“Wake up!”
Thus ends director Spike Lee’s sophomore effort, School Daze, and begins his third, Do the Right Thing, arguably a modern classic in the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Anticipating the Brooklyn Crown Heights and L.A. uprisings in the two-year span since its 1989 release, Do the Right Thing is the equivalent of a cinematic Molotov cocktail, exploding all the popular American mainstream myths about racial solidarity and togetherness in the post-civil rights, Reagan-Bush era.
While the film, which examines the long-simmering racial tensions in a close-set Brooklyn neighborhood that escalates to violence and tragedy, was roundly criticized for its violence by much of the U.S. mainstream media (and many in the European press as well), Do the Right Thing is now considered one of the best films to come out of the 1980s. Its themes on violence, racial intolerance, and police brutality still inspires heated discussions. What made this film so incendiary, and continues to make it incendiary, is not only its themes of racial intolerance and the ways in which our society, particularly those who are oppressed and marginalized, chooses to deal with it, but also for the techniques the filmmakers used, i.e., cinematography and music, to drive that message home.
As a film, Do the Right Thing is a study in how cinematography can effectively add credence to plot and character development. The film’s sensual details, such as the hot, sticky, suffocating heat of a summer day, are visually stunning. Since weather plays a significant role in the film from start to finish – -it is the oppressive summer heat which stokes racial conflicts to the surface, driving the film to its tragic and violent climax – -the cinematographer’s use of light and color increases its visual power.
From its first frame – -the energetic credit sequence in which actress Rosie Perez dances vibrantly to Public Enemy’s propulsive anthem “Fight the Power,” against a rear-screen backdrop that is lit in vivid blues and reds – -right to its final shot, the film is an explosion of bright and warm colors. Bathed in vibrant red, orange, and yellow hues, the film glows in an almost burning-furnace light. In the first scenes, yellow light pours through windows of shuttered apartments, nearly obscuring or melting the actors and scenery around it. In later scenes, particularly the nighttime sequences, a chiaroscuro effect is used, with blue and purple light surrounding the outer areas of the screen, and bright yellows and reds lit on the actor’s faces and bodies.
This effect is striking visually, particularly in color. When Mookie cools his girlfriend Tina, played by Perez, down with ice cubes, the actors’ skins practically glow and smolder, as if they were burning with unchecked rages and desires (chiaroscuro lighting is usually associated with the stylized films of the 1940s and 1950s known as film noir, whose themes of moral ambiguity in the dark shadowy worlds they portrayed were a noted departure from the usual Hollywood fare at the time. If Do the Right Thing could be considered film noir outside of the fact that this is a “Black” film, it could certainly be in Mookie’s act of tossing a trash can into the window of Sal’s Pizzeria after his friend Radio Raheem has been killed by cops, an act ambiguous as any portrayed in modern cinema).
Though the lighting of the outdoor sequences is muted and natural, the filmmakers remind the viewer of the torrid weather with shots of characters dousing themselves with water, such as the young people playing with the jonny-pump of a fire hydrant, or extreme close-ups of the actors’ faces dripping with beads of sweat. Many of the scenic details, such as the wall in front of which the Corner Men sit, are painted fire-engine red, radiating a heat and warmth that leaps off the screen (in fact, some of the set designs are reminiscent of Third World dwellings, melding this Brooklyn neighborhood to an immigrant past and present). The relentless accentuation of heat throughout the film lends believability. When New York tabloid headlines scream “Hot, Hot, Hot,” across the screen, we believe it!
Early on in the film’s preproduction, Spike Lee knew that the emphasis of heat was important to the film’s credibility. He and cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, a longtime collaborator of Lee’s, worked to get the right effect for the film, making sure that the audience was aware of the heat in every shot. “I remember seeing Lawrence of Arabia when I was a kid,” said Dickerson. I must have visited the Coca Cola stand three times before the film was over. I wanted that effect for Do the Right Thing.”
Dickerson effectively used camera angles, such as oblique angles and extreme close-ups, to also play up the tensions brought out by the heat in the film. One example in which camera angles heighten those tensions is the confrontation between Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and Clifton (John Savage), the white bicyclist who steps on and ruins Buggin’ Out’s new pair of Air Jordans. At the start of the scene, when Buggin’ Out and the neighborhood young folk confront Clifton at his brownstone, Dickerson shoots from below when the POV is focused on Buggin’ Out. When it cuts sharply to Savage, he shoots the actor in an extreme close-up, focusing on his sweaty, jittery face. Dickerson holds these angles throughout most of the scene until the end, when Clifton enters his brownstone.
This time, oblique angles are shot on both POVs, except now they have changed: Buggin’ Out and the young crowd are shot from above, while Clifton is shot from below. The reversal in shots should be noted because it is significant to the film’s underlying themes. By reversing the angles on both POVs, Lee is commenting on the inequality between these two sets of people. By shooting Buggin’ Out from below angle and actor John Savage in close-up in the beginning, the young people are seen as being in control of the situation – -their anger could otherwise turn to mob violence – -yet the sequence ends with a below angle shot on Savage as he enters his brownstone, as if he were “above” or superior to the young Black people.
hrough these angles, Lee posits where the real power and control exists in racial confrontations, a power that is exerted with tragic consequences by the film’s end. Another scene that is a study of the use of camera angles to heighten tension and chaos is the confrontation at Sal’s Pizzeria initiated by Buggin’ Out, Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith). Wanting to create an “aura of uneasiness” throughout the film, Lee was adamant about using “chinese angles” or oblique angles “…like the ones that were used so effectively in The Third Man.2 He and Dickerson also turned to films such as In the Heat of the Night, Body Heat and Apocalypse Now for instruction.
These films also deal with heat, the long-simmering tensions (sexual in the case of Body Heat) brought to the surface by it, and the disorientating, hallucinogenic effects of violence (Apocalypse Now). Actually, Do the Right Thing is an homage to films past from Lee’s own School Daze to Night of the Hunter, whose Love/Hate sequence Lee recreates with Radio Raheem.
Since his first film, She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee used music in the same way a painter uses the colors on his palette. Music not only paints sounds in his films, but they color moods and emotions as well. Lee’s understanding and appreciation of music owes a great deal to the fact that his father, Bill Lee, is a jazz musician (Lee scored many of his son’s film, including Malcolm X, Jungle Fever, and Mo’ Better Blues).
In Do the Right Thing, though, the song that immediately springs to mind is Public Enemy’s wicked “Fight the Power.” With its driving, propulsive beat, and its powerful lyrics knocking down America’s favorite cultural heroes (Elvis Presley, John Wayne), thus putting an Afrocentric stamp on the American cultural brain, the song anticipated the firestorm that would greet the film upon its release. Public Enemy, a political rap group, had been sparking controversies with their defiant, pro-Black rap lyrics long before Spike Lee commissioned them to record a song specifically for the film. Both Lee and Public Enemy were unyielding in their views and comments, particularly in the mainstream “white” press, so the group’s participation in the project was apt.
The song itself is played only when the character Radio Raheem appears (with one exception during the credit sequence, suggesting that the song is less a theme for Radio Raheem but for the film itself). The song is a signature statement for Black male pride, independence, and uncompromising strength. It is loud, “in your face,” fearless, and demanding of respect in the same way Radio Raheem is seen not only by himself but by others in the neighborhood, and, for that matter, Do the Right Thing. The rest of the film score was composed by Bill Lee.
While “Fight the Power” is driving and rebellious, Lee’s score, an amalgam of jazz and classical-inspired music, is melodic and complex, emphasizing brass and strings to bring out the characters’ conflicting emotions. His music beautifully underscores the emotional center of the film, particularly in one scene in which Sal (Danny Aiello) tries to understand why his son Pino (John Turturro) is so angry. Building on waves of saxophone, bass, and drums, the music collides with the differing emotions of father and son until it explodes with percussive fury, matching Pino’s anger pitch for pitch. In his essay on the film, critic David Sterritt suggested that the film score was reminiscent of Aaron Copland’s compositions, anticipating Lee’s own use of the composer’s music in his later film He Got Game.
Considering that Copland is thought to be the most American of American composers, perhaps echoing this musical style was Lee’s statement on racism being just as equally American. Or, he could also be stating that the blending of jazz and classical music (a signature Copland style), or African percussive rhythms and European modal styles parallels the blending of Black popular culture in mainstream American society (Lee alludes to this fusion of Black and White cultures in the “Nigger or Black” discussion between Mookie and Pino). However one analyzes his technical choices, in every way, whether through the use of color, camera angles, or music, Spike Lee used every technique available to steadily drive the plot to its shocking and inevitable conclusion.
Do the Right Thing poses a question that seems simple from the outset: what is the proper way for society to address racism in America? Yet such a question can only demand an answer that is anything but simple. Should it be done through dialogue and understanding? Confrontation, or positive direction of energy? Violence or self-defense? Since the issue of racism continues to be a hot-button topic in America, these questions alone can set off explosive reactions. Indeed, the film sparked heated conversations about its message when it was released.
In Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee fearlessly sets up these questions through his characters and their motives. One of the criticisms lodged at the film was that the characters were one-dimensional cardboard cutouts for Lee’s racial polemics. While it is true, as Sterritt noted, that Lee paints a “broad stroke” in creating these characters, his critics missed the point that these characters were meant to be archetypes of how society deals with racism in America. For instance, Sal’s younger son Vito, in his refusal to confront his older brother Pino’s abuse, represents how some White Americans acquiesce to the racism they see around them, yet know is wrong. Sal’s denial of his own racism and his benign paternalism toward the Black people in the community represents White America’s refusal to see or admit the racism that still exists not only in contemporary America but in themselves.
Buggin’ Out is every young socially aware Black man who is nonetheless misdirected in his activism, while the young people on the block are the apathetic Black youth in urban America who are more interested in hanging out than getting involved. Radio Raheem provides another image of Black men, that of “in-your-face,” self-defensive, braggadocio posturing that masks layers of vulnerability (the Love/Hate sequence offers a rare, but brief glimpse into this character’s soul). Da Mayor, played by the late veteran stage and screen actor, Ossie Davis, represents how Black people, but men in particular, medicate themselves against the harshness of racism and poverty through alcohol or drugs.
And the three Corner Men, the film’s “Greek chorus,” are those many Black and White Americans, most specifically in the audience of dark movie theaters across the country, who comment on the world around them, but are unable or incapable of having the power to effect or change them (political impotence). Therefore, in scenes such as the “Nigger or Black” discussion between Pino and Mookie, Pino and Sal’s talk about Pino’s anger; Buggin’ Out’s boycott and his differences of opinion with Jade (Joie Lee, the director’s sister), and the explosive montage of racial epithets shouted out by the film’s characters, become all the more potent and real for the archetypal symbols they represent.
Two themes that are not usually analyzed in the film is how Lee seems to be commenting on the personal responsibility or lack thereof in the Black community and explorations of male identity. While most of the characters (Pino, Vito, Da Mayor, Buggin’ Out) are confronted about their lack of accountability or their misdirected energy and rage, the film focuses sharply on Mookie’s personal irresponsibility. Mookie, who is a delivery man at Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, is unmotivated, lazy, and not a responsible father to his son with Tina.
Sal, his sister Jade (whose couch he sleeps on), Tina, and Tina’s mother all complain to him about this, but their complaints fall on deaf ears. Mookie is motivated only by his desire to get paid. Throughout the movie, he is constantly hitting up Sal for his “pay,” and even returns to the Pizzeria after it has been burned to the ground to get his weekly salary. After Sal angrily tosses crumpled up one hundred dollar bills at Mookie, Mookie initially takes the two-hundred fifty that’s owed him, but by scene’s end picks up the rest from the sidewalk.
He is also politically and socially unmotivated. In one scene, after Buggin’ Out threatens a boycott against Sal’s Pizzeria for refusing to put up pictures of Black people on his Wall of Fame, Buggin’ Out exhorts Mookie to “stay Black,” a call Mookie treats dismissively. It is interesting, then, that Mookie is the one who throws the trash can in the pizzeria. Is Lee suggesting that Mookie’s response of self-defense against police brutality was a responsible act, thus redeeming the character (he did the right thing)?
If so, then why end the film with Mookie returning for his money, a character trait Lee is obviously criticizing? Though these questions aren’t overtly answered, Lee does end his film with the two famous quotes by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, each espousing nonviolence and the right to self-defense respectively, further muddying the film’s message. By refusing to hand simple bromides to comfort his audience, Spike Lee leaves the ultimate responsibility to finding the answers (what is the right thing?) to the viewer.
This is one of the reasons why Do the Right Thing is still such a powerful film. The questions it raises, while still potent, also still elude us, especially in the wake of the Rodney King riots, and other acts of police brutality and racial unrest in America (the film itself is dedicated to such victims of police brutality as Eleanor Bumpers and Michael Stewart).
Through much of his film career, Spike Lee was criticized for his lack of strong Black female characters. This is a criticism Lee took to heart, and, in Do the Right Thing, a journal of production notes taken before and during the film’s shoot, he writes about the need to build up the female characters in the film. While Lee might have seen the need to create stronger female characters, Do the Right Thing is primarily a film about men and their need to express and embrace their masculine identity, especially when it is threatened by other males. Lee, in writing about the confrontation between Clifton and Buggin’ Out, said, “To me, this scene is really about how men, Black and white, test each other’s manhood.”
One can say that all the male characters in Do the Right Thing are constantly testing their manhood, whether it is Radio Raheem, whose boombox, with its size and volume, is a powerful phallic symbol (check out the scene where he battles with Stevie and his friends over who has the loudest “box”), or Vito, whose brother Pino constantly abuses him, tries to toughen him up, and knock some sense (racist sense) into him. Meanwhile, Mookie advises Vito to stand up for himself and “kick [Pino’s] ass.” It’s interesting that after Mookie delivers this advice to Vito, he and Buggin’ Out engage in a playful call-and-response. “You the man.” “No, you the man.” It is as if these characters have to constantly remind themselves of their manhood in an environment that often emasculates them.
The women in Mookie’s life, Jade and Tina, also remind him to be a man, but for entirely different reasons. They simply want Mookie to be more responsible in his life. After warning his sister about Sal (in a preceding scene the movie brings up but does not resolve Sal’s sexual attraction to Mookie’s sister), Jade tells him to move out of the apartment they share, grow up and be a man. Tina tells him the same thing in the scene following the riot. “I am a man,” he says simply. “Act like one then. Be a man,” Tina retorts angrily. Mookie’s simple statement, “I am a man,” reminds me of signs that were carried by the striking sanitation workers in Memphis the day before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968.
While it would be stretching the point to suggest that Lee specifically wanted to recall that tragic moment in American history, it is interesting to note that the character who initiated the riot by the film’s climax would simply and evocatively state what he, like the sanitation workers and all Black men in America, want: respect for his manhood. But as Lee also seems to be commenting, that respect comes with expectations. Do the right thing, is not only an exhortation on what society should do in response to its racial problems, but it is also a demand placed on its citizens, Black and White, male and female, to become more accountable in their personal actions.
After its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989, and its release in the United States, Do the Right Thing became a lightning rod for criticism. Critics and pundits alike condemned it for its socially irresponsible message (director Wim Wenders, a judge on the panel for the festival’s Palm D’or jury prize, said Mookie’s final act in the movie was “unheroic,” prompting Lee to note ironically that the film which beat out Do the Right Thing for the Palm D’or, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh’s first feature film effort, had a “heroic” character who recorded himself and others masturbating on video). Critics also feared the film would incite riots in movie theaters, a fear that was unfounded.
Others pointed out that the film was unrealistic in its portrayal of poor Black neighborhoods and that the characters were one-dimensional. Lee shot back at the film’s detractors, saying that they were more concerned about the burned down pizzeria than with the death of Radio Raheem. Whatever criticism the film received (it did have its supporters, as in film critic Roger Ebert, who attended its premiere showing in Cannes and hailed its praises ever since), it in no way detracts from the film’s strength. Thirteen years after its release, Do the Right Thing still packs a powerful punch.
If Do the Right Thing continues to be such an important film, it is only because of its uncompromising views of contemporary America. Unlike prior Hollywood films about race that exist merely to assuage white and/or liberal guilt, Do the Right Thing refuses to stroke anyone’s ego. And while certain aspects of the film are stuck in its specific time and place (its references to Tawanna Brawley and Ed Koch are as much of a bygone era as the hightop fades and biker shorts sported by its characters), its message of racial violence and police brutality are still all too relevant.
Add the names Amadou Diallo and Rodney King, and such current lingo as “racial profiling” into the film and not a single scene would be altered, nor its profound message diluted. Do the Right Thing, quite simply, is a classic in modern filmmaking. Its political and social message will continue to remind us what lies in store for America when it doesn’t do the right thing.
