In 1989, Spike Lee released “Do the Right Thing,” an extraordinary film about the tensions created by American bigotry, past and present. It captured the stewing racial tensions in countless cities throughout the United States — tensions that in many cases persist today.
Unlike the crowd-pleasing films about racial tension like “Driving Miss Daisy,” which won Best Picture over “Do the Right Thing,” Lee’s film is uncompromising. Rather than the soft, sanitized way films like “Daisy” portray racism, “Do the Right Thing” does not hold back — these social problems do not have easy resolutions, and the message resonates to this day.
Set in a Black neighborhood on a scalding summer day, Lee depicts a series of run-ins between the Black and white residents. Time after time, situation after situation, the tension builds. Repeatedly, violence is almost resorted to and then avoided. Finally, at an Italian American-owned pizza restaurant at the center of the narrative, the tension breaks. Immediately, the narrative explodes.
The central character is Mookie, a Black pizza delivery driver at Sal’s Pizzeria. Sal himself is on decent terms with Mookie and the rest of the community, but his son Pino is rampantly racist, and wants to move the business out of the majority-Black neighborhood.
Through Mookie’s eyes, we witness different kinds of bigotry within the community. Pino represents obvious white supremacy. In one conversation, however, Mookie says, “Pino, all you ever talk about is n—– this and n—–, and all your favorite people are so-called n—–.” Pino’s favorite artists and performers are Black, reflecting the age-old fetishization of Black performers by white American racists.
But while Pino is the most blatant about his racism, nearly every character in the film holds stereotypes about other groups — they just keep them under wraps. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Mookie, Pino, a Puerto Rican American, a white police officer and a Korean store owner break the fourth wall and spit racial stereotypes about other groups at the camera.
Far from being an aberrant magical force only a few people have, prejudice is terrifyingly ordinary. While disaster could be avoidable any other day, moments of tension keep resurging, and as the sun keeps beating down on the residents, a peaceful resolution to the day seems less and less likely.
A crucial detail of the dynamic is the message provided by various elderly Black men and women throughout the film. Each conflict in the film is begun by younger generations, all while the older generation looks on wearily, trying to diffuse the situations, attempting to remain optimistic in spite of the serious tension.
The nature of these conflicts is all too familiar to the older generation, yet they have not given up on their ideals. In a bizarre way, the true triumph of the human spirit does not come from the youngest generation — it comes from the older Black generation that retained its ideals in the face of seemingly irreconcilable divides. It is one of the few windows of true positivity throughout the film.
Nevertheless, reality does not always end positively — in a tension-filled storyline that kicked off the film, Sal and various members of the community exchange racial slurs and get into a fight. The police are called, and they kill one of the Black men involved in the fight with a chokehold, ignoring the calls of onlookers imploring them to stop.
The onlookers, prompted by Mookie breaking the window of the pizzeria, destroy it. Eventually the firemen show up, spraying the rioting crowd with fire hoses. After some time, the crowd scatters and returns home. Sal and Mookie have a pessimistic and hollow conversation in which Sal pays Mookie his wages.
Lee brings the film to a close with two quotes — one from Malcolm X, in which he defends the use of violence in self-defense, and one from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in which he condemns the use of violence for racial justice as “impractical and immoral.” We then see a picture of the two shaking hands, the film ends, leaving us with a lot of questions.
Many analyses of “Do the Right Thing” focus on trying to determine “who was right.” There are so many details and perspectives to consider. We can easily determine the wrong things, but who truly did the right thing is a matter of interpretation.
The brilliance of the film is there are so many moving parts that, even without sharing my moral perspective, the facts I choose to reference and omit shed light on that perspective. Yet that is the mark of great art — it has no easy answers. Instead, we are left with a picture that is simultaneously clear as day and completely opaque.
Roaring back to the present, the film is self-evidently prophetic. While the clear and ugly side of racism may not be as commonplace as it was, issues like police brutality and interpersonal racism are still hot topics. Sharp racial divides in residential areas and schools remain. By any measurable statistic, racial inequality is just as pressing an issue as it was three-and-a-half decades ago.
As such, the hard-edged look at racism “Do the Right Thing” presents gets more brilliant by the year. It has no clear answers, it doesn’t have a neat storybook ending, akin to the story of addressing racial inequality in America. It is a problem we are still working to overcome just as we were in 1989, and few pieces of art capture the nature of the problem more lucidly than “Do the Right Thing.”
