Film Analysis: Do the Right Thing
Do the Right Thing: Radio Raheem
The Film Analysis assignment required that each student select a movie released in their respective year. The purpose of the assignment was to analyze its cultural context; examening specific facets such as race, class, gender, and other features that tie to contemporary American ideology. For my film analysis, I chose the 1989 movie Do the Right Thing.
This film was written, produced, and directed by Spike Lee. It was particularly controversial in a time construed as a reactionary era in American history. The so called "conservative revolution" in the late 1970s and early 1980s ushered in a shift from focus on human rights and social-cultural progress to unremitting attacks on the "welfare state" and those social groups percieved as "special interests": minorities, the old, the young, the working class, the poor - essentially, the general population living outside wealthy and privileged sectors. The campaign waged by "conservatives" to rollback the excesses of the gains made in the 1960s was accompanied by a fierce rhetoric stressing "self-reliance" and "tough love": to the poor that is, while the rich made unprecedented strides thanks in part to the highly protectionist policies of the Reagan Administration, along with regressive tax policies that redistributed income upwards, increasing inequality.
In 1989, Spike Lee released Do the Right Thing. The movie told the story of Mookie, a young black man living and working in Brooklyn. Mookie works as a pizza delivery man at the local pizzeria; owned and run by an Italian-American named Sal. Sal's two sons, Giuseppe and Vito, also work alongside Mookie. Giuseppe is a patent racist, and despises the blacks, as well as the entire neighborhood in general.
Do the Right Thing sets in cultural context the racial and class lines prominent in the decade of the 1980s; there are blacks and whites, poor and well-off. Mookie is a working class black man just trying to make a living to get by in life, and to support himself, his girlfriend, his sister, and his son.
The film is noteworthy because it confronts these issues head-on, in a time when arguably the most prominent examples of blacks in movies were Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor providing comic relief. There is little comedy to be found in Do the Right Thing. Many critics of this film initially lambasted it on the superciliously racist grounds that blacks would be incited by it to riot. That is a measure of how subversive it was for its time; which should sound ridiculously antiquanted two decades after the Civil Rights Movement, but nevertheless stands as an unfortunately accurate statement.
My essay attempted to probe the cultural issues of race and class. My purpose was to demonstrate how reactionary and really cruel the 80s campaign was to "rollback" social welfare. This is a campaign that continues full-speed to this day. The attempts to privatize Social Security, a basic social program that the majority of the population depends on, is just one new fashionable development. Do the Right Thing is both daring and imaginitive. It dynamically juxtaposes themes of redemption and non-violent social resistence, embodied in the image of Martin Luther King jr., and themes of justice and violent self-defense, embodied in the image of Malcolm X. Spike Lee, who plays the main character, ends his iconoclastic film with a quote from both of these figures; seemingly contradictory, but left ambigious for subjective interpretation. What I myself took away from that particular feature of the film was that nothing is black and white, so to speak; sometimes people and social movements must adhere to a message of peace and non-violence, but sometimes they have to defend themselves in some way, in situations where violence may be necessary for justified self-defense.
For a sample of my essay, there is a link here:
Do the Right Thing: An Analysis