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Interesting fact before the beginning of this paper: five years ago, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of ‘Do the Right Thing’, the director, Spike Lee threw a party with a special message from President at the time Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. The two had seen the movie on their first date, and now, in 2019, the movie is getting a UK re-release in honor of its 30th – and the context is very different. The implied happy ending of the Obama era has been unceremoniously amputated and we are once again back in the moods of anger and uncertainty that drove the message of the movie in the first place. When careworn pizzeria proprietor Sal says he is thinking of quitting and turning his place into a condominium called Trump’s Pizza or Trump’s Plaza, the dialogue lands with a slap. Kind of ironic when you think about who is president today.
‘Do the Right Thing’ has plenty more material that is absolutely relevant right now. “If this hot weather continues, it’s going to melt the polar ice caps and the whole wide world,” is said by one of the three idle guys hanging outside on the opposite side of Sal’s Pizza Place. In 1989, the line was a metaphor for disaster in the social climate. And of course, the ending, with a black man killed in a police chokehold, could have been filmed at any time since 1989 because of the amount of police brutality in the news today.
Let’s set the mood a bit, it is a scorching day in New York City, the background music being provided by the character DJ Mister Senor Love Daddy, who at the time was played by a young Samuel L Jackson. Lee himself plays Mookie, a pizza delivery guy for Sal’s Famous Pizzeria in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, which Lee shows in the first stages of white gentrification. His girlfriend Tina rules the movie by virtue of her dance sequence over the opening credits, to the Public Enemy song ‘Fight the Power’. Sal is a middle-aged restaurant owner, who employs his two sons and is at once wary of his predominantly black clientele and sentimental about having been there and having to, in his words “feed them all” since their childhood. He is also tragically in love with Mookie’s sister Jade, to the intense embarrassment of everyone else.
Mookie is reasonably friendly with Sal’s younger son Vito but in a permanently hostile state with the elder son Pino who is angry, depressed and extremely racist. As the temperature climbs, so do the tensions between the two, and things reach an all-time high when Mookie’s friend, Buggin’ Out looks at Sal’s black-and-white photographs of Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and demands to know why there aren’t any “brothers on the wall”.
That argument is probably one of Spike Lee’s masterstrokes, the fact that it’s a culture war, a war about representation that could have come straight from a social media exchange from today. Buggin’ Out suggests, much to Sal’s astonishment, that because African-Americans form pretty much his entire customer base, they have a democratic right to have at least one black American represented on his wall. Sal is not ready for a new political world, whose dawn Lee sketches out here, in which it is not enough simply to refrain from making racist gestures, the fact that omission or erasure is equally insulting.
The white people are at war with the black people, who are, in turn at war with the Latinos, but Lee extends to each faction a vibrant pop-culture identity. Where he is less complimentary is to the Koreans, who run the convenience store across the street from Sal’s pizza shop. They are still a mystery, and in the riot scene after the murder of Radio Raheem, another one of Mookie’s friends, it isn’t immediately clear if the Koreans will be protected from looting by virtue of ethnic underdog status or be considered whites.
The movie closes with contrasting statements from both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and while one is saying that violence is never justified and the other that it is in self-defense. Malcolm X effectively gets in the last word, but just as affecting is the desolate peace process between Sal and Mookie as they debate how much back-pay Mookie is owed.
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