Do The Right Thing

I have been given only a few filmgoing experiences in my life to equal the first time I saw “Do the Right Thing.” Most movies remain up there on the screen. Only a few penetrate your soul. In May of 1989 I walked out of the screening at the Cannes Film Festival with tears in my eyes.

– Roger Ebert

A towering presence as Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s 1989 masterpiece, DO THE RIGHT THING, Bill Nunn passed away in 2016.  Almost exactly a year later, James Alex Fields, Jr., struck and killed Heather Heyer.  Fields, a white supremacist, attended the Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.   Somewhere in between these two events, I found myself asking the same questions Spike asked us all in 1989.

Set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn—”Bed-Stuy” to the locals—a pizza delivery boy, Mookie (Lee), finds himself at the center of an escalating dispute between his employer, Sal (Danny Aiello), and his friend, Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito).  Infuriated by the dearth of African-American heroes on the wall of a local establishment in (what was) a predominately black neighborhood, Buggin’ Out stages a one-man protest.

His portable stereo (in those days, pejoratively called a “ghetto blaster”) powered by 20 D-cell batteries, Radio joins the protest when Sal smashes said box to pieces.  Amidst the looting and rioting, the police arrive, single out, and murder Radio.

At the center of institutional racism lies the respectability politics that escalates conflicts between NYPD and the residents of Bed-Stuy.  Most of their apartments without air conditioning, the kids take to the street side fire hydrant to cool off—angering one driver in particular.  These and other minor altercations with white and Korean property owners, and even between African-American youth and their community elders, froths up, exploding at the film’s tragic climax.

A masterclass in Black drama and history, DO THE RIGHT THING features legends Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as the inebriated Da Mayor and cantankerous Mother Sister, watching over the neighborhood from her stoop.  Married for fifty-seven years, both veterans of Harlem Theatre, recipients of the NAACP Image Award, the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors, their presence graced more than fifty stage plays and films from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out to X in Spike’s eponymous biography of the slain civil rights leader, whose actual eulogy Davis delivered.

Blocked and shot like a hyper-stylized stage play, DO THE RIGHT THING constrains our world through the proscenium arch of Ernest Dickerson’s lens.  Its colors pop.  Its sounds leap.  An ensemble of young actors resembles the chorus of Shakespearean drama—cacophonous, opinionated commentary explicating class tensions.  Many stylistic cues borrow from Lee’s childhood experience with white cinema and/or theatre—Rosie Perez’ defiant opening dance (Ann-Margret’s title sequence from BYE BYE BIRDIE); Radio’s soliloquy about the battle of Love versus Hate (paralleling Mitchum in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER)—but look, and listen.

Consider again Public Enemy’s lyrics in “Fight The Power”—chastising Elvis for making riches appropriating black culture.  In class, we all learned about Bill Haley.  I don’t recall a single teacher ever mentioning Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats.

Likewise, we might think of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, or Copland’s Rodeo. But can you recall any grade school music class that taught us about Langston Hughes, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, or, and especially, Florence Price, whose playful strings in “Juba Dance” are an obvious inspiration for composer (and father to Spike) Bill Lee’s score?

Feel the sultry July air offset by the insouciant score like a breeze disrupting the oppressive heat.  Here, the elder Lee turns around its usage, but not necessarily its meaning.  The shackles may be gone but black folk remain an indentured underclass in their own neighborhood.

At the same time, the movie is about choosing your battles wisely.  People have to coexist in this sweltering hell, whether they like it or not.

Everyone reacts out of self-doubt, and this is why Sal finally cracks.  He can’t take his son’s complaining any more, and though he does his best to keep happy the community in which he earns his living, he doesn’t necessarily like them.  He’s not wrong for wanting quiet, nor is he wrong for putting the faces of Italian-Americans up on his wall.  But for the black residents of Bed-Stuy, Sal’s Pizzeria wouldn’t exist for one year, let alone twenty-five.

“Why you got so much anger in you?” asks Sal of his son Pino (John Turturro).

Pino replies, “My friends they laugh at me.  They laugh right in my face.”

“Do your friends put money in your pocket, Pino?” replies Sal.  “If they were your friends they wouldn’t laugh at you.”

Pino’s anger is a product of his own inability to reconcile his desire for acceptance from both sides—the white status quo, and the increasingly diverse, younger generation supplanting it.  Later, Pino becomes enraged when Mookie suggests that, like Sal, who flirts openly with Mookie’s sister Jade (Joie Lee), he’s attracted to black women.  These dialogues reveal Pino’s deep insecurities—the kind that seed the hatred borne by every bully, including James Alex Fields, Jr.

I’ve often remarked that the problem of race in America rests in the fact that whites still wonder, “Why’d they have to burn down Sal’s?”

The question we ought to ask, that Black Americans asked from the beginning, is, “Why’d Radio have to die?”

Long before Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, or Michael Brown, amidst the crowd that set ablaze Sal’s, we hear two names shouted.  Michael Stewart was a subway graffiti artist.  Eleanor Bumpurs was a mentally ill woman facing eviction.  Both were shot dead by NYPD.

The same year DO THE RIGHT THING hit theaters, Linda Fairstein, head of the New York District Attorney’s Sex Crimes division, persuaded a court to convict the group of young boys known as the Central Park Five on the basis of confessions coerced by NYPD.  Ava Duvernay’s dramatic miniseries depicting those boys’ wrongful incarceration, WHEN THEY SEE US, sparks new furor toward the NYPD’s and Fairstein’s role in dehumanizing black people.  A certain real estate developer spent $85,000 on full page advertisements in the New York Times vociferously demanding capital punishment.

He is the current President of the United States.

For its thirtieth anniversary, DO THE RIGHT THING opens tonight at the Texas Theatre, and in limited engagement next week in theaters across the United States.  Criterion releases a 4K remaster on Blu-Ray on July 23.