This afternoon, Spike Lee will be awarded the Wexner Prize by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The festivities include a month-long retrospective of Lee’s work, which enabled me to finally see Do the Right Thing on the big screen. I was too young to see the film in theatres on its first release, but I’ve watched it dozens of times on VHS and DVD in the intervening years. Lee's masterpiece has been one of my favorite films for a long time, but it never had nearly as much of an effect on me as it did on this most recent viewing. As much as any widescreen epic or special-effects spectacular, Do the Right Thing practically demands to be seen on the big screen.
One important element of the film that can’t be fully appreciated at home is the way Lee re-creates the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in which the film takes place. In Do the Right Thing, this isn’t simply the backdrop for the story, but a vibrant place. Lee presents a flurry of human activity, both seen and heard, and he’ll sometimes foreground characters in one scene only to put them in the background in the next. Lee’s Bed-Stuy always feels like a place where people really live. But as Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy asks, “are we gonna live together? Together, are we gonna live?”
On the hot summer day during which most of Do the Right Thing’s action occurs, the answer to Love Daddy’s question is in doubt. With so many people living on top of each other, there’s already plenty of tension in the air. There’s friction between the African-Americans and the Puerto Ricans who live in Bed-Stuy. Nobody seems happy about gentrification, personified by the Celtics-loving Clifton (John Savage). And there’s some lingering resentment towards the local business owners, a Korean family that has recently opened a convenience store, and even Sal (Danny Aiello), who for years has run the pizzeria with his sons and employs the film’s audience surrogate Mookie (played by Lee himself) as a delivery boy.
Meanwhile, smaller bits of tension pile up on top of each other. Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) makes a stink about the “American-Italians only” pictures on Sal’s Wall of Fame. Sal’s son Pino (John Turturro) can’t keep his racist tendencies in check, and occasionally rails against the neighborhood and its residents. Radio Raheem’s (Bill Nunn) Public Enemy-blasting boom box antagonizes many of those he meets, especially Sal. And then there’s the NYPD, who occasionally drive through, casting suspicious eyes in everyone. Lee shoots many of these moments at tilted angles to create unease in the audience, and the tilts grow ever more extreme as the film progresses. All the while, Lee is saying that these conflicts are a reality in our country, and all it takes is one small spark to make them explode, as they do in Do the Right Thing’s climactic sequence, in which Radio Raheem is killed by the cops and Sal’s store is burned to the ground.
Yet watching the film again, amid all the violence, I was drawn more than ever to its most empathetic character, an elderly seen-it-all drunk called Da Mayor, played by Ossie Davis. Da Mayor is the most ubiquitous supporting player in the film, often hovering over the action when he’s not actively taking part in it. Several times in the film, he’s disrespected by others, but he’s kind to everyone. Even as the tension at Sal’s comes to a head, Da Mayor calls for a peaceful resolution, and eventually he leads Sal and sons away from the rioting to (relative) safety.
Most moving of all are his scenes with Mother Sister, played by Ruby Dee, Davis’ real-life wife. At first, Mother Sister puts him down, proclaiming him “a drunk fool.” Their early scenes together are shot at the same severe angles as the other arguments in the film. But after Da Mayor brings Mother Sister some flowers as a peace offering, the shot composition of their scenes changes. As the sun begins to set, Mother Sister thanks him for saving a young boy, and from this scene onward, their conversations are shot with a level frame, indicating that the friction between these two has given way to a deeper understanding for each other. As if to punctuate his point, the shot of Da Mayor reacting to Mother Sister’s thanks is framed with a streetlight in the background, and as his face brightens, the light flickers on.
At the time of its release, many critics interpreted Do the Right Thing as an attempt to incite racially-motivated violence. Perhaps they were confused with the film’s final quotations, one from Dr. Martin Luther King advocating understanding, the other from Malcolm X arguing about the intelligence of violence in self-defense. But it’s clear to me that Lee sees them as two sides of the same coin: empathize if you can, fight back if you must. Now more than ever, the film plays less as a incitement to violence than to empathy, as set forth in Dr. King’s quote:
“[Violence] is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding… It destroys a community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue.”
Throughout the film, characters are so intent on shouting each other down that they won’t step back and listen, and this as much as the sweltering heat finally leads to the climactic tragedies. It’s for this reason- among many, many others- that Do the Right Thing remains the crowning work of Spike Lee’s fascinating career, and one of the greatest and most important American films ever made. And that, to once again quote Love Daddy, is the quintessential truth, Ruth.
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