My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Part 5): Spike Lee, Visionary
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Directed by Spike Lee
Do the Right Thing tells the story of a Bedford-Stuyvesant (Brooklyn) neighborhood largely inhabited by black people of different sorts—Dominican, Haitian, and more “generic” African-American. The opening of the film shows mostly their differences. Older men talk of moderation, and seem happy with the local status quo. Younger men sometimes quote Malcolm X and talk of rebellion, but mostly just do their (low paying) jobs. In these scenes Lee portrays a vibrant and diverse community. He has a knack for casting and directing unique actors that bring distinctive character roles to the screen, and we see a wonderful panorama of neighborhoods familiar to me as I have wandered around NYC. This community often gathers in a local pizzeria run by Sal, an Italian-heritage guy. There is an uneasy truce here—Sal loves his restaurant and serving the community, yet he is nearly the only white presence in the community and has racist stereotypes that emerge when he gets angry. His all-black customers show a mix of contentment and resentment as they spend their money on his food (and on the groceries in the Korean-run neighborhood market). Three oracle-like guys (above) are introduced that mostly sit in the same chairs in front of a blazing red wall the whole movie critiquing the passersby and themselves in wonderful comic-street-philosophy dialogue. At one point they wonder how the Koreans could be here as immigrants for just one year yet already make a good living owning a store--that replaced an abandoned storefront and upgraded the neighborhood. They wonder if black people are disadvantaged in their own attempts at entrepreneurship, but reach no decision, and don’t seem to have the interest or energy to pursue the matter further. Lee is unsparing in showing both problems within and without the black community, and offers no solutions. When the uneasy truce in Sal’s Pizzeria finally breaks out into a neighborhood riot after the police kill a young man from the community (using a choke hold), we see how quickly that apparently impassive “normal” people can become violent. Lee is brilliant in these scenes. Characters we have met and found previously charming are suddenly snarling, destroying, burning. A riot is truly poignant when we see “nice” people that we know doing it. Lee’s brilliance is to first lure us into complacency with a neighborhood comic soap opera, only to turn it violently on its head. Similar devices have been used recently in The Slave Play but in reverse, where violent interracial abuse (make believe, it turns out) then resolves with our getting to know the back story of all the characters; or amplified in Fairview, where a black family first plays Cosby-like white suburban stereotypes, only to dissolve into actual racial separation (including separation of the audience by race). But in many ways, Do the Right Thing seems more real, more genuine, than any of these recent plays. It left me more disturbed on this viewing than I remember being back in the 1990s. Lee does not stereotype or judge any of his characters, black or non-black. The police violence against blacks common in NYC in 1980s and still in many places now is shown as a given, and not amplified or caricatured. This is just not a feeling that white people can experience or feel in our culture. Seeing this movie again will make me more observant, and maybe a little nervous, when I walk through ethnic neighborhoods in the NYC boroughs---what is smoldering here?
Visually, the film is a brilliant effort for a young director, and remains his masterpiece. There are 1990s MTV visuals (angled camera), rap music, hip-hop dance (a long sequence in the opening credits, e.g.), ultra-close up camera angles, even a Mizoguchi-style crane shot at the end, as the community matter-of-factly resume their business, having rioted and burned buildings only the night before. Lee films dialogue from multiple edgy and innovative angles, giving the film a sort of unbalanced tension, even when there is no violence immediately at hand. Seeing it again, I appreciated how he never really lets you relax, perhaps simulating the ongoing tension in the black community that likely contributes to so many of its medical and economic difficulties. Lee provides no comfortable solution either way, ending the film with contrasting quotes both against violence (ML King) and for it (Malcolm X). He neither applauds nor condemns the riot or the behavior of his characters. It just is. And that may be the most significant point of all, and one that has not resolved thirty years later.
Directed by Spike Lee
Over the past year or two, Broadway and off-Broadway theater has been consumed by dramas by young black playwrights expressing what is often called an “authentic” voice in which the passions, anger, resentments, and continued oppression of US black people can be expressed without the cultural filters of non-black authors. The best or most innovative of these productions like The Slave Play, Scraps, and Fairview are so immediate because they show a mix of blacks’ resigned assimilation into the culture that enslaved them, their use of music, speech, and other cultural distinctions to maintain a separate culture, and their simmering, repressed rage always ready to break through. These plays have dispensed with comforting, liberal endings in which we all come together in unity, often ending in dramatic separation of the races as the only solution. While doubtless innovative, these plays were beaten to the punch by thirty years or so by Spike Lee (1957-). Do the Right Thing was lauded at the time as a creative masterwork by the then young Lee, but when I viewed it last night I was even more appreciative of its style and visionary prediction of all of the incendiary events of recent years, including the Black Lives Matter movement. It reminds us that none of this is new, but instead a recurring, simmering issue that a younger generation of writers is simply reinventing with their own language.
Do the Right Thing tells the story of a Bedford-Stuyvesant (Brooklyn) neighborhood largely inhabited by black people of different sorts—Dominican, Haitian, and more “generic” African-American. The opening of the film shows mostly their differences. Older men talk of moderation, and seem happy with the local status quo. Younger men sometimes quote Malcolm X and talk of rebellion, but mostly just do their (low paying) jobs. In these scenes Lee portrays a vibrant and diverse community. He has a knack for casting and directing unique actors that bring distinctive character roles to the screen, and we see a wonderful panorama of neighborhoods familiar to me as I have wandered around NYC. This community often gathers in a local pizzeria run by Sal, an Italian-heritage guy. There is an uneasy truce here—Sal loves his restaurant and serving the community, yet he is nearly the only white presence in the community and has racist stereotypes that emerge when he gets angry. His all-black customers show a mix of contentment and resentment as they spend their money on his food (and on the groceries in the Korean-run neighborhood market). Three oracle-like guys (above) are introduced that mostly sit in the same chairs in front of a blazing red wall the whole movie critiquing the passersby and themselves in wonderful comic-street-philosophy dialogue. At one point they wonder how the Koreans could be here as immigrants for just one year yet already make a good living owning a store--that replaced an abandoned storefront and upgraded the neighborhood. They wonder if black people are disadvantaged in their own attempts at entrepreneurship, but reach no decision, and don’t seem to have the interest or energy to pursue the matter further. Lee is unsparing in showing both problems within and without the black community, and offers no solutions. When the uneasy truce in Sal’s Pizzeria finally breaks out into a neighborhood riot after the police kill a young man from the community (using a choke hold), we see how quickly that apparently impassive “normal” people can become violent. Lee is brilliant in these scenes. Characters we have met and found previously charming are suddenly snarling, destroying, burning. A riot is truly poignant when we see “nice” people that we know doing it. Lee’s brilliance is to first lure us into complacency with a neighborhood comic soap opera, only to turn it violently on its head. Similar devices have been used recently in The Slave Play but in reverse, where violent interracial abuse (make believe, it turns out) then resolves with our getting to know the back story of all the characters; or amplified in Fairview, where a black family first plays Cosby-like white suburban stereotypes, only to dissolve into actual racial separation (including separation of the audience by race). But in many ways, Do the Right Thing seems more real, more genuine, than any of these recent plays. It left me more disturbed on this viewing than I remember being back in the 1990s. Lee does not stereotype or judge any of his characters, black or non-black. The police violence against blacks common in NYC in 1980s and still in many places now is shown as a given, and not amplified or caricatured. This is just not a feeling that white people can experience or feel in our culture. Seeing this movie again will make me more observant, and maybe a little nervous, when I walk through ethnic neighborhoods in the NYC boroughs---what is smoldering here?
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