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Do The Right Thing Film Analysis

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Published: Oct 2, 2020

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Works Cited

Baldwin, J. (1990). James Baldwin on Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. New York: The New York Times.
Brown, J. (2006). Racial Stereotypes and Identity in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Journal of Popular Culture, 39(2), 245-257.
Diawara, M. (1991). Spike Lee and the Task of African American Filmmaking. Cinéaste, 18(3), 4-11.
Evans, C. (1990). Do the Right Thing and Spike Lee's Invisible Man. African American Review, 24(4), 581-588.
Gates Jr., H. L. (1991). Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. The New Yorker. Retrieved from [URL]
Jameson, F. (1993). Do the Right Thing. In Signatures of the Visible (pp. 41-68). New York: Routledge.
Kellner, D. (1994). Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing: The Symbolic and Political Development of a Film Text. Film Quarterly, 48(2), 14-26.
Lee, S. (2015). Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Mazzarella, W. (1995). How to Hear the Sound of a Brand Name: A Critique of the "McDonaldization" Thesis. American Journal of Sociology, 100(2), 325-352.
Shome, R. (2000). The Ineffability of Race: Gender, Affect, and Silences in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 15(2), 30-53.

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Do the Right Thing Analysis

by Walker Valdez April 2016

Introduction

The film Do the Right Thing, written, directed and produced by Spike Lee, focuses on a single day of the lives of racially diverse people who live and work in a lower class neighborhood in Brooklyn New York. However, this ordinary day takes place on one of the hottest days of the summer. The film centers on how social class, race and the moral decisions that the characters make have a direct effect on the way people interact with each other. It starts with the film’s characters waking up to start their day and climaxes with a neighborhood riot after police officers excessively restrain and kill a young black man named Radio Raheem for fighting an older Italian American restaurant owner named Sal in his pizzeria, and then outside on the street. The film, although released in 1989, with its social commentary on the effect that race has on police brutality is just as relevant today as when it was released 26 years ago.

Though the movie ultimately shows how dangerous it is to react to others based on race, ironically, Lee portrays characters stereotypically in the movie through their language and aesthetics. Spike Lee indulges in stereotypes by using iconography to represent the different racial groups in the film (Etherington-Wright 236). He does this in numerous ways such as having Italian American characters wear crosses and tank top shirts. He also does this in his portrayal of Radio Raheem wearing an African medallion necklace while carrying a large boom box playing loud rap music. Even tertiary characters such as a group of Puerto Rican friends are shown listening to salsa while speaking Spanish and drinking beer on the stoop of their apartment building. Lee also points out that his characters recognize that their different ethnicities can lead to a power struggle by having them openly insult each other through ethnic slurs in both a comic and serious fashion. Lee also shows this when his black activist character Buggin’ Out tells Mookie, who is a black man employed by a white man, to “Stay Black” insinuating that Mookie should never strive to be a Tom or a sell-out (Etherington-Wright 238).

Throughout the film, the characters not only point out the differences in their race, but also display the ideas found in Marxism through their social interactions. According to Understanding Film Theory , “Marxism was conceived as a revolutionary theory that attempted to explain and expose the relations of power in capitalist societies” (Etherington-Wright 83). It also says that Marxism’s founder, Karl Marx, was “concerned with the apparent division between the ruling and the working class” (83). In the film, Buggin’ Out verbally attacks a property owning white man for running over his new Air Jordans and then asks him “What are you doing in my neighborhood?” In this brief scene Lee is able to show how a character in a poor neighborhood feels the psychological need to compete with others economically. This is an example of the Culture Industry and Buggin’ Out displays this because he buys the latest shoes and does not want to feel that he was literally and symbolically being run over by a man who was much wealthier than he was (86).

The film is set in a predominantly black neighborhood and the only two families seen that own businesses are either Italian American or Korean American. Therefore, some of the black characters like them because they are business owners and others dislike them for the same reason. However, at the end of the film the only business owner whose business is vandalized and burned to the ground is a white man’s. Lee shows that, although there is conflict between Korean Americans and African Americans, the history between whites and blacks is much more conflicted. Furthermore, even though many of the black characters love Sal’s pizzeria, they do become aware of what Sal really thinks of them when he feels threatened out by Buggin’ Out and denies him the chance to put a picture of a black man on the pizzeria wall. The movie also clearly shows how by denying the picture, Sal keeps control over the black patrons in his restaurant. The two films clips that will be discussed will be analyzed by using both a racial and Marxist perspective. The first clip shows black and Hispanic characters in conflict over material possessions, but ultimately respecting each other, and the second clip shows Mookie coming to the realization that as much as he tries to moderate peaceful relations between white and black characters at some point he feels he has to fight for what he thinks is unfair, even if it means losing his job over it.

Do the Right Thing Analysis of Scenes

The first selected scene begins with a record being played that brings in the sound of conga drums while the camera fades to the next scene where we find a group of Puerto Rican men who fit a perceived ethnic Puerto Rican image while the salsa music of Ruben Blades is heard loud. Spike Lee opening the scene with heavy use of iconography enforces stereotypes by choice of the men’s clothes, language, and facial appearance. The man in the center speaks in Spanish, referring to his beautiful land Puerto Rico, while his friend disagrees with its beauty by calling it a nightmare. The scene is successful in portraying that this corner of the majority black neighborhood is very different from the rest. While the two friends begin to argue the camera pans away to reveal that the loud salsa music actually comes from an old boom box which begins to blend with loud rap music cluing the viewer that Radio Raheem must be near. The camera pans to the right and starts from the ground, moving up stopping at the large newer stereo being held by two large African American hands wearing gold knuckle jewelry, showing Lee’s use of fetishization by focusing on half of the body and not the face. As the camera pauses, the viewer can read the words Super and PRO stereo and Raheem’s music is heard much more clearly, showing signs of economic excess. The jewelry and the stereo’s excessive noise and size represent economic power and status. The camera pans up to Raheem’s serious face and the African medallion hanging on his neck once again shows iconography. While the camera focus on Raheem, the sound of the Puerto Ricans yelling that their salsa music is being drowned out is heard. The camera rotates to the right again and passes green bushes that represent a tropical climate as the salsa music starts to be heard again.

The man in the center recognizes that Radio Raheem is issuing a challenge of power by standing next to them blaring loud rap music that many black youth identify with. This challenge of power has both racial and economic symbolism because it is essentially seeing not only whose stereo plays louder music, but also whose culture is the more dominating one. When the Puerto Rican man walks over to his boom box, which has a Puerto Rican flag sticker on it, it is clear that his stereo is not as new and when he turns up the volume louder the viewer realizes it’s not as loud either. Raheem then turns up multiple knobs and drowns out the salsa yet again, letting the Puerto Rican man know that in this power struggle he has just lost. He responds by turning down his music again and saying “You Got it Bro” to which Raheem responds by smiling and pumping his fist in the air. This two minute scene, although entertaining, in reality represents the whole movie in the way the different races want to feel acknowledged, powerful and respected by the other races in the film. In this scene Raheem proves he is more powerful and it is a precursor for the many confrontations that he faces throughout the film.

The second selected scene begins minutes after Radio Raheem has been killed by the police because of their response to a street fight between Radio Raheem and Sal. This scene represents how disbelief turns to outrage, as the characters shout the names of other victims of police violence. At this point the viewer begins to realize that this may not have been a freak accident and in fact that has been happening repeatedly in this neighborhood. The residents of this lower class neighborhood are now all aware that it is the norm for them to be victimized by police. The older man saying “They didn’t have to kill the boy,” points out that Radio, though large and intimidating, was still a fairly young man.

When the camera pans to Mookie’s shocked face, it reveals that Mookie has decided that there is something wrong with standing next to these three white men while the rest of his neighbors and friends watch. The way they stand is very important because Sal is standing in the center and his two sons are standing behind him. Mookie is also next to him, but his body is slightly away from them showing that he is reconsidering his position towards them. He looks to Sal, then back at the neighborhood and begins to walk away from Sal and his sons. The act is very significant because Mookie felt a loyalty to Sal through employment, but now a line in the sand is drawn. After Mookie leaves, Sal’s facial expression becomes tenser because he realizes that at least he had someone in the neighborhood literally on his side who ethnically looked like the rest of the residents who at the moment are not happy with him or his sons.

Seeing that tensions may escalate, the character Mayor tries to pacify the crowd, but they do not take him seriously due to his alcoholism and the fact that he is dressed poorly. At this point the crowd is upset, but have not decided to commit any acts of violence yet. The camera panning from a largely black crowd to three white men staring at them shows that Sal and his sons may have more economic status, but they do not have the numbers. Pino’s face shows that he may have been expecting this to happen all along. This scene is very fascinating because at this point Sal and his sons are not just a symbol of wealth, but are now a symbol of any injustice committed against the people of the neighborhood by someone who is white or economically more powerful than they are. It is ironic because Raheem was actually choking Sal before the police came, but the residents do not acknowledge that. As Mookie runs with a trashcan towards the pizzeria, he is not only smashing Sal’s store, but is showing his outrage and anger for being made to feel powerless by the police. Sal’s voice in slow motion can be heard yelling “No!” but by then it is too late. As the residents loot the store it shows that they are tired of being made to feel powerless by the police and by all those who are economically better off. While some destroy the store, others go for the money showing that they are desperate to regain the power that they felt that they never had. While the neighborhood residents destroys the pizzeria, Sal is taken to the other side of the street where he is forced to watch in disbelief as not only his store is being destroyed, but also his economic superiority over them becomes destroyed as well, thus proving to be a remarkable scene.

Director Spike Lee chose to create a film that is able to both entertain and emotionally resonate with an audience by pointing out that when racial and social disparities are not properly addressed by those in power, they can ultimately lead to acts of extreme violence by those who feel powerless. The film is realistic in its approach that a melting pot of different cultures and races doesn’t mean that everyone will live happily ever after. Lee knew that in order to make a film about social issues he needed to embrace the stereotypes in order to criticize them. At one point in the film the police officers are driving through the neighborhood and say “What a waste” while they are driving by. The residents outside at the moment were not committing any acts of violence, but in a brief instant it shows that the officers whose job it is to protect the community do not respect the residents they serve, and also hints at what is to come later in the movie.

The film expertly lets the conflict build slowly instead focusing on the ridiculousness of stereotypes such as the Asian store owner with a thick accent, or the overly agitated and hyper active young man who can be seen as very pro black. The film shows the viewer that these issues concerning race exist, but the characters do not directly confront them until the very end of the film. It is important to emphasize that these issues are not solely with race, but also who is in control. It is the combination of the two that takes things to a boiling point. Comic scenes like a boom box show down ultimately prove to be more about power and less about who’s got better music, and a riot does not usually form without years of feeling that the system created for a group’s protection does not benefit their best interests. Do The Right Thing is more than just a film on police brutality or racial identity, it is about the beauty and ugliness that exist, not only in a low income community, but in our selves.

Works Cited

Do The Right Thing . Dir. Spike Lee. Perf. Spike Lee, Danny Aiello. Universal, 1989. DVD.

Etherington-Wright, Christine, and Ruth Doughty. Understanding Film Theory . Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

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Jotted Lines

A Collection Of Essays

Do The Right Thing: Summary, Analysis

Summary: .

Set on a city block during the hottest day of the summer in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (‘Bed-Stuy’), Do The Right Thing follows the character of ‘Mookie’ (Spike Lee), a pizza delivery boy, and a day in the life of the neighborhood residents as the climate gives way to escalating encounters and disputes around culture, ethnicity and community.

Do The Right Thing was Spike Lee’s third feature film following School Daze (1988) and She’s Gotta Have It (1986). The film came a decade removed from the Blaxploitation film cycle and two years before the ‘black film explosion’ of 1991.1 A prolific film auteur, Lee continues to challenge the idea of black film and American cinema.

The opening credits of Do The Right Thing open to the strains of a soprano saxophone rendition of James Weldon Johnson’s ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’. The song ends screen black and the title sequence begins with Public Enemy’s ‘Fight The Power’ and a cut to a stage. Evoking the conceit of the film musical’s opening number, the montage of the sequence features the hip-hop dance of Rosie Perez in multiple costumes against a changing backdrop of Brooklyn photographs backlit by an array of colour schemes. This opening montage is cut to match the movements of Perez’s dance, a dance of militancy and popping contractions with a face that never smiles. She is more than merely a woman to be leered at or reductively posed as an object of pleasure. Her dance signals a cultural politics of hip-hop and what Guthrie Ramsey notes as the mark of ‘a present that has urgency, particularity, politics, and pleasure’. 2 With these two compositions and their distinct spatiotemporal origins, the present of Do The Right Thing demonstrates a century of urgency.

‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ began as a poem by James Weldon Johnson that debuted in 1900. Johnson and Johnson’s brother, J. Rosamond, would set the poem to music and this composition would eventually be dubbed the ‘The Negro National Anthem’ and adopted as the official song of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP promoted the use of the song as an anthem for the black struggle for access to freedoms and inalienable rights denied by the discriminatory and terrorist practices of white supremacy and the Racial Contract. Moreover, the use of the song during the Civil Rights Movement and its eventual retitling (‘The Black National Anthem’) continued the purposing of the song as black anthem of protest. As Shana Redmond points out,

“Black anthems become incubators not only for a race/sound fusion but also the merger of art and practice. The conditions that give rise to these anthems within diaspora include colonialism, Jim Crow segregation, and myriad legal and extralegal enactments of persistent inequality; therefore liberation and its pursuit are necessarily narrated and exercised in tandem with philosophies and acts of resistance.” 3

Public Enemy offers an anthem less reconciled to the Christian doctrine of social protest and nonviolence but nonetheless remains a song compelled by conditions that animate defiant verse.

While the first song offers the perseverance of faith and belief in inalienable rights, the latter demonstrates a cultural nationalist tact, a more politicised sense of culture and the black lifeworld. Cultural nationalism shifted the meaning of race from the biological to a deliberate posing of race as cultural praxis and a matter of engagement with the anti-hegemonic struggle against white supremacy as embodying features of black personhood. Moreover, the distance between the poles is made plainer with the modal of hip-hop modernism and not that of the sacred verse of gospel. As a sorrow song of what Mark Anthony Neal calls ‘postindustrial soul’, ‘Fight The Power’ offers a sobering and artful discontent from streets far removed from Birmingham, but a relation nonetheless.4

The depth of Do The Right Thing demonstrates the staging of a political art richly informed by multiple historiographies of black visual and expressive culture. The film is propelled by an intersection of history, music, cinema and blackness. This generative nexus of historical scripts encompasses such issues as gentrification, the black public sphere, police brutality, the popular, cultural and ethnic conflict, and the everyday urban. In other words, anti-realist in its stance, the film positions itself in the matrix of black representation as an interpretative echo and refabulation of race and art. The film employs a 24-hour conceit of the hottest day of the summer in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (‘Bed-Stuy’). This plotting of a ‘day in the life’ amplifies the masterful way the film functions as a discrete representational system. The seamless accounting of the day on the block through continuity editing is facilitated by such things as Mister Señor Love Daddy’s radio broadcast, colour, physical movements, emblematic framing, an intricate orchestration of ensemble casting in the depth of field, and sound bridges. With the deliberateness of the film structure, one learns to watch the film and recognise the spatiality of the setting. Eventually, one recognises that at one end of the block is Mookie and Jade’s building, Mother Sister’s brownstone, the Korean-run grocery, and across the street against the red wall are the corner crew (Sweet Dick Willie, ML, and Coconut Sid). At the other end of the block, starting across from the grocery is Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, the stoop where the Puerto Ricans sit, the station home for 108FM ‘We Love Radio’, and the brownstone owned by the Celtics’ fan. The film details a dynamic community of personalities and histories, a space textured by infinite encounters.

The cohesiveness of this spatial conceit does not comply with the platitudes of Our Town, USA. The film proves that the most rewarding consequence of America as ‘The Melting Pot’ is that the analogy has never worked. We the people are not the same: we have different cultures, belief systems, and freedom dreams. These differences Do The Right Thing (1989) 209 represent at times collateral interests but never truly identical ones. In this way, the interethnic conflicts that circulate up and down the block are but a red herring. Do The Right Thing vitally avoids the classical tact of the social problem film to present the problem of differences as systemic or a result of the idea of America itself. In the social problem film, these staged eruptions of racial conflict are resolved and contained with a tacit framing of our spectatorship in terms of cinematically enacted cures.

As Michael Rogin writes, ‘Hollywood, inheriting and universalizing blackface in the blackface musical, celebrated itself as the institutional locus of American identity. In the social problem film it allied itself with the therapeutic society. Generic overlap suggests institutional overlap; Hollywood was not just Hortense Powdermaker’s dream factory, but also the American interpreter of dreams, employing roleplaying as national mass therapy.’ 5 Social problem films with race as their object choice usually enact a limited and circumspect sense of social problem-solving. In particular, the way these films are saddled with the extra-diegetic responsibilities of reconciliation between the races promotes a dangerously ridiculous sense of film as social policy. After all, what James Baldwin called the ‘price of the ticket’ should mean more than matinee admission. Do The Right Thing poignantly demands that one’s spectatorship entail a recognition of our respective subject positions and/or complicities in a productively non-patronising way.

The central conflict of Do The Right Thing cycles around the issue of How come there ain’t no brothas on the wall? Outraged by the absence of black representation on the pizzeria wall, Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) organises a boycott against Sal’s Pizzeria in response to the ‘Wall of Fame’, a collage of photographs devoted to Italian Americans. The call for economic sanctions echoes the use of these strategies throughout the twentieth century by churches, unions and civic leaders as a way of combatting the economic disenfranchisement of anti-black racism. This call for representation is emblematic of a diacritical sense of value. First, there is the value suggested by economic empowerment of a raced consumer-citizen. Second, there is the measure of culture as value. In this way, the central conflict that accrues over the course of the film becomes that of the political and cultural value of blackness.

However, the film’s vessel of civil disobedience and cultural nationalism is far from sound. Buggin’ Out does not articulate a clear plan of black economic development. His persona is that of empty rhetoric; more hothead than firebrand. Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) lumbers and speaks like a heroic throwback from the mind of Jack Kirby. A laconic giant, his voice and being are embodied by ‘Fight the Power’, the only thing constantly blaring from his boombox. His ‘Love vs. Hate’ direct address constitutes the most that he ever speaks, a gesture to the absurd holyroller ways of Robert Mitchum’s itinerant honeymoon killer in Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Yet, this ad infinitum struggle between good and evil, coupled with Raheem’s devotion to the gospel of Public Enemy, frame him as a very textured figure. He wanders throughout Bed-Stuy spreading the word, battling any and all windmills along the way. Every interaction is a contest and exclamation of his being. Finally, closing out the rebel band is Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith). Mentally disabled and physically spastic, Smiley’s speech is as indecipherable as the irreconcilable coupling of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in the photograph postcards he marks and peddles. Stumbling through the film, Smiley tags his cherished wares in a style imitative of Jean-Michel Basquiat.6

This crisis of representation emblematic of this rebel ensemble embodies the necessary tensions surrounding the political question of black representation and film as an art practice. Specifically, what is the purpose of the term ‘black film’? Does it represent an entirely foreign film practice? Is it merely a reflection of black people, not art but simply black existential dictation? Like all other expressions of the idea of black film, Do The Right Thing should not be thought as mimetically tied to the social category of race. The ‘black’ of black film represents something other than merely people. Instead it must be appreciated in terms of the art of film and enactments of black visual and expressive culture. In this way, film blackness functions as a critical term for the way race is rendered and mediated by the art of film.7

This alienation effect of the film escalates with the final sequence of Radio Raheem’s murder by 210 Do The Right Thing (1989) the police. The broken band of rebels storm the pizzeria and what begins as canted and absurd quickly accelerates. Sal begins a litany of ‘nigger’ and pulls out a baseball bat. He then proceeds to destroy Raheem’s boombox, silencing the roar of the Public Enemy anthem.8 Yes, the film resonates with prejudices and interethnic conflict but it also gestures towards the idea of communities constituted by ambivalences. Regardless, the confusion of this confrontation signals a shattering break. Things have gone too far and as Radio Raheem strangles Sal, pulling him over the counter, the fight spills into the street. The fight draws a crowd and the NYPD arrive. A police hold is administered with a nightstick against Raheem’s neck as he is raised and lynched until his kicks wind down. He is murdered. Radio Raheem is dead.

A void appears in the quick exit of the police with a corpse and Buggin’ Out in tow. There is the mournful calm of what has happened and how it has come to this. Mookie they killed him. They killed Radio Raheem. A divide appears, with Mookie, Sal, Pino and Vito on one side and the witnesses from the neighbourhood frozen still, growing angrier in the street. Everyone is a stranger; everyone is revealed. Murder. They did it again. Just like Michael Stewart. Murder. Eleanor Bumpers. Murder.9 The extradiegetic victims of murder at the hands of the police (not persons unknown) now have Raheem among their ranks. Mookie walks away before returning into this breach, throwing a garbage can through the pizzerio’s window. Fireman and police readied in riot gear arrive and the historical rupture is complete. Even in the absence of Birmingham’s finest with German Shepherds at hand, Sweet Dick Willie makes it plain: Yo where’s Bull Connor?10 Smiley begins a new Wall of Fame amid the wreckage by tacking one of his postcards on the smouldering wall: finally some brothers are on the wall. But, was this really what it was all about? Smiley with his ever-delirious visage appears to be the only one to claim some semblance of a victory.

The day after brings the new normal of an awkward, yet tender, meeting between Mookie and Sal. In the end, Mister Señor Love Daddy broadcasts the only available closure – a reminder to register to vote and a mournful shout-out to Radio Raheem.11 The film ends with scrolling citations from Martin Luther King Jr. and X before the film’s final image: the King and X photograph. The offering of these two contrasting political positions – the immorality of violence and the pragmatism of self-defence – is one of the major reasons that the film continues to haunt, inspire, and provoke. For only there on the screen does their proximity hint at some kind of dialectical resolve or compatibility. Do The Right Thing orchestrates the tensions and distinctions between social categories of racial being and the art of film. The film is a question masquerading in the form of a call to action. In other words, the film functions in a way too irresolute to be thought of as merely provocative protest. If the film is troubling, so be it. Killing the messenger has always been convenient, but it never truly disavows that a message has been sent. Always do the right thing. That’s it? That’s it. I got it. I’m gone.

Michael B. Gillespie

Notes

1. For more on the history of the Blaxploitation cycle and the significance of 1991, see Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 1993.

2. Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Be Bop to Hip-Hop, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2003, p. 178.

3. Shana L. Redmond, ‘Citizens of Sound: Negotiations of Race and Diaspora in the Anthems of the UNIA and NAACP’, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2011, p. 22.

4. See Mark Anthony Neal, What The Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture, London and New York, Routledge, 1999, pp. 125–57.

5. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1998, p. 221.

6. The photograph was taken on March 26, 1964, in the halls of the United States Capitol Building during Senate debates on the Civil Rights Bill. It documents the only meeting between the two men and lasted only a few minutes.

7. For more on ‘film blackness’, see Michael B. Gillespie, ‘Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin, Film Blackness, and the Racial Grotesque’, in Mia Mask (ed.), Contemporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, New York, Routledge, 2012. Also, see the press conference (May 1989) that followed the premiere screening of Do The Right Thing at the Cannes Film Festival. (Available on the Criterion Collection and 20th Anniversary Edition DVD releases of the film.) The insistence by much of the audience on reading Do The Right Thing in social reflectionist terms glaringly illustrates the need to distinguish between black people and black film.

8. The baseball bat references Howard Beach and the death of Michael Griffith. On the evening of 19 December 1986, a group of black men entered a pizzeria in the Queens neighbourhood of Howard Beach seeking help after their car broke down a few miles away. Upon leaving, the men were confronted by a group of Italian Americans from the neighbourhood armed with baseball bats. Attempting to escape from a continued beating by the mob, Griffith was struck and killed by a car on the highway.

9. Michael Stewart was a New York City graffiti artist killed while in the custody of New York Transit Police (1983). Eleanor Bumpers was a mentally ill, African American senior citizen killed by NYPD officers during the eviction from her home (1984).

10.Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor served as Public Safety Commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama (1957–1963). A rabid white supremacist, Connor was responsible for the brutal and violent responses (the use of police dogs and fire hoses against protestors) to the desegregation campaigns spearheaded by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

11.This call to vote was part of Lee’s endorsement of David Dinkins’ mayoral run. Dinkins would be elected New York City’s first African American mayor the following year.

Cast and Crew:

[Country: USA. Production Company: A Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks Production. Director: Spike Lee. Producer: Spike Lee. Co-producer: Monty Ross. Line Producer: Jon Kilik. Screenwriter: Spike Lee. Cinematographer: Ernest Dickerson. Editor: Barry Alexander Brown. Music: Bill Lee, featuring Branford Marsalis. Cast: Danny Aiello (Sal), Ossie Davis (Da Mayor), Ruby Dee (Mother Sister), Richard Edson (Vito), Giancarlo Esposito (Buggin’ Out), Spike Lee (Mookie), Bill Nunn (Radio Raheem), John Turturro (Pino), Paul Benjamin (ML), Frankie Faison (Coconut Sid), Robin Harris (Sweet Dick Willie), Joie Lee (Jade), Miguel Sandoval (Officer Ponte), Rick Aiello (Officer Long), John Savage (Clifton), Samuel L. Jackson (Mister Señor Love Daddy), Rosie Perez (Tina), Roger Guenveur Smith (Smiley), Steve White (Ahmad), Martin Lawrence (Cee), Leonard Thomas (Punchy), Christa Rivers (Ella), Frank Vincent (Charlie).]

Film Analysis: Do the Right Thing | Dir. Spike Lee

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Criterion #97

DIRECTOR: Spike Lee

Writer: spike lee, editor: barry alexander brown, top billing cast, danny aiello, ossie davis.

On a sweltering hot day, the people of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Sal’s Pizzeria live out their daily lives while existing tensions simmer between them and threaten to explode.

In one of the most iconic sequences from Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing , Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) explains “the story of love and hate.” As the camera pans, Raheem looks directly at the camera and proudly holds out his fists to us, revealing jewelry emblazoned “Love” on one fist, and “Hate” on the other. Raheem interlocks his fingers and declares that all of life is a constant struggle between these two emotions.

do-the-right-thing-screenshot criterion essay

As effectively blunt as this scene is, the concepts that resonate most throughout the film are the more ambiguous ones that subtly question the straightforward “answers” given within this scene. The end of the film leaves the viewer to wonder the perhaps irreconcilable questions that the film proposes. How should one “do the right thing”? What are their options? Ultimately, the film evokes themes about the impulsivity of decision-making and the impossible choices of morality.

Rather than a traditional plot, we meet a cast of characters who are equally ambiguous and variant in nature and watch as they interact with one another over the course of a single day. The film opens with narration from Mister Señor Love Daddy ( Samuel L. Jackson ), a radio DJ who seems to, while on-air, account for every single person in his neighborhood and inadvertently control their disputes. There’s Smiley ( Roger Guenveur Smith ), a disabled man struggling to earn money by selling copies of a photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X posing together. We meet Radio Raheem, who walks around repeatedly playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” on his massive boom box on full blast, ignoring the resentment and anger of his neighbors. The film’s main character, Mookie ( Spike Lee ) has a job delivering pizzas from Sal’s Famous Pizzeria and seems to know every person he passes by on the streets. As he walks by, he often taunts them, “Get a job!” as they sit on their front steps trying to beat the heat.

Sal ( Danny Aiello ) and his two sons hurl racial insults and make horrible implications to Mookie, but Sal also considers Mookie to be “like family” and takes pride in his twenty-five years of feeding the predominantly-black neighborhood. Mookie is kind to everyone he passes on the street, but he also is a distant father who rarely visits his family. These conflicting attitudes and ambiguities reveal characters who are complex and often difficult for the viewer to identify with, yet, regardless of their pitfalls, we are also able to empathize with them because of Lee’s detailed, careful characterization.

As the film continues, tensions heighten, and the scorching weather makes things even worse. Buggin’ Out ( Giancarlo Esposito ) decides to boycott Sal’s Pizzeria because of the absence of black representation on the restaurant’s Wall of Fame, which only features Italian Americans. Buggin’ Out confronts Sal by declaring that he’s never seen any Italian Americans eating at this restaurant. Sal responds by telling him to put up those images when he has his own restaurant.

After a long and hot day, Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem storm into Sal’s Pizzeria with Raheem’s radio blasting, you guessed it, “Fight the Power,” and demand that the pictures be added onto the wall. After shouting over Raheem’s music and exchanging racial slurs, Sal takes a baseball bat and destroys Raheem’s radio, silencing a musical representation of blackness that is not allowed in Sal’s restaurant.

A heated brawl ensues between Raheem and Sal, escalating the situation until the entire neighborhood erupts into violence and chaos . In the film’s most powerful moment, Mookie is forced to choose between his loyalty to Sal and his communal recognition of black oppression. As he makes his choice, we as viewers are conflicted. Do we take the side of Mookie, who has suffered repeated offenses from the white members in his neighborhood, and is defending his friend? Or do we take the side of Sal, who just wants some peace and quiet, but has had his livelihood destroyed because of his own actions?

One of the most compelling aspects of the film is that — despite the title — it never forces viewers to make a single decision between the characters’ delineations of right and wrong. Despite Raheem’s illustration of the battle between good and evil, we understand in moments filled with violence, quick decision-making, and heightened emotions that doing the right thing isn’t necessarily so simple, because “doing the right thing” is never clearly defined.

As the film presents the viewers with a final ambiguity in the end title sequence, we're compelled to view both perspectives and mourn for everyone involved. Even if none of the characters did the right thing, we could still understand their reasons and motivations. Beyond being a funny, intelligent film, Do The Right Thing is also complex in its ambiguous messages to its viewers and characters, creating a thought-provoking story without any unnecessary moral judgment or didacticism.

THE EXTRA MILE

For The Criterion Collection edition, there's an extensive behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Do The Right Thing and an audio commentary track by director Spike Lee, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, and production designer Wynn Thomas, and actor Joie Lee making this Criterion edition worth adding to your collection. Aside from these features, there is also a music video for “Fight the Power,” which is directed by Spike Lee. Most fascinating, though, is the 1989 Cannes Film Festival press conference with Spike Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, and Joie Lee, where the cast answer questions and confront the varying reactions from audience members.

THE WHOLE PACKAGE

front cover of do the right thing criterion

Buy Do the Right Thing by The Criterion Collection

The packaging for the Criterion release of Do The Right Thing is pretty great, with the classic title font along the spine and the front cover. It’s a standard keep case DVD with two disks, one for the film and the other for the special features. The insert color booklet is enough to warrant adding this to your collection, along with the great special features.

three reasons

LOVE AND HATE

do the right thing love hate rings film essay

RESPONSE TO GENTRIFICATION

SMILEY’S ADDITION TO SAL’S WALL OF FAME

do the right thing screenshot criterion malcolm x

Related: Read more Criterion Audits or check out spoiler-free movie reviews of Criterion Collection titles .

Watch Do the Right Thing Now

The Definitives

Critical essays, histories, and appreciations of great films

Do the Right Thing

Essay by brian eggert july 28, 2019.

“Wake up!” announces Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy, a disc jockey in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, the setting of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing . The first line, which is also the last line of his previous feature from 1988, School Daze, is meant to incite contemplation and discussion rather than supply an unequivocal lesson. In Do the Right Thing , the DJ’s morning address follows the stagelike title sequence in which Rosie Perez dances to a Public Enemy song that encourages listeners to “fight the power.” Within its first moments, Do the Right Thing establishes Lee’s dialectical intention to pose unanswered questions by exposing the artifice of cinema and engaging the critical viewer. The film does not explain what exactly its audience should wake up from, what power we should be fighting, or what constitutes doing the right thing. But Lee’s aesthetically rich work of art uses a distancing effect to incite critical viewership. His technique draws attention to his stylistic choices: the theatrical quality of the drama and staging, the unforgettable moments that nonetheless interrupt the narrative, the choices of actors and their performative styles, and scenes that amount to an allegory in the manner of a Greek tragedy. Together these elements arouse contemplation about the intractable dilemmas of race and ethnicity in American culture. And given Lee’s refusal to provide easy solutions to enduring problems or pacify our emotions with some measure of closure, Do the Right Thing endures as an essential work of cultural introspection.

Set on the hottest day of the summer, Do the Right Thing frames the rise of racial tensions between an African American community and an Italian American business. Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, long-established in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood, is owned and operated by the venerable entrepreneur Sal (Danny Aiello). His sons, the unapologetically racist and angry Pino (John Turturro), and Pino’s bullied younger brother Vito (Richard Edson), also contribute to the parlor. Though, Pino no longer wants to work there as he despises the local African American community. Their sole employee, the slacking delivery boy Mookie (Lee), spends much of his time wandering the neighborhood or attempting to reconcile with Tine (Rosie Perez), the mother of his child. The day’s conflict begins when a young Black man named Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) demands that Sal include some African American faces on his establishment’s “Wall of Fame,” which features exclusively Italian American actors and performers. Sal refuses, arguing that it’s his restaurant, and he will display whomever he chooses. Buggin Out wants Sal to acknowledge that he’s in a neighborhood populated almost entirely by people of color, and since without them Sal’s would not exist, he should show his respect. When Sal refuses, Buggin Out attempts to organize a neighborhood boycott.

Lee structures Do the Right Thing as a philosophical argument whose lessons are ambiguous and whose methods spur the viewer into a dialogue. His dialectical intentions begin with the Universal Pictures logo in the opening, over which a saxophone plays the first bars of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” sometimes called “The Black National Anthem” given its author, NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson. In the next moment, Perez delivers her pulsating dance of coded gestures and shadowboxing to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” a rap song that urgently challenges the so-called progress made to end racism in the United States during the Civil Rights Movement, and then demands action. The two songs are representative of the many strains of back-and-forth viewpoints present throughout the film. The viewer can understand Buggin Out’s opinion that Sal should recognize his place in the Black community by including people of color on his Wall of Fame, just as the viewer can accept Sal’s right as a business owner to decide how to decorate the interior of his restaurant. The way Radio Raheem, Buggin Out, and Smiley provoked Sal may not have been wise, but then Sal’s use of racial epithets and a baseball bat to smash Radio Raheem’s boombox escalated matters to violence. Almost every confrontation in the film can be read from multiple perspectives. And after the sobering conclusion, Lee offers two quotations, one from Martin Luther King and another from Malcolm X, each outlining their oppositional views on the use of violence to solve matters of racial intolerance. He sees the benefits and dangers of both violence and peaceful protest, and rather than declare his faithfulness to one or the other, he does something far more dangerous by calling on the audience to answer his dialectical prompt.

Lee’s quintessentially American brand of filmmaking springs from his cultural and ethnic background, and from there, he focuses on an equally specific range of themes, stylistic choices, and social values in his work. Lee was born in Atlanta in 1957, but his family moved to Brooklyn when he was still an infant. His mother taught African American art and literature while his father worked as a jazz musician. As a boy, he explored his neighborhood with a Super 8 camera and quickly realized what he would do with his life. He completed his first short film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn , at 20, as an undergraduate at Morehouse College. He later graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1982, and his thesis film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads , earned the Student Academy Award. In an interview with Delroy Lindo, the star of Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) and Clockers (1995), the director said that he wanted to film “the richness of Africa American culture that I can see, just standing on the corner, or looking out my window every day.” But Lee has always been concerned with more than representations of contemporary New York life in his resident neighborhood. Ed Guerrero called him an “issues-oriented” filmmaker, noting that he often frames his films around a sociopolitical concern or historical event. Lee does not work in a single genre or style. The defining quality of his cinema is his willingness to engage with the social dynamics of race and culture, most often through the lens of African American identity, history, and representation.

Do the Right Thing was released at a time when hostilities involving race and difference flared, rippling out from New York City across the entire country. A series of racially charged killings of African American men—Willie Turks in 1982, Michael Stewart in 1983, and Yusuf Hawkins in 1989—were carried out by mobs of white people in New York, heightening racial tensions. Lee references the highly publicized Tawana Brawley rape case, where the 15-year old girl accused four white men of raping her over several days and leaving her body marked with racial epithets in November 1987. Although the allegations were contested in court, one scene in the film features “Tawana told the truth” written in graffiti on a wall. The shooting of Eleanor Bumpers by white NYPD officers during an eviction process in 1984 also fueled the tension. And just before the film’s release, the sexual assault of Trisha Meili in April 1989 led to the Central Park Five scandal, where African American and Hispanic teenagers were coerced into confessions of rape and assault, only to be exonerated much later after the true perpetrator confessed in 2001. For much of this, Lee blamed the policies of Ed Koch, and the director included the words “Dump Koch” in the background of another scene. The voting public did just that when they elected David Dinkins over Koch in 1990. These interwoven issues of race, crime, and accusation saturated the cultural discourse that inspired Lee’s film, making Do the Right Thing seem of the moment .

The film premiered at the Canned Film Festival in May 1989 and remains his most widely esteemed and debated work. It received an impressive number of awards and nominations after its release, including a nomination for the Palme d’Or and an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Lee and his cast also won several awards. These include the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s prizes to Lee for his direction, Lee’s father Bill for composing the score, Aiello for best supporting actor, and the top prize for best picture. Several other critical associations and film institutions gave it honors, whereas the mainstream Academy Awards issued their statues to Driving Miss Daisy , a film whose discussion of race relations limits itself to a white audience. Whereas the Oscar for Best Picture went to Driving Miss Daisy , a film that has been largely forgotten in the decades since its release, Lee’s film continues to be at the forefront of the cinematic discussion about representation, race, and unanswerable questions about America and its history. It also took only ten years for the Library of Congress to add Do the Right Thing to the National Film Registry as a work that demands cultural preservation. Driving Miss Daisy has yet to make the list.

Actually, it’s a small miracle that a Hollywood studio distributed Do the Right Thing. Most studios, especially in the 1980s, maintained an aversion to films that rested on ambiguity, polemical ideologies, or challenged widespread views about American identity. Hollywood, too, rarely made films about issues of race and difference, and their conflicted place in the fabric of American history and social power structures. Lee’s film goes against the usual Hollywood production’s push toward entertainment-first and commercial certainty, challenging the relatively moderate limits of the usual political liberalism of Hollywood. Though historically Hollywood productions have used ambiguity and left-leaning ideologies, rarely does a studio film make an unwavering statement, so as not to isolate a segment of the market and, thus, limit the commercial appeal. Then again, the film industry of the 1980s viewed African American audiences as a niche market, and so Black filmmakers and stories were marginalized because such material rarely had crossover appeal. Lee had his own obstacles to overcome. His first two films were profitable but earned him a reputation, which he described as “a wild-eyed black militant, a baby Malcolm X” that flashed a warning sign to Hollywood executives.

When Lee was shopping the script to various studios, Paramount Pictures was the first to show interest; however, they demanded that Lee make alterations to the material to suit their audience. “Paramount wanted Mookie and Sal to hug at the end of the movie,” Lee told The Hollywood Reporter . Lee expanded in his journal, “They are convinced that black people will come out of the theaters wanting to burn shit down.” When Lee refused to tame the film’s central conflict, the studio canceled negotiations. After talks with Paramount ended, Touchstone Pictures also turned down the production. Lee felt he had to combat how he was perceived in Hollywood at the time, that any Black man who was not accommodating to white interests was deemed “difficult” and would not align with studio considerations. Still, Universal Pictures ultimately agreed to finance Do the Right Thing . Head of production Tom Pollack maintained it was not because they wanted to release social issue films, which was the perception after they distributed Martin Scorsese’s controversial The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. Rather, Pollack noted their interest in Lee’s film was primarily a matter of recognizing its potential to make money from a relatively inexpensive $6.5 million budget ( School Daze cost the same and earned over $14 million). After Pollack agreed to finance the picture, Lee shot for 40 days and, by the end of its theatrical run, Do the Right Thing earned $27 million at the domestic box office. Universal would distribute several “Spike Lee Joints” throughout the 1990s.

Structurally and visually, Do the Right Thing alternates among the Bed-Stuy characters, building through a dialectic the tensions and uncertainties that charge Lee’s situations and themes. The rhythm of the film’s arrangement has a theatrical quality, as though the entire neighborhood was the stage and, from scene to scene, Lee dims the lights on one area and illuminates them on another. It’s a film comprised of intervals and interruptions, asides and isolated moments. Lee does not follow a single character for long periods of the film. His drama alternates from individual scenes with Mookie to Sal to Buggin Out to children on the street cooling down in an open fire hydrant. The transitions seldom occur through abrupt cutting, but rather as Dickerson’s fluid camera movements track one scene and then, as another character enters from elsewhere in the neighborhood, the camera reconfigures its attention. Within a given scene, however, Lee often alternates between quarreling characters in a mirroring technique of editing that emphasizes the conflict. The harder the cut, the more intense the argument. When Buggin Out first enters Sal’s early in the film, Lee frames his debate with Sal about the cost of extra cheese, a relatively mild topic of contention, with both characters in the same shot. A moment later as their argument about Sal’s “Wall of Fame” heats up, the cutting becomes a sharper back-and-forth with a cut between each response, representing their opposition since the conflict is more serious. Lee uses these visual rhythms to underscore the connections and breaking points between people of Bed-Stuy.

Disjointed as this may feel at times, Lee ensures that every interval leads to something more in the overall drama of the film. For instance, several scenes involving the Korean store owner Sonny (Steve Park) and his wife Kim (Ginny Yang), and their interactions with more prominent characters, supply an unmistakable arc. In an early sequence involving the Greek chorus, ML bickers about the presence of the Korean grocer in the Black neighborhood: “I betcha they haven’t been a year off da motherfucking boat before they opened up their own place.” Sweet Dick Willie refuses to listen, saying “you got off the boat too,” before sauntering over to get a beer from the grocer. In another scene, Radio Raheem has a tense exchange with Sonny and Kim over batteries for his boombox and the language barrier that prevents him from getting the twenty “D” Energizers he needs. The initial impression of the Korean family in Bed-Stuy is one of animosity; however, the African American locals begin to identify with the Korean Americans, relating to them as similarly displaced people—the African Americans by slavery, the Koreans by emigration. When, in the climactic scene, the rioters enraged over Radio Raheem’s death direct their rage at the Korean grocery store, ML turns from Sal’s to Sonny and shouts, “Your turn, fucker!” But Sonny declares in broken English, “I no White! I Black! You. Me. Same!” The rioters accept this and refrain from continuing their attack.

The racial slur sequence is just one of many Brechtian flourishes, where Lee breaks from the narrative momentum to face the viewer. Another moment features Radio Raheem performing a “Love and Hate” monologue to Mookie during their brief encounter in the street. Raheem wears large gold rings, almost brass knuckles, with the words “LOVE” and “HATE” spelled out on the right and left hand, respectively. He proceeds to tell a mythical story, represented as Raheem shadow boxes toward the camera, each punch marking how either Love or Hate has the advantage in their ongoing battle, until finally the Hate is “KO’ed by Love.” Lee borrowed the moment from Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), featuring Robert Mitchum as a murderous preacher with the words “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on his hands. Mitchum’s Rev. Harry Powell tells “the story of good and evil” in a writhing, expressive display in which his fingers are interlocked, and the sequence exemplified that film’s storybook conflict between the evil preacher and the innocent children he sought to kill. In Do the Right Thing , the monologue places Raheem at the center of the film’s conflict between love and hate, echoed by the philosophies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X quoted at the film’s conclusion. Caught between these two opposing views, Raheem becomes a victim of the conflict at the climactic scene, marshaling the neighborhood and the viewer into introspection. As a character who teaches a lesson in the middle of the film, his death becomes the catalyst for another type of lesson in the finale whose interpretation is far less apparent than the one symbolized in his monologue.

Although Lee never breaks the fourth wall, he offers, in a manner that addresses the spectator, scenes that call attention to their uniqueness and placement within the overall film as emblematic of Do the Right Thing ’s persistent themes. When the frame rushes toward each participant in the racial slur sequence, these characters unleash their discriminating remarks on each other. But Lee has framed them as though they are vented directly to the viewer. Similarly, Dickerson’s handheld camera faces Raheem during the “Love and Hate” monologue, and though the shot could be interpreted as being from Mookie’s perspective, Lee seems to want the audience to consider Raheem’s words outside of the film’s surface context. Along with the presence of Mister Señor Love Daddy, the Greek chorus on the corner, and even the violent climax of the film, Lee frees himself from the constraints of cinematic realism and engages in a form of theatricality, wherein the characters and, perhaps most importantly the violence , occurs on a performative and edifying platform. The violence of the finale functions as a highpoint to the emotional trajectory of the film, but it also represents the meeting of several conflicting views that are neither resolved within the story nor by lessons of the film. These theatrical moments in the film’s discourse become a strategy through which Lee demands a dialectical and not purely emotional outcome.

Lee’s interest in the theatrical legacy of actors extends from Davis and Dee to the Oscar-nominated turn by Danny Aiello, who developed and deepened his character into more than the racist figure Lee originally wrote. Davis and Dee’s performances in the film exist in another, older theatrical style, as their scenes play out in a stagey mini-drama with allusions to the past. In tender performances that could have been authored by playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the two characters have lived through the last half-century of racial tensions and personal failures, and the scars weigh on them. Though the details of their characters’ lives remain scant, the presence of these actors as these characters tells us everything we need to know about them. The performances themselves are theatrical and marked by emotional projection; their voices and expressions reach to the back row, while their presence offers a metatextual link to the tradition of progressive African American voices in cinema and theater. In a different sort of performance, Aiello and Turturro carry out their roles with a naturalism defined by the characters’ shared background, which the actors improvised on the set. In a scene of pronounced psychological realism, Sal and Pino discuss the pizzeria’s legacy, Sal’s devotion to the neighborhood, and Pino’s unwavering racism, and the scene transforms Sal into someone worthy of the audience’s empathy.

Lee grants humanity to each of his characters, while also demonstrating how quickly racism and anger strip away that humanity. In the climactic moment, Mookie, often a voice of reason, shouts “Hate!” before he tosses a garbage can into Sal’s window. During the riot, the seemingly goodhearted Smiley lights the match that sets Sal’s ablaze, while the sweet Mother Sister shouts “Burn it down!” outside. It is the film’s enduring dialectic between nonviolence and violence, love and hate, that keeps the viewer engaged in an essential and productive discussion. The end titles put much of Do the Right Thing into a constructive, open-ended context by questioning what constitutes the appropriate action for people of color to combat racism given the divergent lessons of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Two quotes appear on the screen. First, King denounces violence as a method to bring about racial justice because it stops a healing dialogue and achieves only “a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.” Second, Malcolm X calls the use of violence in “self-defense” a form of “intelligence.” Before the end credits roll, a photograph of the two leaders laughing and shaking hands appears on the screen, the same photo Smiley hawks throughout the film. Lee ends his masterpiece by juxtaposing two personal philosophies that remain at the center of an ongoing debate.

Bibliography:

Bogle, Donald. Hollywood Black: The Stars, the Films, the Filmmakers . Running Press, 2019.

Conrad, Mark T., editor. The Philosophy of Spike Lee . The University Press of Kentucky, 2011.

Enelow, Shonni. “Feel the Love.” Film Comment . July-August 2019, pp. https://www.filmcomment.com/article/feel-the-love. Accessed 20 July 2019.

Guerrero, Ed. Do the Right Thing . BFI Modern Classics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

King, Susan. “‘Universal Was Not Afraid’: Spike Lee Reflects on the Fearmongering That First Met ‘Do the Right Thing’.” The Hollywood Reporter . 2019 June 28. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/do-right-thing-spike-lee-reflects-fearmongering-first-met-1989-film-1220715. Accessed 21 July 2019.

Lee, Spike, and Lisa Jones. Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint . Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Reid, Mark A., editor. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing . Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Schuessler, Jennifer. “Portrait of a Marriage, Onstage and at the Barricades.” The New York Times. 12 November 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/arts/ossie-davis-ruby-dee-archives-schomburg.html. Accessed 20 July 2019.

Sterritt, David. Spike Lee’s America . Polity Press, 2013.

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Provoking Reflection: "Do the Right Thing" Film Analysis

Table of contents, dynamic characters, visual storytelling, social commentary, moral ambiguity, enduring relevance, conclusion: a provocative exploration.

Lee, S. (Director). (1989). Do the Right Thing [Film].
Stam, R. (Ed.). (1998). Race in American film: Voices and visions that shaped a nation. John Wiley & Sons.
Clemons, W. M. (2008). "Fight the Power": Music and political struggle in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Black Music Research Journal, 28(1), 101-126.
Clark, A. M. (2013). "It's Got to Be the Heat": "Do the Right Thing" and the Role of Music in Spike Lee's Art. Notes, 69(1), 83-104.
Bogle, D. (2001). Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. Continuum.

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Forming a Critical Sense of Race with Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”

Interpretations of the film may differ by race, media scholar Kelli Marshall finds.

Each term, my film students watch Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). And each term, they react similarly to the scene in which Mookie (Spike Lee) throws a trash can, igniting a neighborhood riot by breaking the window of the pizzeria where he works. Most students of color feel Lee’s character “did the right thing” while the majority of white students cannot understand why Mookie “would do such a thing to his boss.” Why this reaction—term after term, year after year?

Like most of Spike’s Lee’s films, Do the Right Thing challenges viewers. For starters, Lee consistently rams together the conflicting ideologies of Malcolm X (violence as self-defense and when necessary) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (always non-violence) without explicitly informing the spectator which is the better choice. What’s more, the large cast—compiled mostly of secondary characters—theoretically uneases filmgoers since Hollywood normally offers only two or three leads for us to follow.

But undoubtedly, it’s Lee’s characterization of Italian-American pizzeria owner, Sal (Danny Aiello), and Mookie’s decision to hurl that trash bin into Sal’s restaurant window that challenge many viewers. Is Mookie doing the right thing here? Is he not?

A first thought is this: students of color readily identify with Mookie because he is the film’s lead black character while white students relate to Sal because he is the film’s central white character. This conclusion, of course, is too simplistic. After all, a spectator of any race, ethnicity, class, age, or sexual orientation can connect with a character of any race, ethnicity, class, age, or sexual orientation.

But as Dan Flory points out in “Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist,” perhaps there is a tad of truth to this rather naïve assessment about identification and audience reception.

Spike Lee has said he wrote Danny Aiello’s Sal as a racist. Aiello, however, interpreted his character otherwise. “He’s a nice guy,” Aiello claims, “and he sees people as equal.” Aiello further points out that in the film’s climatic scene—when he destroys the boom box of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn)—Sal has to look deep inside himself “to find the most insulting words he could to throw at those who made him angry.” As a result, Aiello argues, his character “ends up acting like a racist, even though he is not one.” It appears many of my white students make similar conclusions.

But as Dan Flory points out, several anti-black cues pepper Sal’s actions and speech, each of which should make viewers think twice about Aiello’s interpretation. For instance, Sal refers to his black customers as these people , language that distances himself from them and, in essence, “others” them. Similarly, in two scenes, Sal wields a baseball bat—a symbol of white-on-black violence in the 1980s. Moreover, Sal insults his black patrons with terms like jungle music , Africa , and niggers .

Finally, Aiello’s character reacts indifferently to Radio Raheem’s murder by uttering to the growing multiracial crowd around him, “You do what you’ve gotta do.” With such vitriolic words and actions on display one wonders why many of my students, mostly white, don’t (initially) see Sal as a racist.

Flory has a valid answer to this question: because of their life and viewing experience, non-white viewers form “a critical sense of race or double consciousness merely to function and survive in cultures like America’s.” In other words, my students of color possess a more “finely tuned racial awareness” than (most of) their white classmates.

Conversely, white viewers have difficulty “imagining their whiteness from the outside.” They are rarely asked to look at their whiteness critically and , furthermore, their life and viewing experiences have not required them to develop such forms of cognition. Consequently, when called upon to question and/or recognize such issues—as is the case with Do the Right Thing— my white students often find it challenging, even though they may not know why.

For white viewers to see Sal as a racist, they would be required to make “a disruptive change in their system of belief”—an ideology that already (although unconsciously) privileges “aspects of white advantage and power.” So rather than seeing Sal as racist and problematic, many white audiences view him as empathetic and morally good. Nonwhite audiences, on the other hand, see a character that represents—as is doubtless Spike Lee’s goal—a more realistic, more complex perspective on race.

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While I agree with Flory’s conclusions here, I want to clarify one thing: neither Flory nor I believes white viewers are somehow incapable of analyzing a complex text like Do the Right Thing . Certainly not! At the same time though, for nearly ten years the majority of my white students have read the character of Sal and Mookie’s decision to throw the trash can somewhat simply, which suggests there’s still work to be done.

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Studies of Black History at the University of San Diego

Remembrances, discussion, and analysis, do the right thing analysis and reflection.

Do the Right thing analysis and reflection

In search of learning more about African American history during the African American history month, I attended the showing of the movie “Do the Right Thing”. In this essay, I shall provide an overview of the movie and personal analysis of its meaning.

Before actually watching the film, the title gave me the idea of it being about the story of African Americans overcoming some struggle with their environment and coming to terms in a peaceful manner. However, the film turned out to be anything but that. The stories started with DJ love daddy, a radio host in a neighborhood mostly filled with African Americans. He then introduces us to the town that he lives in and the main character, Mookie. Mookie is a delivery boy at a pizza restaurant that most people in the town eat. Sal is the owner of the pizza restaurant. Sal also happens to be one of the few white Americans living in this community filled mostly with African American, Hispanic and immigrants of other racial ethnicities. The differences in cultural background and beliefs certainly warranted tension between Sal and the community members. A character named Buggin Out had an unfriendly history with the owner Sal. Sal has a wall of fame in the restaurant full of white Americans. Buggin Out is offended by the lack of African Americans on the wall and demanded pictures of Africans be hanged. Sal refused his request as he did what he saw fit in his store. Buggin Out tried to get support from the crowd but failed to do so since they all had a long history of eating at Sal’s place. With that being said, Buggin Out is not the only person unsatisfied with Sal. Another character called Radio Raheem had an unpleasant history with Sal for playing his music too loudly in Sal’s restaurant. As their rage grew, Buggin Out and Radio Raheem decided to force Sal to hang up pictures of African Americans in his store. They marched into the store with blaring music demanding action from Sal. After some argument, Sal broke Radio Raheem’s music player to finally stop the music. In his rage, Radio Raheem attacked Sal and was arrested by police officers that arrived at the scene later. During the arrest, Radio Raheem fought back constantly and was choked to death by an officer. The crowd was enraged by this and burned down Sal’s place. The film ended with DJ love daddy announcing the news and stating it is going to be yet another hot day.

The movie was titled “Do the Right Thing”. However, I believe in the movie, nobody really did the right thing. Near the end of the movie, After Radio Raheem was killed. The angry mob was getting out of control. Mookie redirected their anger towards the store by throwing a trash can through the window of the restaurant. I believed this was the right thing to do at the time as the mob focused on trashing the restaurant instead of attacking Sal and his son. However, the story ended with Mookie getting fired, and DJ love Daddy announcing it is going to be yet another hot day. I believe the hot day not only signifies the temperature the town is experiencing, but also the tension between the ethnic groups. So in the end, things never changed. Mookie saving Sal’s life saved him at the time, but he couldn’t solve the bigger， more systemic issues that are the root cause of the problem. Racial inequality and the lack of opportunity is the reason why the community is poor and discriminated against. In the story, Buggin Out and Radio Raheem decided to counteract this through the use of violence. They were merely searching for an equal representation of both whites and blacks on a wall of fame in a remote cafeteria, yet it ended up costing Radio Raheem his life. Although it seems like an irrelevant demand when taking in the big picture, I believe this struggle is a reflection of the bigger issue, equal access, and representation. As discussed in class. African American representation has always been very limited. African American representation is intentionally limited to a one-sided story can be told. As shown in the film, the wall of fame contained a one-sided story of white American being better than African Americans. It contained only pictures of white American achieving great heights. For an uninformative observer, after looking at the wall of fame, the only logical conclusion that the person can draw is praises for the white Americans. By doing this, a one-sided story is formed. The observer would walk away with the conclusion that no African Americans achieved enough to qualify for the wall of fame, making this person more susceptible to other one-sided stories that promoted racial inequality. I believe this movie is called do the right thing to refer to the right way to fight for set equality. As shown in the final scene of the movie, a picture of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr was hung up on the remains of Sal’s wall of fame. Two great civil rights leaders who spent their lives fighting for social justice under very different principles. Much like Malcolm X, Buggin Out and Radio Raheem tried to force Sal to change the picture through violence. And much like Martin Luther’s approach, Mookie saved Sal and kept only what he earned for his pay. I believe the title do the right thing doesn’t mean that anybody actually did the right thing in the movie, but more so, how to fight for your goal in the right way.

Near the end of the movie, DJ love Daddy stated it is yet another hot day. I believe signified that the tension in the community didn’t decrease due to the riot that just happened. A life lost due to the struggle for equality, yet very little was achieved through it. Had Buggin Out taken a different approach such as campaigning for African American representation or presenting a petition, maybe the violence and conflict could have been avoided. The easiest thing for Buggin Out to do was to demand representation through force, but the right thing is usually not the easiest thing to do.

Do the right thing Essay

Do the right thing is a film that was authored and directed by Spike Lee in 1989. The film has been one of the most ground-breaking comedies and it exposes the simmering racial prejudices that dominated America at that time (Reid 3).

The author uses a large cast in the film making it possible to bring out the major themes on issues dominating American society. In the scene, the author exposes his complex study on the dichotomies of daily life among diverse ethnic communities thus making the film to appear more of a comedy than an ordinary drama (Cooper 456).

Previously, the comedy has gained commercial success where the author received myriad awards and accolades due to its cultural significance (Cooper 454). One of the key issues dominating the scene includes various forms of bigotry such as racism existing in Metropolitan cities of US. This essay aims to examine how the concept of “Right” thing has been developed citing examples from the film.

How the concept of the “right’ thing has been developed in the film

Spike Lee has made a deliberate attempt in the scene to develop the concept “right” thing in a manner that delivers a true meaning to distinguish good from evil.

According to the way the concept has been used in the scene, it is definite that there is a true law that distinguishes a right act from a wrong one. In other words, Spike Lee attempts to bring out some of the characteristics of a “right” thing. From a careful analysis of the film, the author has clearly demonstrated that there are universal and natural laws governing the “right” thing.

For example, as the film ends the author projects an utterance by Martin Luther king which says that, “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral” (Cooper 459). From this phrase, it is definite that in every society, there is a recommended way of doing “right”. In this case, one can argue that the concept “right” thing should be practiced naturally since it is the only way to conform to true laws that operate in a given society.

This also implies that there are actions that are unacceptable and for this reason, they cannot be regarded as right. On a slight note, Spike Lee intends to reveal to the audience that a “Right “thing is that action which is socially acceptable (Reid 27). However, the author fails to demonstrate the fact that a “right” thing might be socially acceptable in one society and unacceptable in another. For example, there are certain taboos held by Whites that are unacceptable among the Black people.

In line with this, the concept “right” thing has been depicted as the action that brings joy and happiness to a human life. A good example from the film include a case of Mookie, one of the main characters in the scene who is seated so happily counting his money after working very hard.

One can also discern that as he works, he keeps reminding Sal (his employer) to give him his salary early enough to cater for his upkeeps. Since there is no single moment Mookie ever neglected his responsibilities in the work place, Sal eventually gives him his pay without delay. The author also portrays how the concept helps to eradicate social conflicts and possible losses in the society. For example, in the scene, Mookie does right by working hard to earn in order to silence his problems.

From the scene, doing the right thing requires one to think and act critically (Reid 43). In this case, Spike Lee develops the concept “right” thing by defining it to be a critical and a rational action. It is arguable that when one think and reason rationally, the action that follows will definitely have positive impacts. Failure to do the right thing eventually increases chances of conflicting with people as observed at the beginning of the scene.

For example, as the film unfolds we find long-simmering racial-based tensions in Brooklyn neighborhoods (Reid 23). Racial prejudices escalate to numerous tragedies and violence simply because some people perceive themselves to be better than others (Reid 41). For instance, the Latin American fails to reason that they are not in any way better than Black Americans. Consequently, this results to racial intolerance, hatred, conflicts and deaths of innocent people from minor races.

In the scene, the author develops the concepts “right” thing in a way that it becomes synonymous to that action which conforms to nature. Though this is not explicitly expounded in the comedy, this is evident from Martin Luther King’s quote which says that, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind” (Reid 161). From this phrase, it is definite that blindness interferes with the law of nature by making people immoral, cruel and impersonal. In this case, the “right” thing is that action which does not humiliate or even annihilate the opponent.

At some point, the author poses a controversial question in the viewer’s mind. After viewing the film, one tends to ask, “What is the right thing to do in a society dominated by racism such as America?” This question might appear simple from the film’s outset though it is not easy to get a straight answer (Cooper 459). In fact, the author himself does not provide a clear answer to the question. This is due to the fact that in the scene, it appears very difficult to break some dominant taboos exhibited by characters on stage (Reid 45).

For instance, the White people perceive other races as minor and this is acceptable to them unlike a case where Black people perceive every race to be equal to others. Notably, the author uses characters that are good while others are bad yet we do not see him take a stand on what is perfectly “right”. Instead, the scene is full of suspense leaving the audience to carefully scrutinize what the author perceives to be “right” thing in the society.

To recap it all “Do the Right Thing” is a comedy that depicts how a society should respond to critical issues such as racial intolerance. It also emphasizes how people of diverse races and gender should become accountable to their actions. In line with this, there are numerous ways in which Spike Lee has developed the concept of “right” thing in the film.

In other words the concept “right” thing has been developed in diverse viewpoints as portrayed in the film. For example, one can discern from the scene that the concept “right” thing has been used to denote actions are well guarded by natural laws. Moreover, the concept simply refers to an action that conforms to the state of nature. In line with this, the author to some extent develops the concept to denote a rational and critical action that is socially acceptable.

Works Cited

Cooper, Jill. “What is the Right Thing? A Self-Psychological Discussion of Spike Lee’s do the Right Thing.” Psychoanalytic review 86.3 (1999): 455-64. Print.

Reid, Mark. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2018, December 24). Do the right thing. https://ivypanda.com/essays/do-the-right-thing/

"Do the right thing." IvyPanda , 24 Dec. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/do-the-right-thing/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Do the right thing'. 24 December.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Do the right thing." December 24, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/do-the-right-thing/.

1. IvyPanda . "Do the right thing." December 24, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/do-the-right-thing/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Do the right thing." December 24, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/do-the-right-thing/.

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Essays —. Feb 19, 2001. L eaving the theater after the tumultuous world premiere of Do the Right Thing at Cannes in May of 1989, I found myself too shaken to speak, and I avoided the clusters of people where arguments were already heating up. One American critic was so angry she chased me to the exit to inform me, "This film is a call to ...
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In one of the most iconic sequences from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) explains "the story of love and hate.". As the camera pans, Raheem looks directly at the camera and proudly holds out his fists to us, revealing jewelry emblazoned "Love" on one fist, and "Hate" on the other.
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In Do the Right Thing, the monologue places Raheem at the center of the film's conflict between love and hate, echoed by the philosophies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X quoted at the film's conclusion. Caught between these two opposing views, Raheem becomes a victim of the conflict at the climactic scene, marshaling the neighborhood ...
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May 5, 2015. 4 minutes. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. Each term, my film students watch Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). And each term, they react similarly to the scene in which Mookie (Spike Lee) throws a trash can, igniting a neighborhood riot by breaking the window of the pizzeria where he works.
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Download. This paper will discuss the film Do The Right Thing (1989), directed by Spike Lee, as a source of historical knowledge emphasising housing and class systems that have been structured and set into the American consciousness. I aim to contextualize this movie in the discourse of housing and gentrification that started back in 1860 NYC ...
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March 12, 2019 —. Jarvis Lu. HIST 218. Do the Right thing analysis and reflection. In search of learning more about African American history during the African American history month, I attended the showing of the movie "Do the Right Thing". In this essay, I shall provide an overview of the movie and personal analysis of its meaning.
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It also touches on the film's use of vibrant visuals and music, its commentary on media influence, and its relevance to ongoing discussions about race and justice. Through this analysis, the essay argues that "Do the Right Thing" remains a vital piece of cinema for its ability to provoke thought and discussion about enduring social issues.
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Do the right thing Essay. Exclusively available on IvyPanda. Do the right thing is a film that was authored and directed by Spike Lee in 1989. The film has been one of the most ground-breaking comedies and it exposes the simmering racial prejudices that dominated America at that time (Reid 3). We will write a custom essay on your topic.
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This scene showed Mookie is not a greedy black man and he want to work. Mookie can work and get paid, which is possible for other black people. Do Right Thing is a film that focuses on one day of life in the low-level community of Brooklyn, New York. However, the normal day occurs on the hottest day of the summer.
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Do the Right Thing, is set in Brooklyn, New York during the nineteen eighties in a low-class neighborhood during one the hottest days of the summer. The focus of the film is on how economic superiority and race affects the moral decisions that the characters make how it has a direct effect on the way people interact with each other.

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