#97 Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

#97 Do the Right Thing

1989 // USA // Spike Lee

Criterion Collection (LINK) / Letterboxd (LINK)

If you told me DO THE RIGHT THING is a new release this year, I would believe you without a doubt. Its messages are still socially and politically relevant today, if not more than it had evoked thirty years ago. Then I realised GREEN BOOK had just won the Oscar’s Best Picture this year, which is shamefully a fact I tried so hard to forget, I fully grasp where’ve all these anger came from. DO THE RIGHT THING is incendiary and provocative by depriving the audience of a Hollywood feel-good resolution and sanitised one-dimensional portrait of racism. In fact, Spike Lee challenged us with a series of interconnected incidents, from police brutality, racial profiling, neighbourhood colonization and gentrification, to gender and family relations in the underrepresented black community, that couldn’t be isolated individually.

It fully illustrated what a social and cultural, predominantly African American and Puerto Rican, working-to-lower-class neighbourhood was in reality. The boiling heat accentuated and exacerbated the anger and hate across all the characters, from the two extremes in frenzied agitator Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and overt racist Pino (John Turturro), to the middleman Mookie (Spike Lee) or the seemingly sympathetic Pizzeria owner Sal (Danny Aiello). All characters are multi-faceted, despite they are deeply flawed and the least they did was doing the right thing. In his journal written during the production, Lee described Mookie and his contemporary Black characters that ‘they live for the present moment, because there is nothing they feel they can do about the future. What I’m talking about is a feel of helplessness, or powerlessness, that who you are and what effect you can have on things is absolutely nil, zero, jack shit, nada.’

It’s not only about ‘love verse hate’ as represented by Radio Raheem‘s (Bill Nunn) left and right-hand knuckle rings (which undeniably alluded to brass knuckles and implied violence at the end), the film also grappled with the resentment of economic immobility and the social injustice that have becomes a self-contained oppressive culture in the neighbourhood. The climactic riot sequence didn’t answer, nor intend to resolve, any above-mentioned issues, it unreservedly epitomised a rage that erupted in similar circumstances and dared us wondering why a dead black man was less concerned than a destroyed store. Was Radio Raheem deserved to die? Of course not. The abuse of violence was prominent on both sides, no matter verbally or physically, but the police represent the law and they should be the one who recognises the line that not to be crossed. GREEN BOOK won the Oscar by showing a racist white man redeeming himself by befriending a single black person, whilst DO THE RIGHT THING did the opposite, it simply showed the deeply rooted racism and rage inside a larger context of a cultural neighbourhood where love struggling for existence. It’s obvious which one did the right thing.