Jackie Robinson in Film: His Significance in ‘Do the Right Thing’ and ‘Bringing Down the House’

Perhaps the most revered number and jersey in baseball history belongs to Jackie Robinson, who wore number 42 throughout his 10-year career with the Dodgers.

As John Odell has said, “Robinson wore number 42 throughout his major league career; for baseball fans and American historians, the number … is … associated with no other player, and likely never will be.”¹ On April 15, 1997, the 50th anniversary of Jackie’s debut, his number was permanently retired, with only Yankee pitcher Mariano Rivera allowed to continue to wear it. Odell concludes, “Robinson’s jersey certainly signifies his tremendous playing career. Ultimately, however, what no jersey can ever show are the marks of insults and slurs hurled at Robinson while playing, the injustices he endured on and off the field, and the character he showed throughout his life. It remains our responsibility to collect artifacts like this jersey to pass on larger stories to succeeding generations.”²

Odell is correct that although the jersey cannot convey literally the hostility Robinson overcame in his pioneering debut in 1947 and career, it can represent figuratively his story and subsequent mystique. The two films to be discussed use Robinson’s number and jersey to memorialize the baseball star and civil rights pioneer as a cultural artifact, a repository of meanings which can continue to represent and address social, personal, and racial problems.³

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) concerns the riot that occurs in a Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood when police choke a young black man to death. Lee plays the central character Mookie, the pizza delivery boy, who wears a Robinson jersey for much of the movie until he discards it when the riot occurs. Lee also includes a number of other athletic jerseys, posters, and pictures to signal the power of iconic images to help form ethnic cultural identity.⁴ Clifton, the white yuppie who owns a brownstone in the neighborhood, wears a Larry Bird jersey; a black youth wears a Magic Johnson jersey; Mookie appears at the beginning of the movie wearing a Jordan jersey; a huge sign advertising Mike Tyson as Brooklyn’s favorite is prominently posted on the side of a building; and, finally, a photo of the Marciano­ Walcott fight is shown burning on the “wall of fame” in Sal’s pizzeria during the riot. Mitchell has observed that these signs “are commercial objects and vehicles for the propagation of public statements about personal identity.”⁵ It is the Robinson jersey that creates the most important public image for the film’s themes and motifs of personal identity and racial conflict.

Lee has indicated why he had Mookie wear Jackie’s Dodger jersey with the number 42 on the front and back: “The jersey was a good choice. I don’t think Jackie Robinson has gotten his due from Black people. There are young people today, even Black athletes, who don’t know what Jackie Robinson did. They might know he was the first Black major leaguer, but they don’t know what he had to bear to make it easier for those who came after him.”⁶ But Mookie, the mercurial messenger, is not heroic in any sense like Robinson. He is a man stuck uneasily in the middle, a bridge between Sal’s Famous Pizzeria and the black community. As Nelson observes, “The Jackie Robinson jersey that Mookie wears does not suggest that he’s a racial pioneer but that he’s a man watched closely by interested parties on both sides of the racial divide. Both sides think that he’s loyal to them- that’s how he survives.”⁷

Moreover, McKelly has argued cogently that the film is based on conflicting ideas instilled in Mookie by different characters and cultural forces: “Mookie … becomes… an entire ‘sociology of consciousness,’ a cacophony of autonomous, irreconcilable significations in conflict, each reflecting the persistence of ‘double consciousness’: Sal/Buggin Out, Pino/Vito, DaMayor/Mother Sister, Jade/Tina, ‘whiteness’/’blackness’, ‘King’/’X,’ cool/heat, ‘LOVE /’HATE,’ ‘right thing’/ wrong thing.”⁸ The most important of these binaries are the black/white and love/hate dichotomies, which are represented respectively by the Robinson jersey and the picture of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, which Smiley sells and illustrates by the words love and hate inscribed on his knuckle rings.

The movie consists of a series of attempted integrations resulting in racial conflicts. Buggin’ Out, the neighborhood radical, is upset at Mookie being friendly with Sal’s son Vito, but Mookie tells him to shut up. “Vito is down.” Clifton spills juice on Buggin’ Out’s new Air Jordan shoes, and when some angry neighborhood people tell him to move to Massachusetts, he says, “I was born in Brooklyn.” Pino, Sal’s racist son, declares that his favorite great black athletes and entertainers transcend their color. When Mookie retorts that Pino harbors a secret desire to be black, he is incensed. Then in separate scenes, Pino and Mookie exchange choice ethnic insults in rapid fashion. Pino wants whites and blacks to be segregated in their own neighborhoods and tells his brother that blacks cannot be trusted. Mookie, in turn, tells Vito to disavow his brother’s racism.

The precipitating factor in the ensuing disturbance occurs when Buggin’ Out, the neighborhood radical, wants to integrate Sal’s wall of fame, which sounds like the Hall of Fame, by including pictures of black stars, not just Italian Americans. Sal menaces him with a baseball bat and declares that since it’s his pizzeria he can put on the wall the heroes he chooses. The wall of fame is important to Sal because he owns the store and wants a public declaration of the fame of certain Italian Americans as proof that Italians have entered American life. However, the wall is also important for Buggin’ Out because it. graphically represents the exclusion of blacks from American society.⁹ Integrating the wall would not solve the major problems of the neighborhood, but it would be a token of public acceptance by its major white business establishment: “Spike Lee’s film articulates the desperation of a minority . . . calling on the majority to open the doors to the public sphere promised by its official rhetoric.”¹⁰

Sal’s policy parallels the lack of integration in baseball, which claimed to be the national pastime but excluded black players until Robinson played for the Dodgers in 1947. He refuses to integrate the wall with African American heroes despite the fact that the Bedford-Stuyvesant community is the source of his business. For Sal, Mookie represents the unity and progress which he thinks his family pizzeria has fostered in the neighborhood. But he will not expand this recognition to the community at large by allowing black heroes on the wall of fame.¹¹

After Buggin’ Out organizes a boycott of the pizzeria, Mookie discards the Robinson jersey and wears a Sal’s Famous Pizzeria jersey in the Italian national colors of red, white, and green. When he wore this shirt earlier, it signified, like the Robinson jersey, that Mookie was the link between the pizzeria and his community. However, Sal’s livery now represents the servile position he will rebel against. The riot begins with Sal crushing Raheem’s boom box with a baseball bat and exchanging racial epithets with Buggin’ Out. When the police choke Radio, his knuckles show the words love and hate. After he dies, Mookie smashes the garbage can through the window, and the crowd sets fire to the pizzeria. As it burns, Smiley finally integrates the wall by posting a photo of Malcolm X and King on it.

The movie ends with two quotations, one on non-­violence from King and the other on the necessity for taking action against violence (self-defense) by Malcolm. In his final statement on the movie’s ending, Lee seems to declare his allegiance to Malcom X: “Both men died for the love of their people, but had different strategies for realizing freedom … [and] justice   The way of King, or the way of Malcolm. . . . I know who I am down with.”¹² Similarly, by his participation in the riot, Mookie seems to have disavowed King’s as well as Robinson’s policies of non-violence and integration, but within the complex and ambiguous context of Mookie’s behavior, Lee has both revered and dismissed Robinson’s nonviolent legacy as a viable policy for black advancement.

Bringing Down the House (2003) stars Steve Martin as a yuppie lawyer who learns to incorporate elements of stereotypical ghetto language and behavior to win a case for a black woman who has been framed by her boyfriend.¹³ The plot is in some sense a comic take on the motifs of black/white integration in Do the Right Thing. Like Mookie, Peter Sanderson wears Robinson’s number 42 as the representation of his ability to go between the two communities. But in the comedy, the wearing of Robinson’s number results in a successful integration.

The movie begins with the Internet blind dating communication between divorced tax lawyer Peter Sanderson and Charlene, who represents herself as “lawyer girl,” but actually is a black woman charged with an armed robbery she claims she didn’t commit. When they meet, he doesn’t understand her ghetto language and gets rid of her quickly. But when he is at work, she throws a party in his house for a black charity and infuriates him and his all-white neighborhood. She also infiltrates his country club in full ghetto power dress and beats up Ashley, his ex­ wife’s sister, who i1nsists on treating her as a waitress. Charlene reveals that she is ”bilingual” in white and black language and culture. She keeps showing up in Peter’s white sanctuaries and manages to defeat any attempts to eject her. She teaches Peter to be less uptight, to dance instinctively, and to be more aggressively romantic by using black “styling.”

Widow, Charlene’s tough ex-boyfriend who framed her, hangs out at the Down Low, a club where a white man can’t go. But to prove Charlene’s innocence, Peter buys a rapper outfit from two home boys, replete with stocking cap, chains, Air Jordans, and a sweatshirt with 42 stitched on the back. He explodes on the scene uttering rapper lingo and shaking his booty on the dance floor, with 42 visible throughout his maneuvers. Peter offers to launder Widow’s money and records proof that Charlene was framed. During the ensuing struggle, Charlene is shot by Widow, but is saved when the bullet hits Peter’s cell phone, which she had been carrying. At the end, he returns to his wife and quits the firm to go off on his own, declaring to his boss, “Kiss my natural black ass,” Charlene says, ”You ain’t black,” to which he responds, “Well, I’m off white.”

Peter has learned to function in two worlds as the result of his contact with Charlene. When he dons the ghetto outfit with 42 on the back, he becomes a latter­ day comic white parallel to Robinson’s integration of the formerly segregated major leagues. Similarly, Charlene has taken on white characteristics, as represented by his protective cell phone, which she had earlier denounced as a symbol of his uptight white lawyer’s world. Together, they have brought down the house, destroying Widow’s place and earning our applause. Unlike Do the Right Thing, Bringing Down the House has used Robinson’s mystique as the means of representing a successful reduction of racial conflicts.

FRANK ARDOLINO is a professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he teaches Shakespeare and modern drama. He is currently working on Reversing the Curse in Literature and Film.

 

Notes

1. John “On the Road with Baseball as America.” Memories and Dreams, 26, 2004:31.
2. Odell, 31
3. Jackie Robinson has been the subject of four movies: The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), A Homerun for Love (1978), Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson (1990), and Soul of the Game (1996). In addition, Rhubarb (1951), which ostensibly concerns a cat’s inheritance of a baseball team, is actually about Robinson’s integration of baseball. See my articles, “Breaking the Color Line: Five Film Representations of Jackie Robinson 1950-1992,” Aethlon 13.2, 1996, 49-60; “Tearing Up the Pea Patch at Ebbets Field: Rickey, Robinson, and Rhubarb,” Aethlon, 1992, 133-43.
4. Douglas Kellner. ”Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in the Films of Spike Lee,” Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Mark Reid, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 80.
5. J.T. Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art,” Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, 124.
6. Spike Lee with Lisa Jones. Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 110
7. George Nelson, “Do the Right Thing.” Five for Five: The Films of Spike Lee,” Terry McMillan, ed. (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1991), 80.
8. James McKelly. “The Double Truth: Do the Right Thing and the Culture of Ambiguity,” African American Review 32, 1998, 223-24.
9. Mitchell, 110-12.
10. Mitchell, 123.
11. McKelly, 221-22.
12. Lee, 282.
13. Bringing Down the House. Adam Shankman, director; 2003.