Burning Down The House: Looking Back On “Do The Right Thing”
It Came From The Wayback Machine Vol. 5 (Orig. published in FilmBar, 2017)
It was the first time I ever saw somebody punch a TV.
I was in my early teens, visiting my older brother Greg in San Francisco. It was the first time I was every really on my own, away from my parents, and that feeling of freedom was intoxicating. Greg shared an apartment on Nob Hill with our cousin Paul. The building felt sketchy. The hallways were dimly lit and perfumed with weed. His pretty neighbor down the hall always left her room wearing a bathrobe that did little to contain her preposterous cleavage. And I was left alone all day, with nothing to do but listen to CDs and watch movies and shout curse words with nobody around to tell me that saying “Fuck” was unseemly. It was a horny, shy nerd’s paradise.
One evening when Greg got home from work, we watched Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. I was blown away by it. That first screening is indelibly imprinted on my memory. It was the first time I ever listened to Public Enemy; it was the first time I ever really paid attention to cinematography (the heat-drenched visuals of Thing continue to astonish- it’s hard to think of another film that conveys just how oppressive and omnipresent heat can be on a sweltering day; the film itself looks like it’ll dissolve into a…
