DO THE RIGHT THING
I can’t say that I’ve been an unqualified Spike Lee fan. His flair for publicity has tended to overwhelm his talents as a writer-director-actor, and the fact that he remains better known to the general public for his TV commercials than for either She’s Gotta Have It (1986) or School Daze (1988) points to an adeptness at working both sides of the street that has made it difficult to assess his work. More generally, the fact that he’s a black filmmaker whose first two features had all-black casts has undoubtedly made him overrated in some quarters and just as surely underrated and/or misunderstood in others.
Crucial to the movie’s success is a dialectical presentation of the neighborhood and its options that refuses to limit the film’s viewpoint to that of any single character. The character Lee plays here, a pizza delivery boy named Mookie, is more central than his characters were in She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze. But Mookie’s viewpoint is not that of the film–indeed, the whole point of the movie’s title is that “Do the right thing” means something different to every character. Like Half-Pint in School Daze, Mookie is positioned literally at the crossroads of the movie’s major conflicts; like Lee himself, he works both sides of the street–a living embodiment of the dialectical principle. But he is no more a spokesperson for the film’s viewpoint than anyone else is.
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This is equally true of the movie’s dialectical conclusion. The film ends with two pertinent quotations as on-screen titles–one from Martin Luther King about the impracticality and immorality of violence, and one from Malcolm X about the practicality and “intelligence” of self-defense–followed by a photograph of the two black leaders together, which has previously played a pivotal role in the movie’s plot. While it would be much too pat to say that Tina with her boxing gloves at the beginning “stands for” Malcolm X while her less combative dancing in more middle-class attire “stands for” King, the dialectical significance of such pairings shouldn’t be overlooked. In her red dress and blue tights, Tina resembles Jade, Mookie’s sister (played by Joie Lee, the filmmaker’s sister). Jade is upwardly mobile: respected, treated like a queen by Sal at his pizzeria, and closer than any other black character in the film to the middle class. Tina herself, who’s Mookie’s Puerto Rican girlfriend and the mother of his son Hector, is fiercely working-class, angry and volatile, and even further from middle-class assimilation than Mookie is. Part of the movie’s density is the result of its alertness and sympathy to both sides of both dialectics–not making a choice between classes or between King and Malcolm, but understanding and appreciating what all might have to say.
Unlike the grander ensemble piece Nashville (1975)–which singer Brenda Lee once astutely described as “a dialectical collage of unreality”–Lee’s movie eliminates condescending ridicule as well as platitudes from its basic vocabulary. Nashville’s major platitude–the “truth” meant to subsume every aspect of its pluralistic vision–was the American flag. It plastered this flag across the screen in the closing sequence as if this were some guarantee of cosmic significance: not so much a final statement as a portentous substitute for one. The equivalent image in Do the Right Thing is the photograph of Malcolm and King, and Lee uses it not as an image of closure but as a dialectical starting point, a place to begin. The last time that we see this photograph in the story proper, Smiley has just triumphantly and pathetically posted it to the wall of the looted, gutted, and burning pizzeria. When it appears again after the quotations, it becomes a moving emblem of the future as well as the past.
This flaw apart, Do the Right Thing doesn’t take a single false step–though the action it describes seems little more than an accumulation of countless false steps on the part of an entire community. Within the terms established by the movie, everyone is partially wrong and partially right, evoking laughter as well as tears; and working both sides of the street, Spike Lee manages to see it all happen.
