Do the Right Thing

I first saw (and reviewed) Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing in the wake of the George Floyd protests, which added further relevance to the film. I loved it immediately on first viewing due to its vivid, raw, unapologetic depiction of racial tensions, and just how much Spike Lee's visual style enhanced the tense atmosphere. I was frustrated but not surprised that it lost Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy (history repeated itself when Spike Lee lost to freaking Green Book), a sign that the overwhelmingly white industry at large was not ready for it. Despite all this, it has aged much better than most of the big time Oscar season films of that decade, and maintained relevance through time. I watched it again for my film studies class and fell in love with it all over again. It was just as stunning, raw, sometimes funny, and deeply disturbing as it was in 1989. Right from the iconic title sequence of Rosie Perez dancing to "Fight the Power", it's a thrilling piece of work. Spike Lee takes the MTV music video aesthetic and stylish camerawork, and rather than using it all as a cheap intrusive gimmick, it makes the movie all the more striking. All the reds and oranges painted on the Bed-Stuy walls, paired with beads of sweat and contrasted with ice cubes, feel just as oppressive. The heat of the neighborhood is easily one of the best cinematic symbols for systemic oppression. Ernest Dickerson's cinematography manages to be so beautiful without being overly showy. The way Lee and Dickerson use the camera is all the more striking; whip pans and quick cuts to enhance argument scenes, wide angle shots and brilliant dutch angles for tension, and that searing montage of the characters speaking to the camera. Handheld is used brilliantly as well, not drawing too much attention to itself and enhancing the tension well. Stylistically, Spike Lee is a master of balancing that with prescient themes and a damn good story. Aside from the style, it's got one hell of an ensemble cast (featuring breakout roles from Rosie Perez, Sam Jackson, John Tuturro, and even a young Martin Lawrence), a sparse yet haunting jazz score by Spike Lee's father Bill, memorable characters, and it's just a damn good, powerful movie. But the real reason the film stuck with critics and audiences is how it portrays the intense racial conflict between Bed-Stuy residents, the biggest of which between the predominantly black residents and the racist owners of Sal's pizzeria. Spike Lee is smart enough to not be preachy, or shove in a white savior character, or give a happy ending to the story: it all feels unbearably real. We see the hypocrisy, the condescension, the prioritization of property over people of the racists, who honestly become worse people by the story's end. Originally, the studio wanted Mookie and Sal to hug in the end, which would not have worked at all: in fact, Sal only reluctantly pays Mookie, who he has economically exploited for the rest of the story, in a hysterical, still-racially charged fit. Even the residents of the neighborhood struggle with bigotry; in this case, black residents versus Korean business owners, and the internalized anti-blackness of Latinx residents. This is not Oscar bait like Driving Miss Daisy or Green Book, this is a far more realistic, more depressingly relevant portrayal of race relations. A white person could not have written or directed this. And then there's the finale, one of the most misunderstood endings in cinema history. It is frustrating yet unsurprising to see white critics' (with the exception of Siskel and Ebert, who Spike Lee himself states were among the only white people to "get" the film) disgusted reactions to the finale, misinterpreting it as a call for violence. It is not; Mookie throws the trashcan at Sal's to redirect the residents' anger from Sal himself to the racist empire he created, from the people who uphold the corrupted system to the system itself. The notion that this film is pro-race riot is completely debunked by the final text scroll, quoting both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and their statements on nonviolence versus self-defense. The backlash towards this film for this reason is uncalled for, and honestly racist. As soon as some whites see black folks rise up towards the system that oppresses them, they immediately enforce the myth of black criminality to demonize them. Spike Lee himself has stated that only white audiences question whether or not Mookie did the right thing; proof that the backlash towards the film is entirely racially motivated. Still such a brilliant film that has held up so well today, and by far one of Spike Lee's best, if not his best.