Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing

Opening Shot

Rosie Perez dances to "Fight the Power" in boxing gloves. Not in a club. Not in a music video context that makes it comfortable. She's fighting the air, fighting the frame, and Ernest Dickerson's camera is tilted just enough to make you feel like the ground is unstable. The song is Public Enemy at their most confrontational. The dancer is furious. Before a single character has spoken, the film has told you: today is going to be the hottest day of the year, and something is going to break.

What It Does

Dickerson's cinematography does something I've never seen another film replicate as effectively. He shoots the heat. The colors are oversaturated, the reds and oranges pushed to the point where the image itself feels oppressive. The Dutch angles appear when racial tension escalates, tilting the world off its axis in a way that's more visceral than any dialogue could be. Spike Lee and Dickerson designed a visual vocabulary for systemic pressure that registers in your body before your brain processes it.

Bill Lee's jazz score weaves through the film as a counterpoint to the hip-hop and salsa and opera that different characters blast from their radios. The neighborhood is a cacophony of competing identities, and the soundtrack reflects that literally. When the boom box goes silent, you know something terrible is about to happen.

The ensemble is staggering. Ossie Davis as Da Mayor, Ruby Dee as Mother Sister, John Turturro as Pino, Danny Aiello as Sal, Giancarlo Esposito as Buggin' Out. Every performance is calibrated to a specific register of frustration. Nobody in this film is entirely right. Nobody is entirely wrong. Spike Lee plays Mookie as a guy who seems determined to avoid taking a position until the moment when avoiding a position is no longer possible.

Why It's on the List

Do the Right Thing is the great American film that America consistently refuses to reckon with. It was snubbed for Best Picture in 1989 in favor of Driving Miss Daisy, which tells you everything about the industry's comfort level with actual confrontation versus feel-good racial reconciliation. Lee made a film that presents the destruction of Sal's pizzeria as simultaneously understandable and tragic, a film that refuses to tell the audience what "the right thing" is. The dual quotes from MLK and Malcolm X at the end aren't there to provide resolution. They're there to prove that the argument is older than you and will outlast you.

The Argument Against

Some of the characterizations run broad. The scene where characters from different ethnic groups hurl slurs directly into the camera is effective as provocation but clumsy as dramaturgy. Radio Raheem's "Love and Hate" monologue, borrowed from Night of the Hunter, can feel like Lee is underlining a point the film has already made. And the final act's escalation, from argument to police killing to riot, moves faster than the rest of the film's careful slow-build rhythm, which gives the climax a slightly unearned velocity.

Closing Image

Mookie shows up to Sal's the morning after the riot and asks for his money. Sal pays him, throwing the bills at him one at a time. They stand in front of the ruined pizzeria. No reconciliation. No epiphany. Just two men who understand each other less than they did yesterday, and a neighborhood that is exactly one degree hotter than it was before.