who has been
married for six years to Ted, a wealthy man who seems to
have been attracted to her initially simply because she is
Chinese. Through the mediation of her mother, Rose realizes
that she has subsumed her identity in her role as dutiful
wife, just as we saw in An Mei's earlier recollection-story
about Rose's Chinese grandmother. The progression of Rose's
coming to awareness can be traced in three frame-within-
frame shots, where the visual image corresponds with the
dialogue, or voice-over. In the first, Rose is only a
reflection in a mirror; the only image we see of her is the
"virtual" half of the crystal. The action she performs is

the application of make-up, accentuating her Asian features.

 

122
This behavior is consistent with the "China Doll" image
which Rose has cultivated, believing that Ted loves her for
her exoticism. In the second frame-shot, Rose's identity
is still constructed by someone else; we see her through a
frame from the POV of her husband, Ted, suggesting that he
and we see a two-dimensional picture of Rose. Ironically,
the conversation which occurs at this point is about Ted's
frustration at Rose's unwillingness to make her own opinions
or desires known. In the third crystal-image, as Rose
confronts Ted about her discovery that he's having an
affair, she looks away from the camera through a window,
where her reflection can be seen. The image suggests that
as she musters the courage to confront Ted about his
infidelity, she also confronts a split in her own identity
between the "China Doll" quality which she has cultivated
and the possibility of some more autonomous and self-
respecting sense of herself.

The segment ends by returning to Rose in close-up at
the narrative-touchstone party, where the camera pulls back
to demonstrate that she is re-integrated into the company of
family and friends, including Ted, whom she evidently hasn't
divorced. This suggests that the process of individuation
begun at the point of the third crystal-image has continued.
Her identification as Chinese American and as a member of
family-community is obviously important, visually
represented by the surrounding family and friends, but her

ability to sustain a relationship with a man who has

 

 

123
emphasized the importance of knowing her as an individual
suggests that she is no longer subsumed in that role.

One way to read The hey Leek Cleh, then, is as an
exploration of the development of personal agency and
identity against the backdrop of Chinese American ethnicity.
The context for that exploration is the strength of a
particular community, the community of family, comprised
both of blood relatives and close friends. The visual
structures of The hey Leek Cleh, particularly the
presentation of opsigns and their consequent connections,
are not simply a vehicle for these thematic concerns, but
are themselves an integral part of the structure of the
theme, through the operation of the qualities of the opsign

itself.

CEQQKLIN

Unlike the imagined community of the constructed family
at the heart of The hey Leek Cleh, the family depicted in
Cneeklyn is an actual biological unit. Creeklyn is Spike
Lee's tale of an African American family in Brooklyn in the
1970s, a family whose circumstances loosely parallel those
of Spike Lee's own growing up: father Woody Carmichael is a
struggling musician, mother Carolyn Carmichael is a teacher.
The four boys in the family outnumber Troy, the one girl,
who is the primary character in the film.

exeeklyn opens in the street, with a crane-mounted

camera omnisciently depicting the energy of children on a

 

 

124
summer day as they play hopscotch, jumprope, battling tops,
and stickball. No adults are included in the opening shots,
and the only order is created by the rules of the games.
When shots of adults are eventually intercut with the shots
of children, the adults don't interact with the children;
the adults play dominoes, converse, stroll down the street.
The only hint of any authority structure, or attempt at
social engineering, comes in the forms of two close-up shots
of signs with encouraging messages, such as "a healthy block
is a clean block, and "a cleaner block is up to you."

All this positive energy, bathed in sunlight and
accompanied by a pleasant lyric on the soundtrack, give the
block a quality of nostalgic pleasantness. A few spats
between neighbors--notably a short argument between a
' landlady and a tenant behind on his rent--mute this edenic
quality, but do not undercut it. The multi-racial and
multi-cultural quality of the block is also foregrounded:
the children are African American and Puerto Rican, and the
adults span an even wider ethnic range, reminiscent of the
ethnic diversity of Lee's earlier he ;he high; Thing.

The energy, diversity, and relative anarchy of the
opening scene echo the conditions discussed by Zygmunt

Bauman as characteristic of the postmodern era”, and

 

” "...the postmodern setting...invalidate[s] many an
essential constituent of the cultural discourse. Central
precepts of that discourse, like dominant culture, or
cultural hegemony, seem to have lost much of their meaning,
or (as far as their missionary, crusading stance is
concerned) run out of energy. The contemporary world is,

 

 

125
influential in forming the consciousness out of which its.
inhabitants make ethical decisions. As he notes in
hea;meeenn h;hiea, "These times offer us freedom of choice
never before enjoyed, but also cast us into a state of
uncertainty never before so agonizing. We yearn for
guidance we can trust and rely upon, so that some of the
haunting responsibility for our choices could be lifted from
our shoulders. But the authorities we may entrust are all
contested, and none seems to be powerful enough to give us
the degree of reassurance we seek" (21).

This "state of uncertainty" is a fair description of
the situation of the Carmichael family. Though intact at
the beginning of Creeklyn, the Carmichaels experience a
number of stresses, and experience little or no trustworthy
and reliable guidance; for the most part, they must make it
on their own. The stressors are typical: the five high-
energy children keep their mother in a foul mood most of the
time, a mood worsened by a shortfall of money, and
exacerbated by her husband's erratic patterns of work and
penchant for bouncing checks. Woody's fuse becomes shorter

when, as a musical artist, he feels both unsupported by his

 

rather, a site where cultures (this plural form is itself a
postmodern symptom!) coexist alongside each other, resisting
ordering along axiological or temporal axes. Rather than
appearing as a transitory stage in the as-yet-unfinished
process of civilizing, their coexistence seems to be a
permanent feature of the world, with no authority

in sight aspiring to an ecumenical, universal role. Like
postmodern art--postmodern culture seems doomed to remain
disorderly, to wit plural, rhizomically growing, devoid of

direction" (Intimations 35).

 

126
wife and unable to work effectively in a chaotic household.
Not surprisingly, the stressors and lack of emotional
support lead Woody and Carolyn to separate temporarily.

Conditions of uncertainty and fragmentation, according
to Zygmunt Bauman, are conditions which strengthen the
desire for refuge in community. Bauman's general precept is
true of the particular example of the Carmichaels as well.
Carolyn's stress is evident as she berates her children,
while they in turn pick on each other, particularly on Troy.
Yet despite the stresses and fragmentations, the Carmichaels
maintain a veneer of middle-class respectability, and Woody
in particular works at maintaining affection within the
family. To the extent that these efforts are self-
deceptive, the Carmichaels' desire for stability leads them
to construct an "imagined community" out of their own
family. The signs of that imagined community reflect on
their understanding of themselves in relationship to each
other, but also reflect their self-identification as African
Americans.

Cneeklyn's self-consciously African American display is
consistent with Spike Lee's statements about his purpose as
a filmmaker. In his book Mel he;;ez hleea Lee states his
mission as he saw it at that time: "...making films about,
and for, Black people, first and foremost. Our mission is
not meant to exclude anyone else, it's just what we've been
called to do" (31). Concentrating on an African American

family as the locus of interest, Creeklyn is consistent with

 

127
this vision. Other signs of Afro-centric pride are
exhibited by Woody Carmichael in the clothing he sometimes
wears, such as a red, green and black hat, or a dashiki, and
by the fact the ram's horn with which he calls his children
to dinner is reminiscent of an African custom. The
structure of this latter shot reinforces the positive
quality of the African identification; Woody is shown in
profile, in medium close-up, wearing his red, green and
black hat, his chin lifted, the ram's horn to his lips. The
slight low angle of the shot accentuates the sense of
nobility which this striking shot displays. Woody's African
American pride is complemented by Carolyn's wearing of
beaded braids, a hairstyle which she has fixed for Troy as
well.

The Carmichael family's signs of Afro-centric identity
are not uniformly positively acknowledged or received.
Later, when Troy visits her relatives in Virginia, Aunt Song
disparages Troy's braids and takes them out, replacing them
with pigtails. Song's ambivalence about African styles is
not an isolated incident of a conflicted response to being
African American. Earlier in the film, Carolyn leaves
orders for the children to clean the house while she is out
for the evening. She accompanies the orders with
disparaging remarks about how they never do enough work
around the house, invoking a racist stereotype about African
Americans by calling them "a bunch of shiftless Negroes."

When she returns to find her orders ignored, she again draws

on
chi
"sl

WOI

on
th
ei
SL

ar

128
on stereotypes in expressing her anger. She rouses the
children out of bed to complete the chores, threatening to
"slap the black off of you," refusing to participate in the
work by saying "This ain't no plantation. I ain't no
slave."

Awareness of racial distinctions is established early
as a motif in Creeklyn. As in Lee's earlier he ;he high;
Thing, the residents of the multi-ethnic neighborhood in
Creeklyn refer regularly to the race and ethnicity of others
in deprecating ways. One sequence begins with a group of
boys, including Troy's brothers Clinton and Wendell, sitting
on a stoop. After an establishing long shot at eye level,
the succeeding shots in the sequence are of two types:
either medium close-ups, with the any-space-whatevers
surrounding the speaker's head and shoulders including arms
and legs of others, or two-shots. Early in the sequence
Tommy, a young man in his late teens or early twenties,
sings to the accompaniment of a portable record player.
Suddenly, Tommy flings a pop bottle at the door of Tony
Eyes, shouting "You stinking faggot! Whatcha going to do
about your stinking dogs, man?" Tommy's homophobic insult
' elicits an ethnic insult from Wendell, the second-oldest
Carmichael son, who laughingly comments about Tommy,
"Chinese Puerto Rican Chink Spit." That such talk is common
is conveyed visually by Wendell's posture of sitting back
against the step in a relaxed position, and is confirmed by

the lack of noticeable reaction from the other boy in the

 

129

low-angle two-shot, from Tommy's POV. Tommy's response, in
a close-up from Clinton's POV, is "You friggin' chocolate
black nigger," which raises an immediate audible response
from the other boys on the stoop. Tommy then says to
Clinton "Why you let him talk to me like that, man? I never
say nothing bad about your mama," implying that Clinton has
some responsibility for the behavior of his younger brother.

This motif of awareness of racial distinctions is
carried a step further in the sequence which follows, a
parallel sequence in which Troy and a group girls, none
older than 12, sit on another stoop. Again, after an
establishing shot of the six girls, all the succeeding shots
are close-ups or two-shots, often from the POV of another
group member. All the girls appear to be African American,
except one girl who is identified in the dialogue as Puerto
Rican. The first line of dialogue, spoken by a girl whose
hairdo features a bulb-shaped spike of hair drawn straight
up from the top of her head, is a comment about Troy's
beaded hairdo: "It look funny. It look stupid." The
speaker is seated next to a girl in an orange blouse, who
appears to agree with everything she says. Troy responds,
in a close-up from the first speaker's POV, "So, look at
yours. At least mine isn't standing on my head sticking
straight out like Topsy!" When the first speaker rises to
respond, a girl in purple says "Why don't you sit down with
your old Black self." The response: "I'm Black and I'm

proud." A girl in yellow, stroking another friend's hair,

130
changes the subject: "She got good hair." The girl in
orange says, "She got Puerto Rican hair," to which the girl
with Puerto Rican hair responds with a curt remark and a
dismissive hand signal.

The effect of these two scenes is to foreground issues
of race as means by which people in Cmeeklyn interact with
one another. These interactions may cross ethnic or racial
lines, but they also demonstrate an awareness of finer
degrees of distinction within the category of "African
American," with implications concerning stereotypes about
behavior, or conceptions of beauty.” Though Troy never
comments directly about her self—awareness as an African
American, these examples from family, extended family, and
community demonstrate that her environment is saturated with
such consciousness, suggesting that Troy's exploration of
her own identity is inextricable from her self-awareness as
an African American.

Though the Carmichael family is at the center of
Czeeklyn, the film is actually Troy's tale, told from her
perspective. The construction of the tale relies heavily on
images which in themselves convey Troy's sense of who she is
and who she is becoming within the context of her community

and her family. One of these recurring images in Cneeklyn

 

” The comment about "good hair" recalls Lee's
foregrounding of this African American issue of
constructions of beauty in Seheel_haze. In the
dance/production number entitled "Straight and Nappy," two
groups of African American college women trade insults based
on skin tone and hair quality.

 

131

is the image of Troy as watcher, an image which also
establishes that Troy's is the primary POV in this film,
gives some sense of Troy's inability to make sense of the
events of her life, and suggests that a primary thematic
concern of the film is Troy's coming-to-awareness, or
increasing in knowledge, through the course of the film.

The Troy-as-watcher motif is introduced in an
unremarkable way, through numerous instances where, either
alone or with her brothers, she watches television. The
early scenes where she watches by herself foreshadow other
shots to come later in the film, where she is again a
watcher. Troy gains information and experience through the
activity of watching TV programs such as a World War I
movie, or a Snagglepuss cartoon, both suggestive of the
hegemonic control of society by Caucasians. Later in the
film she sees a Pepsi commercial depicting an African
American girl who's unhappy because she's been left off the
baseball team--an image which Troy can connect with more
directly because of her own sense of being left out by her
brothers. Because of the type of affection image these
shots are, close-ups which exhibit the traits of
faceification, little can be learned about her affective
response to these television images.

Troy carries her watcher-persona into numerous
situations. One scene begins with a slightly low angle of a
short Puerto Rican man and a tall "Bodega Woman," played by

Ru-Paul, doing a bump-and-grind dance in a grocery store

 

132
aisle. As the dance progresses, the camera dollies closer
to the couple. The second shot reveals that the first shot
was from Troy's POV, since the second shot shows her in the
frame with the dancing couple as she walks slowly toward
them, stands a few feet away, watching, then retreats in the
direction of the counter. In the third shot, Troy stands at
the counter looking in the direction of the dancing couple.
The shot is now slightly high angle and from the couple's
POV, though the fourth and fifth shots, from Troy's POV,
show that they are oblivious of her. In the earlier shot of
Troy walking toward, then away from the couple, her face was
not clearly visible. By contrast, the slightly high-angle
shot of Troy at the counter shows her face clearly, though
it is closer in length to a medium shot than a close-up,
since 3/4 of her body is visible and the any-space-whatever
around her clearly contextualizes her within the space of
the grocery. Yet this Troy-as-watcher shot, like the close-
ups of Troy watching TV, is a close-up of faceification
which conveys a sense of wonder while giving little
indication as to her reaction. Troy is so transfixed by the
dancers that she doesn't immediately notice the clerk behind
the counter when he asks for her order; when she does
realize she's being addressed, she tells him "just a
minute," never taking her eyes off the stylized mating
dance. The scene appears to represent Troy's naivete about

sexuality, and her introduction to it as something

133
irrational and provocative, that makes people do crazy
things.

Troy learns by watching throughout the film. This
motif is central to a number of scenes where medium-close-up
shots of Troy standing still, with a blank expression on her
face, are intercut with other activity which she watches and
learns from. The close-ups of Troy are opsigns; the
sensory-motor connections displayed by the actions she
observes do not extend to encompass her as she watches,
disconnected, in a pure optical situation. These are
similar to many of the opsign close-ups in The hey Leek Cleh
in this respect, that they serve to suggest Troy's sense of
disconnection from the events in her environment while they
focus our attention on the processes of her mind, rather
than her actions. In several respects, though, they are
dissimilar from the opsigns in The hey Leek Cleh_noted
earlier. First, the close-ups of the characters in The hey
Leek Cleh which were identified as opsigns were also
recollection images, entry points to the stories told in
flashback of the characters' histories. As such, the
opsigns were single takes of relative temporal length,
followed by the story in flashback. The characters appeared
to be staring off into space; if they were indeed looking at
particular objects it was impossible to know what they were,
since the objects were not included in the frame nor
revealed in a subsequent shot. The opsigns of Troy-as-

watcher, on the other hand, connect her to the actions she

 

 

134
watches, even though she has no direct involvement in them.
The surrounding action places her in proximity to the
events, and the technique of intercutting suggests that she
is watching them. Further, the any-space-whatever
surrounding the recollection-image opsigns in The hey Leek
Cleh momentarily separate the individuals from their
environment through the abstracting quality of the close-up.
These any-space-whatevers are typically a fragment of bare
wall, or an indistinct doorframe, or some other rarefied
scrap of screen image, any-space-whatevers that Deleuze
would call "emptied" (Cinema 2 5). The close-ups of Troy-
as-watcher, however, are surrounded by any-space-whatevers
which, while they abstract Troy from her environment, still
remind us that she is very much a part of it. These any-
space-whatevers Deleuze would call "disconnected" (Cinema 2
6) because they are only scraps of visual information
surrounding the close-up. But they are saturated spaces,
identifiable through the amount of visual detail which
reminds us that she is in a store, or in the street in front
of her house, or in the doorway of her own apartment, or in
her Aunt Song's home. Though the opsigns in The hey Leek
Cleh and in Creeklyn function in broadly the same way, to
signal the disconnection of the character from the action
and to suggest thought, propelling us away from the action-
image and toward the time-image, they are also dissimilar,

disconnecting the character from the environment in The hey

 

135
Leek Cleh, connecting character and environment in Cneeklyn.

A number of sequences in Cneeklyn are built around
these opsigns of Troy-as-watcher. I will examine three. In
the first, as Troy returns home from the store at night, she
sees police car lights blinking as she nears her home. When
she gets close enough for the police car to be in the frame
with her in long shot, she stops, and watches. As the
sequence unfolds, Troy's neighbor Vic is put into the police
car, presumably for hitting their Italian neighbor Tony
Eyes, an event shown earlier. Intercut with medium shots of
Vic being placed in the police car are close-ups of Troy
alone, lit by the headlights of the police car, which also
illumine the street-scene any-space-whatever which frames
her. Her face is expressionless, a "plate" of
faceification, as she simply takes in this scene of Vic's
arrest.

A second scene of watching brings Troy's arena of
learning out of the street and into the home. Troy has been
a watcher of family dynamics between Woody and Caroline from
the beginning of the film, including the fight between her
parents which precipitated their temporary separation. But
in those instances, Troy was part of the crowd scene which
was the family. Shortly after Woody's return to the family,
though, a worker from Commonwealth Edison shows up to turn
off the Carmichaels' electricity because of Woody's non-

payment of the bill. Troy is uninvolved in the action, but

 

136
watches the incident unfold. A close-up of her face again
depicts a blank look, the any-space-whatever this time being
a fragment of the family's brownstone behind her. Earlier
Troy-as-watcher scenes suggested her absorption of
information about sexuality and about the consequences of a
punch thrown in anger. Here she learns that life within the
family is uncertain, and that her father and mother are not
capable of averting all calamities.

A third instance of Troy-as-watcher foreshadows her
inability to comprehend her mother Carolyn's death. For a
few weeks of the summer, Troy lives with her Aunt Song,
Uncle Clem and Cousin Viola in a Virginia suburb. According
to Carolyn, Troy's extended visit has the purpose of getting
her off the Brooklyn streets; Carolyn may, though, have been
aware of her own failing health by this time, and may have
wanted to spare Troy the anxiety of watching her mother
weaken.

At the end of Troy's Virginia stay, two events
coincide. Troy's birthday is the occasion for a sleep-over
party with Cousin Viola and two other girls, and Aunt Song
can't find her small Pekinese dog. When Song pulls out a
sofa bed to accommodate the sleep-over guests, the dead dog
pops out. Song wails inconsolably. As in the earlier
scenes, Troy watches. These shots of Troy-as-watcher once
again depict her in close-up, distanced from the actions
which she observes, yet indirectly connected by

intercutting, and by the sharing of the milieu suggested by

 

 

137
the saturation of the any-space-whatever which surrounds the
close-up.

bell hooks, describing this scene as "the mysterious,
not really comical, death of the pet dog Troy's aunt dotes
on" ("Sorrowful" 12), misses the point when she guesses that
the scene is meant to be comic. Seen as part of the motif
of Troy-as-watcher, the scene becomes one more where Troy
learns lessons but doesn't know what to make of them. Here,
Troy is confronted with death on a small scale and grief on
an overblown scale, and is perplexed by both. Later, when
her own mother dies, Troy is incapable, at least initially,
of any emotion approaching the hysteria that Song displays
over the death of her dog.

All of these scenes of Troy-as-watcher are affection-
images in which the sensory-motor relationship has been
disconnected. Thus they are opsigns: pure optical
situations. Attention to these structures of film allows
for a reading of Czeeklynia message which connects the pre-
rational effect of the opsign with the rational conclusions
that can be drawn about the portrayal of Troy's attempts to
make sense of the events in her life.

Another set of images also foregrounds Troy's attempts
to make sense of the events in her life. At various points
in the film, Troy studies herself in a mirror. Once, early
in the film, she monopolizes the family bathroom, studying
her profile in the mirror, then stuffing toilet paper into

her blouse. The POV is at first over Troy's shoulder, then

 

138
as she turns, past her profile to view her profile in the
mirror. Later, while in Virginia, she again studies her
profile in the mirror, this time wearing a nightie of Cousin
Viola's that Aunt Song has given Troy because Song judged
Troy's own pajamas to be unacceptable. The POV follows a
trajectory similar to the previous mirror shot. In both of
these crystal-images, Troy's reflection on her reflection
suggests her attempt to sort out her own identity, and come
to terms with her own burgeoning sexuality. Though she is
younger than Rose, the woman in The hey Leek Cleh who is
also represented through a series of crystal-images, Troy is
similarly shown to be involved in a process of self-
definition and coming-to-understanding.

The identification of these shots of Troy studying
herself in the mirror as crystal images, a category of
opsigns which are time-images, is useful to realize that
time is more of a concern here than action. Troy is waiting
to grow up. She is trying to make her present her past; by
projecting herself into the future, she attempts the
impossible--she attempts to have the understanding and
awareness of her self, her sexuality, which will attend her
self-awareness at some point in the future. What is
impossible for Troy, though, is at least implicitly possible
in the visual construction of her image in crystal: it
represents the splitting away of future from present
splitting into past which is necessary for Troy to achieve

the presence of sexual maturity which she desires.

 

139

Another manipulation of time occurs with a different
sort of mirror image, the image created by the use of the
anamorphic lens. The entire Virginia sequence (about 20
minutes of screen time) is shot with this lens; bell hooks
contends that the technique is confusing, and done "to
create a comedic atmosphere to contrast with the seriousness
of the Carmichael household ("Sorrowful" 12). In the
context of advertisements for Creeklyn which represented the
film as a comedy, this reaction to the Virginia sequence is
understandable, though misdirected. Viewed as a mirror-
sequence, the Virginia sequence becomes a time-warp, a
through-the-looking-glass experience for Troy.

At the very least, the elongated and distorted images
produced by the anamorphic lens must be read as unrealistic.
At the most obvious level, this connects with Troy's likely
perception that life in this Virginia suburb is quite
unreal. The contrasts with her Brooklyn neighborhood are
many: there are no other children around, there are no
people on the street, the houses are separated by vast
expanses of lawn, which are almost constantly watered by
pop-up watering systems.

But it also seems, during this "unreal" experience,
that the passage of time is distorted for Troy, as well as
for us. This becomes evident toward the end of Troy's stay
in Virginia, when she receives a letter from her mother. We
learn the contents of the letter through a structural device

where, instead of hearing Troy read the letter aloud, we

 

140
watch a sequence of Carolyn herself speaking the lines in
the letter. She's in the Brooklyn apartment, combing out
her young son's hair; as she speaks the lines of the letter
which inform Troy of the events that occurred during the
weeks of Troy's absence, we see intercut sequences
illustrating the events in the letter, including everyday
occurrences such as the boys playing Strat-O-Matic Baseball
on the stoop, and special events such as Woody's concert,
including the tension attending Clifford's decision to skip
the concert to attend a Knicks' championship game. In sum,
we watch the events in flashback with a voiceover of
Carolyn's narration. The manipulations of time are
multiple: Troy in current time "reads" the letter which we
see as narrated by Carolyn because Troy imagines it this
way; Carolyn as narrator imagines earlier events, which we
simultaneously see depicted. These images seem to fit the
Bergsonian category of the recollection-image. But the
manipulation is more complex than a simple recollection-
image, because the images of Carolyn are being formed in
Troy's mind, as are the images of the incidents Carolyn
reports being formed in Troy's mind through the vehicle of
imagined formation in Carolyn's mind. The recollection-
image is not a sufficient explanation for these
manipulations. These images are idealized, edited or
"wished for" images of events which Troy can only know
through the filter of her mother's letter. Still, they seem

more real to Troy than her lived experience in Virginia, and

 

 

141
are imagistically represented as "real," since a standard
lens is used in contrast to the anamorphic lens which
creates the distorted images of the Virginia sequence. The
contrast in physical images visually demonstrates the
through-the—looking-glass quality of the Virginia sequence
for Troy. Deleuze does not supply a category such as
"imagination-image" by which to name these physical
representations of the images Troy creates in her mind;
though the images have characteristics in common with the
dream image, they cannot be categorized as such because
dream-images "are as cut off from memory-based recognition
as they are from motor recognition: no specific group of
recollections comes to correspond to them..." (cinema.2 55).
These "imagination-images" have more similarity to the
recollection-image, being based on Troy's general
recollections of her mother's appearance and the milieu of
her home and neighborhood.

To complicate matters, and to highlight the
unreliability of recollection-images or crystal-images as
accurate representations of reality, the letter-from-Carolyn
sequence embedded in the Virginia sequence is eventually
revealed to be manipulative and only partially true. Though
the physical images of the letter/narrative seem "realistic"
compared to the distorted anamorphic images of the Virginia
sequence, the reality portrayed by those images is distorted
by being half-truthful and idealized. What Carolyn fails to

tell Troy is that she is seriously ill, and slated to enter

 

142
the hospital for tests. Troy only learns this reality upon
her return to New York. Troy's mental picture of her mother
as she read her letter was of a smiling, healthy woman--an
inaccurate picture, as it turned out. All the more reason
for Troy to be confused about what's real and what's not, as
if viewing the reverse of reality in a mirror.

A final sequence embedded within the fun-house mirror
Virginia sequence deserves note. Throughout her time in
Virginia, we've seen Troy with only one other child, Cousin
Viola. On Troy's birthday Aunt Song, searching for her
absent dog, enters the family room to find Troy and Cousin
Viola pillow-fighting. With the distortion of the
anamorphic lens, it appears that the pillow fight is
reflected in a full-length mirror; eventually, we become
aware that two unnamed guests have been invited to sleep
over for Troy's birthday, and in fact there are four girls
pillow-fighting. This crystal-image connects broadly with
the scenes from the Carmichael home where the high spirits
of Troy and her brothers were evident, while at the same
time it connects with the other mirror-image scenes which
foreground Troy's subjectivity. It also immediately
precedes the discovery of Aunt Song's dead dog, a scene
discussed earlier. It is an interesting example of a
crystal-image which is not static, yet there is not a
sensory-motor connection between this action and any
succeeding action. Consequently, it still functions as an

opsign, and a time-image.

 

 

143

The opsign is the condition on which Deleuze's
contention that the movement-image is supplemented in film
by the time-image depends: "In everyday banality, the
action-image and even the movement-image tend to disappear
in favour of pure optical situations, but these reveal
connections of a new type, which are no longer sensory-
motor and which bring the emancipated senses into direct
relation with time and thought. This is the very special
extension of the opsign: to make time and thought
perceptible, to make them visible and of sound" (Cinema 2
17). The opsigns in Cneeklyn fit this description, making
time and thought perceptible through affection-images which
are visually arresting in and of themselves, but which also
contrast with the realistic (or quasi-realistic) depiction
of the family in the film, providing a visual commentary on
the circumstances of the characters depicted, and on their
relationships with one another.

According to Deleuze, there are three types of opsigns
through which time and thought become perceptible. Though I
only intend to explore the chronosign with relation to
Cmeeklyn, an overview of the types of opsigns will
contextualize my use of the chronosign.

Deleuze stipulates that opsigns and sonsigns are
manifested in three ways, or open up the possibilities for
three types of images: chronosigns, lectosigns, and
noosigns. The chronosign is "a time-image which has

subordinated movement. It is this reversal which means that

 

144

time is no longer the measure of movement but movement is
the perspective of time: it constitutes a whole cinema of
time, with a new conception and new forms of montage..."
(Cinema 2 22). With the lectosign the image on the screen
is descriptive, but the description is "subordinated to the
internal elements and relations which tend to replace the
object and to delete it where it does appear, continually
displacing it" (22). This sign is a readable sign, one
which encourages us to "read" it for what it is, rather than
what it appears to represent. The noosign offers us entry
into a process whereby the camera emulates thought. The
camera "subordinates description of a space to the functions
of thought. This is not the simple distinction between the
subjective and the objective, the real and the imaginary, it
is on the contrary their indiscernibility which will endow
the camera with a rich array of functions, and entail a new
conception of the frame and reframings...it becomes
questioning, responding, objecting, provoking,
theorematizing, hypothesizing, experimenting, in accordance
with the open list of logical conjunctions ('or,'
'therefore,' 'if,' 'because,' 'actually,‘ 'although...'), or
in accordance with the functions of thought in a cinema-
verite..."(§inom§ 2 23).

Investigation of the blend of realism and beyond-
realism which characterizes Spike Lee's visual style, and
serves to convey Lee's vision of community, can be aided by

the use of Deleuze's concept of the chronosign. There is of

145
course the representation of a passage of time in the film,
in the conventional sense by which days and weeks pass. But
this is time in subordination to image. Image is made to
represent time, though, in instances where the construction
of the visual image, the opsign, allows us to see time
itself as a construct represented on the screen. These
constructs are not unique to Lee's work, but his use of them
is a structural marker of his work in Czeeklyn and
elsewhere, and serves as a means of framing the concepts
foregrounded in this and other Spike Lee films, one of which
is the construction of family as community.

Deleuze's explication of the chronosign proceeds
through two steps: his adaptation of concepts of time and
memory from Henri Bergson, which he applies to cinema in
instances which he labels "the cinema of enchantment"
(Cinema 2 60), and his own extension of Bergson's concepts
into a cluster of types of time-image in cinema which he
calls the crystal-image, a filmic image which takes a
variety of forms in visually representing the functions of
time. Deleuze's adaptation of the Bergsonian concepts and
the his extension of them, the crystal-image, are both
useful in examining Cmeeklyn.

The Bergsonian concepts which Deleuze applies to the
cinema of enchantment are these: the recollection image,
which is akin to the flashback in that it links up a current
actual image with a recalled virtual image; the dream-image,

in which a dream is cinematically represented as being a

 

 

146
mental (visual) response to a weak sensory stimulus; and the
world-image, where "the optical and sound image is quite cut
off from its motor extension, but it no longer compensates
for this loss by entering into relation with explicit
recollection-images or dream-images...characters do not
move, but...the world takes responsibility for the movement
that the subject can no longer or cannot make" (Cinema 2
59).

The first of these types of images, the recollection-
image, is historically a conventional practice in Hollywood
films. Dreams are also conventionally represented, though
perhaps not typically in the way Deleuze describes in the
dream-image. But the third type of image, the world-image,
is comparatively rare. Interestingly, there are two
instances of world-image in Creeklyn. The first is embedded
in a conventionally-framed nightmare sequence, while the
second is embedded in an otherwise-realistic sequence.

The first sequence using a world-image occurs when Troy
is sleeping, and dreaming. The sequence begins with a shot
seen once before in the film and twice after: an overhead
shot of a Chinese paper umbrella, which appears to hang on
the ceiling of Troy's bedroom. The camera tracks left,
until it stops over Troy's bed, where a long shot shows her
thrashing and appearing to run in her sleep. This lead-in
to the dream-image of the nightmare sequence is a departure
from the technique both Wang and Lee used as an introduction

to the recollection-image, since the dream-image is

 

147
introduced with a long shot and the recollection-images were
introduced with close-ups.

The nightmare sequence itself begins with an out-of-
focus shot of the top of Troy's head, virtually filling the
screen. As she lifts her head we see in the any-space-
whatever surrounding the close-up that she's on the street,
at night. We only see the top half of her body, in medium-
close up. She begins to move-~but with no effort of her
own. It could also be construed that the world is moving,
while Troy is immobile. Now, in the any-space-whatever
behind her, are Snuffy, a neighborhood glue-sniffer (played
by Spike Lee), and his sidekick Right Hand Man. A medium
shot of Snuffy and Right Hand Man shows them demanding food
stamps from Troy, then sniffing in their bags. Then they
compel Troy to sniff, after which she flies upward as if on
an escalator--or the world falls away from her.‘0 She's in
close-up, so the movement of world happens in the any-space-
whatever surrounding her. Her face is virtually
expressionless all the while, as if she is half-asleep, or
dazed. The sequence ends as it began, with a shot of the
Chinese paper umbrella (daylight now), which then tracks
left to Troy's bed, where a long shot shows Woody, her

father, wiping her brow to calm her down. She's aware of

 

” This technique, holding the character stationary
while the any-space-whatever is in motion, is also used in

W. Maleolml. and Qlookere.

 

 

148

the dream, because she says "Snuffy and Right Hand Man are
chasing me."

In order to relate this dream sequence to the rest of
the film, two other things must be noticed. The first is a
matter of narrative: Woody's appearance at Troy's bedside is
in fact a re-appearance. He has been absent from the family
for a period of time because his wife Carolyn earlier asked
him to leave after the two of them quarrelled. Troy was
unhappy that he left, but did not express this directly to
Carolyn. Woody's appearance at her bedside signals his
reintegration into the family.

The other point to notice is that Lee seems to signal
something about the meaning of this sequence through the use
of the musical accompaniment. This relatively conventional
device is used throughout the film, usually in situations
where the mood of the music is meant to replicate and
reinforce the mood of the scene. That tactic seems not to
be Lee's purpose in the nightmare sequence, though, where
the musical accompaniment is the 1970's rock song "Time Has
Come Today," performed by The Chambers Brothers. Instead,
the song lyrics foreground the manipulation of time which
the sequence represents, including the pronounced
ticking/beat of the music, which winds down towards the end
of the scene, as Troy appears to be separated from the
earth. The winding down of the music, in fact, forms a
sound bridge to the "reality" scene of Woody leaning over

the sleeping Troy, as she awakes.

 

 

149

The nightmare sequence is a time-image, specifically a
world-image, not a narrative comment. Within the narrative
the nightmare doesn't make any particular sense; but
understood as a time-image, it becomes a representation of
the dislocation which characterizes Troy's world at this
moment, even though she doesn't express it. That
dislocation revolves most immediately about the split
between Carolyn and Woody, but there are other stressors
too, such as the family's lack of money, and more
importantly for Troy, the incessant harassment she endures
from her two older brothers, Clifford and Wendell. She also
has no one with whom to share her growing awareness of her
changing body, represented by at least two scenes where Troy
studies herself in the mirror to see whether her breasts are
growing. In one of those scenes where she stuffs toilet
paper into her blouse, no one notices, since that happens to
be the moment that Woody and Carolyn's quarrel erupts into
an all-out fight, precipitating Woody's departure. The
world-image of the nightmare, which presents a physical
representation of Troy's world in transition, is an analogue
for the upheaval in her world.

There is one other world-image in the film. Near the
end of the film, after Carolyn's funeral, Troy joins the
mourners back at their brownstone for the traditional
reception. Her own emotional response to her mother's death
is hard to read, and seems to be held in abeyance. She

resists attempts to reach out to her, except for her brother

150
Clifford's taking her hand at one point. But she rises in
indignation when her little brother Joseph comes in crying,
and reports to her that Snuffy had mocked him because his
mother was dead, and then stole Joseph's money. Angrily,
Troy takes Joseph's hand and goes out to the street to
confront Snuffy. ‘When she spots him, the connection is
first made visually by alternating close-ups of Troy, then
Snuffy, then Troy. These close-ups of Troy do not exhibit
the faceification of the earlier close-ups in the Troy-as-
watcher sequences. Instead, this is a close-up of
faceicity, where "micromovements of expression" demonstrate
intensity and desire (on a continuum of love-hate), rather
than wonder (Cinema 1 90). The close-up introduces the
second "world-image": Troy and Joseph, in close-up, appear
to cross the street--except they are not in motion. Again,
either they are moving effortlessly across the street,
toward Snuffy, or they are stationary while their world is
in motion. When they reach Snuffy, or Snuffy reaches them,
Troy whacks him on the head with a stick, draws blood, and
says "I'm tired of you being here. Go sniff on your own
block."

The change in Troy's world signalled by this world-
image is quite evident. She is no longer the child, fleeing
and in need of protection, as she was in the world-image
embedded in the nightmare scene. Instead she's the
protector of her little brother, now filling the protector's

role formerly held by her now-departed mother. This

151

thematic strand is in evidence at various points in the
film; Carolyn was portrayed as protector when her children
ran afoul of the neighbor, Tony Eyes, and from her hospital
bed she specifically charged Troy with responsibility for
her little brothers. The world-image scene is Troy's first
venture into that territory. Her role continues as the film
ends, when Joseph asks Troy for permission to go out to
play. Troy grants permission, with stipulations about when
Joseph is to be back.

bell hooks takes exception to Lee's non-critical
representation of this passing of adult responsibility to a
child only ten years old. As hooks notes, Troy is told by
her mother, from her hospital bed, "how she must assume the
caretaker role...No one in the film is concerned about the
loss of Troy's girlhood...Becoming a mini-matriarch because
her mother is sick and dying requires of Troy that she
relinquish all concern with pleasure and play, that she
repress desire. Sexist/racist thinking about black female
identity leads to cultural acceptance of the exploitation
and denigration of black girlhood" ("Sorrowful" 13). hooks'
article is largely a corrective to critical and audience
reception of Creeklyn which was "fascinated by the funky,
funny 'otherness' of typical Spike Lee black images," even
to the point of ignoring the death of the mother in the film
("Sorrowful" 11). hooks' attention to the centrality of
Troy's character, and the profound impact of her mother's

death on Troy's future, is a more accurate reading of the

152
film than the film's own advertising, which billed it as
"hilarious."

As I have attempted to demonstrate through a Deleuzean
reading of the images in the film, Troy is indeed the
central character in Cneeklyn, and hooks' quarrel with Lee's
seeming lack of criticism of the assimilation of her
subjectivity into the motherly role at the end of the film
is a telling point. The world-images discussed earlier do
portray Troy as the inheritor of her mother's
responsibilities, just as hooks notes. Crystal-images
depict Troy wondering about her sexuality and her future,
and ripening to the adult responsibilities which lie before
her. As these changes occur, her identity within the
Carmichael family is recast from peripheral to central
figure. Recognizing the way the structures of the film
convey this message is the first step toward assessing its
thematic impact, as well as its self-conscious exploration
of African American identity as an element of Troy's coming-

tO - awareness .

W

The high-spirited energy of the first hour of
eeeehellaa is so at odds with the brutal knife-slaying that
opens the film that we have to ask "what's going on here?"
Ethically, what's going on is that the main character, Henry
Hill, bases all his decisions on one bedrock fact,

articulated in the first voice-over words he speaks in the

 

153

film: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be
a gangster." Ironically, the exuberant joking that attends
the slaying of Billy Batts also contains the seeds of
destruction for Henry, Tommy De Vito and Jimmy Conway.
Because the only way to survive as a gangster is to follow
orders, and killing Billy Batts was most assuredly not
following orders. As Henry explains later, again in voice-
over, after Jimmy and Tommy kick Billy Batts senseless on
the floor of Henry's bar, "We had a serious problem with
Billy Batts. He was a made guy with the Gambino crowd.
Before you could touch a made guy, you had to have a sit-
down and an ok." When Jimmy, Tommy and Henry kill Billy
Batts anyway, they signal their inability to play within the
rules, and respect the mob status of a made man. As
Kathleen Murphy remarks of the film's opening sequence, "the
murder is the right place to begin; for it's here that
Henry's dream really starts to break down, though it won't
hit-the wall for another decade" ("Made" 26).

Henry's dream, to be a gangster, has two dimensions.
He wants to live the easy life, but much more importantly,
he wants to be somebody, a big shot, someone who belongs.
This takes on the quality of family more important to Henry
than the biological family headed by Henry's Irish father
and Italian mother. The young teenager, remarking about his
involvement with Paulie's mob at the taxi stand across the
street from his family home, says "People like my father

could never understand, but I was a part of something. I

154
belonged. I was treated like a grown up." As David Denby
notes, "This avid and clever boy is weaned away from his
pinched, working-class family and joins the far more
wealthy, pleasure-loving family of mobsters. They educate,
approve, and reward" ("Meaner" 81). That's exactly the
picture we see when young Henry passes his first real test
of loyalty: called into court for selling stolen cigarettes,
Henry doesn't rat on his friends. When he exits the
courtroom, freed because of the mob lawyer's signal to the
corrupt judge that Henry should be freed, Henry is met and
embraced by Paulie and the rest of his men, who congratulate
him that he "broke his cherry" by being arrested for the
first time. The transition of loyalty, from nuclear family
to Henry's "adopted" mob family, is complete.

Henry's affiliation with the mob family of Paul Cicero
follows the pattern examined by Zygmunt Bauman as he
considers the workings of traditional communities, based on
ethnicity or geography, and those of more loosely
constructed communities, based on perceptions of common
interest which may be more tenuous than they appear. Bauman
asserts that all communities, traditional or temporary, are
dependent upon the perceptions and beliefs of those who
identify with the community: "Communities are imagined:
belief in their presence is their only brick and mortar, and
imputation of importance their only source of authority"
(Theima;iena xix). Though the Cicero mob has the appearance

of stability and permanence, based on blood, ethnicity and

155
loyalty, these qualities exist largely in the minds of the
community's adherents rather than in any immutable family
loyalty, as demonstrated in the bloodbath towards the end of
Ceeehellaa, where the participants in the Lufthansa heist,
"family" members all, are systematically "whacked," or
murdered. But imagined or not, this community appears to be
a family to Henry when he says "I was a part of something.
I belonged." Of course, there are other rewards for
choosing to affiliate with this community. At first, the
money is alluring, as Henry notes: "At 13 I was making more
money than most of the grown ups in the neighborhood." As
he grows older, the mix of glamor and power becomes as
important as the money, as when Henry compares his life to
that of "a movie star with muscle." Les Keyser pulls all
these strands together when he notes, "the Mob is a family
that embraces and contains all its members; like a feudal
fiefdom, it endures by absolute allegiance. Its rewards are
wealth and a sense of belonging; its penalties are exile and
death" (Martin 211-12) .

The price of acceptance into this family is loyalty.
Henry is quite content to affirm his loyalty to Paul Cicero,
at one point bringing Paulie a portion of the proceeds when
Henry, Tommy and Jimmy steal $420,000 in an airport inside
job. But Henry's first loyalty is to his two friends, Jimmy
and Tommy, and collectively the three of them become like
bad sons--involved in the drug trade which Paulie expressly

forbid Henry to enter, and of course being suspected of

156
responsibility in the disappearance of Billy Batts, though
that charge is never proven. But even the appearance of
lack of loyalty is enough to get you killed; the execution
of Tommy, the most obvious loose cannon, shows Henry quite
clearly what he can expect for lack of loyalty.

Thematic and plot concerns such as the foregoing can be
explored endlessly in terms of the logic or illogic of
narrative flow, but they can also be explored in terms of
the visual structures through which they are conveyed.

While the narrative may suggest certain motivations for such
phenomena as Henry Hill's sense of loyalty to Paulie's mob,
or his later behavior as a renegade and consequent
abandonment by and betrayal of Paulie and Jimmy, an
examination of the visual structures of the film leads away
from considerations of narrative logic and toward an
examination of the event-nature of the image, rather than
understanding it as simply a building block of the
narrative. As we learn from Deleuze, the image itself
carries a pre-perceptual impact. As Steven Shaviro asserts,
"the insubstantial flicker of 'moving pictures' cannot
easily be contained within systems of stratification.

Images on the screen are violently torn away from any
external horizon or context, as from any actual
presence...Sheer appearance precedes any possible act of
recognition; film shows before it says" (Cinema;ie 28). The
structure of the images in Ceeehellaa creates a sense of

family based on loyalty which parallels that presented in

157
the narrative, while at the same time visually demonstrating
its instability. Ultimately, the "family" is an entity
which collapses under the pressure brought to bear by
individual subjectivity, both in the film's narrative and in
its visual structure.

In a fashion similar to the party scenes in The hey
Leek Cleh, scenes in Ceeehellaa which depict group or family
gatherings are invested with a good deal of energy through
the device of the moving camera. In both cases the
technique serves to connect the information within the frame
with the wider environment, so that the "set" of the within-
frame is contextualized by the moving camera which
constantly breaks down and reconstitutes the information
within the frame, creating a series of new "sets." These
sets, which occur as what Deleuze calls "any-instants-
whatever," progressively exchange the place of the within-
frame and the out-of-frame, showing the relationship between
them. The panning or tracking creates on the screen "a
figure which is always in the process of being formed or
dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at
any-instant-whatevers of their course" (Cinema 1 5).

But there are dissimilarities between group scenes in
Ceeehellaa and the party scenes in The hey Leek Cleh as
well. The Ceeehellaa scenes do not recur in the same
location; also, in Ceeehellaa, the method of camera
movement, a hand-held camera proceeding through relatively

unbounded space, creates an affective response different

 

158
from that created by the relatively circumscribed movements
in The hey Leek Cleh, where the tracking camera moves slowly
through the room, or the stationary camera pans slowly. As
noted earlier, the moving camera in the party scenes in The
hey Leek Cleh serves to connect the characters with one
another, suggesting their cohesiveness as a constructed
"family." The moving camera in Ceeehellaa, on the other
hand, serves less to connect characters with one another
than to place them contextually within a matrix of
characters which is continually in flux, and while
functioning as a "family," also poses potential harm for the
characters involved. The moving camera's composing,
decomposing and recomposing of images accentuates the
constructedness and the mutability of the "family,"
undercutting Henry's sense of belonging to something solid
and secure. In this sense, the visual structures
specifically parallel the narrative flow. They are also
metaphorically suggestive of the rhizomatic "lines of
flight" which Deleuze and Guattari characterize as a
component in the growth of organisms (Deleuze and Guattari

"Rhizome" 16-18),‘1 in that the tendency toward hierarchy

 

“ "Every rhizome includes lines of segmentation
according to which it is stratified, territorialized,
organized, signified, attributed, etc.; but also lines of
deterritorialization along
which it endlessly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome
each time the segmentary lines explode into a line of
flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome.

These lines never cease to refer to one another, which is
why a dualism or dichotomy can never be assumed, even in
rudimentary form of good and bad. A rupture is made, a line

 

159

and ossification is constantly disrupted by seemingly
spontaneous lines of flight which rupture and reformulate
the system, while still being a part of the system. Jimmy
Conway tells Henry early in the film that the first rule of
mob membership is "Never rat on your friends, and always
keep your mouth shut;" but that first rule is preceded by an
unspoken first principle: "save your own skin." Conway's
"first rule" gathers power in the hierarchy; the first
principle disrupts it.

Scorsese himself was conscious of the possibilities of
camera movement for creating disruptive effects, and claims
to have employed it for that purpose in Ceeehellaa. As he
told Gavin Smith, "...I wanted lots of movement and I wanted
it to be throughout the whole picture, and I wanted the
style to kind of break down by the end, so that by his last
day as a wiseguy, it's as if the whole picture would be out
of control, give the impression he's just going to spin off
the edge and fly out. And then stop for the last reel and a
half. The idea was to get as much movement as possible--
even more than usual. And a very speeded, frenetic quality
to most of it in terms of getting as much information to the
audience--overwhelming them, I had hoped--with images and

information" (Scorsese "Smith" 30).

 

of flight is traced, yet there is always the risk of finding
along it organizations that restratify everything,
formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions
that reconstitute a subject..." ("Rhizome" 18).

 

 

160

What Scorsese expresses in general terms is evident in
the use of the moving camera in Ceeehellaa. When the moving
camera is used, Deleuze notes, "a figure...is always in the
process of being formed or dissolving through the movement
of lines and points" (Cinema 1,5). In a number of long
sequence shots in Ceeehellaa, the camera is employed to
represent the POV of the audience, constructing the imagined
audience as part of the action of the film as it moves
through a room, observing. Many of these shots last 20-30
seconds, the longest over three minutes before cutting to
another angle. All are created with a hand-held camera;
some involve the audience directly as characters speak
towards the camera, as if acknowledging its presence as a
character in the scene. Many of these hand-held sequence
shots show a recurring emphasis on placement of Henry Hill
within a "family" community which is both glamorous and
dangerous, rigid yet always in flux.

-One such example of these hand-held sequence shots
appears early in the film and establishes a pattern for the
others. It occurs as the young Henry begins his association
with Paulie Cicero's gang, functioning as an errand boy. As
such, he is in the back room of Paulie's bar, where a
presumably illegal gambling operation is taking place. The
shot begins in high angle close-up of a table of cold cuts
and cheese, tracks along the table to its end, where hands
put meat on a sandwich, then tilts up to show that we're

watching young Henry. The POV shot tracks and pans with

161
Henry briefly as he takes the sandwich through the crowded
room, but almost immediately the camera takes a different
route, flowing across tables of poker players, then tilting
up to rejoin Henry as he delivers the plate with the
sandwich to a man surrounded by other men at a table in the
medium distance. The tilt up also reveals that the room is
crowded with people, all men. Never stopping, the camera
leaves Henry, tracking and panning past Paulie, then coming
to rest on a doorway, just as Jimmy Conway enters. Though
the shot is packed with people, few are seen clearly, as the
moving camera cuts off heads or shows only parts of bodies
around poker tables; Henry, however, is seen clearly though
briefly as he constructs the sandwich, Paulie is prominently
featured as he stands apart from others and observes, and
Jimmy Conway is featured as he steps into a pool of light,
surrounded by a darkened any-space-whatever, when entering
the room. The sequence continues, with Henry meeting Jimmy
for the first time and receiving from Jimmy a $20 tip just
for being a good kid. The voiceover, in Henry's voice,
asserts young Henry's awe of Jimmy.

On a narrative level, this sequence shot might be
considered to be an establishing shot, demonstrating the
nature of the "family" to which Henry has attached himself
(all male, engaged in illegal activities, etc.) and
featuring two of the three men who will figure most
prominently in his attachment to the crew: the "father

figure," Paulie, and the "mentor" figure, Jimmy Conway. In

162

the Deleuzean analysis, an establishing shot will be
conveyed as a perception-image, the type of image which
functions as a vehicle for orienting a viewer to the
circumstance of the image. In shots where the frame is
fixed (i.e. the camera is stationary) the perception image
is a "dicisign," or "perception in the inane of another
perception" (Cinema i 217), a "solid state" perception where
the parameters of the frame are unchallenged. But the shot
described above is a perception-image of a different sort,
which Deleuze names the "reume," or liquid perception. The
most evident example of such a perception would be a shot of
flowing water, but the concept applies whenever the subject
of the shot seems to flow through the parameters of the
frame, rather than being contained by it. The frame is
still felt, but as the limit through which the elements of
the shot flow. With its sometime privileging of Henry,
Paulie, and Jimmy as subjects, the shot loses some of its
character as pure example of the type, but because it is
characterized by dispersal and flow, still fits this
category. What the reume shows, in this as other instances,
is an image of insubstantiality. The world which Henry is
entering may have primary figures, such as Paulie and Jimmy,
but it is a fluid world of changing relationships; nothing
is fixed.

This sense of insubstantiality is reinforced by the
second sequence shot I wish to consider, a reume where the

flowing matter again consists of images of people. In this

163
shot, however, not only the frame is felt as the object
limit of each any-instant-whatever, but the camera is also
felt as the surrogate for the viewer, as characters address
the camera, validating John Simon's assertion that "Whenever
possible, he [Scorsese] shoots from a character's point of
view" (Simon "Mob" 64).

The shot follows an establishing shot outside the
Bamboo Lounge, a bar where the gangsters hang out. At the
beginning of the sequence shot, the camera travels up an
aisle between tables bathed in the red light of the lounge.
From a high angle perspective, the tracking camera reveals
men and women at a sequence of tables; some of the men are
introduced on the voiceover narration by name. As they are
introduced, they look at the camera and respond with "hey,
how ya doin'," "what's up, guy," "stayin' out of trouble?"
and other comments which make it seem that the camera is a
character. The flow continues as the camera comes to the
end of the row of tables, circles around behind the bar, and
tracks along the bar, revealing more characters who also
either respond directly to the camera, or utter dialogue
which confirms what the voiceover narration asserts. The
perspective remains slightly high angle, the distance medium
close. When the camera reaches the end of the bar, the
nature of the sequence shot changes in a manner which
reduces the effect of flow. Up to this point, the camera
has been oriented to the side as the tracking occurs, so

that the images flow into the left side of the frame and out

164
the right side. When the camera reaches the end of the bar,
however, it follows a character who leaves the end of the
bar and walks toward the door, tracking behind him. At the
door to the kitchen, the camera abandons this character and
follows another into the kitchen, where it discovers Henry
Hill pushing a rack of fur coats. The camera follows Henry.
The effect of tracking behind Henry, in medium shot, is less
unsettling than the left-to-right discovery of characters
which occurred in the club. Additionally, the lighting in
the kitchen is normal, as opposed to the red tint in the
club.

As with the shot of the young Henry in the gambling
den, this shot too is partially comprised of following Henry
as he is placed conceptually in the world he inhabits. Also
as with the previous shot, the voiceover narration
identifies this shot as an establishing shot in the sense
that it appears to be meant to introduce specific people
within Henry's world, the world of Paulie's mob. In
reality, though, none of the characters so introduced is
particularly important; even those who are seen again later
in the film are seen in thoroughly minor roles, and many are
literally not seen again. The physical structure of the
shot provides a surer clue to its significance; the people
being introduced are at once both important and unimportant-
-individually unimportant, mere cogs in the mechanism of
Paulie's mob, but important as figures of the apparent

cohesiveness of that "family." Sliding over these images as

165

it does, all in one take, the sequence shot connects them
all to the figure who comes last, Henry Hill, as does the
fact that the voiceover narrative is rendered in his voice.
Unlike The hey Leek Cleh, however, which also exhibits
extensive use of the reume as a tool for connecting
characters within the confines of the apartment which is the
locus for the "real-time" party from which the rest of the
narrative emanates in flashback, the use of the reume in
Ceeehellaa creates a sense of instability by moving through
space which has not been previously defined and is therefore
always being discovered for the first time, along with its
inhabitants, by the camera.

The third sequence shot to consider is by far the

longest take in the film.‘2 After insulting his future

 

“ Kathleen Murphy describes the shot this way:
"Henry's first real date with the woman he eventually
marries (Lorraine Bracco) is a paean to the juice that gets
you anywhere; the director plays this long shot-sequence in
fast-forward mode, with not a single cut to retard the rush.
Henry hands Karen out of his car, guides her across a neon-
lit street, straight through the block-length line of
hopefuls waiting to get into the Copacabana, and down a
flight of stairs to swinging doors that open--magically--
just for them. Camera hot on their heels, the couple
hurries down dim halls, Henry scattering tips and banter on
all sides. They burst into a brightly lit kitchen alive
with activity, passing between counters and smiling faces.
Then, through a curtain and into the nightclub proper, where
the maitre d' immediately signals a waiter; the camera turns
to catch the man already on his way to stageside, table held
high. Henry and Karen are barely seated when drinks arrive,
courtesy of a group nearby; camera swings swiftly leftward
to register the men raising glasses in salute. Basking in
privilege, the couple settles in for the show. Henny
Youngman, 'king of the one-liners,' is still cracking wise,
voiceover, even as Scorsese, sly king of the one-shots, has
cut into another pell-mell
performance--an airport heist that's played like a game of

166
wife, Karen, on their first date, Henry decides to make it
up to her by taking her to the Copacabana nightclub. The
shot begins in closeup on Henry's hands as Henry tips a
doorman on the street outside the club in exchange for
watching Henry's car. Henry and Karen cross the street; the
camera follows, contextualizing them by including the long
line of people waiting to enter the club as an element in
the any-space-whatever which surrounds the figures of Henry
and Karen. The camera follows as Henry and Karen pass
through the line and down stairs to a basement-level door,
which a restaurant employee opens for them. The camera
continues to follow through the confined spaces of a series
of corridors which lead, eventually, to a restaurant
kitchen. For a brief moment the camera loses sight of Henry
and Karen in the kitchen, panning left towards a chef;
otherwise, it follows them as they pass tables, turn
corners, and dodge the numerous kitchen staff who bustle
about. Henry and Karen emerge from the kitchen into the
nightclub and the camera loses them once again, directing
its gaze toward the maitre d', who greets Henry and orders a
special table to be placed down front for him. After Henry
and Karen are seated, the camera leaves them once more,
panning left to show "Mr. Tony," who has sent a bottle of
wine to Henry's table, seated in a group at an adjacent

table. After panning back to Henry and Karen, the camera

 

hide 'n' seek" ("Made" 26)

167
leaves them for the final time in the shot, tilting up to
Henny Youngman on stage as he begins his routine. The
routine forms a sound bridge to the next shot, of Henry and
Tommy striding across an airport parking lot on the way to a
robbery. The sequence of Henry and Karen at the Copa lasts
over 3 minutes, and consists of one shot.

This third sequence shot is the most extreme departure
from the manner in which the moving camera was used to
create the sense of community and connection in The hey Leek
Cleh, and is indeed a departure from the use of the moving
camera in the other two sequence shots from Ceeehellaa
discussed above. Though the movement of the camera still
results in an image characterized by dispersal and flow, the
fact of its following Henry and Karen gives the shot at the
same time a central, privileged image or pair of images.
Their environment, the any-space-whatever which surrounds
them, is constantly breaking down and reforming, but the
central images, while in motion and therefore not static,
are nevertheless still central. Consequently, this shot
which by its very sweep and length calls attention to itself
and to the frame as its object limit, is a perception-image
suspended somewhere aldng the continuum between dicisign and
reume, containing elements of both subjective and objective
perception, as defined by Deleuze in the spirit of Bergson:
"a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in
relation to a central and privileged image; an objective

[perception is one where, as in things, all the images vary

168
in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all
their parts" (Cinema i 76). Water is the most pure example
of the latter; the breaking down and recomposing entailed in
the shots, described earlier, of the camera moving through
the gambling den and through the bar, so that the subjects
flow through the frame, share the characteristic of
objective perception with Deleuze's example of a shot where
water flows through the frame. The shot of Henry and Karen
at the Copacabana is a subjective perception-image, but not
a fixed one, because of the effect of flow occurring in the
any-space-whatever which surrounds them. It does, however,
highlight their subjectivity and even though it places them
in relation with other characters, the other characters are
for the most part anonymous (restaurant employees, kitchen
staff, maitre d'). The one who is not entirely anonymous,
"Mr. Tony," is understood to be a mobster and in some sense
a member of Henry's "family," (we met him in the second
sequence shot discussed above, when he was introduced as
"Tony Two Eyes") yet the connection is brief and
inconsequential, the result of a single swish pan. Though
the shot happens at midpoint in the film, it presages the
condition which characterizes Henry and Karen at film's end:
estranged, and alone. In this manner visual structure and
narrative logic meet, undermining Pauline Kael's assertion
that "the filmmaking process becomes the subject of the

movie. All you want to talk about is the glorious whizzing

169
camera, the freeze-frames and jump cuts" (Kael "Tumescence"
101).

Another component of narrative logic which is
reinforced by visual structures is a thematic strand which
echoes elements of The hey Leek Cleh and Creeklyn, the
issue of identity formation as a factor affected both by
group identification and by markers and constructions of
ethnicity. The first words in Ceeehellaa foreground this
issue, when Henry says "As far back as I can remember, I
always wanted to be a gangster." His desire is complicated,
however, by ethnicity: Henry's mother is Italian, but his
father is Irish. Like Jimmy Conway, another Irishman, Henry
can never be a "made man" in the mob.

Les Keyser asserts that Scorsese intended to foreground
issues of ethnic identification in Ceeehellaa, and that "to
ensure verisimilitude, Scorsese cast virtually all Italian
American performers in Ceeehellaa..." (Keyser Man;in 201).
The concern that the look of the film should identify it
with Italian American identity is a topic discussed at some
length by Leo Brandy, who asserts that "in many of
[Scorsese's] films the ideology is not ethnicity or religion
per se so much as it is the way in which those social and
psychological forces are mediated by and even subordinated
to visual style. The crucial issue is not ethnicity but the
renneaen;a;ien efi e;hniei;y..." (Braudy "Sacraments" 250).
Brandy sees ethnicity and religiosity represented in

Scorsese's films in "(1) the importance of ritual

170

narratives, (2) the significance of ritual objects, and (3)
the conferral of ritual status. Unlike the Protestant (and
often Jewish) denigration of visual materiality in favor of
verbal mystery, these directors [Scorsese, Coppola, DePalma]
mine the transcendental potential within the visual world.
Objects, people, places, and stories are irradiated by the
meaning from within, which as directors they seek to unlock"
(Braudy "Sacraments" 242).

The iconic quality of visual representation of
ethnicity which Braudy alludes to suffuses Ceeehellaa,
beginning with Scorsese's casting of his own mother as
Tommy's mother. She appears three times--first, making a
meal of spaghetti for Tommy, Jimmy and Henry as they are en
route to bury Billy Batts; second, as a guest at Henry's
wedding, sitting next to Tommy and encouraging him to find a
girl and settle down like Henry, and finally, fussing over
Tommy's appearance in the living room of her home on the day
he thinks he is to become a "made man," though actually it
is the day of his death. Scorsese's father is cast also, as
an associate of Paulie Cicero's. His most prominent moment
occurs as he cooks for Paulie, Henry and others of the mob
who have been imprisoned. When seeking the iconographic
representation of ethnicity, these scenes with Scorsese's
parents provide some clues about objects and rituals to
consider.

The most prominent of these ritualistic behaviors is

the preparation and eating of meals. The three moving

171
camera shots discussed earlier are all shots where food and
food preparation are prominent; in two of the three, the
shot begins with a high angle shot of a table laden with
food or drink, with the camera then tracking along the
table. In two of the three, a significant portion of the
shot occurs in a restaurant kitchen. These types of shots
recur throughout the film, which features approximately 20
scenes which include the preparation or consumption of food
or drink. These scenes take place in a variety of
locations, both public and private, and serve various
purposes, from familial to social to business. But all are
interactive. In CeeeEellaa, no one eats alone.

Eating is a central motif in Ceeehellaa, its visual and
thematic recurrence underscoring the familial quality of
Henry Hill's relationship with his fellow mobsters. Since
both CIQQKIYB and The hey Leek Cleh also contain numerous
shots that represent eating, the shots from Ceeehellaa can
be compared with the other two films, with some potential
for isolating gestures and signs which may potentially be
identified as ethnic markers within the film.

One point of comparison has to do with the characters
depicted in the scenes of eating. Except for two scenes,
every scene in Cheeklyn depicts family members eating

together, usually the Carmichael nuclear family.‘3 One

 

” Though a few scenes do show some incidental eating
on the street, involving children, such as the scene where
Troy and her friend make purchases from the ice cream truck.

172
exception is a scene intercut with Woody's recital,
depicting a small celebration of family and friends
occurring after the recital where about seven or eight
people gather around the dining room table in the
Carmichaels' apartment. The other exception is the
reception held in the apartment after Carolyn's funeral,
where food is present. The medium shots which depict Troy's
alliance with her brother Clifford include a table with food
on it in the foreground, but very little eating is actually
done in the entire sequence. A third sequence, which does
involve relatives eating together, is the only instance of
eating a meal that occurs outside the Carmichaels'
apartment, and depicts the Carmichaels being fed in the
kitchen and informal dinette of Clem and Song's suburban
home, before they leave to take Nate to another relative's,
further south. In this scene, interestingly, the boys and
men sit at the table while Troy and Viola, and their mothers
Carolyn and Song, stand behind the counter which separates
table from food preparation area.

Unlike Creeklyn, depictions of eating in both
Ceeehellaa and The hey Leek Cleh are extensive. The hey
Leek Cleh has numerous scenes both of nuclear families
dining together, and of larger gatherings where various
people are present. And of course the entire narrative is
structured as a series of flashbacks emanating from a "real-
time" party where food and eating are dominant visual

motifs. Dining in Ceeehellaa is even more of a communal

173

experience; the only scene of a nuclear family eating alone
occurs early in the film, when young Henry's family eats
dinner together; even there, Henry does not join them,
instead standing at the window to look across the street to
Tuddy's cab stand. In every other instance, either a group
of mobsters eats together or a mixed group of families and
friends eats together. Consequently, it would be difficult
and perhaps inconsequential to compare scenes from the three
films which literally depict the gathering of nuclear
families to eat, since the overall use of eating in the
films only revolves around the nuclear family in the
instance of Czeeklyn. But remembering Bauman's assertion
that communities, and by extension families, can be
provisionally constructed entities as well as biologically
constituted ones, it is possible to compare the three films
on the basis of scenes of eating which involve "families" as
the films themselves construct this entity: in The hey Leek
Cleh being constituted by the extended "family" which
gathers in June's father's apartment for June's "bon voyage"
party, and in Ceeehellaa being constituted by the extended
"family" comprised of the mobsters and their families. As
Karen says at her wedding to Henry, "It was like he had two
families...," meaning his biological family and the "family"
constructed around Paulie Cicero.

One scene of eating which is typical in Ceeehellaa also
provides a basis for analysis and comparison. It is the

second scene of eating in the film, effectively juxtaposed

174
with the first, which involves Henry's nuclear family. Here
as in every subsequent scene of eating, Henry is present.
In this scene he interacts not with his nuclear family but
with his new family, the men who work for the mobster Paulie
Cicero. The scene, a picnic in the yard behind the
cabstand, consists of only three shots. It nominally serves
to illustrate Henry's recollection in voiceover where he
explains that Paulie does all his communicating through
intermediaries or in one-one-one situations, and that he is
paid tribute by hundreds of people in return for
"protection." The visual construction of the scene tells
its own story about Paulie.“

The first shot, like many others in Ceeehellaa,“
begins with a high angle closeup of a table of food. The
camera pans left to right across the table and tilts up
slightly to watch a pair of hands put mustard on a hotdog; a
man walks left to right between camera and hotdog, only his
midsection and hands visible as he carries a drink; the

camera pans left to right following the drink, then stops to

 

“ Kathleen Murphy asserts that a referent for reading
this scene can be found in the movie business itself, which
mirrors the hierarchical structure of Paulie's domain:
"Anyone who's witnessed the protocols of movie direction
will recognize Paulie's style--on the streetcorner and
during the patio picnic where his orders are nodded from
director's chair to his A.D. to 'union man'" ("Made" 27).

“ The shot of young Henry preparing a sandwich in the
private gambling club, the shot in the Bamboo Lounge which
introduces the mobsters, the shot of the meal preparation in
prison, which begins with an extreme close-up of Paulie
slicing garlic with a razor blade.

175
let the drink carrier walk out of the frame to the right,
revealing a row of four occupied chairs against the backdrop
of a green hedge. Three of the chairs are metal garden
chairs; the fourth, upholstered, holds Paulie Cicero, the
subject of the voiceover. The men eat. Someone in a blue
shirt walks between camera and seated men; we only see the
blue-shirted individual from neck to thigh. Tuddy, Paulie's
brother, enters the frame from left, crosses to Paulie, and
whispers. As Tuddy whispers, another (or the same) blue-
shirted person crosses the frame. Tuddy then leaves the
frame at the right.

The second shot is a matching cut, showing Tuddy
entering the frame from the left to confer with the left-
most of three men already in the shot in medium distance,
standing with the house or building behind them. Tuddy
whispers with the other man; someone in a blue shirt walks
between the camera and Tuddy. Tuddy leaves, walks right to
left, and the camera pans with him. He returns to Paulie to
confer, bending to whisper in Paulie's ear; another blue-
shirted person walks by. Tuddy stands erect next to Paulie,
nods in the direction of the other man, and the camera pans
right to show the other man nodding in return. .A pan back
right to left picks up Tuddy walking left to right; the
camera reverses direction and pans left to right with Tuddy
as he finds Henry seated inconspicuously behind the man with
whom Tuddy was earlier talking. Tuddy stoops to whisper to

Henry. Henry rises, comes toward the camera, walks around

176
Tuddy's former interlocutor, and goes up a set of stairs
that lead into the building, leaving the frame at the back
of the frame. The shot ends before Henry is completely out
of the scene. The third shot is a medium shot of Paulie,
still seated between two men visible in the frame. He has a
napkin tucked into his shirt, and he's chewing. The sides
of the frame tighten, excluding the other two men as the
camera zooms in on Paulie. It stops as he is in medium
closeup, the any-space-whatever consisting entirely of the
green hedge behind him. No one, blue-shirted or otherwise,
walks between camera and Paulie now.

The gestures to notice in this scene are of two sorts:
those made by the characters, and those made by the camera.
The things I notice about the characters are these. First,
even though food is consumed, the primary characters are
concerned with business. Paulie eats, but also listens
intently to Tuddy and issues orders accordingly. Tuddy has
no food, only a cigar. Henry too is without food, as is the
nameless man with whom Tuddy confers. Thus food, and
consumption of food, are only a pretext for conducting
business in this scene, and the picnic only a convenient
venue. This is reinforced by the fact that the only people
present are men. Thus the impression created by the
camera's initial attention to the food table is false, or
misdirecting. This same misdirection also occurs in two of
the sequence shots discussed earlier, which begin with

tracking or panning shots across tables of food, but where

177
food really is secondary to business. In fact, in many of
the scenes of Ceeehellaa which are structured around food,
eating is merely a pretext for being together so that
business can be done.

Another thing to notice about the characters is that
their command of space is a clue to the hierarchical quality
of their relationship. Paulie and three others sit; the
others stand. Of those who sit, Paulie's chair is most
substantial. Henry, as the youngest, sits at the periphery
of the action. Tuddy, as Paulie's brother and emissary, has
free access both amongst those sitting and standing, but is
the only one privileged to have Paulie's ear. While there
is some incidental movement in the service of getting food,
most of the men in the yard are stationary.

The gestures of the camera work in concert with those
of the characters, most noticeably in these ways. In the
first shot, while Tuddy exercises his privilege of free
movement, the camera is skeptical of his prerogative; Tuddy
enters the frame at left, while Paulie is centered. The
camera allows this intrusion, but doesn't change its focus;
Paulie remains centered as Tuddy leaves at right. However,
Tuddy's contact with Paulie has empowered him, in the
camera's eye as well. The second shot of the sequence
begins with Tuddy entering the frame from the left, but
Tuddy becomes the primary object within the frame; when he
leaves his conference with the other man, the camera now

follows him as he returns to Paulie, then follows him again

178
as he leaves Paulie to find Henry. When Tuddy gives
Paulie's orders to Henry, the camera recognizes the
importance conferred upon Henry by this action, and follows
Henry until he leaves the frame by going through the door at
its rear. Then the shot ends.

In each of these situations, the camera as observer
decides whom to follow and whom to leave. In this respect,
as in the beginning of the first shot when it initially
misleads the viewer, the camera takes on some of the
functions of thought, as described by Deleuze: "Even when it
is mobile, the camera is no longer content sometimes to
follow the characters' movement, sometimes itself to
undertake movements of which they are merely the object, but
in every case it subordinates description of a space to the
functions of thought" (Cinema_2 23). Deleuze names this
type of cinematic sign the "noosign," the third in a
taxonomy of chronosign (time-image), lectosign (readable
image) and noosign (thinking image). When the camera mimics
the functions of thought, it has left the realm of the
action-image and entered into the province of time.

The third shot in the sequence cements Paulie's primacy
in this scene, cementing as well the realization that eating
is simply a pretext for doing business. The shot begins
with Paulie centered between two other seated figures, but
the thinking camera excludes them through the device of a
slow zoom on Paulie. In this shot, no one (blue-shirted or

otherwise) breaks the camera's gaze; the earlier two shots

179
in the sequence presented choices to the camera, whom to
follow and whom to abandon. This third shot situates Paulie
as the unquestioned controller of the action. After the
zoom it is a medium close-up, an affection-image where the
any-space-whatever surrounding Paulie is the evenly
distributed green of the hedge, unbroken by fence, chair,
people, or any interrupting lines. Paulie's face is not
expressionless, but it is unchanging, giving it the quality
of faceicity, the quality in this case not exactly of
wonder, but of unchanging intensity, of force of will. The
cut to the shot following (which begins a sequence
subsequent to the one under discussion here), one of young
Henry presumably following Paulie's orders given through
Tuddy, shows Henry smashing car windows with a crowbar, thus
bonding the affection-image of Paulie's intensity to the
action that emanates from his force of will.

The signs to be read from this scene, those of food
preparation and serving as a pretext for business,
functional eating, the constructedness of the mob family,
and its hierarchical order, are reinforced by numerous other
scenes in Ceedhellaa. When young Henry fixes a sandwich in
the gambling establishment, the camera sweeps over the food
table but then away from it, as we do the "business" of
meeting Jimmy Conway. When Paulie meets with Sonny, the
owner of the Bamboo Lounge, to discuss Sonny's problems with
Tommy, the setting is a restaurant. They meet over a table,

yet we barely see the table, and no one eats. On two

180
occasions Henry takes his wife and daughters to Paulie's
home for dinner. The table is heaped high with food, but we
only see it in long shot. Again, we don't see anyone
actually eat, but on each occasion we see Paulie take Henry
aside before the meal to discuss matters of business: on the
first occasion the whereabouts of Billy Batts, and on the
second the necessity of Henry's staying away from drug-
dealing. All these examples also demonstrate the
hierarchical deference with which Paulie expects to be, and
is, treated.

The one seeming exception proves the rule. With Billy
Batts' not-yet-dead body in the trunk of Henry's car, Henry,
Tommy and Jimmy stop at Tommy's mother's house for a shovel
in the middle of the night. Tommy's mother (Catherine
Scorsese) surprises them as they enter the house. She
insists they stay while she fixes them a meal. This is the
only scene in Ceeehellaa which depicts extended conversation
taking place across a table, or actually shows consumption
of food over a period of time. Further, there is minimal
camera movement; half of the 24 shots in the sequence are
close-ups of Henry, Jimmy, or Tommy, most of the rest are 2-
or 3-shots across the table, where bread, wine and pasta are
prominently featured. The only business conducted is that
Tommy borrows a large knife from his mother, inventing a
story about hitting a deer and having to extract its foot

from the car's grille. Otherwise, the conversation is

181
spirited and social, concluding with Tommy's mother showing
a painting she has painted.

Here, the camera does not think; instead, it links the
static affection-images of Jimmy, Tommy and Henry, who are
all complicit in Batts' murder. No close-ups of Tommy's
mother intrude in this process. The consumption of food
together, combined with the bondinging of the close-ups,
marks the men as equals rather than in a hierarchical
relationship. More precisely, they are equally complicit in
the flouting of the hierarchy by murdering Billy Batts, an
act which Henry later denies to Paulie that he has any’
knowledge of. Aside from the macabre spectacle of these
three eating the food naively prepared for them by Tommy's
mother while Batts awaits his death in the car trunk
outside, this scene is also remarkable as virtually the only
scene in Ceeehellaa where food consumption occurs in a
context more social than practical or business-oriented;
they eat the food here because Tommy's mother insists on
preparing it for them. As such, it is in defiance of the
pattern for food consumption established in the rest of the
film. This isn't too surprising, since Henry, Jimmy and
Tommy's other behavior here in killing Billy Batts is also
defiant of the hierarchical order of fealty to Paulie Cicero
which they know themselves to be responsible for upholding.

The approach to eating in Creeklyn and The hey Leek
Cleh is in marked contrast to the business-oriented approach

to food consumption which characterizes Ceeehellaa. Like

182
Ceeehellaa, the time for eating in Creeklyn is often
associated with control, but not in the hierarchical manner
of Ceeehellaa. The controller in Creeklyn is Carolyn, the
mother, and the controlled, at least nominally, are the
children. Woody, the father, makes gestures toward
sweetness and peace. Though these generalizations describe
all four of the scenes where the nuclear Carmichael family
eats together, a close examination of one of these scenes
will suffice.

The third of four scenes where the nuclear Carmichael
family gathers around the dining room table is a scene which
lasts for 2 1/2 minutes of screen time, and comprises 64
shots. Except for two of the first three shots in the
scene, none employs any camera movement. The first shot is
a high angle close-up of a plate of blackeyed peas; the
camera then booms down and tilts up to show that Nate, one
of Troy's younger brothers, is seated at the table, staring
at his plate of peas. The next shot shows his mother,
Carolyn, from a low angle, standing next to Nate, demanding
that he eat his peas. The rest of the family has left the
table; in subsequent shots of Nate, the any-space-whatever
sometimes includes a fragment of Joseph, the youngest
brother, or Troy, as they play in the background, out of
focus. Woody enters from the hall, having just returned
from the store with ice cream and cake. The other children
come running to their places at the table; Woody distributes

the treats, despite Carolyn's statement to him that "You

183
know I don't want them eating that junk!" Nate too wants
cake, but is forbidden from having any until the peas are
finished. Woody sets aside a piece for him; when the dog
Muttly snitches Joseph's piece of cake from the table Joseph
complains and Woody gives him another piece. When Nate
protests that it was his piece that Woody gave to Joseph,
Woody reclaims the piece of cake, breaks it in half, and
gives half to Joseph, saving the other half for Nate.
Clifford and Wendell taunt Nate, Clifford drawing a slap on
the head from Carolyn. Carolyn tells Nate again,
exasperatedly, to eat the peas; Woody says "Do like your
mother tells you." Nate then puts a forkful in his mouth
and promptly vomits in his plate. Everybody but Woody
scatters. Nate says "Do I still have to eat my peas?"
Woody replies, "That's ok now. Just go in the bathroom and
get cleaned up." The last shot of the scene is a tight
closeup of Nate looking in Woody's direction, from Woody's
POV .

As with the scene from Ceeehellaa, the gestures made by
the characters and the gestures made by the camera work in
concert to show the power relations within the family, and
the alliances and sympathies which form within those
relationships. The first thing I notice is that, while
everyone else in the scene is mobile, Nate and Carolyn are
not. Nate is confined to his chair until he eats his peas;
Carolyn is the enforcer, standing next to him with her hand

on the back of his chair. Though the camera only moves in

184
the first and third shots of the scene, the camera
nevertheless establishes relations of power and loci of
sympathy. In the third shot, a closeup of Nate, the camera
pans right and tilts up, slightly, following Nate's glance
up towards his mother and situating us on the same plane,
with the same low angle perspective of Carolyn, as Nate.
Every time we see Nate we see him in closeups of varying
distances, a series of affection images. Every time we see
Carolyn, on the other hand, we see her from a low angle
which accentuates her power, but also her unapproachability.
This presentation of Carolyn through low angle shots
continues throughout the scene, in contrast with shots of
Woody which are mostly closeups, always from the same medium
angle as all the shots of Nate and the other children ranged
around the table. Through this visual text, Woody is
aligned with the children as he struggles with Carolyn for
primacy within the family; Also, viewers are aligned with
Woody and the children; numerous shots are explicitly from
Woody's or a child's POV, others implicitly so because of
camera angle. Only two shots are either explicitly or
implicitly from Carolyn's POV, and they occur early in the
sequence: high angle shots of the table with the children
seated around it and Woody parceling out treats. The camera
in this scene is not a "thinking" camera, as with the
noosigns presented in the picnic scene from Ceedhellaa, but

it does present us with "readable" images, or lectosigns,

 

185
readable by virtue of the way shot angle and POV suggest
alliance.

The major characters in the scene are Carolyn, Nate,
and Woody, with Woody and Carolyn in a struggle for primacy,
each employing their own method of child-rearing. The fact
that Troy and Joseph, Clifford and Wendell are here
positioned as spectators rather than participants is
conveyed by the camera through the fact that those four are
always shown either in whole-group shots or in two-shots as
they sit at the table. Carolyn, Nate, and Woody are shown
to be primary characters by the fact that they are
frequently shown in one-shots, often closeups: Nate in 20
one-shots, Carolyn in 9, and Woody in 10. In the cases of
Woody and Nate, these closeups take on the traits of
faceicity, affection-images which display emotions through
"micro-movements of expression" (Cinema 1 90). Carolyn, on
the other hand, is shot from slightly farther away and shows
less variability in her facial expressions, leading to the
conclusion that these are affection-images of faceification
where the "immobile receptive plate" (Cinema 1 90) of her
face testifies to her resolve. Again, these contrasts serve
to demonstrate that the camera builds sympathy for Nate and
Woody, not for Carolyn. This perception is reinforced by
the structural balance of the scene; the closeups of Carolyn
occur early in the scene, and are in balance with the
closeups of Woody as the scene progresses. Closeups of

Woody are more numerous towards the end of the scene, and at

 

186

the very end, after Carolyn literally flees the scene, it
ends with shot/reverse shot closeups of Woody and Nate.
Though Carolyn exercises power throughout by force of will
and prominence of position (she stands at the table while
Woody and the children sit), the alliance which Woody builds
with the children through kindness (provision of treats,
sympathetic treatment of Nate after he vomits) prevails
against Carolyn's toughness and drives her from the field.

The juxtaposition of affection-image closeups in
Ceeehellaa, as Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy ate at Tommy's
mother's house, served to link them as equals in the plot to
kill Billy Batts and thereby defy the hierarchy of the mob.
The juxtaposition of affection-images in the vomit scene in
Creeklyn functions differently, bonding Woody and Carolyn as
combatants over Nate's fate, and ultimately bonding Woody
and Nate as allies. The combative relationship between
Woody and Carolyn is accentuated by their positioning at the
table, on opposite sides from each other, Carolyn next to
Nate so that she can exert physical as well as emotional
control. Her hand rests on the back of his chair, and she
physically restrains him when he reaches for cake. Even
though Woody verbally reinforces Carolyn's insistence that
Nate eat his blackeyed peas, he nonverbally positions
himself as an ally of Nate's, and by extension the other
children, as reflected in the camera angles which align him

this way.

187

The other scenes where the Carmichaels gather for meals
share some of this quality of struggle for primacy and
control in the family. Interestingly, in another type of
eating scene which recurs features one or more of the
children eating while watching TV, food is again imbricated
with conflict. In one, Troy eats Trix. When little brother
Joseph asks for some, she replies "No, you idiot." Older
brother Wendell then steals the box from Troy. In another,
Troy returns from the store with candy and finds her
brothers watching TV. She taunts them with the candy,
prompting Clifford to call her an "evil, flat-chested
wench." She replies, "nigger." Clifford then grabs her bag
of candy. Even scenes which include food incidentally are
imbricated with conflict. Troy steals Clifford's buffalo
head nickel collection, and uses the money to buy ice cream
cones for herself and a friend. Twice, Troy steals from
neighborhood stores. She's caught stealing potato chips;
later, she is not detected stealing a package of meat. Food
is literally used as a weapon when Clifford first shoots
aerosol Dream Whip directly into his mouth as a snack, then
shoots some onto his hand to rub it on Troy's face. In all
of these ways, the association of food and conflict, food
and control of others, is reinforced in Creeklyn.

Eating in Ceeehellaa is a pretext for business; in
Czeeklyn it is a pretext for exercising control. In The hey
Leek Cleh, by contrast, eating functions in such a variety

of ways that it is difficult to generalize. Its depiction

188
is consistent, though, with the narrative structure of the
film discussed earlier in this chapter: eating in The hey
Leek Cleh is the pretext for the narrative itself, in the
sense that the narrative is structured as a series of
flashback stories circulating around the hub of June's bon
voyage party, at which eating plays a primary, celebratory
role. While many of the flashbacks also include scenes of
eating, most times in situations where families eat
together, or entertain guests, the "master meal" of the
film, the current-time party scene, is both pervasive and
typical, making it the scene that it makes the most sense to
examine.

Actually, the party scene is presented in six scenes,
alternated with flashbacks: 1) greeting of guests and
preparation of food; 2) the mah-jongg game; 3) serving of
main courses; 4) end of main courses, presentation of
dessert (cake); 5) serving of cake; 6) champagne, toast to
June, guests leave. These six scenes take just over 15
minutes of screen time, and are recorded in 79 shots,
including 22 which are either static closeups over the mah-
jongg table, or shot/reverse shot between June and Lindo at
the end of the final party scene. Many of the 57 remaining
shots are lengthy sequence shots, where the camera slowly
tracks and pans through the apartment. These numbers become
more striking when compared with the numbers for the dinner
(vomit) scene from Cheeklyn analyzed above, which took 2 1/2

minutes of screen time to present 64 shots, almost all from

189
a static camera, a large proportion of them closeups.
Though The hey Leek Cleh uses a great number of static
closeups during the flashback sequences, as noted earlier,
to highlight issues of personal identity contextualized by
identity as Chinese American, the only extended sequences of
static closeups that occur in the party scenes are the
aforementioned mah-jongg and shot/reverse shot sequences.
The sequence shots include a number of closeups, but always
temporary, as the camera keeps moving, contextualizing them.
Initially, then, the presentation of the party scenes has
more in common with the look of the picnic scene discussed
in Ceeehellaa than with the dinner (vomit) scene from
Creeklyn; It differs from the picnic scene, though, in that
the camera engages in minimal "thinking," and is never
duplicitous. Camera movement is typically motivated by
following the movements of a primary character, who is then
kept central in the frame. An alternative motivation for
camera movement is to situate a character as a member of a
group of characters: a pan across a line of women, or a slow
zoom out from a closeup of an individual to show the larger
group are typical examples of camera movement as
contextualizing device.

An examination of one of the party scenes will serve as
an illustration of the way all of them work, with the
gestures of the characters mirrored by the gestures of the
camera in constructing both the sense of the extended family

and their ethnicity, and in contrast to the gestures of

190
characters and camera in Ceeehellaa and Cneeklyn. The third
party scene follows the set of flashbacks which feature
Lindo's girlhood in China, her relationship with her
daughter Waverly as a child, and her more recent tensions
with Waverly as a grown daughter. As with other party
scenes that follow flashbacks, this one begins with a
closeup of the person whose flashback we've just seen,
' Lindo, shoulders and head only. In the any-space-whatever
are fragments of people in a small group behind her; a
portion of the chandelier hanging above the dining room
table is included at the top of the frame. This affection-
image is one of faceification, as Lindo is lost in thought;
it is only on-screen for a few seconds, supplanted by the
second shot, a sequence shot which begins by reinforcing the
contextualization implied by the any-space-whatever of the
first shot. Lindo stands facing the camera at the left of
the frame, her son-in-law Rich is seated to her left, her
daughter Waverly is seated to his left. The group of four
people standing behind Lindo are less prominent within the
frame, but clearly visible and in focus. The food on the
table is within-frame in the foreground. Rich maneuvers
with chopsticks, an allusion to a scene of his chopstick-
ineptness in the flashback. Here he lifts a piece of meat,
gets everyone's attention for his accomplishment, then drops
it, occasioning laughter. Lindo walks screen right, the
camera panning with her, revealing other guests in pairs and

trios, June's father standing, and June seated at the end of

191
the table. Lindo walks behind June's father, then behind
June. June passes food to another seated person, then says
"Here's a fork." Simultaneously Lindo, back to the camera,
receives a platter heaped with vegetables and rice from An
Mei. With a "ta da!" she places the platter in front of
June, to the accompaniment of ooh's and aah's from others in
the room. Composition is now a medium angle two shot, with
Lindo and June in the center of the frame, others less
prominent. Lindo uses chopsticks to place food on June's
dish; when June protests, Lindo says "Whatsa matta? Guest
of honor! Should eat more. Too skinny." The third shot of
the sequence is a cut-in shot, the reaction of Ying Ying and
Ah Mei, medium angle, with the chandelier at the top of the
frame and fragments of other guests in focus in the any-
space-whatever. An Mei says to Ying Ying, "June so happy.
Going to China." The fourth shot completes the take of June
and Lindo, same angle, distance, and guests in the any-
space-whatever as previously, with Lindo still piling food
on June's plate, saying "Only steamed. Can't make you fat,"
and June smiling, putting her hand to her face, shaking her
head resignedly. The fifth shot returns to An Mei and Ying
Ying in the same medium angle two shot, with An Mei
remarking how terrible it is that Suyuan died before being
able to see her daughters in China. At that, Ying Ying
turns away from An Mei and toward the doorway behind her.
The final shot in the sequence maintains the continuity, as

Ying Ying, in frame from the waist up, completes the turn

 

 

192
and takes a couple steps toward the camera. Momentarily,
she is framed by a shaft of light; the other guests in the
any-space-whatever are out of focus. She then leans against
the door frame, which creates a vertical of red at the left
of the screen. In leaning, she leaves the shaft of light.
She looks past the camera, vacantly. Her voice, in
voiceover, speaks the words "Only one thing is worse..." and
the voiceover continues as her flashback begins.

The gestures of the characters in this scene, as in the
other party scenes in the film, testify to their sense of
connection with one another and their acceptance of one
another, ethnically as well as individually. At least for
the length of this party, they form a family/community
characterized by acceptance and mutual fondness. Two of
these gestures hinge on consumption of food, which in
contrast to Ceeehellaa is a focus of activity here, and in
contrast to Creeklyn is an activity which signifies
togetherness rather than strife. One such gesture is Rich's
fumbling with the chopsticks, a marker of his non-Chinese
status which he acknowledges by being proud of his temporary
prowess, and which everyone else forgives by laughing with
him when he fumbles their use once more. The other such
gesture is June's acceptance of Lindo's insistence that she
take more of the featured dish, even after June protests.
Again, polite laughter signifies acceptance. These two
incidents are also replete with markers of ethnicity: the

chopsticks, the food, the appearance of Lindo, Waverly,

193
June, An Mei, June's father, and some of the guests, which
contrast with the Caucasian appearance of Rich and other
guests. The potential for division or mistrust which this
realization creates is muted, or erased, by at least three
gestural factors: the laughter, the fact that conversations
seem to proceed freely without recognition of racial
differences, and the fact that all of the guests are
connected through their expensive, conservatively styled
clothing and jewelry. The apartment too is tastefully and
conservatively furnished and appointed, and as eclectically
as the guest list is composed: Chinese art on the walls,
elegant English dining room furniture, and in one shot, a
television set showing a football game.

Another way in which this scene resonates with others
in which food is central is that times of eating are sites
for sharing of communal knowledge, or passing on of family
wisdom. Rich's fumbling with the chopsticks suggests that
he has something to learn about the mechanics of using these
tools, but the fact that he's still trying, and calls
attention to his momentary mastery, shows that he accepts
the importance of learning this skill as a marker of
togetherness and acceptance. This superficial incident
recalls a more significant lesson Rich learned earlier, in
the Lindo flashback sequence, where Waverly introduced Rich
to her family at a dinner party given by Lindo. At that
meal, too, Rich bungled the use of chopsticks, but he

committed a much more serious gaffe by failing to understand

194
that when Lindo criticized her own cooking, that was a
signal for the others present to praise it. When he said
"All it needs is a little soy sauce," pouring the sauce on
the dish simultaneously, he inadvertently insulted Lindo,
making a poor impression on his prospective mother-in-law.
His obtuseness marks his status as an ethnic outsider; the
occasion of eating is both a site of ethnic demarcation, and
a locus for learning what it takes to be an insider.

This resonates with one of the culminating scenes of
the film. The three previous flashbacks have revolved
around the surviving members of The Joy Luck Club--Lindo,
Ying Ying, and An Mei. Logically, the last would be
Suyuan's, but it must be presented through the filter of
June. She remembers events surrounding Suyuan's last
Chinese New Year's celebration, an event she celebrated by
serving an elaborate dinner to her family, Lindo's family,
and other guests. The featured dish was snow crab. During
dinner, Waverly embarrassed and humiliated June by revealing
that Waverly's high-powered business associates were not
satisfied with some freelance writing that June had done for
the company. Waverly asserts that June's writing is
"unsophisticated," and implies that June is unsophisticated
herself. To ease the tension, Suyuan makes a remark that
appears to accept Waverly's assessment of her daughter.
Later, while they are cleaning up in the kitchen, June
confronts her mother with the embarrassment and pain that

Suyuan's remark caused her. Suyuan uses the occasion to

195
teach June a lesson about self-respect. She points out at
dinner, June took an inferior piece from the platter of snow
crab, but that Waverly had no qualms in helping herself to
the "best quality" crab. The lesson is that June's lack of
respect for herself is a greater problem than any lack of
respect she might receive from others. Again, as so often
in this film, a dinner is both the site and the means for
passing on family and communal knowledge, as well as a sense
of ethnic identity. Like the narrative itself, these
lessons build in force because of their dispersal and
circularity, as they are woven into the various flashbacks
and party scenes.

A final factor to consider in the third party scene is
the way the visual construction of the scene is integrally
connected with the presentation of family and ethnicity.
This can be seen by contrasting the visual presentation of
this scene with that of the scenes discussed from Ceeehellaa
and Smokin-

As noted earlier, the party scene seems to have more in
common with the picnic scene from Ceeehellaa than with the
dinner (vomit) scene from QIQQEIYD- With all the shots in
the scene from Cneeklyn being static, and many of them
closeups or tight two shots, the sensations created are
those of tension, claustrophobia, and a struggle for
control. The greatest control in the scene is created by
the camera, which not only rigidly controls what we see by

keeping the frame filled with closeups and tight two-shots,

196
but also controls what we think about the subjects through
the implicit identification and sympathy created through
camera angle and POV. The number of shots in the scene also
control viewer response, since both the scene's rhythm and
its effects are under the control of the editor; the
juxtaposition of images enhances the sense of conflict.

By contrast, the scene from The hey Leek Cleh is much
less manipulative. The closeups in the scene, whether
static, stand-alone closeups or momentary elements of
sequence shots, are always contextualized by fragments of
figures of people in the any-space-whatever surrounding the
subject of the closeup. The effect of closeups in Cneeklyn
was to isolate the individual from the other characters, and
intensify the sense of conflict through shot/reverse shot
editing. Even the closeups in The hey Leek Cleh do not
isolate, but situate the characters within family, and
community--a community which is identified by ethnic markers
yet open to otherness as well. Further, unlike the closeup
in Ceeehellaa which accentuated Paulie's power, the closeups
of individuals in The hey Leek Cleh disperse attention even
while focusing it. The first and last shots in the sequence
are closeups, yet people in conversation are seen clearly in
the any-space-whatever behind Lindo and out of focus in the
any-space-whatever behind Ying Ying. The closeup gives
momentary primacy to the foregrounded character, but it is

impermanent and non-hierarchical.

197

This same oscillation between individual primacy and
communal identification characterizes the long sequence shot
which follows Lindo-from one end of the table to the other.
Conceptually, it is similar to numerous sequence shots
throughout The hey Leek Cleh, where the motivation for the
tracking or panning is to follow the movement of a single
character, granting her primacy as the movement of the
camera breaks down and reforms the information within the
frame. unlike the sequence shots in the picnic scene in
Ceeehellaa, the camera does not make decisions about which
character to follow: it stays with the one granted primacy
initially. Yet the saturation of the frame with large
amounts of other visual information, in this case the table,
the food, the other party-goers, and the slow pace of the
pan or tracking motion, combine to give us alternative
points of focus. The character being followed is granted
primacy through that act, but is sometimes almost incidental
within the entirety of the frame. Individual identity is
situated communally; the camera both grants primacy and
disperses it through the flow of the sequence shot. The
shot is not a noosign, the camera making decisions and
forcing them on us, but a lectosign, a readable image which
because of its saturation leaves us much latitude in
deciding where to focus and how to read the shot. One
example of this latitude is the way that the inclusion of a
number of Caucasian guests can be read as a gesture of

ethnic openness and inclusivity, but needs to be read

198
against and contextualized by the markers of complication of
ethnic identification such as the artwork on the walls, the
nature of the food, Lindo's truncated English, the mingling
of chopsticks with forks, and the physical appearance which
marks some party guests as Chinese, just as others are
Caucasian, and one is African American.

The gestures of the characters and the gestures of the
camera in We Crooklyn. and The Joy Leek 9.11.22. and
the contrasts and comparisons between those gestures as
examined in each film in scenes of eating, reveal much about
the way each film text situates itself with respect to
issues such as individual identity, family and communal
identity, ethnicity, interpersonal conflict, and
hierarchical or dispersed social formations. Because these
issues of theme and idea are presented visually as well as
verbally, they open themselves to analysis of the way the
visual presentation creates a pre-perceptual, affective
context for reception of these themes and ideas. The use of
Gilles Deleuze's analytical tools, as developed in Cinema 1
and Cinema 2, is an entry point for examining with precision
the visual presentation of these films, and the affective

and pre-perceptual effects of that presentation.

CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSION

What are the signs of ethnicity, or racial identity, in
film? Most prominent are the faces and features of the
characters portrayed. But this is only a beginning, and an
insufficient one. Even though the blaxploitation films of
the 1970s were peopled by African Americans, it could hardly
be claimed that they were ethnically or racially
representative. They simply represented a calculated effort
on the part Of their financiers to make money by exploiting
Black fantasies, irrespective of the question of the

integrity of the films' portrayals of African Americans.“

 

“ Jesse Algeron Rhines succinctly explains the genesis
and eventual demise of the blaxploitation film: "From 1969
through the mid-19708, white-owned distribution companies
released an average of fifteen films per year featuring
blacks as strong, sexually charged characters frequently at
war with traditional American society. Although aimed at
black audiences, many of these films were written, produced,
and directed by whites. Their low production costs and high
profit ratios helped distributors prosper, but blockbusters
like Ihg_§gdfiathg; and Ih§_Exgxgi§;,, released in the same
period, demonstrated that African- Americans on screen were
not needed to bring African-Americans into movie theaters.
Neither of these films featured black characters, yet one-
third of the domestic box office was from black communities.
Since black dollars flowed as easily or, in fact, more
easily to such blockbusters than to black exploitation
films, black-oriented films were soon virtually abandoned.
Between 1975 and 1985 the theatrical release of films by
African-Americans, or films featuring African-Americans in
significant roles, averaged fewer than two a year.

199

200
The Charlie Chan films, while peopled with Asian faces (or
Caucasians made up to look like Asians), were not
representative of an Asian American perspective. More
recent films have featured ethnically diverse casts, but
they often serve only to create the impression of diversity
without offering any genuine complexity or greater
understanding of ethnic diversity or identity.

A more credible marker of ethnicity in a film is the
sensibility of the writers or directors responsible for the
themes dealt with and the manner in which they are depicted.
Thus, directors like Spike Lee, John Singleton, or Melvin
Van Peebles are assumed to provide an authentically African
American filmic perspective. Ang Lee, John Woo, or Wayne
Wang, by virtue of their names as well as their ethnic
heritage, become the critics' touchstones for Asian and
Asian American perspectives in film. John Ford is
identified with an Irish American perspective, Woody Allen
with a Jewish American perspective, Martin Scorsese with an
Italian American perspective.‘7 But this approach too
elides a number of significant questions. What is meant by
ethnicity, and how is that concept different from race? How

does one's ethnicity intersect with one's sense of personal

 

Distributors were content to focus on big—budget films with
special effects and bankable stars" (38).

” See, for example, Lester D. Friedman, 3911nggg15
1m§g§_gfi_;hg_ggu, New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1982, Patricia
Erens,Ih§_Q§__1g1Am§11gan_Q1n§ma,Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1984; Lee Lourdeaux, 1W1;
America, Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990.

201
identity? Can claims of ethnicity or ethnic representation
be made in a vacuum, or must the work of one director or
writer be compared with the work of others, in order to
create a context where such claims can be examined? How do
these questions bear on the way we read films which appear
to address issues of ethnicity?

According to Lester D. Friedman, there is an "enduring
conflict between those who conceive of ethnicity and
cultural identity as a predetermined, immutable condition
beyond circumstances and rational control, and those who
view ethnicity and cultural identity as a self-determined,
changeable condition subject to situations and personal
taste" ("Celluloid" 18). In making this observation,
Friedman acknowledges that this binary opposition echoes the
implication of Werner Sollors' title, Beyond Ethnigigyi
Consent and Descent in American m. that ethnicity is
both a cultural heritage and a choice, and that "most
conceptions of ethnicity negotiate a compromise of varying
degrees between these extreme positions" ("Celluloid" 19).
Peter Feng suggests that the appellation "Asian American,"
referring as it does to a variety of ethnicities, extends
the concept of ethnicity in yet a different direction--the
political: "'Asian American' is not a cultural term at all,
nor even an ethnic label, but rather the name of a coalition
of Americans who have come to realize that their political
situation——determined in part by how Asians are seen by

outsiders--requires them to act together" ("In Search" 33).

202

This political dimension to the question of ethnic identity
has, at some time or other, characterized the self-
definition of most other American ethnicities as well. As
Ella Shohat explains, "ethnicity does not constitute a fixed
entity or category expressing a natural, essential
difference, but rather a changing set of historically
diverse experiences situated within power relations" (216).

Recent studies in the representation of ethnicity in
American film have stressed this cultural, political
dimension. Focussing on the filmic presentation of
ethnicity as otherness, and the tacit pressure of those so
defined as "other" to assimilate, Gina Marchetti asserts
that "Hollywood has the power to define difference, to
reinforce boundaries, to reproduce an ideology which
maintains a certain status quo. Although organized protests
always exist as a last resort, the means to challenge
Hollywood's hegemony over the representation of race and
ethnicity remain elusive...Access to the industry also
exists, but entrance demands a tacit agreement to
assimilate, at least to a certain degree, with the dominant
culture" (278). Thus directors like Spike Lee, Wayne Wang,
and Martin Scorsese exist in a state of liminality, dealing
on the one hand with the economic and social pressures to
present racial and ethnic images which mesh with the
Hollywood "tacit agreement to assimilate," and on the other
with the political and personal reasons they have for

producing images of race and ethnicity which meet their own

203
standards of verisimilitude. The accuracy of such
representations is always open to question, as is the socio-
political motivation for the production of these images.

The positional liminality of ethnically identified
directors such as Lee, Wang, and Scorsese manifests itself
in another way as well. Both through the operation of
Hollywood stereotyping and through the operation of self-
definition, directors like Lee, Wang, and Scorsese are
identified as "hyphenated" Americans: African[-]American,
Chinese[-] or Asian[-]American, and Italian[-]American.‘a
As Peter Feng notes, "To claim a hyphenate identity is to
assert a subject position while simultaneously asserting the
impossibility of stable positioning" ("Being" 93). The
subject position asserted by the hyphenate director is of
necessity one situated on a border, oscillating between the
stance of Hollywood insider necessary to finance film
projects and secure distribution, and the stance of

spokesperson for a particular ethnic perspective, unlikely

 

“ I bracket the hyphens to acknowledge that the hyphen
itself is the subject of current debate. I have not used it
in this study because of its visual suggestion of
disjuncture between the ethnicity and the Americanness of
the person being represented. In Peter Feng's words, "the
hyphenate term itself...critiques the discourse of identity
and labeling. The hyphen, while yoking two terms together
on the page, emphasizes the inadequacy of either term;
furthermore, as the hyphen strains to hold the terms
together and apart, it denies the creation of a stable third
term in the space between the two. The strength of the
hyphenate term then is the way in which it foregrounds the
inadequacy of its discursive construction" ("Being" 93).

For further discussion, see Peter Feng's "The Politics of
the Hyphen," gingaggg 21:1-2 (Winter-Spring 1995): 33.

204
to be understood or valued within the Hollywood
infrastructure. Lee, Wang and Scorsese have all
acknowledged, to some extent, their positionality on the
cusp of the hyphen.

The tension of liminality, a felt quality of ethnically
identified directors themselves, is also a state of being
for ethnicities in general, and as such becomes a thematic
paradigm for at least some of the films of these directors.
In Jungle Beyer, for example, Spike Lee creates a storyline
where the love affair between an African American man and an
Italian American woman, though passionate on an
interpersonal level, cannot be sustained because of the lack
of social support each experiences when they deviate from
norms imposed on them by ethnicity, race and class. Both
Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) and Angie Tucci (Annabella
Sciorra) seek and find a small measure of support and
understanding from their close friends, but not enough to
sustain them. The wider context of the film amply
demonstrates the social atmosphere of racial/ethnic
intolerance and misunderstanding which exist in their
respective neighborhoods of Harlem and Bensonhurst, dooming
their cross-racial and cross-cultural relationship. As
Henry Louis Gates observes, "Jungle Eege; shows how
overdetermined interracial contact is in American society—-
overdetermined by hundreds of years of exploitation,

mythology, and pseudoscience" (169).

205

Yet Jungle Eeye; is not simply a story of racism. Its
more subtle message is that interracial connections occur,
and that the highly nuanced dynamics of such relationships
are not adequately explained by simple revelations of racism
in society. As Gates says, "[the film] also shows that
social categories like 'black' and 'white' are not mutually
exclusive, either, that the supposed cultural and
psychological barrier between black and white ethnic
Americans...is just one more myth of American racism.

Jungle Eeye; shows that the relationship between black and
white in America is one of endless fascination and cultural
and social interpenetration...Jungle £e1e2--perhaps destined
to be misinterpreted as one more film about white racism--is
actually a brilliant exploration of the liminal space that
connects, rather than divides, black America with white"
(169). Though Spike Lee has often consciously chosen to
frame his films with little or no reference to white America
(MMHMIL Milan. mm. W).
films such as Jungle Eexe; reveal his own liminality, his
own desire and ability to explore the subtleties of the
spaces between the absolutes of black and white, where
traces of each mingle with the Other.

As explored earlier, the films of Wayne Wang also
display this positional quality of liminality, particularly
as it relates to the spaces between the categories of
Chinese and American, both as descriptors of cultures and as

descriptors of individuals such as Jo and Steve in Chan 15

206

M1ee1ng. As in Jungle Eezex, the initial notion of the
fixity of ethnic identity in Chan 15 M1ee1ng is interrogated
and broken down, showing it rather to be a dynamic,
rhizomically changing, process of becoming. As Peter Feng
puts it, "Wayne Wang's films explore the contradictions of
Chinese American identity and in so doing propose a space
for Asian American subjectivity. Chen 1e,M1ee1ng takes the
interrogation of identity as its central project, presenting
a variety of perspectives on Chan Hung from a variety of
puddles...Whereas each character [in the film] fixes Chan
Hung in an attempt to fix her/his own identity, the
spectator is not allowed to occupy any one of these fixed
perspectives but must instead negotiate all of them"
("Being" 110). With no fixed vantage point, but instead
with a rhizomatically connected inquiry which builds its own
logic as it unfolds, Chan 15 M1ee1ng demonstrates the
quality of liminality which Wang's films share with Lee's.

Wang's other Chinese American films also display this
liminality. Bet a_Eeul ef Tee, a story of the difficulties
faced by a post—Second World War Chinese bride as she
attempts to adapt to her Chinese American husband's frantic
business life and consequent neglect of their relationship,
explores the frictions that occur and the fissures that
develop as traditional Chinese expectations get lost in the
translation to a new context in New York. As examined
earlier, the de-centered narrative of Ine Jey Luek,glun is a

study in shifting perspective, the liminal quality of

207
uncertainty held in suspension, again, between the cultures
of the Chinese past and the American present.

This narrative liminality, the de-centeredness of
storyline that characterizes The Jey Luek Cluh, is also
evident in the three Wang films to date that are not
specifically Chinese American: Slemganee, Smeke, and Blue 1n
the Eaee. In Slendenee, the narrative makings of a

conventional murder mystery are rendered unconventional by
the ambiguity and uncertain positionality of Drood (Tom
Hulce), the main character. It may be fairly conventional
for the narrative structure to keep the audience in suspense
as to whether the character is a murderer or not, but
Drood's liminality is not only an uncertainty in our eyes,
but in his own as well. He genuinely occupies the space
between criminal and victim, not only in the audience's
(lack of) understanding, but in his own. In Smeke, the
liminal positionality is also a matter of narrative de-
centering, but more in the manner of The Jey Luek Cluh.
Like The Jey Luek Cluh, the narrative structure of Smeke is
fractured into multiple stories, each announced at its
beginning with the name of a particular character. The
narratives are connected by the characters' associations
with one another. They find their physical point of
commonality in a Brooklyn cigar store, but the stories do
not add up to a conventional narrative. Even though overt
issues of ethnicity are not on the surface of Smehe, its

narrative structure suggests the liminal positionality which

208
I here associate with Wang's ethnic perspective. Blue 1n
;he Eeee, an even more fractured and episodic film, exhibits
many of the same characteristics.

As with Lee and Wang, Martin Scorsese's liminal
positionality as an ethnically-identified filmmaker has been
often remarked upon. In fact, it is rare to see an article
about Scorsese in the popular press which does not reach to
connect his filmmaking to his personal history and
.ethnicity, even though many of his films do not thematically
invite this connection. Lee Lourdeaux's comment is fairly
typical: "Scorsese's canon, when compared to Francis
Coppola's, is far less ambivalent about the tensions between
the Italian and American halves of his identity. The films
set in Little Italy primarily treat conflicts within Italian
American culture, conflicts that Coppola never had to face.
The films set outside Little Italy, all narratives of
seeming Anglo conformity, do not so much erase Italian
culture as place it in strong ethnic parentheses. (Even the
nonethnic housewife in Al1ee Beeenlh L1ye Heze Anymexe has
kitchen curtains decorated with tiny eggplants, intimate
signs of Italian culture)" (219).

I have earlier considered these "conflicts of Italian
American culture," as they are played out in Mean SLIEQLS.
As with Wang and Lee, though, Scorsese's hyphenated
positionality is not only a matter of themes, but also a
matter of stance, occupying the liminal space of being in-

between, in process, in motion. Perhaps no film of

209
Scorsese's shows this more clearly than $331 Dr1ver, where
Travis Bickle's meandering, voiced-over musings are visually
augmented by the constant motion of his taxi through the
streets of New York. As in Ceegzellee, the constant motion
of Travis' cab is echoed and reinforced by the motion of
Scorsese's camera, another sign of the fluid and unfixed
nature of this film. Leslie Stern suggests this sense of
motion and restlessness in her description of the opening
shots of 1331 Bz1ye1: "Out of the night the bumper of a
yellow cab emerges like the snout of a huge beast rising up
out of some subterranean lair. It edges into shot [sic]
filling the frame, accompanied by a dramatic soundtrack.
This curiously oblique introduction inaugurates a sequence
of restless images, a sequence that signifies compulsive
aimlessness...We are cruising, gliding in a lateral track
next to the pavement; people on the street move in slow
motion, like the living dead" (47).

The stance of Iex1 Br1xe; is continuously liminal. It
does not only exist in in-between space, but as Robert
Kolker suggests, "exists only within its own space, a space
which is itself formed by the state of mind of its central
character, in that strange double perception in which we see
the world the way the character sees it, but see as well the
character himself and therefore perceive and judge his
perceptions" (228). In Kolker's formulation, 1:31 Bx1ge;
implicates us as spectators in the liminality which

characterizes Travis, and by extension the world of the

210
film. Though Kolker makes no reference here to ethnicity or
race, his formulation sounds much like W.E.B. DuBois's
explanation of the liminal situation of the African
American, the "double consciousness" referred to in Chapter
2 in my discussion of Chen 1e_u1ee1ng, the circumstance of
seeing oneself through the filter of another's perceptions.

In its liminality, Iex1 Bg1ye; demonstrates how
Scorsese's sensibility works in concert with the liminal
condition of ethnicity, even in one of the films which
Lordeaux would identify as one of Scorsese's "narratives of
seeming Anglo conformity." In the works of Lee and Wang as
well as Scorsese, I have traced here the trope of liminality
as a mark of ethnic sensibility in a conventional manner,
turning to the work of other critics to demonstrate how they
too identify this trait as a sign of ethnicity in the films
of these directors, explicitly or implicitly. This will get
us to a certain point, but no farther.

The shortcomings of the method employed above are at
least two. First, this approach conflates the positionality
of the film with the positionality of the director in a
manner which makes it virtually impossible to untangle the
two. Thus, in discussing the ethnicity of Scorsese's films
(or Lee's, or Wang's) it becomes necessary to discuss the
ethnicity of Scorsese (or Lee, or Wang) himself. This
eueeu11e; approach to film analysis is particularly rampant
in the popular press, but consistently appears in academic

analysis as well. Critics and scholars often seem to assume

211
that, before the analysis of any particular film is anything
more than provisional, the director must be asked about his
or her intention in making the film. In the analyses I have
made in previous chapters, I have consciously kept to a
minimum any reference to the director himself, or to the
director's intentions for the film.

A related shortcoming is expressed by Paul Schrader,
who notes the neglect of serious critical consideration of
style. In his classic essay "Notes on Film Noir," Schrader
says that "American critics have always been slow on the
uptake when it comes to visual style...[they have] been
sociologists first and scientists second" (225). Schrader
explains that such critics have seen style only as a vehicle
for the theme, or idea, of a film, rather than adopting
Schrader's view that "style determines the theme in every
film" (225). Though Schrader's "Notes" was first published
over 20 years ago, and his comments do not account for
numerous strands of film criticism to appear since his
essay, the comments in some ways still ring true today.
Style, when referred to in contemporary critique, too often
is viewed as a support system for narrative and theme,

rather than a central element in molding viewer response.‘9

 

“ Schrader's reference to "American" critics seems to
implicate primarily the auteurists of the Andrew Sarris
variety, whose adaptation of the theories of the cahiers du
Cinema critics of the 19503 to scrutiny of Hollywood
production elevated studio directors such as John Ford and
Howard Hawks to the status of auteur. My only assertion
here is that the auteurist impulse still thrives. This is
not to deny, but only to bracket, such contributions as

212

I have chosen to consider the way that the theme, or
idea, of "community" is portrayed in the films discussed in
this study by considering, broadly, the way this idea is
communicated through visual style, or, more accurately,
through the images and signs which constitute the cinema.
Thus the title, images of community. The term image is
itself ambiguous, denoting both a linguistic trope and a
visual representation. It would be easy to allow this
sliding signifier to oscillate between these two denotations
(perhaps I have unwittingly done so on occasion), but
primarily through the use of the concepts, the vocabulary,
and the set of tools provided by Gilles Deleuze's taxonomy
and explication of the images and signs of cinema, I have
attempted to approach the theme of "community" through an
analysis of its representation by these images and signs.
The use of the particular theme, "community", allows for a
comparative dimension to the study: in examining the ways
that images of community are constructed in the films of
Lee, Scorsese and Wang, I use Deleuze to consider
similarities and differences. This allows me to avoid
operating from any essentialized definition or preconception
of ethnicity, but instead to use Deleuze to note the
similarities and account for the differences among these

three directors in order to provisionally offer a reading of

 

Stephen Heath's (post)structuralist analyses in the British
journal Bereen, or Laura Mulvey's feminist application (also
in Screen) of psychoanalytic theory to posit the camera's,
and thus the spectator's, phallocentric gaze.

213

how the images produced in their films manifest an ethnicity
which emanates from their image and sign structure, as well
as from the intention of the director and the thematic
impact of the dialogue or narrative trajectory.

Of course, many of the images created by Lee,
Scorsese and Wang are quite typical of the filmmaking
tradition in which they work, the tradition of Hollywood.
Scorsese, particularly, acknowledges his debt to the
tradition, and makes extensive reference to it both in
interviews about his filmmaking, and in reflexive references
within the films themselves.50 The tools of cinema develop
through technical and artistic advances, and certainly Lee,
Scorsese, and Wang have made their contributions in this
respect, but it is not their contributions to this
advancement which primarily concern me here. Rather, their

use of the tools available to them, and their permutations

 

” Examples abound, such as Scorsese's insertion of
clips from John Ford's W in W or
J R '8 discussion of W in Wm?

Scorsese is copious in acknowledging the influence of
earlier filmmakers such as Michael Powell, whose The_geg
Bheee is identified by Lesley Stern as an influence
throughout Eeg1ng_Bull. And, of course, Cene_£ee; is a re-
make, clearly an indication that Scorsese sees himself as
part of the Hollywood tradition while at the same time not
bound by it. Spike Lee has not been nearly so vocal and
specific about the influences on his work, and has been
specifically critical of a tradition which he sees as an
expression of a dominant society that marginalizes African
American filmmakers. Yet he too employs clips from other
films in Cgeehlyn. Wayne Wang's clearest acknowledgment of
the Hollywood tradition comes in Chen_1e_u1ee1ng, where the
title and the narrative premise are both ironic
reappropriations of the Asian American image from the old
Hollywood series of Charlie Chan movies.

214
of those tools, provide a basis for analysis, for
comparison, and potentially, for speculation about whether a
particular use of these tools, in contrast to the use by
another or other directors, might constitute an imagistic or
signatory mark of ethnicity which is imbricated with or even
precedes the narrative and thematic evidences of ethnicity.
As detailed in previous chapters, it is in the service of
this particular approach that Deleuze's analysis provides a
mechanism for analysis and comparison.

To approach the images of ethnicity in the work of
these filmmakers through Deleuze is particularly fruitful
because of Deleuze's framework, that cinema is "a
composition of images and of signs, that is, a pre-verbal
intelligible content" (Cinema I ix). The effect on the
viewer of "the images of the cinema [is], therefore,
'automatic...'" (Cinema 1 ix), meaning that our first
experience of the image is its pre-perceptual apprehension
through the operation of our central nervous system. We
experience cinema first with our bodies, through the
absorption of sensation, and only after that with our minds.
Much of film criticism and theory elides this pre-perceptual
point of origination and begins further up the line,
analyzing cinema as it engages us intellectually, through
narrative and theme. According to Steven Shaviro, such an
approach suggests that "percept and affect must be
subordinated to textuality and the Law of the

signifier...[film theory] endeavors to subdue and regulate

215
the visual, to destroy the power of images, or at least to
restrain them within the bounds of linguistic discursivity
and patriarchal Law" (16). But the nature of cinema itself
militates against being understood this way: "...perception
can no longer be subsumed under reflective consciousness, or
under cognition and judgment; instead, it marks a limit
beyond which these can never extend. Sensation is
disengaged from the transcendental conditions that are
supposed to ground and organize it, as from the referential
coordinates that allow us to locate and preserve it. Sheer
appearance precedes any possible act of recognition; film
shows before it says" (Shaviro 28). In this context,
Shaviro notes, Godard's famous comment about Weekend, that
"what is presented is not blood, but merely the color red,"
serves as a defining example: "The immediacy of the image
short-circuits the processes of signification, while its
simulacral incorporeality precludes any objective reference"
(Shaviro 27).

Neither Shaviro nor Deleuze, of course, was the first
to recognize that the imagistic nature of film, as well as
its de—centered, spatially non—sequential manner of
construction through editing, would affect the viewer pre-
perceptually. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," Walter Benjamin comments that "the
distracting element of [film] is also primarily tactile,
being based on changes of place and focus which periodically

assail the spectator...The spectator's process of

216
association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by
their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock
effect of the film..." ("Work" 238). While both Benjamin
and Shaviro notice this sensory "shock effect," though,
Deleuze's contribution, and my reason for using his insights
as the basis of this analysis, is that he goes beyond
noticing to create a matrix of classifications for filmic
images. Building on Bergson and Peirce, Deleuze facilitates
a more precise analysis of the operations of cinematic
images, beginning with the pre-war operations of the
movement-image and showing how the loosening or the breaking
of the sensory-motor link51 led to the crisis of the action-
image, which produced the post-war phenomenon that has
extended into our own time, the supplanting of the movement-
image in cinema by the time-image: "In everyday banality,

the action—image and even the movement-image tend to

 

“ In Richard Dienst's discussion of Deleuze's C1neme,
he construes the sensory-motor link as the causal
relationship between image and viewer: "...what in fact
defines the entire regime of the movement-image, is the way
in which sequences of images are supposed to extend into the
responses emitted by those living images called spectators.
(I would call these 'subjects supposed to see.') Deleuze's
keyword for this extension is 'sensory-motor link'" (Dienst
152). While I don't disagree with the plausibility of
Dienst's formulation, I find it more likely that Deleuze
locates the sensory-motor link within the sequence of
movement-images itself, where a depicted action results from
the character's having experienced a sensation, or series of
sensations, conveyed through previous behaviors, usually by
other characters, "since behaviour is an action which passes
from one situation to another, which responds to a situation
in order to try to modify it or to set up a new situation"
(Cinema_1 155). These behaviors constitute the situation
which has permeated the character's awareness. The character
first absorbs, then acts: the sensory-motor link.

217
disappear in favour of pure optical situations, but these
reveal connections of a new type, which are no longer
sensory-motor and which bring the emancipated senses into
direct relation with time and thought" (C1neme ll 17).

In positing this fundamental rupture, the transition
from action-images (in which the sensory-motor link remains
intact) to the pure optical and sound situations which
appear in cinema devoid of the sensory-motor link, Deleuze
points the way toward understanding the sensibility of post-
war cinema. Concurrently, he recognizes how the sensibility
of post-war cinema mirrors the sensibility of the times it
depicts. The logic of the cinematic sequence is no longer
necessarily driven by the narrative force of behaviors or
events, but instead inheres in the way the images immerse us
first in pure sensation, because the participants themselves
absorb sensation without engaging in a resultant action.

Deleuze's observations about the loosening or rupture
of the sensory-motor link, and the resultant pure optical
and sound situations portrayed in post-war films, arose as
much from his observations about the landscape of post-war
Europe as they did from his understanding of post-war
European film (particularly the Italian neo-realists), or,
more precisely, from his recognition of the way the images
in film replicated images and social conditions in real

space and time.52 In this study, I have built upon and

 

” Deleuze identifies this issue as the bridge between
the two volumes of C1neme, addressing it in the "Preface to

218
extended Deleuze's observations to show how the images in
the films of Lee, Scorsese, and Wang can be read as
representative of images in late 20th Century American film
in the way that they, too, reproduce images and social
conditions central to our own place and time in their
depiction of community, ethnicity, and race.

These concepts, foregrounded as they may be in the
thematic and narrative elements of the films of Lee,
Scorsese, and Wang, are also communicated through the
construction of the movement-images and time-images in the
films.53 The anxieties and conflicts engendered by
questions of community, ethnicity, and race are not only
part of the narrative trajectory of a film, but are also

communicated pre-perceptually through its images, as

 

the English Edition" of C1nem§_2: "Why is the Second World
War taken as a break? The fact is that, in Europe, the
post-war period has greatly increased the situations which
we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no
longer know how to describe. These were 'any-spaces-
whatever', deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste
ground, cities in the course of demolition or
reconstruction. And in these any—spaces-whatever a new
race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw
rather than acted, they were seers. Hence Rossellini's
great trilogy. W. Stmmbnli. Wu: «1 child
in the destroyed city, a foreign woman on the island, a
bourgeoise woman who starts to 'see' what is around her.
Situations could be extremes, or, on the contrary, those of
everyday banality, or both at once: what tends to collapse,
or at least to lose its position, is the sensory—motor
schema which constituted the action-image of the old cinema.
And thanks to this loosening of the sensory-motor linkage,
it is time, 'a little time in the pure state', which rises
up to the surface of the screen" (C1neme_2 xi).

3 Though I restrict myself to a specific set of films
by these three filmmakers, the broader applicability of the
concepts is implied.

219
discussion in previous chapters of the specific imagery of
various films demonstrates in some detail.

A question central to the concerns of Lee, Scorsese,
and Wang, bearing as much on the social conditions
surrounding the production of their films as on the
societies depicted in their films, is the question of who
controls the representation of ethnicity and ethnic
identity. Stuart Hall's analysis of the importance of this
question for blacks is equally applicable to any group which
experiences disjuncture between its own lived experience of
itself, and the representations of itself generated by
others: "...we tend to privilege experience itself, as if
black life is lived experience outside of representation.

We have only, as it were, to express what we already know we
are. Instead, it is only through the way in which we
represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we
are constituted and who we are. There is no escape from the
politics of representation, and we cannot wield 'how life
really is out there' as a kind of test against which the
political rightness or wrongness of a particular cultural
strategy or text can be measured" (30).

Historically, the "right" of controlling representation
has been conferred economically and politically, so that the
construction of the identity of peoples represented as Other
has been out of their own control, and lodged firmly with
dominant hegemonic forces. Considering this problem

particularly from the perspective of blacks, Cornel West

220
calls it "the modern black diasporan problematic of
invisibility and namelessness [, which] can be understood as
the condition of relative lack of black power to represent
themselves to themselves and others as complex human beings,
and thereby to contest the bombardment of negative,
degrading stereotypes put forward by white-supremacist
ideologies" ("Cultural" 16, emphasis in original). By
identifying this as a "diasporan problematic," West alludes
to the positionality of blacks as Others not only in '
societies dominated by European and American economic and
political power to control representation, but also in
homelands such as his own Ethiopia, where a history of
colonial control by these same hegemonic forces has
controlled representation of the image of indigenous
peoples. Diana Fuss shows how Frantz Fanon foregrounds the
implications of the operation of colonialism for the
question of self-definition, or identity: "Colonialism works
in part by policing the boundaries of cultural
intelligibility, legislating and regulating which identities
attain full cultural signification and which do not. For
the black man, the implications of his exclusion from the
cultural field of symbolization are immediate and
devastating...'Fixed' by the violence of the racist
interpellation in an imaginary relation of fractured

specularity, the black man, Fanon concludes, is 'forever in

221
combat with his own image'" (Fuss "Interior" 21-2).“ This
fracturedness, the position of being in combat with one's
own image, seems almost inevitably to be a corollary of not
being in control of the production of representations of
oneself.

West and Fanon seem to cast this liminal position of
Otherness as a particularly African or black colonial
position, but the colonial impact on representation affects
all whom Gayatri Spivak would call "subaltern." The
phenomenon is not specifically racial, but is rather a means
of defining the relationship between hegemonic and Other,
categories which change situationally. Vietnamese
anthropologist/filmmaker Trinh T. Minh—ha examines the means
by which anthropological inquiry, for example, sets up a
binary opposition between the hegemonic social scientist and
the "Other" whom s/he studies. The conventions of
anthropological documentary filmmaking are supposedly
designed to avoid the dominant/Other binary, but in fact
perpetuate it. As Trinh explains, "Factual authenticity [in
anthropological filmmaking] relies heavily on the Other's
words and testimony. To authenticate a work, it becomes
therefore most important to prove or make evident how this
Other has participated in the making of his/her own image;
hence, for example, the prominence of the string-of-

interviews style and the talking-heads, oral-witnessing

 

“ Fuss quotes from Fanon, Bleek p.120.

222
strategy in documentary film practices. This is often
called 'giving voice', even though these 'given' voices
never truly form the Voice of the film, being mostly used as
devices of legitimation..." (134). In anthropology, as in
politics and in economics, control over representation lies
with those who control the tools and set the parameters for
their use.

Since the ethnic and racial communities with which Lee,
Scorsese, and Wang have identified themselves are sometime
participants in this discourse of Otherness, it might at
first appear appropriate to consider the operation of third-
world dynamics of Otherness and marginality as possible
analogues for the filmwork of ethnically-identified American
filmmakers. This presents some problems, however, as can be
seen in examining the genealogy of third-world cinema
suggested by Teshome H. Gabriel, who suggests that third-
world cinema develops in three phases: "Unqualified
Assimilation," "Remembrance," and "Combativeness." The
first phase is one in which the third-world filmmaker so
closely identifies with the "Western Hollywood film
industry" ("Towards" 31) that the filmmaker's aims are
almost exclusively to entertain, and his/her style
emphasizes "formal properties of cinema, technical
brilliance and visual wizardry, [which] override subject
matter" ("Towards" 32). In the "Remembrance" phase, which
according to Gabriel describes much of current third-world

film, the films deal with themes that are "the Third World's

223
source of strength, i.e. culture and history" ("Towards"
32). Filmmakers and crews are more likely to be indigenous.
Though style is still likely to show the influence of.
Hollywood, a move in the direction of the indigenous is
signalled by "growing insistence on spatial representation
rather than temporal manipulation" ("Towards" 33). Gabriel
identifies the "Combative" phase as the phase of maturity
for third-world film, marked by its examination of "the
lives and struggles of Third World peoples" and its
"insistence on viewing film in its ideological
ramifications" ("Towards" 33). Style in this phase is
congruent with substance, evincing "an ideological point of
view instead of that of a character as in dominant Western
conventions" ("Towards" 34). Gabriel also notes the
propensity of the mature, ideologically aware third-world
filmmaker to contextualize his/her work historically, often
through use of flashbacks. As with the other phases,
Gabriel cites a number of examples of third-world films
which meet his criteria for the "Combative" phase, while
also noting that most third-world films have not yet reached
this stage.

Gabriel's taxonomy of third-world film foregrounds the
political necessity of struggle in the (post)colonial
context, where indigenous people have been cast as "Other,"
both politically and culturally, by hegemonic interlopers.
Third-world filmmakers participate in the counter-hegemonic

struggle by reclaiming the right of cultural formation

224
through construction of filmic representations of their own
ethnic and racial identity. This struggle may seem quite
congruent with the goal of recuperation of ethnic identity
and self-representation ascribed to Lee, Scorsese, and Wang
throughout this project. In some respects it is; in others,
it is not. This is empirically evident in the fact that
Gabriel's description of third-world film's progression
through phases of assimilation, remembrance, and
combativeness does not describe the trajectories of the
filmmaking careers of Lee, Scorsese, and Wang. In fact,
their careers seem to follow exactly the opposite path: from
combativeness through remembrance to (a type of)
assimilation.

One possible explanation for this counter—trajectory
may be the positionality, explored earlier, of one "who
c1aim[s] a hyphenate identity" (Feng "Being" 93). Occupying
this liminal space on the cusp of the hyphen makes
particular demands on those who oscillate between struggle
against and participation in Otherness, both hegemonic
Otherness and subaltern Otherness. Gayatri Spivak has often
alluded to the problematic nature of her own implication in
and entanglement with the positionality of hegemonic
privilege in her position as a Western university professor,
while at the same time speaking from her positionality as a
native of a third world country, with a counter-hegemonic
political stance. Her provisional solution to this problem

is to reject the dead-end of binary thinking, and accept

22S
liminality as the only positionality possible: "In the field
of ethno-cultural politics, the postcolonial teacher can
help to develop this vigilance rather than continue
pathetically either to dramatize victimage or to assert a
spurious identity. She says 'no' to the 'moral luck' of the
culture of imperialism, while recognizing that she must
inhabit it, indeed invest it, to critique it" ("Foundations"
160-61) .

Trinh T. Minh-ha's inquiry into her two vocations,
anthropology and filmmaking, offers a specific example of
accepting the conditions of liminality and operating from
that stance. Trinh's film, flexed Sneeee;;h1y1ng 1e,Reund,
inquires anthropologically into an African culture not her
own. The gap between her subject and herself is the gap
between outsider and insider. From her own third-world
positionality Trinh asks, "where should the dividing line
between outsider and insider stop? How should it be
defined? By skin colour (no Blacks should make films on
Yellows)? By language (only Fulani can talk about Fulani, a
Bassari is a foreigner here)? By nation (only Vietnamese
can produce works on Vietnam)? By geography (in the North-
South setting, East is East and East can't meet West)? Or
by political affinity (Third World on Third World counter
First and Second Worlds)? What about those with hyphenated
identities and hybrid realities" (145)? Trinh's response to
her rhetorical questions is embedded in the construction of

her article. She quotes extensively from Zora Neale

226
Hurston, an African American anthropologist and novelist,
conflating Hurston's positionality with Trinh's own in this
respect: that both, as ethnically identified ethnographers,
occupy liminal space: "The moment the insider steps out from
the inside, she is no longer a mere insider (and vice
versa). She necessarily looks in from the outside while
also looking out from the inside. Like the outsider, she
steps back and records what never occurs to her--the
insider[--] as being worth or in need of recording. But
unlike the outsider, she also resorts to non—explicative,
non-totalising strategies that suspend meaning and resist
closure...She refuses to reduce herself to an Other, and her
reflections to a mere outsider's objective reasoning or
insider's subjective feeling. She knows, probably as Zora
Neale Hurston the insider-anthropologist knew, that she is
not an outsider like the foreign outsider. She knows she is
different while being Him. th quite the same, not quite
the Other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place
where she constantly drifts in and out" (145-—emphasis
added).

As Trinh stands between cultures, both professionally
and personally, yet participates in both of them as "not
quite the same, not quite the Other," so to do Lee,
Scorsese, and Wang stand between cultures within which they
participate as African American, Italian American, and
Chinese American. If the trajectory of their careers runs

in the opposite direction of Gabriel's appraisal of the

227
maturation of third-world film through stages of
assimilation, remembrance, and combativeness, I suggest it
is because Lee, Scorsese, and Wang are not third-world
filmmakers, but share a positionality of greater complexity,
in that they both participate in and resist their particular
communities, even as they both participate in and resist
American culture. Trinh T. Minh-ha labels this
positionality as the "Inappropriate Other/Same who moves
about with always at least two/four gestures: that of
affirming 'I am like you' while persisting in her
difference; and that of reminding herself 'I am different'
while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived
at...Whether she turns the inside out or the outside in, she
is, like the two sides of a coin, the same impure, both-in-
one insider/outsider" (145-6).

From their position as Inappropriate Other/Same, Lee,
Scorsese, and Wang interrogate their own relationship with
their ethnically identified position, even as they
interrogate the hyphenated positionality of their own
ethnicities as both partially constitutive of and
necessarily resistant to the wider American culture. As
cultural workers within the film industry, Lee, Scorsese,
and Wang have been in position to follow Cornel West's call
to "contest the bombardment of negative, degrading
stereotypes" ("Cultural" 16) of their own ethnicities. I
contend in this project that the work of their early careers

was designed to do just that, meaning that they began at

228
Gabriel's most advanced stage, the stage of combativeness.
Spike Lee subtitled his book on the making of his first
film, Bhele Ceeea Haye 1;, "Inside Guerrilla Filmmaking,"
and commented in the introduction: "It's not for me to say
whether BCHT is a landmark film (I make 'em, that's all) but
I do want people to be inspired by it, in particular, black
people. Now there is a present example of how we can
produce. We can do the things we want to do, there are no
mo' excuses. We're all tired of that alibi, 'White man
this, white man that.‘ YO! Fuck dat! It's on us. So
let's all do the work that needs to be done by us all. And
to y'all who aren't down for the cause, move out of the way,
step aside..." (Spike 17). Martin Scorsese began with two
films of a projected trilogy (Thule Than Kneeh1ng, Mean
Bureeee) which were designed to portray accurately the lives
of young men, petty hoods, in his lower Manhattan Italian
American neighborhood, without reference to the romanticized
images characteristic of The Cedfiahhe; or to Hollywood
stereotypes such as the Dead End Kids or the Bowery Boys.
Scorsese even refers to Mean ELIQELE and CeedEellae as
"anthropology."55 Wayne Wang's first film, Chan 1e,Muee1ng,

 

“ See, for example, this question and answer from
Gavin Smith's 1990 interview with Scorsese:
Smith: Do Welles and W serve as an
antidote to The_Ced£aLhezle.mythic version of the Mafia?
Scorsese: "Yes, yeah, absolutely. Mean_§§;eeue, of course,
was something I was just burning to do for a number of
years. (By the time I did it.) Ih§_§Qd£§§h§I had already
come out. But I said, it doesn't matter, because this one
is really, to use the word loosely, anthropology--that idea
of how people live, what they ate, how they dressed. Mean

229
has been extensively discussed earlier as a conscious
reappropriation of the image of the Chinese American,
recuperating it from the stereotypes perpetrated by
Hollywood in the Charlie Chan series.

In each instance, the necessity of beginning from a
position of combativeness in relationship with the wider
American culture, and with its Hollywood stereotypical
representations of ethnicity, is a driving force. These
initial films constituted notice served (since flhele Than
Kneeh1ng, Chan, and 5531 were produced as independent films,
outside the Hollywood mainstream) that representational
space was hereby being appropriated for correctives to the
mainstream stereotypes previously created by Hollywood. The
notice was received. All of Scorsese's and Lee's subsequent
efforts have been financed and produced within the Hollywood
mainstream.“ While Wang subsequently made independent
films (Dim Sum. Eat a BQWl Qfi 19B) he also has secured

financing and produced films within the Hollywood system

 

SLIEELE has that quality, a quote 'real' unquote side of it.
Ceeufiellae more so. Especially in terms of attitude.
Don't give a damn about anything, especially when they're,
having a good time and making money. They don't care about
their wives, their kids, anything" (Scorsese "Smith" 28).

“ Though sometimes still within a combative and
charged atmosphere. Lee, for example, mounted a publicity
campaign to have himself named as director on the Maleelm_x
project, and appealed to prominent African Americans to
secure sufficient financing to produce the film on the scale
he thought appropriate. Scorsese agreed to make The_Laee

' ' on a minimal budget after realizing
that he was in danger of having all studio support withdrawn
from the controversial project.

230
(Blamganee, The Jey Luek Cluh). These subsequent films,
whether concerned with ethnic themes or not, have been a
corrective to previous Hollywood ethnic stereotypes
perpetuated both in film narratives and in assumptions about
the quality of work done by ethnically identified directors
and actors. '

From the combative stage, all three directors proceeded
to a stage analogous to Gabriel's stage of remembrance. All
three have made explicitly historical films, recuperating
the representation of their ethnic American history both
from Hollywood representations and from stereotypes current
in the wider culture. Spike Lee immediately contextualized
his second film, Beheel Bane, by opening with a montage of
still photographs depicting specific events from African
American history, accompanied by the singing of the
spiritual, "I'm Buildin' Me a Home." The film itself is a
representation to African Americans of African American
issues, meant not to combat stereotypes, but to build
consciousness and identity. Lee's most monumental project
of reclaiming representation has been his Maleelm x, which
he insisted from the beginning had to be made and controlled
by an African American.57 Wayne Wang's second film, 21m
Bum, like Chan 15 M1ee1ng, is set in Chinatown. But the

rhizomatic liminality foregrounded in Chan is only alluded

 

” In Lee's case particularly, but to a degree with
Scorsese and Wang as well, the stages of combativeness and
remembrance blend with one another to a degree.

231

to in 21m Bum, an exploration of the intergenerational
dynamics between Chinese American mother and daughter over
whether the daughter will marry. The theme prefigures The
J91 Lueh Cluh, another Wang film (along with Bah a Beul 9;
Tea) which is consciously and primarily a representation of
the ethnic positionality of Chinese Americans, almost
without reference to any sense of combativeness with the
wider American culture. Though Scorsese's body of work
contains fewer films which can be characterized as works of
remembrance. Mean Streets. Basins Bull. sizedEellae. and
Cae1ne certainly contain elements of this characteristic.
In an emotional if not a historical sense, The Lag;
Tempeau1en e: Chx1e; is a work of remembrance as well.

Gabriel's first phase for third-world film, which I
identify here as the most mature phase for the films of Lee,
Scorsese, and Wang, is the phase of assimilation with the
hegemonic environment of film production. At first glance,
this seems to suggest that these directors whose early
careers were marked by noble struggle have now sold out to
Hollywood's commercial interests. While I do not deny that
all three have become far more sophisticated in their
ability to get a film project financed, and that all three
have learned how to negotiate the Hollywood power structure,
I do not mean to imply that by "assimilating" in this
manner, they have compromised their artistic or ethnic

integrity. Though "assimilation" may have a commercial

232
component, my primary contention is that "assimilation"
should be construed narratively and aesthetically.

The assimilative impulse is perhaps most clearly seen
in Scorsese's body of work, where a number of films (Al1ee
noesnltLierereAnmere.The§elerefMenex.§eneEeaL
The Age 9; lnneeenee, and others) appear to have no ethnic
point of reference. Whatever representations these films
construct, they seem not to be representations of ethnicity
in either a combative or a remembrance mode. In this sense,
the subject matter of the films can be said to have
assimilated with broader Hollywood traditions, traditions
which Scorsese consciously alludes to directly through such
tactics as re-making an earlier Hollywood production (Cape
Fear). Wayne Wang, too, has made films within the Hollywood
system which are virtually devoid of direct reference to
Chinese American or Asian American experience.58 His first
such effort, Slamganee, starring Tom Hulce and Mary
Elizabeth Mastrantonio, disappeared from sight almost
immediately after its release. Bmehe and Blue 1n ;he Eaee,
by contrast, have found a measure of recognition and success
as art house releases. In the latter two films as well,

Wang works with established and well-known actors, unlike

 

“ Though it is no easier for an ethnically identified
director to escape stereotyping than it is to erase the
ethnically stereotyped images which Hollywood produces.
Peter Feng notes that "at least one reviewer...went out of
his way to mention that a minor character in Bmehe was of
mixed Asian ancestry, as if to assure readers that they were
not mistaken, that Wayne Wang usually did Asian movies (Feng
"Being" 115).

233
his practice with the Chinese American films of using an
ensemble of seasoned actors whose names are generally
unfamiliar. Blamdanee, Bmehe, and Blue 1n hhe,£aee seem to
suggest that Wang, too, has developed to the point where he
can "cross over" between ethnic and non-ethnic themes, that
he has the option of "assimilating" with Hollywood tradition
and production. It is more difficult, however, to make such
a claim on the basis of Spike Lee's body of work. On the
most obvious level, all of his films have foregrounded
African American characters and themes. .All retain a degree
of combativeness, even when their primary thrust is
remembrance. His most recent release to date, Ce; en ;he
Bun, is a loosely constructed narrative about the differing
motives and social positions of a busload of African
American men united by their intention to participate in an
intensely political event, the Million Man March organized
by Louis Farrakhan and staged in Washington D.C. Working
with such themes, Spike Lee cannot be said to be heading
toward an assimilationist phase, except in the sense that he
has thoroughly learned the skills and tactics necessary to
secure financing and respect within the Hollywood system,
even as the subjects of his films continue to confound
Hollywood expectations. At first glance, this may seem to
suggest that Lee has maintained a degree of "purity" which

no longer applies to Scorsese and Wang. Or it may suggest,

234

conversely, that it is only a matter of time until Spike Lee
tries his hand at a non-African American theme.59

Does this movement toward assimilation signal a
lessening of ethnic consciousness in the films of Scorsese
and Wang, and potentially Lee? If subject matter is the
only criterion, perhaps so. But subject matter is not the
only criterion. It has been my purpose throughout this
project to demonstrate that the sensibility of ethnic
positionality is not simply a matter of subject matter, or
of theme, but that narrative structure and the structure of
images in the films of Lee, Scorsese and Wang demonstrate
the sensibility of ethnic positionality as well. To test
this theory, I have shown how Deleuze's C1nema, though
itself as much a work of philosophy as of filmic analysis,
can be used with primary film texts as a tool of practical
criticism to examine the conventions these directors employ,
and, through comparison, to reach some provisional
conclusions about the possibility of locating their ethnic
sensibilities in the structures of their images of community
as well as in the subject matter of their narratives. Thus,

when (for example) Scorsese's use of the impulse-image was

 

” Why, of these three ethnically identified yet
successful filmmakers, has Spike Lee been the one to
maintain a combative-recollective stance? Any answer is of
course purely speculation. Though I intend no minimization
of the way that Italian Americans and Asian Americans have
historically been marginalized in American society, the long
history of violence and racism directed against African
Americans in this society suggests to me that Lee simply has
more to be combative about. .

235
examined in the creation of an originary world in Cape Bear,
and was subsequently connected with his use of the same
image-structure in Mean Buzeeee, the ethnic positionality of
MSEB.&LI§§L& was shown to resonate in Cape Fear, even though
the latter film is not typically included in the list of
Scorsese's ethnic explorations. Though no extensive
analysis of Bmeke has been attempted in this project, its
de-centered narrative structure is certainly reminiscent of
the structure of The Jey Luek Club. and Wang's privileging
of the affection-image in both films shows how the ethnic
sensibility of Jey Luek resonates in the images and signs of
the non-ethnic Bmehe. The use of Deleuzean tools
facilitates analysis of the structures of images of
community in the films of these three filmmakers, images
imbricated with their ethnic positionalities.

The move toward "assimilation," then, on the part of
Scorsese and Wang (and the tentative prediction of such
movement at some time in the future for Lee), needs to be
carefully bracketed and understood not to imply that these
directors are to be construed as abandoning their
positionality as Italian American, Chinese American, and
African American artists. Instead, their "assimilative"
thrust should be understood to reinforce and reinscribe
their ethnic positionality within their body of work, even
when the subject matter may not be specifically ethnic.

This happens in two ways: aesthetically and culturally. On

the aesthetic plane, this "assimilationist" move can be seen

236
as an artistic assertion that ethnicity is not only
inscribed in a film's subject matter, but is also inscribed
in its image and sign structure. Culturally, this move
toward "assimilation" must be seen not as a capitulation to
the identity politics of the hegemonic, but as an assertion
of these filmmakers' own identity politics as "hyphenated"
Americans. This is a position of liminality, but also a
position from which assertions of cultural power can be made
in resistance to the identity of "exotic Other" thrust upon
them through traditional Hollywood images, replacing these
with images from their own films of "empowered other," in
the sense in which Homi K. Bhabha explains the operation of
"otherness" in a multicultural society: as the condition
necessary for cultural self-definition. Bhabha suggests
that we should value otherness, a sign of liminality, as a
necessary condition for hybridity, the Third Space which
must supplant hegemony and diversity as a socially and
culturally stabilizing force. Bhabha connects advances in
linguistic theory with the possibilities of advances in
cultural understanding: "the theoretical recognition of the
split-space of enunciation may open the way to
conceptualising an international culture, based not on the
exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures,
but on the inscription and articulation of culture's
hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the
'inter' [i.e. a liminal space]--the cutting edge of

translation and negotiation, the in-between, the space of

237
the entre that Derrida has opened up in writing itself-—that
carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it
possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist
histories of the 'people'. It is in this space that we will
find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and
Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this 'Third
Space', we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as
the others of our selves" (131).

The Otherness which Bhabha describes is not an
Otherness of lack, but an empowered Otherness. The liminal
positionality from which it operates is not a liminality of
anxiety or rootlessness, but a generative liminality of
creative social and cultural production, the liminality of
Bhabha's "Third Space," where hybridity signifies that the
cultural contributions of ethnically identified Americans
can manifest at one and the same time their ethnicity and
their Americanness, without being exoticized or
marginalized, because in their hybridity they are productive
of Americanness itself. This is the generative, creative
Otherness which, in its essential Americanness, describes
the "hyphenated" ethnic positionality of films made by Spike
Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Wayne Wang, and marks their place

in late Twentieth Century American film and culture.

WORKS CITED

WORKS CITED

Bauman, Zygmunt. Breedem. Concepts in Social Thought.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

---. Intimatione of Postmodernitx. London: Routledge: 1992-
---. Beeemedern Eeh1ee. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
--—, Thinking gggigleg1eally. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction." lllum1nah1ene, Ed. Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-251.

Bhabha, Homi K. "The Commitment to Theory." Queet1ena e:
Th1xd C1nema. Eds. Jim Pines and Paul Willamen.-
London: British Film Institute, 1989. 111-132.

Braudy, Leo. "The Sacraments of Genre: Coppola, DePalma,

Scorsese." (1986) natixe Informanti Essaxe on Eilmi
Eiotionl and Popular Culture. New York: Oxford UP.
1991. 240-252.

Cawelti, John. "Chinatown and Generic Transformation."

(1976) Film Genre Reader 11. Ed. Barry Keith Grant.
Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. 227-245.

Cook, Pam. "Scorsese's Masquerade." B1gh; and Beund 1:12
(April 1992): 14-15.

DeCurtis, Anthony. "What the Streets Mean: An Interview

with Martin Scorsese " The South Atlantic Quarterlx
91:2 (Spring 1992): 427-458.

Deleuze, Gilles. C1nema l; The Mevement Image. Trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1986.

---. Cinema 111 The Time Image. TranS- Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

--- and Felix Guattari. "Rhizome." Cn hhe,L1ne. Trans.
John Johnson. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. 1-69.

--- and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Blateauei Capitalism
and Beh1zenhxen1a. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1987.

238

239

Denby, David. "Meaner Streets." New leak 24 Sept. 1990:
78+.

Denzin. Norman K. The Cinematic Society; The Yoxeuris Case.
London: SAGE Publications, 1995.

-. Images of Postmodern society; social Theorx and
Cenhempezaxy C1nema. London: SAGE Publications, 1991.

Dickstein, Morris. "Self-Tormentors." Ba1h1ean Beg1eg 61:4
(Fall 1994): 658-664. '

Dienst, Richard. 5:11] Ljfg in Eddl Time- IhCCIX Bite:
Telexision. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Shula e: Blaeh Bulk. 1903. New York:
Vintage Books/The Library of America, 1990.

Erens, Patricia. The Jew 1n Ame11ean C1nema. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1984.

Fanon, Frantz. Blaeh Bh1n1 flh1he Masks. 1952. Trans.
Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967.

Feng, Peter. "Being Chinese American, Becoming Asian

American:Chan is Missing. Cinema Journal 35:4 (Summer
1996): 88-118.

---. "In Search of Asian American Cinema (Race in
Contemporary American Cinema, Part 3)." C1neaeee 21:1-
2 (Winter-Spring 1995): 32-36.

---. "The Politics of the Hyphen." C1neaehe 21:1-2 (Winter-
Spring 1995): 33.

Friedman, Lester D. "Celluloid Palimpsests: An Overview of
Ethnicity and the American Film. " HDEDCdkdblc Imgggfii

Ethnicitx and the American.Cinema Ed. Lester D.
Friedman. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. 11—35.

---, HQLlXHQQQLE Image 9; ;he Jew. New York: Fredrick
Ungar, 1982.

Fuss, Diana. "Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the
Politics of Identification." B1ae11h1ee 23:2-3
(Summer-Fall 1994) 20-42.

Gabriel, Teshome H. "Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular
Memory. Towards a Third Aesthetics. " Queeh1ene e:

Th1xu C1nema. Eds. Jim Pines and Paul Willamen.
London: British Film Institute, 1989. 53-64.

240

---. "Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films."
Questions of Third Cinema. Eds. Jim Pines and Paul
Willamen. London: British Film Institute, 1989. 30-
52.

Gates, Henry Louis. "Jungle Fever; or, Guess Who's Not
Coming to Dinner?" The Films of finite Leer Time for
E1xe. New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1991.
163-169. ‘

Hall, Stuart. "What is This 'Black' in Black Popular
Culture?" Blaeh Benula; Culeuze. A project by Michele

Wallace, ed. Gina Dent. Dia Center for the Arts,
Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number 8.
Seattle: Bay Press, 1992. 21-33.

Hoberman, J. "Sacred and Profane." ,B1ghh ang_Beund 1:10
(Feb 1992): 8-13.

hooks, bell. "Sorrowful Black Death is Not a Hot Ticket."
Sight and Seund 4:8 (1994): 10-14.

Hosney, Jim, Jacquelyn Wollman, and Jesse Ward Engdahl. "The
Passion of St. Charles: Martin Scorsese's Mean

Streets " South Atlantic Quarterlx 91:2 (Spring 1992):
409-418.

Kael, Pauline. "Tumescence as Style." Men Texhe; 66:32
(September 24, 1990): 98, 100, 101.

Keyser, Les. Maxe1n Beexeeee, Twayne Filmmakers Ser. New
York: Twayne, 1992.

Kolker. Robert Phillip. a Cinema of Lonelinessi Bennl

Kuhricki.Connola1.$corsese1 Altman. New York: Oxford.
1980.

Lee, Spike, director. Cleehexe. With Mekhi Phifer, Harvey
Keitel, and John Turturro. Universal Pictures, 1995.

---, director. Creehlyn. With Alfre Woodard and Delroy
Lindo. Universal Pictures, 1994.

---, director. he ;he B1ghh Th1ng. With Danny Aiello,
Spike Lee, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Universal
Pictures, 1989.

--—, director. Jungle Beyer. With Wesley Snipes and
Annabella Sciorra. Universal Pictures, 1991.

---, director. Maleelm 3. With Denzel Washington, Angela
Bassett, Albert Hall, Al Freeman Jr., and Delroy Lindo.
Warner Brothers, 1992.

241

---, director. Mel Behee; Bluee. With Denzel Washington,
Spike Lee, and Wesley Snipes. Universal Pictures,
1990.

---, with Lisa Jones. Mel BCLLCI Bluee. A Fireside Book.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.

---, director. Beheel Bane. With Larry Fishburne,
Giancarlo Esposito, and Tisha Campbell. Columbia
Pictures, 1988.

---, director. Bhele QCttd Maze 1;. With Tracy Carmella
Johns, John Turrell, and Tommy Hicks. Island Pictures,

1986.

---- Spike heels Cotta Hare Itr Inside.Cuerrilla

A Fireside Book. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

---. with Lisa Jones. Uplift the Racei the Construction of
Beheel Bane. A Fireside Book. New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1988.

Librach, Ronald S. "The Last Temptation in Mean Bhgeehe and

Lourdeaux, Lee. Italian and Irish Filmmakers in Americai
Fordr Canrai Coooolat and Scorsese. Philadelphia:
Temple UP, 1990.

Marchetti, Gina. "Ethnicity and Cultural Studies.
Unsoeakahle Imagesi Ethnicity and the American Cinema
Ed. Lester D. Friedman. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.
277-307.

May, Todd G. "The System and its Fractures: Gilles Deleuze
on Otherness." Journal of the British Society for
Ehengmenelogy 24:1 (January 1993): 3-14.

Murphy, Kathleen. "Made Men." E1lm Cemnenh 26:5 (1990):
25-27.

Penman, Ian. "Juke Box and Johnny Boy." B1ghh and Seund
3:4 (1993): 10-11.

Rhines, Jesse Algeron. "The Political Economy of Black Film
(Race in Contemporary American Cinema: Part 4)."
C1neaehe 21:3 (Summer 1995): 38.

Rule, Sheila. "Director Defies Odds with First Feature,
'Daughters of the Dust.'" New York T1mee 12 Feb. 1992:
C15, C17.

242

Said, Edward W. C;1enhal1em. New York: Vintage Books,
1978.

Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir." (1972) E1ln genre
Reade; ll, Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas
P, 1995. 213-226.

Scorsese, Martin, director. Afihe; Heuze. With Griffin
Dunne, Rosanna Arquette. Warner Brothers, 1985.

---, director. Cane Beag. With Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte,
Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis. Universal Pictures,
1991.

---, director. Cae1ne. With Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone,
Joe Pesci. Universal Pictures, 1995.

—--, director. CeedEellae. With Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci,
Ray Liotta. Warner Brothers, 1990.

---, director. Mean SLICCLE- With Harvey Keitel, Robert De
Niro, David Proval. Warner Brothers, 1973.

---, director. 3ag1ng Bull. With Robert De Niro, Cathy
Moriarity, Joe Pesci. United Artists, 1980.

——-, director. Tax1 Br1xe1. With Robert De Niro, Jodie
Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel. Columbia
Pictures, 1976.

---. "The Martin Scorsese Interview." Interview with
Anthony DeCurtis. Bell1ng shene November 1, 1990, 60,
61, 63-65, 106, 108.

---. Beexeeee en Beexeeee, Eds. David Thompson and Ian
Christie. London: Faber and Faber, 1989.

Sharman, Leslie Felperin. "The Joy Luck Club." Rev. of The

Joy Luck Club. dir. Wayne Wang. Sight and Sound 4.4
(1994): 44-45.

Shaviro, Steven. The C1nemah1e Bedy. Theory out of Bounds.
2. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Shohat, Ella. "Ethnicities in Relation."

unspeakable
Imagesr Ethnicity and the American Cinema. Ed. Lester
D. Friedman. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. 215-250.

Simon, John. "The Mob and the Family." Mah1enal Bey1en
43:1 (January 28, 1991) 63—65.

243

Sobchak, Vivian. "Postmodern Modes of Ethnicity."
: Ethnicity and the American Cinema.
Ed. Lester D. Friedman. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.
329-352.

Sollors. Werner Beyond Ethnic1t11 Consent and Descent in
Ame11ean Culhune. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

---. "Introduction." The Inuention of Ethnicity. Ed-
Werner Sollors. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Foundations and Cultural

Studies " Questioning Foundations1

e iv . Continental Philosophy V.
Ed. Hugh J. Silverman. New York: Routledge, 1993.
153-175.

Stern. Lesley. The Scorsese Connection. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1995.

Taubin. Amy. "Blood and Pasta " New Statesman and Society
3:126 (November 9, 1990) 12-14.

Taylor, Clyde. "Black Cinema in the Post-Aesthetic Era."

Questions of Third Cinema. Eds. Jim Pines and Paul
Willamen. London: British Film Institute, 1989. 90-
110.

Tomlinson, Hugh and Robert Galeta. "Translator's

Introduction." Cinema 111 The Timeelmace. Gilles
Deleuze. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989, xv—
xviii.

Tomlinson, Hugh and Barbara Habberjam. "Translator's

Introduction." Cinema 11 The Moxement Image. Gilles
Deleuze. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986, xi-xiii.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. "Outside In Inside Out." Queeh1ene e;
Th11d'C1nema. Eds. Jim Pines and Paul Willamen.
London: British Film Institute, 1989. 133-149.

Wang, Wayne. "A Delicate Balance: An Interview with Wayne
Wang About The Jey Lueh,Cluh.' Interview with John C.
Tibbetts. LiteratureLEilm Quarterly 22 1 (1994): 2-6.

-—-, director. Blue 1n Che Eaee. With Harvey Keitel.
Miramax Films, 1995.

---, director. Chan 1e M1ee1ng. With Wood Moy and Mark
Hayashi. New Yorker Films, 1982.

244

---, director. Bah a Benl e1 Tea. With Cora Miao, Victor
Wong, Russell Wong, and Lau Siu Ming. Columbia
Pictures, 1990.

---, director. The Jey Lueh,Cluh. With Tsai Chin, Kieu
Chinh, Lisa Lu, and France Nuyen. Buena Vista, 1993.

---, director. Blamuanee. With Tom Hulce and Mary
Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Island Pictures, 1987.

—--, director. Bmehe. With William Hurt and Harvey Keitel.
Miramax Films, 1995.

Weiss. Marion. Martin Scorsese. A Guide to References and
Reeeuneee. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987.

West, Cornel. "The New Cultural Politics of Difference."

KeecinsraitmzhilosonhxandBaoeinAmerica New
York: Routledge, 1993. 3-32.