The Great Movies: "Do the Right Thing"

Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee, 1989

Previous Contact: I watched Do the Right Thing on the big screen at its original release. At the time I thought it was OK but felt a little sheepish about not liking it better, since there seemed to be pretty much universal critical enthusiasm. On this watching, I expected to "get it" and love it.

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Do the Right Thing is intended as a parable about racial tension. It is played out on a block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City which is also carefully crafted to stand in as an Anytown, U.S.A., as wholesome on the surface and as gently seedy underneath as any Mayberry. Everyone knows everyone else in this village, and the cast is as large and as packed with colorful personalities as a Dickens novel. The movie progresses as a long series of stylized vignettes where small groups of characters have conversations in colorful settings which, even when they are outdoors, are still contrived to seem enclosed and intimate.

The most singular feature of the movie is the steadfast moral ambiguity of its characters. Even though the action takes place over only a dozen hours or so, every character is given a chance to show his or her dark side. We are asked, ultimately, to be shocked at the possibly racially-related death of one of the characters -- but we have seen him, earlier in the film, spew out his own hateful stream of racism as well. We are asked, perhaps, to feel for a man who loses his livelihood and what remains of his innocence in a small race riot -- but we've also seen his own inflexibility around racial issues. We see washed-up neighborhood bums who rise to opportunities to do good, and articulate, energetic young people who think that it's fun to wander around stirring up trouble and negativity. By the end of the movie, they've stirred up quite a bit of both.

Then there's Mooky, more or less the protagonist, who we meet at the beginning of the movie as a mellow, soft-spoken, intelligent, working man out for a honest day's work. As events progress, we gradually realize that he's a deadbeat dad and chronic screw-up who isn't so much working as allowing an employer to pay him for making his daily social rounds. Late in the film, he's shown looking tired and disgusted with all of the building tension and violence. He sighs thoughtfully and then, with an air of resignation, knowingly performs an act that transforms tension into riot. It's a weird moment.

"Do the Right Thing" is an interesting title for a movie in which events deteriorate as the cumulative effect of numerous people failing to cut their neighbors a break. At a dozen or so points in the plot, characters have an easy opportunity to back down, to let it slide, to chill out; instead, they choose to grease the slide toward the final spasm of violence. Everyone is a little too sure of themselves; no one does the right thing.

The movie famously ends with a pair of quotations, one by Dr. King decrying violence as a means of combating racism and one by Malcolm X defending it. The King quote is especially apt to the film, but the Malcolm X quote is a non sequitur. Although racism saturates the story and world of Do the Right Thing, none of the violence that eventually erupts is a means of combating racism, or self-defense against racism, or even a taking of revenge for racism. It's a sheer spasm of human destructiveness, pure and simple.

Plot: It's a hot day in Brooklyn, and everybody's out on the street. Down at Sal's Pizzeria, there are overlapping, escalating arguments among the basically decent small businessman Sal, his wimpy younger son, his hateful older son (a character who Lee seems to have forgotten to give any redeeming features, which screws up the otherwise pristine ambiguity), his employee Mooky, and two neighborhood kids, the enormous, taciturn Radio Raheem and the diminutive, garrulous Buggin'Out. Nobody pays attention to anyone else's priorities. Trouble ensues.

Visuals: The brightly colored, brightly lit sets render Bed-Stuy as something like the Fisher-Price village, a sweet, wholesome community almost surprised on this summer day to find trouble in its midst.

This is, it must be said, a movie that is starting to show its age. The characters of the film sport the height of fashion for 1989, which of course looks ridiculous to us from our current spot on the cultural long wave. To my surprise, the title music (by Public Enemy) doesn't sound anywhere near as urgent or powerful as I remember it doing at the time. Interestingly, for a film about racial tension in Brooklyn in the 1980s, there is no evidence that illegal drugs are a problem in peoples’ lives, or for that matter that they even exist.

Dialog: This is a dialog-based film with a solid script. It each of its many vignettes, characters articulate or embody ideas about race and racism; this gives the movie a slightly staged, even didactic feel, yet the characters are complex enough, and the acting solid enough, to handle the political content without cracking.

Prognosis: The very quality that makes Do the Right Thing intellectually interesting – the ambiguity of its characters – also make it frustrating to sit through. It’s hard to watch a group of more or less likeable people make bad decision after bad decision when better decisions are available and would cost them little – you want to reach into the film and knock heads together. It's also frustrating to have Lee imply, through those quotes at the end, that he's shown you something profound about how racism works at the street level: people just get more and more frustrated until, pow! things get violent. Without those quotes, the movie becomes a much more tenable case study in how things, in any given context, simply go better for everybody when people listen to each others' concerns and maybe even back down once in a while. And that’s the truth, Ruth.