I just rewatched Do The Right Thing, 1989, with my 2024 eyes. It’s provocative.
From Wikipedia:
“Lee has remarked that only White viewers ask him if Mookie did the right thing; Black viewers do not ask him the question. Lee believes the key point is that Mookie was angry at the wrongful death of Radio Raheem, stating that viewers who question the riot are explicitly failing to see the difference between property damage and the death of a Black man.”
I wonder if the movie goes beyond what Lee intended. It seems wants the right thing done and, if so, it raises the question, what is that?
The movie famously ends with the two contrasting quotes:
MLK’s: a preachment against violence to get justice, and for the need for love and understanding;
and Malcolm X’s, more wiggly: bad people in America hold the power and that violence might be justifiable if the issue is self defence.
Lee seems to cite MX for the idea that for American Blacks in 1989, violence is self-defence against white racist power, and, therefore, is intelligence rather than violence.
Isn’t it thematically notable that the movie begins with a lengthy sequence of Rosie Perez dancing aggressively including boxing sequences in the dancing, all to Public Enemy’s Fight The Power?
Wikipedia says:
“”Fight the Power’ is a song by American hip hop group Public Enemy, released as a single in the summer of 1989 on Motown Records. It was conceived at the request of film director Spike Lee, who sought a musical theme for his 1989 film Do the Right Thing.”
I take all this arguably to suggest that Lee had in mind the vindication of MX’s quote.
Why else the opening sequence?
Why else the thematic incorporation of Public Enemy’s lyrics?
Why else in what Wikipedia reports Lee said, that Mookie‘s trashing of Sal’s window is an understandable reaction Radio Raheem’s death?
The whites in the movie in the persons of Sal and his sons are shown as propertied and hardworking, with Sal and his younger son not prejudiced and his older son, John Tuturro, an out and out racist. The white cop Long is racist, one homicidally so. Ponte, the other cop, not so much.
Lee shows the Blacks in a largely negative light. Many are unemployed. Mookie, the movie’s protagonist, is an irresponsible loser, unable to hold on to a job, living off his much more responsible sister. He’s quite indifferent to his son, and seems only to come around to see his baby son’s mother Rosie Perez when he wants sex, after which he’s gone for a week at a time.
His racist son aside, Sal is a benevolent man, proud of his business and accommodating to his customers so long as they are respectful to him and of business.
His keeps harkening back to a past when he and his 25 year old business were accepted in the neighbourhood, welcome and trouble free.
So I say Buggin’ Out is wrong to demand Sal hang pictures of Blacks on his Wall of Fame rather than only pictures of Italians.
He’s wrong to try to organize a boycott of Sal’s on that basis.
And I say Sal is in his right to insist Radio Raheem turn off his boom box inside the pizzeria, to which Raheem takes unjustified exception.
In the result, Buggin’ and Raheem at night insist the Wall of Fame have Blacks. Sal again tells Raheem to turn his radio off. Raheem refuses. Buggin' insults Sal and says he’ll shut his pizzeria down.
Sal explodes.
He demolishes Raheem's boombox with a bat.
Raheem attacks Sal.
And the violence worsens till the cops come and Long kills Raheem leading to Mookie trashing Sal’s window and sparking a riot that leads to the pizzeria being brunt to the ground.
I argue that all this dramatizes hopelessness and tragic intractability, both exploding into meaningless destructive violence and loss with, a fair amount of sympathy going to Sal.
This view of the movie supports MLK’s quote and cuts against MX’s. So why, again, the opening sequence of fighting the power?
Why does Lee present the issue, at least according to Wiki, as the loss of property as against the death of a black man, when the movie shows them both as terrible occurrences in that intractable hopelessness? They ought not be pitted against each other.
Does not this tension point to incoherence?
Either, it seems to me, Lee’s film either works thematically against itself or Lee has, however explicitly, subtly dramatized the impossibility of doing the right thing.
My 1989 eyes saw the latter of those two possibilities. My 2024 eyes incline to the former of them.
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