Do the Right Thing (Movie)

"Yes, we should. I’ve been teaching Do the Right Thing for 30 years. It is a powerful and profound film. One thing that’s important to mention when we talk about this film is that often people talk about Spike Lee as a great black filmmaker. That is so incredibly reductive. Spike Lee is one of the most important American filmmakers and Do the Right Thing is one of the most important American films of the last 50 years. It’s a challenging film. My students have wrestled with it from the beginning and continue to wrestle with it because, as I point out in my book, it is not a film with a closed ending. Usually when we read a novel, we’ve spent a few hundred pages with characters and we expect the story to be wrapped up and tied up with a bow. We have gone on a journey and we are ready to know what we’ve learned. Many films about race do this as well. One of the films that came out in 1989 and actually won the Academy Award for Best Picture the following year was Driving Miss Daisy . It’s a very traditional Hollywood film and it’s often the kind of film that the Oscars will honour, because it’s a film about an individual who becomes less racist, in this case through her contact with a person of colour. It’s a film that’s tied up with a bow and what it indicates to its audiences is that your responsibility is done. You are absolved of future thought. “We are going to have to figure out a way to live together. That’s the great challenge and opportunity that Do the Right Thing presents us with” Spike Lee does not do that in Do the Right Thing. The title of the film comes from a line delivered by Da Mayor who is played by the civil rights activist Ossie Davis. Early in the film, he pulls aside Spike Lee’s character, Mookie, and says, “Doctor, always do the right thing.” And so the question that we ask over and over again in discussions of this film in class and in the screenings that I do is, ‘Does anybody do the right thing? What is the right thing?’ Spike Lee himself has said that audiences have been asking him this question since the movie came out. In particular, he says that people are always coming up to him and asking, ‘Did Mookie do the right thing?’ And he makes the point that he has never been asked this by a Black person. Not to spoil it, but at the end of the film, there are a series of really dramatic and violent actions and white audiences have always reflected differently on those actions than Black audiences. It’s interesting to note, by the way, that Barack Obama and Michelle Obama saw Do the Right Thing on their first date. There’s a movie about that afternoon they spent together and it depicts them walking out of the movie and one of Michelle Obama’s white law partners coming up to them and asking Barack specifically, ‘Do you think Mookie did the right thing?’ He says something very similar to what I have often said. Again, not to spoil the end of the film, but there is an option where human lives can be lost or property can be destroyed. White people, because they typically own property, tend to look at destruction of property as violence, but there is actual fatal violence in Do the Right Thing . So, what the Barack Obama character says—and what I think the actual Barack Obama said, because he’s a smart guy—is, ‘Here’s why Mookie did what he did.’ If violence that would have gone against human beings is redirected to property, isn’t that a win? And yet white audiences struggle with that. That is very much Spike Lee’s strategy. When I teach this film or talk about it, I say that what Spike Lee is intending to do is confront us. He does that even before we start the movie. In the opening moments of the film, even before the credits roll, we hear a few bars of a song called “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is sometimes called the ‘Black national anthem.’ We hear a few bars of it played by saxophone and then Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” comes on and we immediately get this collision between old Black and new Black. “Spike Lee is one of the most important American filmmakers and Do the Right Thing is one of the most important American films of the last 50 years” Then, during the opening credits, Rosie Perez is boxing and during much of that time she is actually boxing us ; she is looking at us and breaking the fourth wall. Breaking the fourth wall is a strategy that Spike Lee uses throughout this film to confront the audience directly. The most famous sequence in the film is what Spike Lee calls ‘the racism scene’, where characters in the film turn to the audience and spew racial hate about the group that they are most angry about. For Sal’s son, it’s African Americans, for the Italian cop it’s Puerto Ricans, etc. We are meant to be uncomfortable and to live in that discomfort. That’s one of the things that also happens in another Spike Lee film, BlacKkKlansman , which I talk a little bit about in the book and is also really amazing, one of the top films of the last 50 years. It doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t absolve us of further work. Spike Lee, not just as a great artist, but as an activist, is pushing the audience: ‘This is what I’ve shown you. This is the story that I’ve given you. What is the right thing? What are you willing to do? What are your next steps? Discuss.’ It was not a huge grossing film because white audiences were scared away from going to the theatre. Roger Ebert talks about hearing a critic at Cannes saying, ‘They can’t show this in the States, there will be riots.’ Three really influential white critics wrote that it was a dangerous movie because, instead of enclosing the story and tying it up for us, Spike Lee is inciting the audience’s emotions. Something similar happened with John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood which came out a couple of years later. That’s also a really phenomenal film, from this phase where people of colour are writing and directing their own films and appearing in them. White audiences were scared away from that film as well, because they were made to think, ‘Hey, this is going to be a scary thing for us to watch.’ My wife, Jeanie, talks about seeing this film in Austin with her then boyfriend, and how they were the only white people in the audience. Do the Right Thing is a film with incredible cultural value, but not the same kind of popular success we talked about with Birth of a Nation or with Gone with the Wind, where the white, mainstream audience felt comfortable and safe and confirmed. Largely, yes. Even with the radical actions that Sidney Poitier’s character takes during the film. You have a racist character who becomes less racist. That’s wrapped up, done, I can go to bed. There is no simple way out of it. As I said, often when I teach it or lead conversations about it I ask, ‘Who did the right thing in this film? Did anybody?’ There is not a person who’s universally good in the film. I talk in the book about Da Mayor, who on several occasions does do the right thing, but he’s an alcoholic and the laughingstock of the youth in the neighbourhood. They don’t take him seriously. Mookie does not do the right thing through most of the movie. He’s morally lax and lazy. Then, at the end of the movie, you see him make this conscious decision and you don’t know what it means until you reflect on it. Go back and take a look at this film, or watch it for the first time, and look how precise his motions are at the end of the film, when he makes his decision. He is trying to do the right thing and to do it with a minimum of harm, understanding that there will be harm. But it is the better of the two choices. I absolutely hear what you’re saying, because every time I watch the end of Do the Right Thing I am in tears, because it feels like things will never change. There is violence against a young Black man, just as there was earlier this year, just as there may be this afternoon. It’s heartbreaking. There’s also that human recognition that we are all wrestling with this and we are invited to think about it further. The film ends with the radio disc jockey, played by Samuel L. Jackson, asking, “Are we going to live together?” And that is the essential question, particularly for us in the United States, because as James Baldwin says, here we do not have the luxury of distancing ourselves. We can’t divorce each other. We are going to have to figure out a way to live together. That’s the great challenge and opportunity that Do the Right Thing presents us with."