MOVIE REVIEWS | INTERVIEWS | YOUTUBE |  NEWS |  EDITORIALS | EVENTS | AUDIO | ESSAYS | ARCHIVES | CONTACT |
 PHOTOS | COMING SOON| EXAMINER.COM FILM ARTICLES ||HOME

                                                          
Friday, June 27, 2014

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER
"Do The Right Thing", Then And Right Now


Spike Lee as Mookie, a pivotal character in the director's legendary "Do The Right Thing", which turns 25 on June 30.  Universal
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        FOLLOW                                            TWEET
Friday, June 27, 2014

June 30, 1989.  That was the date that Spike Lee gave the world "Do The Right Thing".  I'm not sure the world has been quite the same since.  That summer in 1989 -- what a hot, feverish New York City sweat bath it was! -- I saw "Do The Right Thing" on the big screen in the very early morning hours of Sunday, July 2, the last "Saturday" night show, at forty minutes past midnight, at the-then East 59th Street Cineplex Odeon in Manhattan.  I had waited three hours in "Star Wars"-length lines to see it.  The Odeon theater was packed.  I sat at the very back.  The audience was racially mixed and age-diverse.

"Do The Right Thing" was an intense, vivid experience.  Every frame was vibrant.  Every shot had life.  Nuance.  Humanity.  Every colorful, eye-popping image spoke volumes.  I felt this film in unmistakable ways: in my heart and soul.  The final confrontation in Sal's Famous Pizzeria and the death of Radio Raheem I replayed over and over in my mind.  I saw "Do The Right Thing" again a week later.  Then again about a week or two after that.  The feelings I had remained the same each time.  They still do.

Mr. Lee's third feature remains the zeitgeist of New York City and America in terms of race relations and racial justice.  In racial, sociopolitical and economic terms "Do The Right Thing" evoked what was happening in America in 1989 and now.  The film's atmosphere and setting was Brooklyn, specifically "Bed-Stuy Do-Or-Die".  In 1989 the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn was predominantly black.  In the film, characters debated gentrification passionately, as if they knew what the future held.  In 2014 Bedford-Stuyvesant is diverse, populated by many whites, some of whom would likely have seen it as a no-go zone in the early 1990s.  Mr. Lee himself talked about gentrification and culture and its affect on New York and other U.S. cities earlier this year.

At the time "Do The Right Thing" was shot in the summer of 1988 revelations by Tawana Brawley had unfolded.  Two years earlier Michael Griffith was murdered by a white mob in Howard Beach, Queens.  Both of these events, as well as other New York City racial flashpoints and injustices, were incorporated, either purposefully or accidentally, into "Do The Right Thing".  An encounter between a Korean grocer and two black characters in one climactic scene ended in edgy conciliation in the 1989 film.  Less than a year later about two miles away in the same borough of Brooklyn in real life, a black woman was assaulted inside a Korean grocery, prompting a nearly year-long boycott.  In March 1991, a sixteen-year-old black girl, Latasha Harlins, was shot dead by a Korean grocer in Los Angeles.  That same month Rodney King had been brutalized by L.A. cops for all the world to see.  Neither event resulted in convictions.

As its theatrical release arrived a few white film critics like Joe Klein of New York Magazine, among others, declared that "Do The Right Thing" would cause riots by blacks in New York and across the country, essentially saying that white people would be better off staying at home and avoiding theaters.  It was racist fear-mongering at best.  Such ignorant sentiments arguably kept a sizable number of white moviegoers at home.  Mr. Lee often laments that a large number of whites have since accosted him, saying they first saw "Do The Right Thing" on video, not on the big screen.

As for those film critics' predictions of blacks rioting, the only thing that happened that summer following the release of "Do The Right Thing" in the U.S. was the murder by several whites of Yusef Hawkins, a black teenager who had merely answered an ad for a used car in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. 

I had marched through Bensonhurst a few months after "Do The Right Thing" was released.  Police were the only line of safety between a few hundred marchers and a full-scale white riot.  It was a scary, ugly sight.  The climate of racial hatred had been so vicious on that autumnal Saturday in 1989 that it felt like 1964 Mississippi.  Throngs of men, women and children, young and old people -- just like those who attended Klan lynchings of blacks -- lined the sidewalks on either side of us, five or six deep, screaming racist invective, holding up watermelons and basketballs, mooning us and spitting at us.

Today Bensonhurst, like Bedford-Stuyvesant, is far more diverse.

The art-imitates-life aspect of "Do The Right Thing" was astounding.  Inseparable.  The fictional, authentic characters uttered the realities of everyday life.  When one of the characters shouts of Radio Raheem, "he died because he had a radio!", you could easily think of Jordan Davis, who was killed in 2012 by a white man who said the hip-hop music coming from the car Mr. Davis sat in was loud. 

You may think of Trayvon Martin, killed in a not so dissimilar manner from Mr. Hawkins.  Just minding his own business.  Sal Frangione and Michael Dunn could be the same person.  Both had a distaste for blacks.  Sal and Donald Sterling could be twins: business owners who liked operating in and benefitting from the attributes and financial success blacks brought them while secretly or overtly despising blacks at the very same time.

The political ramifications were also clear in "Do The Right Thing".  The motifs burned bright.  Mookie wore Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, a symbol for a man whose legacy was activism and justice-seeking.  Ossie Davis's Da Mayor character resembled then-New York City mayoral candidate David Dinkins.  The film's "Dump Koch" graffiti was evident.  Mr. Lee said he hoped his film would help oust Ed Koch, who had accentuated the climate of racial tension and division in New York throughout his decade-plus long tenure as the city's mayor, from office.  Mr. Lee's wish was granted.  Mr. Koch lost to eventual mayor Mr. Dinkins in the Democratic primary three months after "Do The Right Thing" was released.

Posters of Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential run were a backdrop in Mr. Lee's film, and now, over 25 years later, an often pilloried and disrespected President Obama sits in the very office Mr. Jackson ran for.  Mr. Jackson was a disciple and close friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, whose quote, along with Malcolm X's, form a coda to "Do The Right Thing".  Both quotes, on the impact of violence and its effects, speak to much the same points and are closer in commonality than some may wish to think.

"Do The Right Thing" is a series of minor and major incursions and invasions of space, territory and assumption.  Each of these elements is played out then countered like moves on a life-sized chessboard.  Calculation, percolation, escalation.  The mechanics of the film's characters, predicaments, social, cultural, historical and racial realities were emblazoned throughout in ways large and small.  In all that the memorable characters of "Do The Right Thing" said, felt and did, their naked honesty pierced the screen. 

I maintain that Spike Lee's film represented one of the most honest and genuine conversation starters about race and racism in America.  In that summer of 1989 I  had discussions about the director's film with my white work colleagues.  We viewed "Do The Right Thing" very differently.  Two colleagues I spoke to were worried about Sal's pizzeria being destroyed.  I was concerned about Radio Raheem being killed for no reason at all. 

There's "Imitation Of Life" and numerous other films, but "Do The Right Thing" was one of the signature films about race, class and conscience.  It confronts you and compels a reaction.  Complex, even-handed and nuanced, the film is an open-ended question rather than an attempt at an answer to the deep, still-very real (and worsening) problems of institutional racism, and the casual racism within those who believe they aren't racist.

"Do The Right Thing" was the groundbreaker, in lots of ways.

One of the questions I still ask myself and others 25 years later, is, why didn't Sal simply call the police?  As he smashes Radio Raheem's stereo box to pieces with his baseball bat, a pay telephone, which we have seen used in the film at least once before, is less than two feet from him.  The police had visited Sal's Famous Pizzeria just moments before.  Why didn't he use it? 

"Do The Right Thing" has its 25th anniversary on Monday, June 30.

COPYRIGHT 2014.  POPCORNREEL.COM.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.                 FOLLOW

MOVIE REVIEWS | INTERVIEWS | YOUTUBE |  NEWS |  EDITORIALS | EVENTS | AUDIO | ESSAYS | ARCHIVES | CONTACT | PHOTOS | COMING SOON| EXAMINER.COM FILM ARTICLES ||HOME