Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989)

Back in May, at the Cannes Film Festival, both Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood had new films being exhibited: Eastwood, The Changeling, Lee’s a WWII drama about black infantrymen called The Miracle at St. Anna. Lee mentioned being dismayed at the absence of black soldiers in Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, telling the press, “If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that -- that was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know." When word got to Eastwood, he replied, “The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go: ‘This guy's lost his mind.’ I mean, it's not accurate.” Referring to Spike Lee, Eastwood concluded, “A guy like him should shut his face.” When Lee heard the “shut his face” comment, he responded by saying, “First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either.”

No one said anything about a plantation, Spike. He wasn’t inferring anything about a plantation, he wasn’t suggesting it, he was angrily telling you to “F--- off” like he would to any other non-ludicrously-paranoid person. Spike Lee’s conclusion jumping and exhausting race-centered defensiveness should have, by now, convinced most reasonable observers that the man has got a chip on his shoulder that’s bigger than he is, and renders his thoughts, views, and opinions highly suspect.

I believe Spike Lee’s third film to be a flawed masterwork, but, in admitting that, I feel like I’m letting Lee get away with murder. That Do the Right Thing claims to be ambivalent and impartial is a bald-faced lie and the fact that few critics second-guessed its intentions, is sadly, all too predictable. A small handful of critics, however, did, but for the wrong reasons, foolishly proclaiming that the movie was a call to arms. In response to these extreme accusations, Lee felt compelled to step forward:

Am I advocating violence? No, but goddamn, the days of 25 million Blacks being silent while our fellow brothers [sic] and sisters are exploited, oppressed, and murdered, have to come to an end. Racial persecution, not only in the United States, but all over the world is not gonna go away: it seems it's getting worse (four years of Bush won't help). And if Crazy Eddie Koch gets reelected for a fourth term as mayor of New York, what you see in Do The Right Thing will be light stuff. Yep, we have a choice, Malcolm or King. I know who I'm down with.

He was fortunate enough to parade Do the Right Thing down a street lined with eggshells; he has the pomposity to step forward as the self-appointed voice for not only his generation, but as the voice and veritable deliverer of all the generations of black men and women who lived, suffered, and died from the birth of American slavery to the present day, though it is highly unlikely he has a tangible conception of even a fraction of the disadvantages he proposes to serve as avatar. He is the clichéd angry black man: the knee-jerk suspicion? Check; the advocacy of double standards, even at the cost of his own credibility? Check; irrational combativeness? Check; carrying an air of being put-upon, even when being treated fairly? Check; being treated fairly and resenting it for being so cruelly patronizing? Check. Add to that a Napoleon complex, delusions of grandeur, and a medium being used as a soapbox, and you have a first-rate demagogue. Surrounded by eggshells.

Spike Lee takes to that medium like a prodigy, but once seized, he uses it to dubious ends. At the heart of the hypocrisy is the answer to the titular question. Well, Mookie (Lee) gets along with Vito and Sal? Yes, and Mookie also tells Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) to cool it when he becomes hostile towards Vito unprovoked. Mookie, being decidedly enterprising, strikes a cunning harmony between both the militant blacks and the resented Italians. By the end of the film, Mookie deliberately shatters that harmony with a well-placed trash can, announcing to the neighborhood that he’s finally hopped off the fence.

Firstly, I found it contrived that Sal (the great Danny Aiello) could be so profoundly abiding at one moment, even going so far as to remind his racist son, Pino (John Turturro) again and again and again to be tolerant and calm, but can then be provoked into a volcanic fury when the screenplay calls for it. Secondly, though it makes perfect sense to wonder why Sal hasn’t considered that his clientele being primarily black should compel him to meet their demands a little better (e.g. fashion the interior of his Pizzeria to be more suitable to their desires), it is not A-okay to invade him in his own place of business with bullying impositions. Lee, I fear, thinks that such combative behavior is a necessity.

The most preposterous element of the film is Spike Lee’s propounding of Radio Raheem as admirable or heroic. Radio Raheem is a menace and a bully. He presumptuously struts around Bed-Stuy blasting Public Enemy into any and alls’ faces, a tyrant who Spike Lee submits as a natural pathology of the age-old mistreatment and subjugation of the black man. Sure, it’s inevitable that such injustice will breed a subculture of men like Radio Raheem, but to argue, as Lee does, that those who are not directly responsible for the injustice should suffer under the tyranny of Raheem’s angry cloud of righteous indignation is to impose the very same oppression on them that Lee is so adamant in crying out against. The movie unknowingly contradicts itself as soon as Lee neglects to suggest that Radio Raheem is in the wrong or that, God forbid, he should turn his music down or, at the cost of the revolution, off.

The chronology goes like this:

1. Radio Raheem walks into Sal’s playing his Public Enemy as loud as possible. Spike Lee (with rather sophisticated cinematic subtext) cuts to a fisheye lens close-up of RR staring Sal down, a whole subculture of simmering resentment challenging him to put up with it. Sal doesn’t. He shouts over the din to turn it off. RR, as if he’s been told to compromise the very foundation of his belief system (maybe he has), grudgingly turns the volume down. He is now pissed beyond all reason at Sal.



2. RR bumps into Buggin’ Out, who, apoplectic at the absence of black national figures pictured on the "Wall of Fame" at the Pizzeria (“Hey Sal! How come there ain’t no brothas on the wall?!”) next to the ones of Sinatra, Pacino, and other Italian icons, convinces RR to confront Sal forcefully and together.



3. RR and Buggin’ Out ferociously face-off against Sal at the counter of the Pizzeria, RR’s Public Enemy blasting at top volume. Sal screams in close-up. Buggin’ Out screams in close-up. RR refuses to turn down his music or leave. Customers are watching in horror. Sal smashes RR’s beloved boombox (a huge beast of a machine) with a baseball bat. Silence. RR leaps over the counter and begins to thrash Sal. He drags Sal outside and begins to strangle him with no apparent intention of stopping. He is going to kill Sal. A mob gathers as do the two policemen who have already been established as unsympathetic and contemptuous of certain black residents in the neighborhood. The hulking RR is pulled off Sal by the even more hulking cop, and is gripped with a horizontally applied billy club that has been violently tightened against the boy’s windpipe. During this struggle, the cop's face is seen briefly with a look that can be recognized as nothing other than malevolence. He holds the club against RR’s windpipe longer than is necessary, even after individuals in the mob tell him to stop. RR is, accidentally, or not so accidentally, strangled or has his windpipe crushed. He falls to the pavement dead.



4. In response to this, Mookie throws the garbage can through the big front window of the Pizzeria, inviting the volatile mob to elaborate on the destruction until the Pizzeria is in ruins and all that is left is the mentally retarded black man Smiley pinning a small photo of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall in question while a geyser of flame flutters behind his head. It is a frightening and powerful shot, a brilliant moment.

Now, according to Roger Ebert and other sources, “Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then Lee observes: ‘Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.’”

The problem is not whether or not Mookie should have thrown the trash can through the window. That sort of anger seems reasonable considering the murder of RR by the cops. The problem is that RR was in the middle of committing murder himself. Is it also not unreasonable for cops, seeing a man being strangled by another, bigger man who is out of control with anger, to perhaps be more aggressive and panicked in intervening? In Lee’s defense, the whole situation is messy and complicated, but Lee’s remarks about the film’s detractors are self-righteous and smug in the most egregiously hypocritical way: in Roger Ebert’s Great Movie review, he notes, “On the Criterion DVD of the film, Lee reads from his reviews, noting that Joe Klein, in New York magazine, laments the burning of Sal’s Pizzeria but fails to even note that it follows the death of a young black man at the hands of the police.” Oh, sort of like how Mookie laments the death of a young black man at the hands of the police, but fails to even note that the young black man was in the process of strangling to death an older Italian man? Strangling him to death over a smashed boombox.

At the very end of the film, Sal sits in the rubble of his former place of business, and Mookie comes to ask him for his paycheck. Sal, shocked and offended that Mookie would have the audacity to ask for a paycheck after inciting the destruction of his Pizzeria, reproaches him angrily about the hurling of the trash can. Mookie yells back, “Motherfuck a window. Radio Raheem is dead.” Well, what if Radio Raheem had not been pulled off Sal? He most certainly would have killed him. Would Mookie have been upset with Radio Raheem for killing Sal, who he spent so many days with at the Pizzeria, who once told Mookie, “…there wil always be a place for you here, because you’ve always been like a son to me…” I think he would have. And when Radio Raheem, perhaps through a glass partition, talking to Mookie on a telephone, tried to explain or quarreled with him, would Mookie have told him, “Motherfuck a boombox. Sal is dead.”?

That’s the question I would ask Spike Lee.

Do the Right Thing is a visionary work of art if you don’t linger too much on the troubling ideology at the heart of it. I have written on the artistic merits of the film before without addressing Spike Lee’s message, which I see as being muddled at best, hypocritical at worst, and thoroughly disingenuous, as Lee puts forth two contradictory quotes at the end of the film, one from Martin Luther King Jr. condemning violence, and a second from Malcolm X:

I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn't mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't even call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence.

Well, it doesn’t sound like he’s talking about physical, individual-on-individual violence, but more of an abstract violence. “Do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation,” “that situation” being “bad people in America…who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need.” That is not physical violence he is describing. He is describing abuse and maltreatment through neglect. I think of the poor man whose children are starving who steals a loaf of bread. I think of a scene from Do the Right Thing when Ossie Davis’s character, Da Mayor is ridiculed by a quartet of black youths for being an old drunk. They drop withering judgments on him, and he tells them, “What you know about me?...Until you’ve stood in the doorway and listened to your five hungry children crying for bread, you don’t know shit!”

Heartbreaking and moving though this may be, does it count as violence, the only thing against which self-defense remains self-defense and not simply ruthless self-preservation? I suppose it does, if you play fast and loose with the definition. Lee seems to enjoy doing that, without realizing how easy it would be to do it right back at his film. Couldn’t Radio Raheem’s reign of noise pollution or his breaking of the rules of a privately owned establishment (i.e. trespassing) be considered terrorizing the community? Does Sal not have a right to defend himself from Raheem’s oppressive boombox? Or are only black people allowed to be intelligent? Can white people be down with Malcolm X's philosophy? It's obvious from the film, from "Yep, we have a choice, Malcolm or King. I know who I'm down with" and from the fact that the second quote is the X quote, giving him the veritable last word, that Lee prefers the boxing over the velvet variety of glove. Nothing wrong with that. What I find disturbing is that he wants to box with people not wearing any gloves. Indiscriminate revolution, revenge, fire with fire, etc. I get the feeling that Spike Lee put that Martin Luther King Jr. quote in merely out of obligation.


Bottom line is, despite all of these issues, I still find the film to be a feast for the eyes and the senses. The colors, the heatwave motif, the sheer originality of the story; it’s all simultaneously intoxicating, sumptuous, and provocative. It’s everything cinema should be on the outside, and one would hardly guess that it’s all being held together on the inside by chewing gum and band-aids.



Grade: A-