Film Review (w/ Spoilers): Do The Right Thing

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

The point about Do The Right Thing isn't that Mookie (played by Spike Lee) did or did not do the right thing. The point is that we, as a society, are more willing to create a moment of angry response against social ills rather than participating in a social movement to change the systems and keep something like Radio Raheem's (played by Bill Nunn) death from happening often.

I found myself going back to this film after an entire week of my Twitter and Facebook and every social media being filled with pictures of rallies and dumb tweets from both sides and general police brutality as a whole. But mostly it was because of that one video, the one that started everything, of George Floyd begging for air while police officer and certified piece-of-shit Derek Chauvin choked him with his knee--and how it reminded me of the climax of this film.

Radio Raheem shows off his philosophy.
Copyright © 1989 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks.

Do The Right Thing is a great movie. It's earned its place as a classic in modern American cinema. But it saddens me that this thirty-one year-old film isn't just relevant today, but that nothing has changed since its release. And my friend whom I watched it with pointed out why that may be.

But we'll get to that.

Before that, the bare-bones: It's the hottest day in Bed-Stuy, and tensions are high. Everyone is trying to avoid confrontation, but when you heat a melting pot, you're bound to get an explosion.

The script to this is brilliant. Even without the ending, this probably stands as one of Spike Lee's best films. Everything feels alive, and every important character shown on screen has this inner life that makes one forget that they're watching an ensemble piece. Any single one of these character's stories could be made to their own separate, compelling story, as they are written now. That's amazing to think about, just these characters functioning on their own plane of existence, whether it's mythical or human, and yet still plausibly being in the same space as each other.

The editing is brilliant, too. The scene where the characters are spitting racial stereotypes out is an effective trick that Spike Lee uses again in the future (in another classic of his, 25th Hour), and the way every scene is arranged creates a feeling of discomfort that almost duplicates the heat that these characters are experiencing. The confrontation scene with Radio Raheem, Buggin' Out (played by Giancarlo Esposito), and Sal (an Academy Award-nominated performance by Danny Aiello) feels like pure panic, a sensory overload of sound and visuals that make you feel the heat and anger and tension that being in that situation would've felt like. This is a modern masterpiece, a once-in-a-lifetime work of art that came together in the right way. The opening credits alone are brilliant, and the rest of the film does not disappoint in that promise.

Racist stereotypes.
Copyright © 1989 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks.

But the ending... Let me explain.

My rewatch was done with a friend, and she's a very keen academic with great observational skills. She hadn't seen this, and was very much unaware of how the film ended. When we discussed the film afterwards, she told me simply that she didn't like the ending.

Now that was confusing to me, because to me, this ending was the perfect culmination of everything: finally, the racism that Sal and his sons have been showing throughout the film has actual consequences; finally, someone fights back against the power. Burning down Sal's shop feels like a moment of power for this community of minorities that has had nothing for so long, without killing Sal and his sons. And Sal learns his lesson about being a racist piece of shit against the neighborhood that he serves and makes money off of.

So I asked my friend, and she laid it down straight: nothing changed, because there was no moral center and SUSTAINED movement before or after Radio Raheem's death, and it sends the wrong message that we should encourage anarchic ideas in revolutions. Why was that the wrong message? Because revolutions aren't built from anarchy.

Because in the end, Sal was unrepentant about the death of Radio Raheem, blaming Buggin' Out instead. In the end, the police officer who killed Radio Raheem never gets arrested or blamed for it. For all the tributes and moments of angry retaliation that happens because of Radio Raheem's death, it never lasts. Sal can probably open again--and maybe he'll put a few black people on the wall just for tokenism's sake--and in time, people will forget about Radio Raheem, about their anger at the police and the blatantly racist Italians who own Sal's Pizzeria, and everything will go back to the way it is.

And that may be why, in the thirty-one-or-so years that the film has been released, nothing has changed in how America responds to classism and racism. Videos like George Floyd's still need to go viral before people even pretend to care or give lip service to the unfair systems in America. And their anger never turns into reform, but only as an escape, a way to let out steam until they feel OK.

My friend said that if they wanted to avenge Radio Raheem's death, they should've burned the police station first. They should've started a targeted effort not just for vengeance, but as a way to be heard of the fact that they don't have rights. Violence or nonviolence, Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, it's not enough to just burn Sal's to the ground and make a short-term martyr and symbol out of Radio: you need to build upon that emotion into something sustainable, so that the next time this happens, the consequences aren't so dire.

Instead, Spike Lee copped-out for the more cathartic ending, one that leaves you with all your anger flushed out so that you can come out of the cinema feeling righteous. There's a place in the world for cinema like that, but it explains why social change can't happen just because you point your camera at something and pressed "record".

Do The Right Thing is still a classic, of course. It's just sad to know that the reason why it's so successful as a film is also the reason why it won't ever change society as a whole: it writes for the moments, never for the movements.

The theme song still slaps like a motherfucker, though.

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Film Review (w/ Spoilers): Do The Right Thing

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