MAY/JUNE 2007
Living Together
Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing
Alan A. Stone
When Spike Lee celebrated
his 50th birthday earlier this year, he had many irons in the
fire: a sequel to his successful crime thriller Inside Man,
biopics about Joe Louis and James Brown, a television series for
NBC, and a host of music videos and commercials. But his most
intriguing plan was for a feature film about the 1992 Los Angeles
riots that were sparked by the acquittal of white policemen who,
infamously, had been videotaped beating an unarmed black motorist.
That Lee would return to race riots,
the subject of his most original and provocative film, Do
the Right Thing (1989), was only part of the intrigue. Even
more extraordinary—for those who remember the white establishment’s
hostile reaction to Lee’s earlier effort—was Hollywood
super-producer Brian Grazer’s announcement that the new
project was “the best way to use Spike’s power as
a filmmaker to tell an evenhanded story that gets beyond the iconic
pictures that we all remember.” Lee himself promised “a
truthful and realistic examination of what happened.”
To be evenhanded about the images
of Rodney King being bludgeoned by uniformed police officers and
of the white truck driver Reginald Denny being attacked by black
youths during the riots, seems close to impossible. Film (even
documentary film) does not lend itself to evenhandedness. Even
if it did, Spike Lee might not be the best choice for that job.
The young Spike Lee had an attitude;
he was in white people’s faces, speaking his truth to their
power. His project was unapologetic about getting even, not being
evenhanded. When white critics complained about his negative stereotypes
of Italians (Do the Right Thing) and Jews (Mo’
Better Blues, 1990) Lee had a ready answer: just look at
the stereotypes of blacks in the movies made by Jews and Italians.
The early films that made Lee’s
cinematic reputation—Do the Right Thing and She’s
Gotta Have It (1986)—assumed a black audience and ignored
white sensibilities and expectations. Predominately black audiences
reacted knowingly and laughed, while white audiences sat quietly
and missed most of the humor. When I first watched Do the
Right Thing in a crowded suburban theater, there was stunned
silence. Many in the all white audience would have agreed with
critics Terence McNally and Joe Klein that the film was an incitement
to violence. One critic went even further, describing Do the
Right Thing as propaganda comparable to Leni Riefenstahl’s
film about Hitler, Triumph of the Will. When I discussed
the film at a public lecture, a group of elderly women who identified
themselves as Holocaust survivors assured me that Lee was another
Joseph Goebbels. None of them had actually seen the film; their
judgment was based entirely on Lee’s combative statements
and interviews as reported in The New York Times.
At the time, critics’ central
focus was the moral import of a decision by Mookie (Spike Lee).
Near the end of the movie a black crowd has gathered outside the
pizzeria where he works and where his friend Radio Raheem (Bill
Nunn) has just been killed by white police. Mookie picks up a
trash can and throws it through the window of Sal’s Famous
Pizzeria. Mookie’s act sets off a riot that destroys the
last white-owned business in the “Bed-Stuy” block
in which the film takes place. Did Mookie “do the right
thing”?
Most critics said no, although
one defense of Mookie argued that he turns the crowd into a mob
bent on property destruction rather than violence against Sal
(Danny Aiello) and his sons, Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard
Edson). Mookie’s words to Sal seem to confirm this theory:
“Motherfuck a window; Radio Raheem is dead.” But Lee
has often said that the focus on the moral question is a white
preoccupation. No black person ever asks him if Mookie did the
right thing; they get it.
Nonetheless black academics here
felt obligated to respond to the charges that the film would cause
riots. Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., in a panel discussion
reprinted in The New York Times, described it as a “porous”
text that allowed viewers to reach their own moral conclusions.
“The moviegoer is even left with a choice, put there literally
through the two quotes of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.”
Gates’s placing the moral choice on the viewer was the closest
any critic got to calling Lee evenhanded.
But Brian Grazer’s recent
comment about the “evenhanded” Lee must not be dismissed.
That Spike Lee has changed needs no discussion. He has gone, as
the critic William Lyne has written, “from black power to
black box office,” and beyond that to mainstream Hollywood.
In the process he has become a less original and creative filmmaker.
But the more interesting question
is whether we can look at Do the Right Thing today and
see, if not evenhandedness, then a non-polarizing film, and truthful
part of American life. Has American culture shifted enough in
the intervening years so that white audiences can see the film
a different way?
What I found striking in revisiting
the film is that its creative expression overshadows its political
and moral import. It does not feel dated. It is as vivid today
as it was in 1989, despite the “Public Enemy” soundtack,
the graffiti reference to Reverend Al Sharpton’s 1980s cause
celebre (“Tawana never lied”), and a Mike Tyson poster.
The film itself is still alive and kicking, right from the beginning.
And if white audiences felt threatened back then, today they should
be able to sense the explosion of Lee’s youthful creativity
in a celebration of defiant pride. That is the man’s persona
and his message.
Do the Right Thing opens
with Rosie Perez dancing to “Fight the Power.” Perez
is indomitable, fusing sex and aggression into the language of
dance. She is so over-the-top, so hyperbolic, so raw, and so totally
engaged that she is less erotic than a force of nature. This is
the Dionysian dance that Nietzsche could only imagine. Here Lee,
whose TV commercials have the same extraordinary emotional and
creative energy, is at the peak of his artistic power.
But the enduring vitality of Do
the Right Thing is not only the product of Lee’s creative
inspiration. His collaborators fought his power; the film is a
product of that struggle. Lee initially wanted Public Enemy to
do the music track based on the spiritual, “Lift Every Voice
and Sing.” Public Enemy convinced him that young blacks
were listening to rap, not spiritual or jazz, and they created
“Fight the Power,” heard perhaps 15 times during the
film. Danny Aiello insisted that Sal be more complex than a stereotyped
racist and he improvised a human side. Others made important contributions,
notably the cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, whose bold camera
work gave the film an aesthetic originality and coherence.
Rosie’s dance is an overture
for what follows. Lee wrote the script for Do the Right Thing
in a two-week burst of creativity. It has the style and structure
of a classic Greek tragedy. The events all take place on one hot
day, with tempers rising with the temperature. There is a Greek
Chorus, three middle-aged men, sitting on folding chairs on the
sidewalk, discussing their lives and their community. There is the
equivalent of the blind seer, a handicapped young man, who spastically
makes his way through the film peddling photographs of Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X. This unforgettable character was played by an
actor who persuaded Lee to create this crucial role for him, refusing
to take no for an answer. And the humanized Sal is the character
whose Italian pride is the hubris that leads to his downfall. But
Do the Right Thing also has the style of an opera—a
rap opera. Radio Raheem, who wears brass knuckles that spell out
“love” and “hate” on each hand, has a rap
aria:
Let me tell you the story of “Right
Hand, Left Hand.” It’s a tale of good and evil. Hate:
it was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love: these
five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand:
the hand of love. The story of life is this: Static. One hand
is always fighting the other hand; and the left hand is kicking
much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, Love, is finished.
But, hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back.
Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes now, that’s right.
Ooh, it’s the devastating right and Hate is hurt, he’s
down. Left-Hand Hate KO’d by Love.
Although Lee borrowed this
idea from Robert Mitchum’s love–hate speech in the
film classic The Night of the Hunter, he has certainly
improved on the original.
In the middle of the hot day there
comes a montage of racial slurs. Characters look into the camera
and deliver an aria of hatred. What stands out today is how the
diversity of the Bed-Stuy community is represented: the tensions
among blacks with different values, the uneasy lines between blacks
and Hispanics, the conflicts in Sal’s family, and the sense
that the white police are threatened and threatening—they
remind us of our soldiers trying to keep peace in Iraq. What seemed
then like a clash between whites and blacks, now seems far more
complicated. And the disc jockey, Mister Señor Love Daddy,
(Samuel L. Jackson), asks a final double question: “Are
we gonna live together; together are we gonna live?” Today
that question has more import than Mookie’s action.
So from this distance it seems
that Gates got it right. But there is still another theme that
points to the film’s openness and truthfulness. There is
much that shows the destructive side of life in the inner city.
Lee made it clear that he was not interested in making films about
blacks who will be positive role models for the community. Nonetheless
this is a film about black pride and black identity. Lee cares
about that.
Three important moments demonstrate
this theme. The great actor Ossie Davis, who plays “Da Mayor”
of the block, delivers the first. He is a man defeated by life
and by alcohol, but we will see in this panhandling bum an undying
spark of self-respect, and in the end a kind of redemption.
The second moment comes when Mister
Señor Love Daddy reads the honor role of black musicians
and the list goes on and on in an undeniable declaration of black
creative achievement.
And finally we return to Mookie’s
decision to throw the trash can through the window. As the philosophers
say, every act has unforeseen consequences (this is why the critics
condemned the choice.). But every act also has an expressive function,
and Mookie is in this moment expressing his solidarity with his
community.
Throughout the film he is the Levi-Straussian
figure who mediates between the categories of black and white.
He delivers Sal’s pizzas and keeps the peace in the pizzeria;
he mediates between the blacks and Hispanics—he is the father
of Rosie Perez’s son. But after he watches Radio Raheem
killed by the police in a chokehold (an incident based on real
events) he can no longer be a mediator. He must take sides.
This interpretation suggests that
Lee will tell the story of the L.A. riots from a black perspective,
and if it is not evenhanded we can hope that it is “porous”
and will ask as many questions as it answers—most importantly,
“Are we gonna live together; together are we gonna live?”
Today we realize Mister Señor Love Daddy’s question
is not just about race in America. It is about survival on the
planet. Do the Right Thing was one of the best films
of the 20th century. It looks even better in the 21st. <
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