Abstract

I might as well say at the outset that, although I can return Christensen’s compliment, and call his response “thoughtful,” I am most interested in those places where the fullness of his thought, and particularly of his own language, has paralyzed his thought in compulsively repetitious patterns, and led him into interpretive maneuvers that he would surely be skeptical about in the reading of a literary text. Even more interesting is the way Christensen’s antipathy to the film, and the violence of the language in which eh expresses the antipathy, has prevented him from registering the plainest sensory and perceptual elements of the film text. In a rather straightforward and literal sense, Christensen has neither seen nor heard Do the Right Thing, but has screened a fantasy film of his own projection. To say Christensen has projected a fantasy, however, is not to say that his response is eccentric or merely private. On the contrary, it is a shared and shareable response, a reflex in the public imaginary of American culture at the present time. As such, it deserves patient and detailed examination. W. J. T. Mithcell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology