I saved the best for last in this Spike Lee series. I’ll start by addressing my point in the BlacKkKlansman post about how I’ll never fully respect Lee after the fiasco of the lawsuit against SpikeTV for trying to capitalize on “his” name, which in his world apparently isn’t a common name or common word, and which in his world is apparently also his real name </sarcasm>. While it remains an idiotic lawsuit, after rewatching Do The Right Thing I can now understand if he feels irrationally paranoid about white Hollywood screwing him over. A movie like this came out in 1989 yet SIXTEEN YEARS LATER not only did something as juvenile as Crash win Best Picture but people praised it for being a movie finally bold enough to tackle racism! Huh???????!!!!!!!!!!!!

I recently described Crash this way: “I get less-than-fantastic service from a black waiter who’s having a busy day and I call him the n-word; then I go to my car across the street and see an Asian with a flat tire so I help him change it and I give him the number of a shop where he can get a good deal by giving my name. Come up with such a pair of unrelated, contrived, over-the-top-dramatic occurrences involving different races for a dozen or so different people, use a random number generator to determine what order they fall in, and tell them one after another without any sort of flow or structure to the story. Also, add a car crash, thinking that somehow ties everything together.”

I heard Crash described as a movie for people who say, “Some of my best friends are black” and it was such an insult that it beat frontrunner Brokeback Mountain, a legitimately brave and challenging movie about bigotry.

Spike Lee was probably one person who expected such an occurrence though, given Do the Right Thing had infamously not even gotten a Best Picture nomination while the actual award that year went to one of the ultimate “Hollywood pats itself on the back for curing racism” movies, Driving Miss Daisy.

Do The Right Thing’s big sin in the eyes of voters was that it didn’t offer any easy answers to racism – because THERE ARE NONE – and wanted them to look inside at their own flaws. Movies like Crash or the “white savior” movies will show some characters acting racist in an over-the-top way, white protagonists doing something nice, and everyone singing “Kum ba yah” because we have world peace. <eye roll>

Guess what? Not only do people not switch from good to bad that easily, there is no such thing as purely good or purely bad. Also, even if someone finds a way to act better, that’s pretty meaningless unless they’re also doing a lot to address the widespread evil in the world. Of course, if EVERYONE agreed to be nice to each other, that would lead to a very different world, but that’s impossible. Can things get better at all from the way they currently are though?

Do The Right Thing does not present any forced answers – it just makes us look at the most challenging questions. Everyone in the movie harbors some sort of prejudice – but they’re not all lumped together. Some people clearly bring more harm to those around them than others do, but on an extremely hot (both due to weather and boiling racial tensions) day there’s no telling what any of us can end up doing. Although there are characters almost everyone likes, and characters almost everyone dislikes, at the end of the day, the real enemy is systemic racism.

That’s as much as I can say without discussing one of the most-analyzed endings in movie history, so here goes:

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In response to the frequent question of “Did Mookie do the right thing?”, Spike Lee famously said, resolutely, at a 25^th anniversary screening that no black person had ever asked him that and that Mookie had thrown the trash can through the window out of anger at seeing his best friend killed by the NYPD, not to deflect anger and save Sal.

Of course, once the work is on the screen, people are free to interpret it however they want; many artists deliberately leave their work ambiguous to encourage interpretation and Lee himself has ultimately said that it’s up to the audience.

What exactly happens onscreen to justify any interpretation though?

I don’t think Mookie tried to save Sal, although that was a consequence of his action. If Sal’s welfare was his primary concern, he could have tried talking to the mob and reminding them, as Da Mayor did, that Sal didn’t kill Radio Raheem – that was the police’s doing. Mookie was already in a bad mood due to Sal’s putting the moves on his sister Jade (not that Jade’s feelings on the matter meant anything to him), and the anger was ignited many times over when he heard Sal use the n-word. Remember his use of that epithet turned the black customers Sal liked enough to let in after-hours against Sal, when they initially took his side over Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem’s. Mookie himself had previously told Buggin’ Out to get lost, although he then also told Sal to put the bat away. Mookie ultimately just wanted to go home after a hard day of (not) working. Watching Raheem’s murder made Mookie want to stop drifting aimlessly through life and take some sort of action to express his anger. Mookie is no hero, being a lazy, irresponsible worker and neglectful towards his girlfriend and their son. He’s simply a guy who got defensibly angry and lashed out.

Was his action justified though? Sal not only wasn’t the one who killed Raheem, he would have been killed BY Raheem if the police hadn’t intervened. You could say that Sal brought violence into the conflict by breaking Raheem’s boom box (or even with his racial slur) but neither justifies at all Raheem picking Sal up by the neck, throwing him around by the neck, and trying to choke the life out of him. In that regard, it’s a good thing the police showed up when they did.

Does that mean the officer was justified in killing Raheem, or that the mob’s subsequent anger was unjustified? Absolutely not. Lee deserves props for not making this a case of a nonviolent citizen getting harassed for no reason and ending up dead; he forced us to confront the tough issues instead. Raheem was trying to kill Sal and was resisting arrest when the officers tried stopping him, but if he had succeeded in choking the life out of the old Italian man that would still have only been manslaughter. Or at worst, second-degree murder. He was young enough that he would have been released from jail at some point. Pretending for a moment that he had committed first-degree murder, he still would have been entitled to a jury trial before receiving any sentencing. His sentencing then could have been less than life in prison and certainly less than the death penalty. Under no circumstances should cops take it upon themselves to punish a criminal with death, let alone in this case.

When you consider the fact that Sal didn’t die, or even suffer grievous bodily harm (he was talking just fine only moments later), Raheem should have only gone to jail on a battery charge. In a fair world he might have even gotten a light sentence given his clean record. Instead, Officer Long decided to administer the death penalty without any sort of due process, and the other black citizens of the neighborhood knew from experience that he would get away with it. If anything, the white people in power would praise him for keeping the streets safe by eliminating a thug.

We come back to the issue, though, that Sal wasn’t the person responsible for that. Some people might have even overlooked his using the racial slur in the heat of the moment when Raheem and Buggin’ were antagonizing him, but he was also callous after Raheem died, saying that the police did what needed to be done. Maybe we can forgive him for not bemoaning the murder of the guy who had just been strangling him, but the mob understandably wasn’t in a forgiving mood. Although it wasn’t his intent, Mookie did save the lives of Sal and his sons by deflecting the anger towards the restaurant. They’re lucky the first person to take violent action had enough of an affinity towards them to only attack the place, not the people. It seems like in response to the question of whether Mookie did the right thing, the actor/director who played him wants us to say, “Who the fuck cares? It’s just a restaurant. Someone died!”

Did the punishment fit the crime for Sal, however? What punishment? The first time I watched the movie, 15 years ago, my main sympathy was for Sal and my main anger towards Mookie. I couldn’t believe Sal lost his business when he’d been the victim of violence. I’ve only gotten more progressive as I’ve gotten older, though, and rewatching the movie now I made more note of how Mookie pointed out insurance would cover all Sal’s losses. As much as Sal bemoans having built that place with his bare hands, he can take the insurance money and rebuild elsewhere. The only bad thing to really happen to him was that he’d been kicked out of the neighborhood where he’d been proud to say the residents grew up on his food. It’s possible he would have been unwelcome anyway after his racial tirade, not to mention his son Vito’s contempt for the neighborhood’s black community and intense desire to relocate the restaurant.

Not that the African-Americans were all saints. Buggin’ Out deservedly got arrested for starting all the trouble, and initially nobody would take his side over Sal’s. More tellingly, some of the blacks wanted to follow up destroying Sal’s pizzeria by doing the same to the Korean grocery store across the street, removing all non-black business ownership from the neighborhood. As the Korean wife holds her little boy protectively, the husband tries saying he’s black like the mob, not white. That works, and he does have a point. As much as Asians are referred to (condescendingly) as the model minority, if they seemingly don’t behave there are plenty of whites who will turn on them. Just ask Japanese internment camp survivors. Or current victims of hate crimes brought on by COVID-19.

Or this dude from the United flight.

While that conflict is ultimately averted, gentrification is a cyclical process. There are multiple references to how the neighborhood’s becoming black-dominated in the time the pizzeria has operated is now being reversed and it’s becoming a hotspot for white real estate developers. The current residents growing up in the neighborhood fear being kicked out due to unaffordable prices, and that adds to the undercurrent of anger simmering on his hot day. The African-Americans managed to kick Sal & his sons out of the neighborhood, and form a very tentative alliance with the Koreans, yet all that will be trivial once the area is filled with hip, rich, white people.

Having the same legal rights to pursue economic advancement isn’t good enough; we’ll only have peace once everyone as the same OPPORTUNITIES for it as well. How do we get there though? Simply voting hasn’t been good enough. There are too many people who call themselves “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” voting with the outright bigots. Should blacks, the most oppressed minority in American history (except for Native Americans, who tragically are mostly not alive to fight their battles anymore), try to fight for their rights, as Malcolm X said? Or remain peaceful at all cost, as Martin Luther King said? The two men saw eye-to-eye late in their lives, and the last image of the film is a picture of them together, so maybe the truth is in between the two ideologies.

Legendary picture prominently featured in the movie.

Who knows though? As we try to figure it out, some people try to enjoy their lives, which we see at the end of the movie, but in the meantime,  others will keep tragically losing theirs.

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Bottom line: Leaves you breathless with its power.