Oh Cinema: Films for the Trump Years: Do The Right Thing

**the following article contains some spoilers for Do The Right Thing**

It was almost poetic, the sort of perverted, fateful irony usually reserved for Greek tragedies. Almost exactly thirty years after the Academy ignored Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, still argued by many to be his best and most important film, in favor of the whitewashing blandness that is Driving Miss Daisy, it looked like the Academy was set to get this year's apology tour right; Spike won his first-ever competitive Oscar for the screenplay for BlacKkKlansman, and there had been some speculation going into the night that the film could be a sleeper contender for Best Picture.

Alas, in retrospect, what preceded Spike's win was the ominous sign that this good feeling could not, indeed would not, last; Green Book took the other Screenplay award from the hand of a clearly-disapproving Samuel L. Jackson, and at the end of the night, it took home Best Picture as well. Green Book ultimately tied with Black Panther at three Oscars apiece, and Bohemian Rhapsody took home the most with four. It was with good reason that a properly-saucy Spike remarked afterwards to reporters, “Every time someone's driving somebody, I lose.”

It must needs be remarked that this year's Oscars did include a number of real, positive, groundbreaking firsts, with Spike Lee's win being joined by trophies for Peter Ramsay, Ruth Carter, Hannah Beachler, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, among others. However, the relative dominance, especially among the “prestige” awards, of films made by serial abusers, conspiracy-mongerers, and old, white men blatantly disrespecting the wishes of the black subjects they profited off of will inevitably lead to this year going down as another shamefully embarassing chapter in Academy history. In the age of Trump, defined by rising white nationalism and adjacent-white-nationalism-apologists, and in a post-#MeToo media landscape, there is simply no excuse for this. #Time was supposed to be #Up for shit like this. Clearly, it is not. Not by a long shot.

And so, given the depressing parallels this creates to 30 years ago, it's worth revisiting the film the Academy once deemed less worthy of recognition than Flattering Your Racist Grandma: The Motion Picture.

Do The Right Thing is a film about complex, interlocking racial tensions in a small Brooklyn street, played out over the course of a single day. There is an ongoing heatwave plaguing the city, and as our narrator, the seemingly all-knowing local DJ Love Daddy informs us, the day ahead will be the worst one yet. We get a sense of the personalities, dynamics, and institutions that exist between residents old and new that define life there. Mookie (played by Spike Lee himself), the delivery boy for the famous local pizza joint; Sal and his sons, Pino and Vito, the Italian owners of the pizza place and, apparently, the only white family still living and working in the neighborhood after the others have moved out; Mother Sister and Da Mayor, two elderly locals who form something of a moral compass for everyone else; Buggin' Out, a young black man spoiling for a fight with seemingly everyone; Radio Raheem, famous for his massive boombox, whose Love/Hate brass knuckles provide the focus for one of the film's most famous and enduring images; and so, so many more.

The nucleus of the travesty of justice, understanding, and empathy that ultimately ends the day is Buggin' Out and Sal getting worked up around lunchtime over the fact that only Italian-Americans are presented on Sal's “Wall of Fame.” In Sal's eyes, it's his restaurant, and he's Italian-American, so he can do what he wants. Fair point. In Buggin' Out's eyes, since the restaurant is in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood and propped up by the money spent there day in, day out by black customers, Sal ought to pay tribute to the community that keeps him in business. Also fair, as well as a frighteningly prescient parallel to how the makers of Green Book gained profit and Oscar gold from the story of Dr. Shirley over the explicit wishes of both its subject and his family.

But as with all things, two arguments that, on their own, seem fair and that might, in a cooler situation, be able to find their way to a common middle ground, are in this case entering a proverbial tinderbox of social, economic, and racial tension, all exacerbated by that damned, unending, all-pervasive heat.

Heat is one of the most important parts of the film, both literally and symbolically. It makes everyone just a little bit angrier, sweatier, stickier, on edge. And it works here as a damn-near perfect metaphorical stand-in for how racial and ethnic divisions can pervade and surround everything in a society, and how even the most minor of disagreements and the most innocent moments are instantly imbued- or rather, infected- with a hostility and anger that can lead, all too quickly, to escalation.

Buggin' Out and his anger over the Wall of Fame is one example of this. Another is the incredibly awkward and tense moment when Mookie's sister, Jade, comes in to Sal's for a slice. Sal is clearly head-over-heels for Jade; the way he insists on “making her something special” and the few word they exchange sitting in a booth are moments of real tenderness, a level of kindness and humanity the heat can't touch. But even this is immediately squelched out by both Mookie and Sal's older son, Pino, whose hostility to even the idea of Sal and Mookie's sister being interested in each other is plain to see on their taught, wary faces.

Part of what makes this film such an incredible feat of visual and narrative storytelling is how quickly and effectively each character, large and small, are established and made to feel individual and unique. One of the greatest bugbears of films seeking to deal with race is avoiding the pitfall of generalization, i.e., to not fall victim to exactly that which the film wants to push back against. Here, each character is shown to us as genuinely human, with virtues and vices co-mingling constantly. The title almost seems to hint that there is some clear answer- one thing that truly is “the right thing,” or one character or group of characters are the “good guys” in contrast to all else- but the film is too smart for that. Each character has moments of sympathy, of compassion, of doing a good turn, only to turn around and say or do something aggressive, immature, selfish, or just plain stupid. What the right thing to do even is depends on the situation and perspective of each person. Even the title is open to contradicting interpretations. It works as a gentle plea for humanity in an inhumane world. It could also be a command, barked out in anger and for decidedly “wrong” reasons. Like with everything else in the film, whether or not there is a difference between the “right” and “wrong” thing to do is something the viewers are left to ponder over for themselves.

The lone exception to this masterful shading, at least in my view, is the Korean family that owns the convenience store across the street from Sal's Famous. We are informed that they are relative newcomers to the neighborhood, and this plus the fact that they have already achieved a level of economic success most longtime residents of the street have never had is more fuel for resentment and mistrust between the Koreans and everyone else, be they black, Hispanic, Italian, what-have-you. But the 360-degree treatment never quite extends to this family; they are key to a few scenes, but we never see anything from their perspective. With most of the film devoted to the angers, worries, fears, and insecurities of the African- and Italian-American parts of the cast, the Korean and (to a lesser extent) Hispanic characters sometimes feel like a bit of an afterthought. That, at least, was my impression, but I will leave it to other viewers, especially viewers of color, to decide whether or not this dilutes the film's power as a meditation on racism.

Another imbalance within the film I noticed was its treatment of women. Mother Sister is treated as a wise elder, respected by all in the community, but she is the only woman the men really seem to listen to. Mookie clearly struggles in being present as a partner for his girlfriend and father for their child, and when he sees Jade and Sal flirting, his immediate reaction is standard, overprotective machismo; he tries to ban his sister from ever going to Sal's again, and takes it upon himself to confront Sal and tell him keep far away from her. Where, indeed, is Mrs. Sal? We are never told.

This, however, I don't see as a flaw in the film, but rather as an accurate reflection of how gender dynamics play an equally forceful role in how discrimination seeps into all sorts of relationships and can extend inequality, racial or otherwise. It's yet another shade in a film that succeeds to bringing in nearly the whole spectrum of bigotry for consideration and debate.

All of this builds to the film's devastating climax, a massive confrontation/fistfight/firefight where seemingly every bit of pent-up anger explodes outward, devastating everyone within reach. In the scram that results between Sal, Mookie, Buggin', Raheem, and the others, the (mostly) white cops start wading in. People are beaten, harmed, their livelihood destroyed, and one young man black man is picked up by a cop and strangled to death, in the middle of the street, for all to see.

This devastating moment was controversial and effecting enough when the film first came out in the 80's. Now, though, in 2019- several years after the video of Eric Garner's death and his final words were seared into our collective conscious- it is even more potent, a tragic reminder that the videos, audio, and stories of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice that seemed, at the time, never-ending, were really only “new” or “revealing” for white people. For minorities- African, Asian, Muslim, Hispanic, Native, LGBTQ, and more- it was nothing new; just another continuation of a long, long history of random, senseless violence this country has never, ever ceased to inflict on the marginalized.

Do The Right Thing retains every bit of its power, fury, and force today because of this. This country- its voters, its politicians, it's business leaders- have continued to refuse to do the right thing, or to even seriously discuss and consider what right things need to be done to allow us to actually begin to heal, in some form, from the past and to truly move on. As long as the thousand-and-one pointed questions this films throws at the viewer remain unconsidered, untested, and unanswered, none of us will have the ability or right to look Radio Raheem in the eye and say that, yes, in the end, Love will win out over Hate.

-Noah Franc

Previously on Films for the Trump Years:

Part 1- Selma

Part 2- Good Night, and Good Luck

Part 3- 13th

Part 4- Get Out

Part 5- Chasing Ice/Chasing Coral

Part 6- The Big Short

Part 7- Human Flow

Part 8- Winter's Bone/Moonlight

Part 9- Black Panther

Part 10- Arrested Development