1989! A number, another summer!
One that would change cinema forever.
Indiana Jones had just has his (intended) Last Crusade. Tim Burton crafted the grandaddy of the modern comic book movie with a Prince-scored Batman. What’s now called the Disney Renaissance begin with a little mermaid named Ariel. And a tired studio system was crumbling, with passionate new voices slipping, or sometimes bursting, through the cracks. Michael Lehmann skewered the twee John Hughes high school pictures of the past decade with the darkly witty Heathers. Gus Van Zandt hit the strung-out streets of Portland for Drugstore Cowboy. Michael Moore took documentary cameras out of the Ozarks and into your face with Roger & Me. Yet while sex, lies, and videotape took home the Palme D’Or that year at Cannes (itself a huge victory for the indie cinema movement and a stellar debut for Steven Soderbergh), another independent voice had returned to the indie scene ready, hyped and amped, with the fury of a boom box blasting on a hot Bed-Stuy summer day.
Do The Right Thing celebrates its 25th Anniversary this year, and the folks at 40 Acres and a Mule (Spike Lee’s production company, still located in the heart of Fort Greene, Brooklyn) are celebrating it in style. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is doing a Spike Lee retrospective throughout the month, the classic Spike’s Joint merchandise shop reopened for a day with fans lining up for hours to get their hands on one-day-only exclusives like a “Boycott Sal’s” t-shirt (with Spike in person to sign and take pictures). Recently the crew kicked off a block party commemorating the film in its original setting of Bed-Stuy with Dave Chappell and Wesley Snipes coming out to celebrate and shake hands, and its shooting location of Stuyvesant Avenue (between Quincy Street and Lexington Avenue) now bears an additional official street sign declaring it “Do The Right Thing Way”.
In a landmark year for cinema like 1989, the legacy of Do The Right Thing stands out amongst the rest. It took Spike Lee from a flash-in-the-pan filmmaker to an established auteur, resulting in a career of powerful political statements and mainstream cinematic successes. It sparked a dialogue about modern race relations that has yet to be resolved, and that no other film has come close to addressing. The famously at-odds critics Siskel and Ebert would both declare Do The Right Thing to be the best film of 1989, and one of the best films of the decade. It’s theme track, “Fight The Power”, would not only become Public Enemy’s biggest hit, but would end up on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest Songs in Movie History, one of only two rap songs to receive the honor. The American Film Institute would also rank Do The Right Thing as one of the Greatest Films Ever Made, and the Library of Congress would deem the film culturally significant enough to select it as one of the 25 films inducted into the National Film Registry in 1999, it’s first year of eligibility, making it one of only five films in the Registry’s 20+ year history to do so.
Yet, to truly talk about Do The Right Thing, one has to look at how it came to be, and how one singular voice became the voice of a neighborhood, the voice of a movement, and the voice of a generation. Spike Lee, born Shelton Jackson Lee, was born in Atlanta, Georgia to a mother who taught arts and black literature and a father who made a living as a jazz musician. The family would soon move to Brooklyn, a neighborhood which greatly endeared itself to Lee and would be the setting of many of his future films (including the largely autobiographical Crooklyn, which explored his own childhood). He studied at the progressive John Dewey High School, and would receive his Bachelor’s Degree from Morehouse College, an all-male, predominantly and historically black college in Atlanta, before returning to New York to receive a Master’s Degree from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, where he studied under another famed New York auteur, Martin Scorsese (Spike made enough of an impression on him that he would later produce Spike’s 1995 crime dramaClockers). It was at NYU that Spike would produce his thesis film, a 60 minute short entitled Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. This raw but impressive film about a barbershop owner trying to avoid the less-than-legitimate business dealings of his predecessor became the first student film to be screened at Lincoln Center’s New Directors New Films Festival, and won the Student Academy Award for Best Narrative Short.
Lee has admitted on numerous occasions that he had believed receiving the award would open the door to a fruitful career, but found that even with his success, no one was willing to bankroll a film that dealt with the kind of subjects Spike wanted to deal with, or the characters he wanted to show. His first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It, would contain a female protagonist addressing her sexual independence with a primarily black cast, which studios viewed (and still view) as box-office poison. Lee, despite all his accolades, was forced to write letters and essentially scrounge for the $175,000 it would take to make the film, and even then could not afford retakes of any scenes due to the cost of film, and would even have the cast save their soda cans during meal breaks, which he would later recycle in an attempt to recoup some of the expenses of the film. The film’s unique subject matter and daring, confrontational shooting style would pay off when the film went on to gross over $7 million in the US box office alone. The New York Times declared it “…a groundbreaking film for African-American filmmakers and a welcome change in the representation of blacks in American cinema, depicting men and women of color not as pimps and whores, but as intelligent, upscale urbanites”, and Spike would be asked to reprise the character of Mars Blackmon in a series of advertisements for Air Jordans.
After the uphill battle to get She’s Gotta Have It made, Lee had a much easier time in securing a $6 million budget to make School Daze, a film which took a razor sharp wit to the struggles both within the administration of and on the campus of a historically black college. Yet, after having to fight tooth and nail to convince those in power that audiences would pay to see a “black” film with his last movie, Spike took heat from a different community with School Daze which took him by surprise. Prominent figures within the black community, particularly officials and leaders at black universities, criticized the film for its depiction of black campus life, and decried the use of racial slurs the students directed at each other, and the suggestion that students would segregate themselves based on skin-tone or hair. Production was halted when Lee’s own alma-mater of Morehouse asked him to move the production off-campus as they found his depiction to be racially degrading, and many colleges refused to let Lee appear at their campuses as a guest speaker.
Coping with the opposition from both sides he’d met with his last two films, as well as recognizing the newly building racial tensions of the past decade (N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton had recently incited controversy for the anthemic “Fuck Tha Police” while crack was tearing apart the inner-cities and AIDs had begun to rear it’s ugly head), Spike saw his hometown of Brooklyn to be a microcosm of the problems plaguing the nation as a whole, and in two weeks banged out the script for what many consider his crowning achievement as a director.
Do The Right Thing is an incendiary film that burns up the screen from its very first frame, Rosie Perez bathed in red light, furiously dancing in front of brownstone buildings to the tune of Public Enemy’s battle-cry “Fight The Power”. From there, we enter a Bed-Stuy unlike any film had shown before, vibrant and alive with color, so bright it assaults the viewer as though to show at once a thriving community and a bomb about to burst. Local DJ Mister Senior Love Doctor (played by at-the-time unknown Samuel L. Jackson) acts as a smooth-talking Greek Chorus, setting the tone and constantly trying to keep the peace as the temperature rises to unbearable heights amongst the booze hounds and boom boxes. Our cast of characters enter as caricatures: the lazy, slacker Mookie, the old-school Italian pizzeria owner Sal and his two sons, the neighborhood drunk, the contemptful old matron, the “angry black man”, and the long-suffering baby mama, all of whom the film proceeds to endear us to through its run time, fleshing them out and confronting them with their own flaws. A stable but sweating community is put in display with cute vignettes and jazzy, cinematic scores (like the sweet scenes between Mother Sister and The Mayor, played by groundbreaking actors and real life couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee), which repeatedly get disrupted by the spectre of suppressed black rage represented by the stoic, near-mute Radio Raheem and his namesake exclusively blasting the furious vitriol of Chuck D lamenting the rigged game that creates pseudo-racial equality.
Of course, what starts with an arguably justified altercation over whether Danny Aiello’s Sal has an obligation to put prominent black figures on the wall of his pizzeria in addition to the Italian figures which currently adorn it, escalates rapidly due to both the heat and the confrontational nature of the unstable Buggin’ Out (played by an unrecognizable Giancarlo Esposito, known to the world now as Gus Fring of Breaking Bad fame), until a riot ensues, resulting in the destruction of the focal-point pizza parlor. The image of the otherwise calm Mookie hurling the trash can through the window is an iconic one, burned into the history of cinema along with the famous center-punched shot of Bill Nunn’s Radio Raheem explaining his rings labeled “Love” and “Hate” in a brilliant homage to Charles Laughton’s expressionistic thriller Night of the Hunter, wherein Robert Mitchum’s murderous reverend delivers an almost identical speech about his tattooed knuckles, hauntingly representing the scourge of religious oppression in the nation’s past.
Upon its release, the film drew massive acclaim, though many proved Spike’s assertion about the underlying racism of America when they suggested that releasing the film was reckless as it would incite black youths to riot (which Spike pointed out was reviewers implying the black community was so “uncivilized” that they could not restrain themselves due to a fictional film). It received two nominations at that year’s Academy Awards, one for Lee’s screenplay and a Supporting Actor nomination for Danny Aiello. Many in Hollywood felt the film had been unjustly ignored, and during the ceremony itself Kim Bassinger went off-script in order to praise Lee, whom she felt was visionary. Bassinger was one of the many who strongly felt the film deserved a Best Picture nomination, if not the actual award itself, which would end up being given to Driving Miss Daisy, which would also receive an award for Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Make Up, while Do The Right Thing went home empty handed (interestingly, Aiello lost to actor Denzel Washington, whose later collaboration with Lee on Malcolm X would end up equally snubbed by the Academy). Lee felt particularly hurt by Driving Miss Daisy’s victory, due to it’s use of “safe stereotypes” to tell the story of how a patiently oppressed “domestic Negro” could form a friendship with his bitter, racist, elderly employer. It’s hokey, dishonest message of “racial harmony” triumphing over Lee’s honest depiction of America hurt Lee more than if he hadn’t been nominated at all, and he has since said the Academy Awards are meaningless to him as a result.
The film, which stands as required viewing for any with an interest in black history, the culture of New York or indeed understanding America’s post-Civil Rights Movement culture in general, raises a number of questions but answers none. Admittedly, the film is so powerful and evocative that almost every viewer comes away with an idea of “who was wrong”, but in the end, it only exposes their own prejudice whether they blame the “uppity black guy” or the “racist old Italian”. The truth is the film is intentionally ambiguous in its ideas (evidenced by the conflicting quotes by Dr. King and Malcolm X presented at the end of the film), intending to spark a genuine discussion rather than cinema’s typical one-sided arguments. It doesn’t want to make a point, it wants to make you think. Did Mookie, in fact, heed the Mayor’s advice to “do the right thing” when he hurled the trash can through the window, focusing the mob’s rage away from Sal and toward his pizzeria, thereby saving his life? While that argument is certainly supported by Sal’s understanding nature in the film’s poignant and open-ended conclusion, it also stands to reason that Mookie, spurred on by outrage at the death of Radio Raheem at the hands of the white police, would want to tear down an establishment where the traditional New York tension between blacks and Italians was personified so perfectly by John Turturro’s Pino. Indeed, audiences tend to see the flawed characters of every race but their own within the film, and only when they recognize those first unseen faults can the real discussion begin. Spike has never been one to shy away from calling out his own community on what he feels is “hurting the cause”, whether it be in his under-appreciated 2000 joint Bamboozled or his recent comments about how Tyler Perry’s films are essential “coon toons” where black audiences pay to feed into hurtful stereotypes, and yet it is perhaps Mookie that is his most poignant statement on the plight of the modern black man in America.
While Buggin’ Out is a young man who uses the concept of racial injustice as an excuse for his own emotional instability, Mookie is a much more sympathetic character as he’s merely a victim of his own spiritual inertia, enabled by a societal expectation which facilitates that lethargy. This point was driven home 23 years later when Mookie, now in his forties, returned in Spike’s under-seen 2012 joint Red Hook Summer, still delivering pizzas for an evidently rebuilt Sal’s. Mookie, like the rest of the neighborhood, carried around a deeply suppressed rage at the twinges of racial oppression he faced in his life, but he numbed all those sensations with sex and shirking his responsibilities both as an employee and a father. He has disdain for being reduced to the stereotype of a “lazy Negro” in the eyes of his employers, and yet feeds into it by virtually personifying the stereotype, embodying the vicious cycle which arguably is what causes an epidemic of young men in prison and without fathers. Perhaps that’s why Lee cast himself in the role. Perhaps, as someone with the willpower to fight tooth and nail in a rigged game to rise above the societal expectation for a young black man out of Brooklyn, he felt a catharsis exploring what could have been, and in turn trying to show all young men what could be, that it was their choice. That indeed, the power we have to fight is not so much external as it is the beasts within us all, the demons which beg us to categorize things in terms of black and white, to stereotype those different from us, and to see their stereotypes of us as permission to fulfill them, to let go of ambition, to float in a stoned haze of hampered down fury, quiet desperation, and a zombie-like search for the next kick, perpetually resigned that things can never and will never change. Yet they did, and they have. Though it didn’t and couldn’t solve everything in society’s “rigged game”, the world of cinema was forever changed, through nothing but the sheer, unsupressible will of one kid out of Brooklyn. And that is the true legacy of Do The Right Thing. It is a testament to what monumental things can be done when one man keeps his head held high, and his ears to the ground.
And that’s the double truth, Ruth.
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