Do The Right Thing. 1989. Brooklyn, New York City. An electrifying work of the colours of conflict, community and conscience painted on every layer of America. The sweltering summer day in Brooklyn pulses with life, humour and an inexorable build of tension. From the first fiery frame, Lee draws you completely into a film that displays every human emotion, conflict, and dilemma in its most raw and sweatiest form. A refusal to offer easy escapes for any of its characters and easy answers to what is the ‘right thing’ for any of its audience surges through the film, presenting an ensemble of wholly 3-dimensional, blazingly entertaining and incredibly realistic range of characters that tumultuously inhabit and share a single block in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
From its opening moments, as we see Rosie Perez in her debut role dancing to what becomes the film’s anthem, Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’, Lee dazzles us with a technical bravado and stylistic aesthetic in the film. Particularly, I like the use of a vivid colour palette, dominated by red/yellow, conveying the film’s dominating heat and boiling tensions straight from the first frame. After a short introduction from Samuel L. Jackson’s ‘Love Daddy’, the local radio host, we follow Mookie (played by Lee himself) and a host of other supporting characters and ensemble players as they wake up and navigate the hottest day of the year. We meet a flurry of the residents of the neighbourhood: Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), Tina (Rosie Perez), Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), Sal (Danny Aiello) and his two sons, Vito and Pino (Richard Edson and John Turturro, respectively), among a host of other smaller characters. Each of these characters not only feels authentic and real but wholly interesting, making the film fly by with incredible pace. Honestly, I could’ve watched another 4 hours of the days of these characters and life on this block easily.
The racial tension between the characters bubbles to the surface when Buggin’ Out feuds with Sal over the lack of Black representation on the ‘Wall of Fame’ in Sal’s Pizzeria. The wall comprised entirely of famous Italian Americans such as Robert De Deniro, Frank Sinatra and Al Pacino becomes a leitmotif of the shift of the film into an unsettling (and it is important that it is so) uncovering of the deeply ingrained and completely naturalised racism in America. Tempers flare and sweat beads trickle as a series of vivid vignettes show different moments around the block, every character’s mistakes, their grievances, their victimhood and their abuse towards others that adds to the emotional and societal fire of hate. Eventually this fire materialises, as in the climax of the film, and the day’s (or rather, years and years’ worth of) oppression and internalisation of racial tension peaks, a riot starts at Sal’s. This ends with every character guilty and punished, Sal’s shop destroyed, Radio Raheem killed by a policeman and the rest of the characters falling into traps of violence amidst the chaos.
Do The Right Thing was inspired by real incidents of racial violence and police brutality and influenced by the normalised, casual racism embedded into American society, as seen when Pino talks about his favourite celebrities. Its climactic tragedy remains hauntingly relevant, and one can’t but help to draw comparisons from more recent parallels. The chokehold that kills Raheem evokes images of the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd; it’s uncomfortable to think about, but it’s true. But why is it uncomfortable? Simply, I think it’s because across the world, particularly in America and the UK, we would like to think that times have changed, that racism is ‘eliminated’ or non-existent now. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. There is ingrained within each and every one of us an undercurrent of racial tension, built up over years of societal pressure and suppressed, internalised prejudices. Watching the film in the wake of things such as the Black Lives Matter movement can create the somewhat pessimistic, but not wholly unrealistic, view that nothing has really changed. Over 35 years since Do The Right Thing released, rampant police brutality, gentrification and boiling systemic and internalised racial tension still pressure our values of pluralism. But in re-watching, we can view some ways in which we can change to avoid both everyday and culminated violent racism. By recognising and combatting our own mistakes – our own acts of racism – we can begin to move forward and finally answer Spike Lee’s call for change. Spike Lee evokes all this discussion, and much more, in just under 2 hours with this film.
Vibrant, provocative and harrowingly relevant and important, Do The Right Thing is a film that refuses to fade in the public eye. It demands to be recognised, discussed and valued as it rightly should and rightly is. In a world still grappling with the same injustices Lee so vividly depicted, I have had one main takeaway from my rewatch: it perhaps didn’t start with us, but it can end with us.
MORTFILMS 