Do The Right Thing : Belief & Postmodernism
Radio Raheem
At first the one who seemed most misunderstand, Radio Raheem quickly became the most revered citizen of Bedford–Stuyvesant after the police had killed him. He was most known for pompously walking around town blasting his boombox to the only song that he liked, "Fight the Power," by Public Enemy.
Radio Raheem was the most prideful of anyone else's beliefs. He sported a shirt that recognized his town of Bedford-Stuyvesant, he was always playing a radical song that questioned authority, and he always expressed his love for others he cared about, such as when he tells Mookie that he respects him. He is just like any of the other characters in the film, he feels inferior to the successful non-blacks in the community but he just expresses himself much more loudly. Radio Raheem has difficulty coinciding with other people that don't feel the same way as him and he struggles finding the difference between the good aspects of life and the bad ones.
Eagleton's Postmodernism
Hate: it was with this hand that Cane iced his brother. Love: these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: static. One hand is always fighting the other hand, and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, Love, is finished. But hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes, now, that's right. Ooh, it's a devastating right and Hate is hurt, he's down. Left-Hand Hate KOed by Love.
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Radio Raheem's brass knuckles are representative of a spiral that connects to Baudrillard's thoughts about hyperreality.
When we first think of love and hate, we associcate the two with positive and negative feelings, respectively. Radio Raheem looks at the two beyond their literal meaning and sees them both as violent killers that are always attacking each other.
Scholar Terry Eagleton questions the realism of belief by asking why exactly do we have it in a postmodernist society, stating:
"This strong conventionalist theory sometimes includes in the category of 'beliefs' observational propositions which nobody could currently doubt, thus expanding the term 'belief' to the point of uselessness. As with the case that 'everything is an interpretation', or its leftist equivalent 'everything is political', this position cancels all the way through, flying from our grasp like an overstretched piece of elastic."
Love and hate aren't what they are made out to be when we first see it. They are exactly the same but words are just representation of what we make them out to be. The words on his hands don't mean much, because they can only be anything that we want them to be. Belief in something is something that we want to have and it can be interpreted any which way, which makes a point that belief is in some way pointless. Love and hate are two beliefs that don't just contradict each other, they just neutralize each other.
When we first think of love and hate, we associcate the two with positive and negative feelings, respectively. Radio Raheem looks at the two beyond their literal meaning and sees them both as violent killers that are always attacking each other.
Scholar Terry Eagleton questions the realism of belief by asking why exactly do we have it in a postmodernist society, stating:
"This strong conventionalist theory sometimes includes in the category of 'beliefs' observational propositions which nobody could currently doubt, thus expanding the term 'belief' to the point of uselessness. As with the case that 'everything is an interpretation', or its leftist equivalent 'everything is political', this position cancels all the way through, flying from our grasp like an overstretched piece of elastic."
Love and hate aren't what they are made out to be when we first see it. They are exactly the same but words are just representation of what we make them out to be. The words on his hands don't mean much, because they can only be anything that we want them to be. Belief in something is something that we want to have and it can be interpreted any which way, which makes a point that belief is in some way pointless. Love and hate are two beliefs that don't just contradict each other, they just neutralize each other.
