Is “Do the Right Thing” a “black movie?”
Its director Spike Lee is an African American who has long made films about race and politics, is very outspoken about the lack of black actors and roles in Hollywood movies, closed this film with two quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and even made a biopic on the latter.
Hollywood knows how to market a movie like “Do the Right Thing” today, if it could even be made. And Lee has attained a label that colors (for lack of a better word) his films for better or worse.
But “Do the Right Thing” is non-partisan and unified in the way it depicts a whole melting pot of a community that doesn’t actually melt together, only simmers. Its blacks, Mexicans and Asians are no more admirable than the racist whites. Everyone shows hate and anger, but everyone has their problems and their reasons. No one party is strictly immune or antagonized.
The brilliance in Spike Lee’s film is that he led us to believe that this was a small-scale story about a misguided community, one he depicted with disappointment, but compassion, only to show chaos on a global scale. Like Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) blaring “Fight the Power” at all hours, Lee shouts his frustration with the country and the world. He doesn’t make a film about race but about how anger and hate begets more violence and destruction. And to really alert us to our hypocrisy, he does so with a film that is as aggressive and animated as society itself. Continue reading “Do the Right Thing (1989)”