Right,
Here's a movie essay I made when I was working as a freelance writer. It's in English ;)
Movie: Do The Right Thing
Director: Spike Lee
Year: 1989
Starring: Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Spike Lee, John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez and many more
IMDb link: www.imdb.com
"It's the hottest day of the year in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood
of Brooklyn, and tensions are growing there, with the only local
businesses being a Korean grocery and Sal's Pizzeria. Mookie, Sal's
delivery boy, manages to always be at the center of the action."
Essay:
Background
‘Do the Right Thing’ is probably still the most important
movie out of America’s black conscience, Spike Lee. Before this movie, he was a
somewhat obscure independent movie maker who had some success with two
underground flicks. After this movie, he became a well known, controversial
director, whose technical abilities were obvious, but also who was accused of
race violence and sociological pessimism (Klein). ‘Do The Right Thing’ puts Lee
on the movie map as a angry black man, a black racist, an irresponsible idiot
who writes incoherent doom scenarios about racial conflicts.
The
movie ‘Do The Right Thing’ was released in 1989. The movie is set in the
neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, New York. It covers 24 hours
of the hottest day of the year and tells the story of what happens to the
people in a street. The movie is full of confrontations and conflicts between
Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Koreans and Italian Americans. The main
conflict is about the ‘Wall of Fame’ in Sal’s pizzeria that leads to a big fire
in which the pizzeria is burned down.
The film
brought forth a dialogue about one of the most ingrained aspects of American
culture: racism. It presents the issue as complex and multi-faceted, while at
the same time questioning the ideologies represented by the numerous
characters.
Analysis
It is the hottest day of the year in
Stuyvesant Avenue, Brooklyn, New York (Lee 24). During one day, we follow the
residents, an uncomfortable mix of Italian Americans and African Americans, who
apparently learned to live peacefully together over the years. The main action
is concentrated around Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, owned by Sal, a man who loves it
that the people of the neighborhood are brought up on his pizza’s, who controls
his Italian temperament usually very well and who gets along with everyone.
Mookie, a pizza delivery boy, has no harm in himself, but who is just really
lazy. Buggin Out is a self declared rebel who wants to make the world a better
place by forcing Sal to hang up pictures of famous African Americans on his
“Wall of Fame”. When Sal refuses, Buggin Out tries to organize a boycott
against the pizzeria. A boycott nobody really seems to follow. Da Mayor is the
local drunk who, in spite of his benevolent mind, knows what to do: the right
thing. The last main character is Radio Raheem, a big guy who walks the
street all day long with his ghetto-blaster. He doesn’t seem to have any
ambition but to have the loudest stereo of the street.
Spike Lee introduces us to this
community in the first hour of his movie, by picturing them as a group of
people who were thrown together on this one street, without asking for it, who
try to live together as good as possible; white, black and even the Korean
family on the other side of the street (Lee 24). Throughout the whole movie we
get the impression that there is peace between the residents of Stuyvesant
Avenue, but only because everybody watches their words, because everybody holds
in the words that later might be regretted. Under the surface lies a slumber anger,
which might not need that much to burst (Lee 24). The best example is the
character Pino, one of Sal’s sons. Pino is an openly racist person, who would
love to sell the pizzeria and move to a white neighborhood. Scene after
scene, we see Sal and his other son Vito, trying to pull Pino back before he
does something stupid and release his anger against the blacks. Later in the
movie we see Sal flirting with Jade, Mookie’s sister, and we can see the
reactions of Mookie as well as Pino; the repulsion is clear, but they don’t say
anything, because who knows where that might lead.
Pictured this way, Stuyvesant becomes a
street full of inflammable situations and characters. The trigger is pulled
when Radio Raheem enters the pizzeria, accompanied by Buggin Out. A fight
develops between Sal and the two gentlemen and the police get involved. Radio
Raheem is strangled by one of the police officers and dies. What happens then,
is still one of the most powerful scenes every filmed by Lee. It’s not about
if a riot will start, but the silence that hangs during those two minutes after
the police is gone, All the neighborhood is gathered on the street, almost
everyone saw what happened. Sal and his sons are literally standing against
their black neighbors and obviously frightened; Radio Raheem’s death is
partially their fault. Someone says something, but everyone is just looking at
each other. The audience feels the tension; we know that terrible things are
going to happen. It is Mookie who makes an end to the scene by throwing a
garbage can through the window of the pizzeria. After that, all hell breaks
loose and the pizzeria goes up in flames.
It was a controversial scene; mainly
because Mookie was the one black character, which all the white spectators
could identify with. He didn’t behave extravagant, he was a likeable lazybones.
In the end, he was black, but he did nothing that we would typically associate
with blacks and just he is the one who starts the riot. Many people saw it as a
statement from Lee that violent action was the only way black people would be
heard (Klein). Mookie makes this idea change again, when he comes back the next
morning to the pizzeria. Although Lee changed the ending (Script), it makes the
audience still favor Mookie as good dual character.
Mookie just saw his friend get murdered
and his anger took over. That is exactly what the movie is about: people can
do their best to live together with others, but eventually through heat and
extreme situations, they burst and lose control. It happens to Sal in the pizzeria
during his fight with Radio Raheem and Buggin Out. And it happens to Mookie
when he throws the garbage can.
After the movie, at the very end, we see
two quotes from Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. These quotes are clearly
put there to make the spectator think about violence and racism in general. Is
violence really an answer to end racism or is it just adding more fuel?
Apparently it is not easy to always do the right thing and sometimes doing the
right thing for one person, is a wrong thing for another.
Conclusion
The conclusion of the movie does seem
very pessimistic; black and white (or any other color) might be able to live
together for a while, but in the end it is doomed to fail. There will always be
a day when situations escalade, there will always be a day when someone's radio
is too loud, when someone starts a fight about the wrong pictures on the wall.
All good will of the world cannot go up against the fundamental fact that we
are not made to live together. That is a really negative point of view, but not
a call for violence.
The use of stereotypes and
generalizations through subtle methods is showing varying degrees of racism,
hypocrisy and relationships. The balance between the various characters is a
very important part of the film. It doesn’t show just racism between two
groups, but shows racism of all races. It also shows us the unique differences
in culture and gender issues.
Lee makes the statement through his
surrealist style; the whole movie was filmed on location in Stuyvesant Avenue, and
the heat of the day is implied by bright, full colors that give a weird
feeling of overexposure (Lee, 29). The three older men on chairs in front of a
bright red wall look like a Greek choir, who give comments on the occuring events
once in a while during the day. Spike Lee made a very theatrical movie by using close-ups that
deform the faces a little and by long expressive camera movements. The result
is that the movie gets a manic energy, a picture that runs to an inevitable
finale.
‘Do The Right Thins’ is still a relevant
movie, which still entertains with its visual flair and humor, while the
content, still often wrongly interpreted, still brings the bad news. It is a
beautiful marriage between style and content, about people who try to do what
is right with all the power they have, but just can’t do it.
Works
Cited
Lee, Spike,
Lisa Jones, and David Lee. Do The Right Thing: The New Spike Lee Joint.
New
York,
NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989.
Klein, Joe. “Dinkins
and Do the Right Thing.” Spiked? 26 June (1989): 14-15.
“Do The Right Thing Script – Screenplay.”
Drew’s Script-O-Rama. 8 May 2009.
<http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/d/do-the-right-thing-script.html>
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