How both Double Indemnity and Do The Right Thing have created Aesthetic Effects, using Cinematography & Sound.

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 In Do The Right Thing and Double Indemnity, Cinematography and Sound have been used to create aesthetic effects. These are created through the use of colour and lighting on the screen and different angled shots and music.

In Do The Right Thing, the use of an orange tint in all scenes taking place outside in the open, is key to creating an atmosphere of heat throughout the film. Spike Lee has stated that they wanted the audience watching the film to feel just as hot and uncomfortable as the characters are in the film. The orange tint used throughout the film easily achieves this. This is in contrast to Double Indemnity, which due to its Film Noir nature is obviously in black and white. However, there is still an element of lighting used to emphasise an aesthetic effect. Most prominently, Double Indemnity uses venetian blinds when Walter first meets Phyllis, the blinds nearly cover up Walter as he hides in the darkness, similar to how he is hiding in plain sight from Keys at his day job. Double Indemnity uses lighting to add suspense and mystery similar to Do The Right Thing’s colour tint which is designed to make the audience feel uncomfortable.



Do The Right Thing effectively uses dutch angles throughout the film, most prominently in the scene where Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem face off against Sal in the pizzeria. Throughout the whole argument the camera looks down at Buggin’ Out and Rahim but is facing up at Sal; This is all while the camera is at a tilt. The tilt represents the world, particularly this part of America becoming unstable with all the racial tension that is building up. The camera is looking down on Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem, the same way America looked down on the black community. We can compare this to Double Indemnity, throughout the wide majority of the film the camera is stable and sees Walter at head level. This rule has 2 exceptions however; When Walter nearly gets caught by Keys as Phyllis approaches the door and when Walter finally confesses to Keys that he was the accomplice in the Mrs Dietrichson case. When Phyllis hides behind the door as Keys leaves the camera looks down at Walter, although Keys can’t see Mrs Dietrichson, the camera can. Finally, as Walter confesses to Keys and as he slowly dies of the gunshot wound, the camera is raised far above Walter, looking down on him the way Keys, a man who once respected Walter, was too. These two films both use camera angles to artistically represent how the characters are seen socially. American society looked down on the black community but looked up to people like Sal, so the camera does the same. When Walter is doing something criminal we along with the camera look down on him. 


Music and Sound is also used to deliver the message in both films. In Do The Right Thing we are told the message of the film through the ideology of the music. Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” is essentially what the film is about. The black community stands up to Sal who refuses to put up pictures of African-American celebrities on his wall despite the large majority of his customer base being African-American. This is evident in the face off scene, Sal beats the boombox with a baseball bat whilst “Fight The Power” blares from it, this is Sal metaphorically fighting back, he doesn’t want the power he possesses to leave. Double Indemnity also uses sound to guide the plot but in a different way, Double Indemnity uses the voice of Walter at the end of the film to guide the plot, Walter guides us through his actions sometimes with voiceovers, other times we just cut to him talking. He directs his commentary at Keys, as we see at the end of the film this is his confession that he was guilty of the crimes he’d been trying to help Keys solve. In a way we also see this technique used in Do The Right Thing as Senor Love Daddy guides us through the opening scene for the film, setting up the plot, introducing characters and telling the characters, as well as the viewers, that it’s going to be extremely hot. Senor Love Daddy also makes appearances intermittently throughout the film, just like Walter does.



In conclusion, both Do The Right Thing and Double Indemnity effectively use: Colour and lighting, different angled shots and music and voice-overs as commentaries of the films message. While these are all used effectively as they are, these effects are only fully effective to the film as a whole when used in conjunction with the rest of Cinematography and Film Sound.

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