US (1989): Comedy/Drama

Rated R, Color, 120 minutes

Do the Right Thing was variously hailed as the most insightful view of race relations ever to hit U.S. screens or condemned as dangerous agitprop, but its timeliness—and ability to strike nerves—was never in question.

Click here to view the introductory slideshow

Scenes for study (require RealPlayer, available as a free download from www.real.com):

• Opening credits ("Fight the Power")
• Fightin' Words
• Mister Señor Love Daddy's Righteous Roll Call (audio only)
• Raheem's Radio

Note: clip tests can focus on any one of these selections.

Synopsis

The story is set on one block in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Blacks and Latinos inhabit the area, but the local grocery is run by Koreans and the local eatery, Sal's Famous Pizzeria, is owned and managed by the Italian American Sal (Danny Aiello), who commutes to work with his sons, Vito (Richard Edson) and Pino (John Turturro). Also working at Sal's is Mookie (writer-director Spike Lee), the deliveryman, who lives with and mooches off his sister, Jade (Joie Lee, the director's real-life sister), tries to do as little work as possible in his no-future job, and is less than attentive to his Puerto Rican girlfriend, Tina (Rosie Perez), and their infant son.

Neighborhood characters. Representing the older generation are Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), the block's kindly, philosophical, alcoholic elder statesman, whose unsolicited advice to Lee is that he "always do the right thing"; and Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), who minds everybody else's business while holding court from her stoop. There are also a trio of "cornermen" who sit around all day doing nothing but commenting on everything, acting as a kind of chorus throughout the film; a roving quartet of teens; the married Korean grocers, whose black English is limited; and Mister Señor Love Daddy (Sam Jackson), the DJ at local WE-LOVE radio, who provides another form of running commentary as his voice accompanies his neighbors on their Saturday rounds.

Campaign against Sal's. Although Giancarlo Esposito is Lee's friend, he's unable to enlist the laid-back deliveryman in his campaign against Sal's. Everyone else also ignores his crusade, with two exceptions: Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), a stuttering, retarded man who sells postcards of the only picture of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X together (which people buy out of kindness or just to get rid of him); and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), a big man with a big beat box, he lets do his talking for him as he roams the area, blasting Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" (the only song he likes) at top volume.

Both Smith and Nunn have a grudge against Sal's; the racist Turturro having chased Smith away from the place in a fit of anger, and the put-upon Aiello having given Nunn a piece of his mind to go with his pizza. Aiello also has to deal with his staff's bickering: Turturro and the mild, somewhat slow Edson are at odds, particularly over Edson's friendship with Lee, who is not shy about challenging Turturro's racism. Turturro, in turn, makes no attempt to hide his prejudice, and never misses his many chances to get on Lee's case for loafing—though all three workers do their share of goofing off, and none registers joy when Aiello bequeaths the place to his sons and assures Lee he'll "always have a place" there. Turturro tells his father he's "sick of niggers" and hates his job, an attitude Aiello—who has invested everything in the pizzeria and expresses pride that "these people grew up on his food"—can't understand.

Explosion. As the mercury rises, so do tensions, aggravations, and tempers, until Sal's is about to close for the night. Aiello lets some kids in for a last slice, followed by a confrontational Nunn blasting Public Enemy and demanding service. Aiello, at the end of his rope, calls Nunn a "nigger" and destroys his radio with a baseball bat, whereupon a fight breaks out; Aiello and Nunn end up grappling on the street, and the police arrive.

"Accidents". "Restraining" Nunn, the cops accidentally kill him within sight of the locals and arrest Esposito, beating him in the back seat of the police car as they drive off. Standing near Aiello and his sons, Lee is confronted by the enraged crowd surrounding Nunn's body; Lee then walks deliberately over to a garbage can and throws it through Aiello's window—setting off a riot in which Sal's is trashed, looted, and set on fire.

Impasse. The next day, Lee revisits the scene to pick up his pay from Aiello—who also gives him severance pay, although he throws it on the ground in anger at what he views as Lee's betrayal. Lee takes the money; Aiello recoups his losses in insurance. Little has changed, apparently, though everything has changed: Nunn is dead, Esposito's in custody, Sal's is closed, Lee and Aiello—black and white—are at an impasse. Before the credits roll, Lee offers two quotations: the first from Martin Luther King, preaching nonviolence, the second from Malcolm X, arguing that violence may be an oppressed people's only form of self-defense.

Critique

Lee's film is marked by a dialectical approach, both in content and style, that deliberately defies categorization. It presents a critical challenge even when regarded in the context of Lee's previous features, representing a giant step forward from She's Gotta Have It (1986) and School Daze (1988), neither of which evidenced the breadth of vision or stylistic control of Do the Right Thing. All three, however, share a common thread in their uncompromising focus on black characters and issues (this is Lee's first film with major white characters) with a seriousness that adds bite to their comedy and that has paid off well at the box office, drawing large, black audiences hungry for authentic images of their own communities—and making Lee America's designated leader of "independent black filmmaking." It's a term that at once reduces and magnifies Lee's talents, as such labels tend to do, while placing him within the context of a movement still in the process of defining itself aesthetically.

Lee's agenda. Lee is a movement filmmaker, who is clearly working with a stated agenda: to give blacks a cinematic precedence and presence and, in Do the Right Thing, to bring the issue of black powerlessness to the fore in a popular context. The film is not propagandistic or without subtlety, however, and is clearly meant to entertain and make money, no less than the films of Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, whom Lee admires. (Lee was compelled to continuously point this fact out in an endless stream of television and radio shows to discuss the controversial aspects of the film.) Like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola's work, Do the Right Thing is also art, but not an art that can be evaluated strictly by the usual aesthetic criteria of technique or for its depiction of transcendent human qualities; any discussion of the film must take its message into account.

Crisis and conflict. The film presents a society in crisis, a crisis both immediate and historical in nature. It's significant that what eventually brings the conflict to a head is the seemingly unimportant absence of black faces on Aiello's wall. Viewed in itself, it's trivial, one man's pardonably chauvinistic expression of Italian pride—isn't that what melting pot America's all about? To Esposito, however, Aiello's wall represents a historical distortion: the lie that black people's contributions to our society don't rate commemoration. Seen from this point of view, Aiello's wall is symbolic: one more example of blacks being forced to view themselves through a white prism in which they are absent or stereotyped. Lee's structure also reflects the disjunction between the historical and the immediate moment: the "episodic" plot reveals the nature of its construction only at the end, when it becomes clear how inexorably all the apparently minor incidents in Lee's script have led to the concluding violent impasse.

Symbolic characters. It's one of the triumphs of the film that while it presents a variety of interesting characters—some more developed than others, but none of them stock heroes or villains—almost all the people and incidents in the film have a symbolic value. Critics who have complained that Lee has been "unrealistic" in failing to portray inner-city crime, drug use, etc., miss the point that his approach is intentionally nonrealistic. The film's Bed-Stuy is something of a microcosm of the black community in general. Esposito, Smith, and Nunn are its militant sector; significantly, all (even Esposito, stifled by his neighbors' apathy) are inarticulate—and thus essentially powerless—and viewed with condescension or annoyance by the basically complacent community.

Bridging black and white. Caught in the middle of all this is Lee's Mookie, a young black man in a dead-end job who can't begin to support his infant son, and apparently doesn't care. He's also intelligent, easy-going, and the black character who comes closest to bridging the gap between black and white—which is why his throwing the garbage can through Aiello's window has been perceived by some as director Lee's assertion that the ensuing rioting is the right thing after all. This fusion of Lee with the character he plays lifts Mookie to the status of a hero or role model, however, which he clearly isn't intended to be; his attitudes are no more responsible or profound the morning after the violence than they were before.

Danny Aiello's Sal is nearly as sympathetic and central a figure as Lee's Mookie. Contentions that his character exemplifies Lee's own racism are ridiculous, especially when one considers that Lee allowed the politically conservative Aiello to reshape the role after he complained that it was too one-sided. Sal and Mookie's final inability to come to an understanding is so tragic because both are flawed and basically well meaning. Like all the characters in the film, they have differing interpretations of how to do the right thing, but the circumstances that arise from their inability to address these differences—which only culminate in the killing of Nunn and the riot—have made further dialogue impossible, for the time being.

Dedication. Dedicated to the families of six blacks who died under controversial circumstances in New York (including Michael Griffith, whose death in Howard Beach is said to have inspired Lee's script) and released by Lee with the admitted intention of affecting the New York City mayor's race, Do the Right Thing couldn't have been more timely.

Awards. Although it was without question the most talked about film of 1989, and one that was selected by numerous critics as the year's best film, the always-conservative Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn't see fit to even nominate it in the best film category. It did, however, earn nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay (Lee) and Best Supporting Actor (Aiello).

Music. Songs include: "Fight the Power" (Carlton Ridenhour, Hank Shocklee, Eric Sadler, Keith Shocklee, performed by Public Enemy), "Don't Shoot Me" (Spike Lee, Mervyn Warren, Claude McKnight, David Thomas, performed by Take 6), "Can't Stand It" (David Hines, performed by Steel Pulse), "Tu Y Yo" (Ruben Blades, performed by Blades), "Why Don't We Try" (Raymond Jones, Larry DeCarmine, Vincent Morris, performed by Keith John), "Hard to Say" (Jones, performed by Lorri Perry and Gerald Alston), "Party Hearty" (William "Ju Ju" House, Kent Wood, performed by EU), "Prove to Me" (Jones, Sami McKinney, performed by Perry), "Feel So Good" (McKinney, Perry, Michael O'Hara, performed by Perry), "My Fantasy" (Teddy Riley, performed by Riley and Guy), "Never Explain Love" (Jones, Cathy Block, performed by Al Jarreau), "We Love Radio Jingles" (performed by Take 6), "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (James Weldon Johnson, Rosamond Johnson, performed by the Natural Spiritual Orchestra).