Do the Right Thing: Racial Inequality Leading to Violence

Is violence the answer to everything? After watching “Do the right thing” when I left the class left my face stunned and a few tears left my eyes. Spike Lee did an impossible thing. He had made a movie about race in America that understood with all the participants. He didn't draw lines or take sides but simply looked with grief at one racial flashpoint that stood for many others.

People like myself are appalled that the devastation of Sal's begins with a trash can throw through the window by Mookie, the employee Sal refers to as “like a son to me.” Mookie is a character we're meant to like. Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then he observes: “Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.” But the movie in any event is not just about how the cops kill a black man and a mob burns down a pizzeria. That would be too easy, and this is not a naive film. It covers a day in the life of a Brooklyn street, so that we get to know the neighbors, and see by what small steps the tragedy is approached.

There are really no heroes or villains in the movie. There is even a accountable cop, who screams “that's enough!” as another cop chokes Radio with his nightstick and perhaps the other cop is terrified because he is enclosed by a mob and the pizzeria is on fire because we know all of the people and have spent all day on the street, we feel as much grief as irritation. Radio Raheem is dead and Sal, who has watched the neighborhood's kids grow up for 25 years and fed them with his pizza, stands in the wrecks of his store.

The victim Radio Raheem is not innocent he plays his boom box at loud volume and the noise not only drives Sal silly, but also the three old black guys who sit and talk at the corner. He wears steel knuckles that spell out “Love” and “Hate,” and although we know Radio is harmless, to the cops the knuckles look bad. Not that the cops look closely because they are white, and when they pull Radio from Sal in the middle of a fight, it doesn't occur to them that Radio might have been provoked.

Seeing the film, I was reminded of what a formal accomplishment it is. Spike Lee was 32 when he made it, assured, confident, in the full joy of his power. He takes this story which sounds like stern civil realism, and tells it with music, humor, color and exuberant invention. He breaks completely away from realism in many places in the closeups of blacks, whites and Koreans chanting a montage of racial descriptions, and in the patter of the local disc jockey, who surveys the street from his window and seems like the neighborhood's soundtrack. At other times, Lee makes points with deadpan understatement; there are two slow-motion sequences involving the way that people look at each other.