Spike Lee (1989)

A famous film and a missed opportunity.  Spike Lee sets the action during a Brooklyn heatwave over a period of twenty-four hours.  He dramatises the racial tensions of the place and the brewing violence inherent in it.   In the first half of Do the Right Thing, the irritating effect of the weather on the characters’ mood is palpably convincing.  If the eventual explosion occurred as a result of frazzled nerves – but was at the same time an expression of hostilities that went deeper than heat-induced mood – Lee might have achieved more than a memorably dynamic and confrontational succès de scandale.   As the film goes on, the people in it use political language that is increasingly and often crudely explicit yet they get through the day without all hell being let loose.  When the mayhem eventually occurs, it’s after dark and the explosion doesn’t seem to be the consequence of an inexorable raising of the temperature.  The laying waste to Sal’s Famous Pizzeria – the nerve centre of the whole film – may be the necessary climax to Lee’s political intentions but at closing time, when things are cooling off, it isn’t either dramatically or atmospherically inevitable.  (By the very end of the film, the weather has become disappointingly metaphorical – with talk of chilling out etc.)

Do the Right Thing often has the look and sound of a great film.   The vivid, deep-toned photography by Ernest Dickerson and the emotionally supple score by Lee’s father Bill don’t just consistently serve the story.  They’re also attuned to and suggestive of the meteorology and the agitation in the air.   The film is politically of the moment:  the graffiti we see include references to notorious recent examples of crimes which had seen blacks on the receiving end of violence and injustice.  But the writing is sometimes desperately clumsy.  We can see that the restaurant owner Sal’s elder son Pino is instinctively and strongly racist and that he’s pretty thick.  It’s implausible when Pino – in an exchange with Mookie, the black dogsbody in the pizzeria – blares on about what he’s inferred from listening to Al Sharpton Jr, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan.  Pino is too determined a bigot even to spend time hearing other points of view.  As Lee has written it, the character of Sal isn’t much more than a series of socio-political statements.  He can live with the multi-ethnic neighbourhood but draws the line at accommodating his now mainly black clientele by substituting photographs of black heroes to replace those of Italian icons (De Niro, Pacino, Sinatra, a pope) on the walls of the pizzeria.  When the place goes up in flames, Sal delivers a tired that-place-was-my-life-I-built-it-up-with-my-bare-hands lament.  Lee is fortunate that Danny Aiello’s fine performance creates a richer individual than the script supplies. (John Turturro, as might be expected, rather overdoes Pino’s raw viciousness.  Richard Edson is better as Sal’s other, less hostile son, Vito.)

Ossie Davis as a lovable philosopher-drunk and Ruby Dee as a sweetly stern matron seem to embody black cinema stereotypes that Lee regards as obsolete – but is it intentional that their style of acting seems a thing of the past too? Plenty of others in the large cast aren’t embarrassing in this way but still seem to be doing a turn, for all that the turn is individual and vivid.   I think this applies to Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison and Robin Harris (the choric streetside commentators on the neighbourhood’s goings on), to Giancarlo Esposito (the pizzeria customer leading the campaign for black pin-ups on Sal’s wall), and to Rosie Perez (in her undeniably striking screen debut as Mookie’s Hispanic girlfriend).  There’s more depth in the performances of Lee himself (as Mookie), his sister Joie (as Mookie’s sister) and Bill Nunn (as Radio Raheem – whose ghetto-blaster plays ‘Fight the Power’ throughout and whose death sparks the eventual conflagration).  The stand-out performance in the African-American cast is from Sam Jackson (the future Samuel L Jackson) as Senor Love Daddy, a local radio DJ who provides weather updates in more ways than one.  Jackson gives his spiels a rhythm that’s both funny and dangerous.  (Senor Love Daddy’s dazzlingly unending roll call of great black singers is one of the highlights of the film.)

Radio Raheen wears a four-fingered ring on each hand – ‘HATE’ on the left, ‘LOVE’ on the right (a clear nod to the words written on the knuckles of Robert Mitchum’s false preacher in The Night of the Hunter, whose homiletic party piece is acting out a battle between his two hands).  A number of times in the course of Do the Right Thing we see a photograph of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X shaking hands – the photo is shown to camera by a disabled man who wanders round the neighbourhood (Roger Guenveur Smith).  At the end of the film, Lee puts on the screen quotes by both men:  King foreswears violence as a means of advancing black civil rights; Malcolm sees violence as justified if it’s a considered act of self-defence.  If Lee means to suggest that he’s personally split down the middle between the two views – determined to do the right thing but ambivalent as to what that is – this represents a striking departure from the point of view that seems to propel the film:  at no stage does Lee seem drawn to King’s idea of right.  Sal’s restaurant is destroyed when, after Radio Raheen has died at the hands of the police, Mookie throws a trash can through the plate glass window with a yell of ‘Hate!’  The mob that has gathered in the street bursts into the pizzeria and starts a fire.  The act of destruction can hardly be seen as one of self-defence, so it doesn’t seem to be justified by Malcolm X’s philosophy either.  Lee looks to be using both King and Malcolm fraudulently in an effort to convince us (and perhaps himself) that Do the Right Thing is more thoughtful than it actually is.

At the start of proceedings in a nearly full NFT1, the BFI’s head of events (a man with plenty to answer for) announced a ‘very special guest’ to introduce the film.  It was Spike Lee who, to great applause, gave an introduction that was exemplary in its brevity – a couple of sentences.  There was much clapping at the end of the film too – perhaps increased by the knowledge that Lee was in the building – but it made me wonder what was being acclaimed.  Was it the film-making or the film-maker’s point of view?  I suppose it was a mixture of the two – and that that’s preferable to applauding a piece solely for its virtuosity and regardless of its political viewpoint.  (You wouldn’t hear a BFI audience putting their hands together for a Leni Riefenstahl film and you wouldn’t want to.)  But do people really mean to endorse a picture which appears to sanction racially-driven violence?  (The trashing of the pizzeria is cathartic.)  The irony – one that Spike Lee should deplore – is that I’m sure some of that applause was condescending.  It was the sound of a predominantly white audience accepting what it wouldn’t have tolerated from a white director, and feeling that to clap was the right – the politically correct – thing to do.

21 September 2009