For our final installment, Do the Right Thing offers a masterful, fine-tuned view on race in America. Which shouldn’t make you feel like you know what’s coming, because you don’t. Spike Lee has become an iconic director with countless films over the decades since he created (and starred in as a young man) Do the Right Thing in 1989, but to be honest this one is why he has achieved elevated status.
Like most art, it’s complex and a bit messy. It’s theatrical, uncomfortable, hilarious, tender, and shocking. It swings from comedy to social commentary to tragedy while still feeling coherent. Even the colors are heightened, exaggerated, in what Lee has called ‘Afrocentric bright’. As a period piece of sorts, it’s drenched in the US cultural references of both the 1960s and the late 1980s - Michael Jordan and Malcolm X, Prince and MLK, and Public Enemy’s thundering battle cry of Fight the Power infused throughout - yet manages to still feel relevant.
And despite being about racial tension, you can feel the love Lee has for every character (ok, except for the police) on the sweltering, multi-ethnic Brooklyn block where the action takes place on a single summer day. There’s plenty of vitriol between groups - some good-natured, some not - but no punching down here.
Interestingly, there isn’t a single gun in the film, even though the 80s were a time of massive gun violence in US cities. The block becomes almost a kind of uneasy village, where even the downtrodden are imbued with a kind of nobility and at times even innocence.
No easy answers but plenty of moral ambiguity, like all of Film Club offerings.
It’s not for everyone, but for us Film Clubbers it’s a must-see. It’s certainly a fascinating counterpoint to the west Texas world of No Country for Old Men, which coincidentally was also set in the 80s (though made in 2008). Reminding us there is no single ‘truth’ in the US - let alone the ‘triple-truth, Ruth’ as a character in DtRT likes to say.
In searching for the right review, I noticed how many were from the last few years. That tells us something. Here’s one good look back at the film from the NY Times in 2020:
The chants of “Howard Beach” during the climactic conflict — referring to the Queens neighborhood where Michael Griffith, a 23-year-old black man, was killed after being chased by a white mob in 1986 — may require a footnote now, but the list of the victims of similar violence that appears before the end credits only needs an update [including] Eric Garner, Philando Castile and so many others.
How does that happen? How does it keep happening? “Do the Right Thing” looks for the answer in the details of everyday life, which is full of accidents, potential flash points and micro (and not so micro) aggressions. It’s also full of tenderness, silliness, and small moments of sorrow and grace.
Lee’s genius resides in the way he orchestrates all of that. This is one of the funniest movies I know — I’ll just mention Sweet Dick Willie and leave it at that — and also one of the saddest. It’s noisy and quiet, brazenly theatrical and breathtakingly subtle. Not all at once, but in just the right order.