Do the Right Thing: Go See This Movie

SPIKE Lee's Do the Right Thing is a disturbing movie.

It is also powerful, thought-provoking and frightening. It is the kind of film that leaves you speechless walking out of the theater.

There is no question that you should see this movie, if you haven't already. It contains some of the best performances this year in a technically excellent production. With its slick cinematography and funky, flashy unique characters, the film looks good.

And there is no question that it is the summer's most controversial film.

What is disturbing about it is that the movie raises a lot of hard questions, without offering any clear answers.

Lee, who entered the spotlight with his debut film She's Gotta Have It, questions what the Civil Rights Movement is for Blacks in America today, where few have found an acceptable middle-ground between the dichotomy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent position and the much more aggressive stance of Malcolm X.

The movie is about misdirected energy, misplaced violence and what is presented as inevitable hatred between social groups.

THERE is Buggin' Out, a radically militant Black activist who directs his energy not towards constructive change, but at a pointless effort to get pictures of Blacks hung on the all-Italian Wall of Fame in a local pizzeria.

And there is Da Mayor, an older alcoholic, who, with his wise words and placating ways, seems to swing more towards King's side of the spectrum.

It takes place on one very hot day at Sal's Famous Pizzaria in Bedford Stuyvesant, a Black neighborhood in Brooklyn where the general undercurrent of class and race resentment is kept under pressure by the heat until it explodes in violence by the day's end.

One memorable scene is a series of clips as members from each social group dump on somebody else. Mookie (Lee) hurls derogatory anti-Italian comments on the boss' son Pino (John Turturro), who insults him back with just as many racist stereotypes. Then the film cuts then to the policeman, who insults a Hispanic youth, who insults the Korean family who has recently opened up a vegetable stand on the block. The Korean man follows with his own insults about Jews. The circle of hatred, it seems, would go on endlessly, if there were any Jewish characters in the film to keep it going.

Lee has said that the film was inspired by incidents of racial violence in New York over the past decade: the Howard Beach incident three years ago, when a young Black man was chased onto a highway by a gang of white thugs and killed by a motorist; the death of an elderly Black woman Eleanor Bumpurs, who was shot by New York police; and the death of Black graffiti artist Michael Stewart, who was killed in the custody of six New York police officers in 1983.

But while these incidents could have inspired an overwhelmingly angry film, Do the Right Thing manages to reveal the humanity of its characters, with both good and bad sides.

Particularly outstanding performances--in an excellent cast--are given by Lee and Danny Aiello, who plays Sal, the owner of the pizza shop. Both succeed in their very human and confused portrayals of characters torn in many directions.

Sal has maintained his business for decades in the same neighborhood, proud to have seen the local kids grow up on his food. But, despite his generosity and warmth for Blacks in the neighborhood, he is also capable of racism and violence when local Black youths disturb his romantic and idealized version of his life.

Mookie is a self-absorbed pizza deliverer, able to control himself admirably in the face of offensive racism from the boss' son, but drawn to incite violence against his employer when the police kill one of his friends.

The police are the most shallowly drawn characters, representing the bad guys with no explanation--besides the fact that they are racist--for their hostility.

THE real tragedy in this movie is that the neighborhood Blacks see no recourse for the murder of a Black teenager by police but to destroy the only white business in the neighborhood. Their anger cannot be directed at the real source, the police, because of their powerlessness. But their frustration and anger needs to be vented in some way.

The frustration of the Black community is the central topic of this film, and Lee outlines the external and internal causes of its fragmentation.

The external causes--the small value placed on Black lives by police and others, the lack of economic opportunity or alternative visions--are more obvious.

But Lee tackles the internal reasons as well--the frequency of fatherless Black children, the self-defeat of internalized racism, the misplaced hostility towards easy victims who are not the real causes of oppression, the misdirected activism towards dead-end causes.

The film is far more than entertainment; it is social commentary.

FOR audiences used to neat Hollywood endings that tie up all the strings, offering lasting solutions to unsolvable dilemmas after two hours, Do the Right Thing will be shocking in its complex representation of real life, where things are not that simple.

There are no easy solutions offered in this film, and no absolutes. Lee instead blurs all the dividing lines. There is no right and no wrong, and even the lines of race, around which all of the tension is developed, are left blurred at the end. The Korean man, fearing that his shop will be the next one gutted by fire, proclaims that he is Black.

As if the climax of the film is not enough, the final ideas left for the viewer to ponder are a pair of quotes from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. King explains why violence is always destructive for everyone, and Malcolm X describes why violence may be necessary sometimes.

Lee does not point to either and say this is right. He leaves much up to the viewer to decide. Do the Right Thing is a difficult film because it forces all members of the audience to think--hard--about their personal positions about race relations and come up with their own conclusions. And, like the final quote from Malcolm X, the movie has a very disturbing, depressing end.