Bed-Stuy, Do or Die: Representations of Oppression in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”

At the 1990 Academy Awards ceremony, actress Kim Basinger caused a stir when she used her brief moment on camera to criticize the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for its failure to nominate what she believed to be the best film of the year for the “Best Picture” prize. Before fulfilling her original role of introducing Dead Poets Society as one of the nominees for the top prize, she declared to the audience: “We’ve got five great films here, and they’re great for one reason: because they tell the truth. But there is one film missing from this list that deserves to be on it because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all. And that’s Do the Right Thing.”[1] Basinger was not alone in her conviction that the Academy’s failure to recognize the greatness of Spike Lee’s third feature film constituted an injustice. Do the Right Thing[2] was featured on 81 film critics’ “top ten films of 1989” lists and has become Lee’s most fondly remembered work, yet it only received two Oscar nominations: best original screenplay and best actor in a supporting role, both of which it lost.[3] To this day, Spike Lee argues that the Academy snubbed his film because of racial bias. He claims that the predominantly white Academy members were unwilling to seriously consider a film that told its story from a non-white perspective and focused on an uncomfortable themes regarding race.

The debate over DRT’s artistic merit and over the accuracy of the film’s message extended far beyond the Academy Awards controversy. The film was met with mixed reviews. Some critics, like Roger Ebert, praised Lee’s mastery of his craft as well as his boldness in presenting an earnest look at painful racial issues that deserved more discussion in mainstream culture.[4] Others, like The Village Voice’s Stanley Crouch, lambasted the film for race-baiting and for using amateurish film techniques in order to convey Lee’s wrongheaded message.[5] Several critics in the latter camp went so far as to predict that the film would incite race riots in cities where it was screened.[6] The range of opinions held by the larger movie-going public was equally wide, as exemplified by a series of readers’ letters published by the New York Times, wherein some readers hailed DRT as an insightful piece of art[7] while others called it “artistically flawed and politically empty.”[8]

In order to fully understand why the public reaction to DRT was so forceful, it is necessary to understand the historical, political, and cultural context of the era during which it was produced and distributed. The version of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood (Bed-Stuy) that DRT portrays is far from a realistic depiction of its real-life counterpart. Lee and cinematographer Ernest Dickerson took considerable artistic license in deciding which elements of Bed-Stuy’s culture to emphasize and which to completely ignore. The ways in which DRT’s fictionalized neighborhood depart from reality were deliberate choices in service of the film’s message.

DRT acts as a political statement in two ways. First, it serves as a protest against the Hollywood film industry’s lack of non-white creative voices. Second, and more importantly, it serves as a vehicle for Spike Lee’s commentary on inner-city racial unrest. In Lee’s depiction of life in Bed-Stuy, he minimizes the presence of social ills like failed family structure, drug addiction, and welfare dependence. This decision was rooted in Lee’s goal of constructing DRT as a counter-narrative to mainstream political discourse on black urban communities. By downplaying these concerns, Lee focuses his film on what he believes to be the principal source of strife in black America: economic exploitation. DRT’s two political functions are undeniably related. Both protesting Hollywood’s diversity problem and refuting racist popular beliefs are central to Lee’s mission of addressing and combatting racism’s role in American popular culture.

Do the Right Thing tells the story of a race riot in Bed-Stuy on one of the hottest days of 1989. The main character, Mookie (played by the director) is a black delivery boy for Sal, an Italian American who runs a pizzeria with his sons Pino and Vito. Other prominent characters include: Jade, Mookie’s sister; Tina, Mookie’s Puerto Rican girlfriend; Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem, two of Mookie’s friends; and Da Mayor, an elderly but good-spirited drunkard. Sal and his sons are the only characters who do not live in Bed-Stuy. Rather, they commute everyday from the white neighborhood of Bensonhurst. The film is primarily composed of vignettes, following different characters in each scene. Most of these vignettes focus on small confrontations, many of which are racially charged in nature. The principal storyline concerns the “Wall of Fame,” a collection of photographs of famous Italian-Americans hanging in Sal’s restaurant. Buggin’ Out reasons that because Sal’s clientele is overwhelmingly black, it is only fair that some of the photographs depict black icons as well. Sal ejects him from the restaurant, but Buggin’ Out returns that night with Radio Raheem and their friend Smiley to confront Sal. The fight escalates into an all-out brawl that draws several police officers to the scene, one of whom chokes Radio Raheem to death in the chaos. Enraged, the neighborhood’s black residents destroy the pizzeria and then set it ablaze.

One of the primary factors motivating Spike Lee to direct DRT was dearth of black voices in mainstream Hollywood productions at the time. Indeed, in the late 1980’s, corporate film studios were loath to put forward the necessary funding for projects that featured African Americans as main characters or that told stories from a non-white perspective. Virtually no big-budget films attempted to cater to a black audience. Films that did focus on black communities, or on moments from black history, reduced their black characters to little more than props or parts of the location. In his essay, “Reflecting the Times: Do the Right Thing Revisited,” film scholar William Grant comments on the widespread use of this technique around the time of DRT’s release:

In films such as Cry Freedom (1987), Mississippi Burning (1988), and Glory (1990), the African-American struggle is a subtext for white heroism. For example, in Cry Freedom, a film that purportedly portrays the well-known black South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, a white journalist is the central character. Consequently, Biko’s anti-apartheid struggle is completely overshadowed.[9]

Hollywood was willing to occasionally feature black actors in its productions, but by invariably choosing to tell stories through the eyes of white protagonists, it effectively denied a voice to black creators and refused to tell stories from a black perspective. Black characters, to the limited extent that they were actually featured in mainstream cinema, were granted screen-time but not a voice.

Thulani Davis, an African-American playwright and screenwriter, expressed her frustration with American cinema’s treatment of black agency in a review for DRT that she wrote for The Village Voice. She refers to Hollywood’s habit of dehumanizing black bodies as the “National Geographic paradigm” and expresses her genuine surprise that a corporate studio like Universal Pictures would distribute a film like Lee’s: “In most cases white films use the National Geographic approach to the rest of us: showing nice pictures of beautiful people doing what they do in the broadest manner possible, and in a public forum. You see us break dancing, cutting, strutting, or doing dope on the street. [DRT] is one film I would have said could not be made by the industry in Hollywood.”[10] Black film critics like Davis were not satisfied with simply seeing black actors onscreen. Solving the film industry’s diversity problem would require producing more mainstream films treated non-white characters as individuals with unique personalities. Grant’s mention of “the African-American struggle” also speaks to the larger desire of black film audiences to see new Hollywood films acknowledge, not only that African-American history must be told from the perspective of non-white figures, but also that everyday life is different for black Americans compared to their white counterparts. Spike Lee was certainly among the voices criticizing Hollywood’s diversity problem at this time.[11] He used an almost exclusively black cast for each of his first two feature films — She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and School Daze (1988) — as a response to the pervasiveness of mainstream films with all-white casts, a streak he would continue in DRT.[12] Additionally, in 1989, the most famous depiction of African-American life was The Cosby Show, which rarely brought up racial issues and focused on an upper-middle-class family living in a gentrified neighborhood. Lee addresses Cosby’s monopoly on black voices in Hollywood by formatting DRT’s opening scene as a hip-hop version of the sitcom’s opening credits sequence.[13] The film goes on to spend the next two hours portraying a complicated version of black America that fit neither the “National Geographic paradigm” nor the Cosby aesthetic.

Given this context, it is clear that one of the aspects of the national moment in 1989 that Spike Lee intended DRT to address is the lack of diversity of perspectives offered in mainstream American films. This fact may also help explain why Lee elected to write DRT as an ensemble piece. Lee makes sure to present divergent perspectives on elements of the plot. For example, the audience knows Sal and Buggin’ Out well enough to understand why each of them stands where they do on the matter of Sal’s “Wall of Fame.” Lee explicitly states during the behind-the-scenes footage in The Making of Do the Right Thing that in the conflict that eventually escalates into the film’s climax, he wants the audience to feel that both characters have a valid argument and that neither one is exclusively right or wrong.[14] He takes this same care to virtually every major character. Another example is how, during the single on-screen interaction between Buggin’ Out and Jade, the audience comes to completely understand why the two characters disagree on the “Wall of Fame” issue: Buggin’ Out is an ideologue, and he sees the issue as a violation of principle that he cannot allow. Meanwhile, Jade is more concerned with the big picture, and she views the wall as too inconsequential to warrant serious attention. She would be down, as she says, for something meant to benefit “the community.” The reason why it is so important that Lee uses his characters to showcase a diverse array of ideologies is that, in doing so, he avoids casting the residents of his Bed-Stuy as part of a monolithic black community. In doing so, he is refuting the “National Geographic paradigm.” African Americans are not simply part of the setting in DRT, and they are not ideologically homogeneous. Thus, Lee’s film grants black characters a level of humanity that they are denied in the overwhelming majority of Hollywood films. Not only does DRT seek to satisfy black audiences’ demand for a film from a black perspective, but rather it provides a multitude, almost as if to compensate for the lack thereof in contemporary cinema.

Spike Lee’s discontent with Hollywood’s lack of diversity is evident not only in the film’s format (i.e. broadcasting a multitude of non-white voices), but also in DRT’s emphasis on themes of cultural representation. The most notable example of this theme is the very conflict that explodes into the riot at the film’s end. Buggin’ Out’s frustration with the lack of black icons on the “Wall of Fame” reflects contemporary black Americans’ frustrations about the lack of black stories being told by Hollywood. “Rarely do I see any American Italians eating in here,” he complains to Sal. “All I see is black folks. So since we spend MUCH money here, we do have some say.”[15] Buggin’ Out’s rhetoric corresponds with a line of argument frequently used by media critics arguing for greater representation in Hollywood: the film industry relies on business from black moviegoers, so audiences are entitled to more movies that tell black stories and are aimed at black audiences.[16]

In addition to the paucity of black icons in American popular culture, DRT also addresses Hollywood’s reluctance to tell stories from a non-white perspective. In one poignant scene, Mookie pulls Pino aside to confront him about his constant usage of racist language. Mookie points out that Pino’s predilection for the n-word is at odds with his obsession with black celebrities like Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson. Pino responds by blurting out, “It’s different. Eddie, Magic, Prince… they’re not niggas. I mean, they’re not black. I mean, let me explain myself. They’re not really black. I mean, they’re black, but they’re not really black. They’re more than black. It’s different.”[17] Mookie expresses skepticism to his colleague, but this exchange communicates a different message to the audience: because black celebrities exist in an otherwise overwhelmingly white culture, and because they are marketed to white consumers, their racial identity can be easily disregarded. When an actor like Eddie Murphy appears in a white film, he is acting as a black face rather than a black voice. His presence does not accomplish the goal of telling a black story. This transformation of black icons into essentially race-less cultural entities is what allows white consumers like Pino to look up to them without having to reconcile their racist worldviews. Frustration with American culture’s lack of respect for black voices is a powerful motif throughout DRT. Commentary on this subject, however, explains only part of DRT’s potency as a political film. The chief source of the work’s power comes from the way that it deftly contradicted popular beliefs about how to explain social unrest in urban communities of color.

Throughout the War on Poverty, mainstream conservatives argued that hardships faced by black communities were the result of a collapsed family structure. In a 1965 report for the Johnson administration entitled “The Negro Family: the Case for National Action,” then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted high levels of single-mother families among black Americans.[18] He argued that the absence of father figures, and thus a lack of traditionally structured family units, would contribute to a perpetual “culture of poverty” (i.e. one without middle-class America’s traditional work ethic) and stand in the way of progress and equality for African Americans. This “culture of poverty,” more so than institutionalized forms of discrimination and racial exclusion, was believed to be ultimately responsible for keeping black communities in poor economic conditions. This belief persisted well into the 1980’s. In a 1982 book, political columnist Ken Auletta called Moynihan’s warnings “prophetic.”[19] Political commentators also affirmed their support for Moynihan’s understanding of the black family in a 1985 Newsweek article called “Moynihan: I Told You So” and a 1986 CBS documentary called The Vanishing Black Family.[20]

DRT refutes the Moynihan belief that the hardships faced by communities of color are the result of a collapsed family structure. For example, towards the middle of the film, there’s a scene where Da Mayor saves Eddie, a young boy, from getting hit by an oncoming car after he runs into the street. When Eddie’s mother arrives and Da Mayor explains what has happened, she proceeds to spank him and yell at him in public. As Eddie runs off, his mother yells after him: “Get upstairs now! And when your father come home, he gonna wear your little behind out, too!”[21] Through the horrified reactions and cries of protest expressed by the crowd of onlookers, Lee signals that the audience is meant to have an extremely negative reaction to this sight. The image of a woman beating her child to the audible dismay of their neighbors is almost reminiscent of Moynihan’s warnings about failed motherhood. However, the woman’s line about Eddie’s father subverts the narrative about single mothers’ being responsible for social strife. This scene demonstrates that two-parent households can be just as damaging as single-parent ones, thereby complicating the “culture of poverty” narrative.

The other family unit in DRT that contradicts the myth of absentee fathers being responsible for racial inequality is Mookie and Tina, who together have a son named Hector. In all of their interactions, Tina criticizes Mookie for not being sufficiently present in their family life. During a phone conversation, she snaps: “I want you to spend some time with me and Hector! I want you to try and make this relationship work.”[22] At the end of the film, he spends the night with Tina and Hector only to depart early the next morning in spite of Tina’s protests. He goes to see Sal and demands his paycheck for the week’s work, saying a line he has been saying throughout the movie: “I wanna get my money, I wanna get paid.”[23] With cash in hand, Mookie returns home to Tina and Hector. This scene puts Mookie’s refrain in a new context, because now his obsession with money seems less to reflect greed than a motivation to provide for his family. This revelation warrants a re-evaluation of his character because it suggests to the audience that Mookie’s primary motive for the whole film has been, in fact, to be a good father by providing for his child. The forces scapegoated by the Moynihan Report do initially seem to present a challenge to the cohesion of this family unit, but ultimately they prove not to be an accurate assessment. Moreover, by the end of the film, Tina and Mookie’s domestic struggles seem insignificant in light of the hatred that almost destroyed their block the night before. Clearly, failed family structure is not Bed-Stuy’s most pressing issue.

The other side of the mythology surrounding the “culture of poverty” that DRT actively contradicts is the falsity that black communities are parasites of the state because of their dependence on welfare. Conservatives of the Reagan era argued vehemently for the abolition of New Deal- and Great Society-style social welfare programs like AFDC and federal housing subsidies, both of which Regan drastically reduced as president.[24] According to them, these programs were harmful because they eliminated all motivation for poor individuals to seek employment and because welfare recipients could easily take advantage of them. One of the chief components of Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign was exaggerated tales of welfare abuse and his pledge to prevent it.[25] Reagan’s alarmist rhetoric continued during his presidency and contributed to the growing myth of the welfare queen — a person, typically a black woman, who abuses government assistance programs instead of seeking employment.[26] Political scientist Franklin Gilliam would later write in his article “The ‘Welfare Queen’ Experiment” about how, during this period, warnings about rampant fraud were coupled with the media’s growing tendency to portray welfare recipients as invariably black in order to draw upon classic stereotypes of black laziness.[27] Similar to the Moynihan Report mentality, this understanding of welfare blamed the challenges facing poor communities of color on the moral failings of black individuals rather than on structural issues.

DRT serves as a counter-narrative to contemporary beliefs about welfare both by refusing to mention it and by portraying characters as proactive, rather than dependent. In the film, not a single character is shown to be a recipient of government assistance in any form. In fact, the only character who mentions welfare is Pino, when he sarcastically asks Sal, “You running welfare or something?”[28] The comment is meant as an insult when Sal pays Da Mayor a dollar to sweep the sidewalk in front of the pizzeria. As Pino’s intense bigotry comes to light later in the film, it becomes clear that his understanding of welfare is based on racism rather than fact. The scene, which takes place early in the film, also affirms that these characters are aware of welfare as an issue; they know that government assistance is available, they just choose not to use it. DRT also refutes the myth that the existence of welfare programs encourages young residents of impoverished communities to see government aid as the solution to poverty rather than personal responsibility. In an early scene, four teenagers harass Da Mayor, calling him a bum and a drunk. Mayor retorts that they do not deserve to criticize him without considering the pain he has endured in his life, like feeling powerless at the sight of his children crying from hunger. Ahmad fires back, declaring, “I wouldn’t stand in the doorway and listen to my five children go hungry. I’d be out getting a job, doing something, anything to put food in their mouth!”[29] Ahmad’s friends voice their agreement with his proactive sentiment. Their belief in proactivity, not welfare, as the solution to poverty depicts them as the antithesis of the mythical welfare queen.

Along with the “culture of poverty,” the biggest scapegoat in contemporary popular discourse for social turmoil in communities of color was the epidemic of drug use. Again, the prevailing narrative about this social ill blamed black Americans for their own shortcomings, rather than endeavoring to identify and fix the structural failings that made it possible. Throughout the 1980’s, First Lady Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign, “Just Say No,” reflected the belief of the American middle class that the spread of narcotics could be blamed on the faulty character of individuals. Two months after DRT’s release, President George H.W. Bush gave his first primetime national address to announce the extreme new measures that his administration was to begin taking in the War on Drugs. In the televised speech, he said of the crack-cocaine epidemic, “Who’s responsible? Let me tell you straight out: everyone who uses drugs, everyone who sells drugs, and everyone who looks the other way.”[30] He called drugs “the greatest domestic threat facing our nation today,” and claimed that they were “sapping our strength as a nation.” In sum, the national consensus was that the drug problem took precedence over all other sources of social unrest. The solution, though, was to punish individual drug-takers rather than conceive of the issue as societal or institutional.

Lee’s decision to omit drug addiction from his depiction of life in Bed-Stuy was a conscious political statement. As he documents in the film’s production journal, the first several corporate studios that he approached with his script suggested that he re-frame the project to be about “black-on-black crime in a drug-infested neighborhood.”[31] Lee notes that he would have received a larger budget if he chose to go that route, but ultimately he decided to keep his original vision of a low-budget film that primarily explored racial prejudice. The same production journal also makes clear the extent to which Lee’s decision not to include drugs in his film constituted a deviation from reality in its depiction of the neighborhood. As actor Danny Aiello would later reminisce, “Before the block was cleaned up for the movie there were crack vials all over the place and when we were shooting, many of the people hanging around, watching were, unfortunately, drug addicts. I loved filming there, but it really was a devastated area.”[32] Prior to the beginning of filming, one of the abandoned buildings that the crew would soon tear down was occupied by opioid- and crack-addicted squatters. Out of fear, officers of the New York Police Department were unwilling to come into Bed-Stuy to help prepare the neighborhood for filming. Consequently, Lee’s team established a relationship with the Fruit of Islam, the paramilitary arm of Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, which served as a security force throughout the production process. The Fruit of Islam worked to rid the set of addicts and kept them away until the conclusion of filming. In spite of the abundance of evidence of Brooklyn’s drug problem throughout filming, Lee adhered to his original pledge to keep drugs out of DRT.

According to his own words, Lee made this decision for several reasons. The first among these was the sheer immensity of Brooklyn’s drug problem in 1989. Lee decided that the crack epidemic was too big of an issue and, accordingly, deserved its own film rather than simply being a subplot in one dedicated primarily to exploring racism.[33] His second stated reason was the general perception among white America that every citizen in a black community was addicted to crack. Lee resented this motif in popular culture and wanted to respond by presenting a film with a predominantly black cast wherein no characters suffer from addiction.[34] The third reason was the racist nature of the national conversation about drugs. Cocaine addiction was a significant problem among employees of accounting firms and financial institutions. Yet, as Lee points out, no critics had objected to Oliver Stone’s decision to leave the drug issue out of his 1987 film Wall Street.[35] Therefore, it would be equally appropriate to direct a film about Bed-Stuy that does not address drugs. When critics at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival questioned Lee on his decision, he pointed out the racist double standard in their line of thinking.[36] DRT’s use of artistic license to depict a Bed-Stuy that does not suffer from the effects of the national cocaine epidemic was part of an inherently political decision: by actively avoiding the topic, the film forces its viewers to consider that there are factors contributing to urban unrest completely unrelated to drugs. In leaving out crack, Lee allows the film to instead focus its conversation on his primary motivation for making the film: structural racism.

As part of his decision to leave the narcotics epidemic out of DRT, Lee’s film depicts neither drug usage nor drug addiction. The only Bed-Stuy local with a substance problem is Da Mayor, who is characterized as an alcoholic, but his addiction appears harmless. The only beverage that we see him drinking is beer, and it has virtually no effect on his overall comportment. Da Mayor’s alcoholism does not impede his ability to continuously dispense wisdom to his neighbors, and he takes on an almost heroic role when he rescues Eddie. His confrontation with the teenagers also gives us insight into his affliction: he is traumatized by his painful memories of extreme poverty and of heartache, and he drinks to numb his own pain.[37] His alcoholism is not the result of faulty character. In the context of the War on Drugs and the tendency to portray crack addicts as reckless criminals, this artistic decision is all the more striking as a political statement.

Subordinating the issues of failed family structure, welfare, police brutality, and drug addiction allows Do the Right Thing to foreground what it presents as the most pressing issue for poor neighborhoods of color: economic exploitation. Black thought leaders have been categorizing economic exploitation as a form of racism throughout modern history. The most celebrated 20th-century author on this subject is W.E.B. DuBois, who also conceived of racism as a class struggle. Lee’s understanding of this matter (as depicted in DRT), however, is best articulated by Kwame Ture in his 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Ture explains that black communities in America can be best understood as a colonized nation.[38] In a traditional example of colonialism, an imperial power exerts political control over a foreign nation, exploits the colony’s natural resources for its own profit, and represses the native population by denying it the full benefits of citizenship, all the while keeping the seat of political power far from the affected nation. Likewise, the “white power structure” — Ture’s term for the leaders of various white-controlled institutions, like business-owners and landlords — operates various establishments that employ black labor and make profit by selling to black consumers. Because black Americans are excluded from the institutions that rely on their labor and capital, as well as from the legislative bodies that govern their communities, they are effectively a colonized people. The Bed-Stuy power structure depicted in DRT reflects Ture’s philosophy about the role of economics in the repression of communities of color.

Of all the institutions that DRT shows playing a role in the everyday life of this community, none are owned by the black and Puerto Rican residents that regularly patronize them. The only restaurant that we see in the entire film is Sal’s pizzeria, so the viewer’s understanding of Bed-Stuy’s commercial scene is of one dominated by non-black-owned businesses, in spite of the neighborhood’s overwhelmingly black population. Ture’s colonial paradigm becomes especially relevant when we learn that Sal’s family, which controls the block’s foremost business, actually lives in Bensonhurst, Queens.[39] In light of this knowledge, Buggin’ Out’s fixation on Sal’s almost exclusively black clientele comes to reflect Ture’s assessment of black colonialism as exploitation.

The only other business-owners in the film are the Korean family who owns the convenience store across the street from Sal’s. Their situation is presented differently from that of Sal’s. ML, an African-American character, grumbles about the neighborhood’s abundance of non-black enterprises reliant on black customers, ranting, “A motherfucking year off the motherfucking boat and they already got a business in OUR neighborhood. A good business!”[40] His friend Sweet Dick Willie then interjects, claiming that the domination of Bed-Stuy’s economy by outsiders can be attributed in part to its black residents’ own inertia. The third member of their group, Coconut Sid, counters that the reason for their inaction is their awareness of the likelihood that they will be ultimately denied the opportunities they pursue on account of their blackness. “It’s be because we’re black,” he reasons. “Ain’t no other explanation. Ain’t they always trying to keep the black man to be out of shit?” This line indicates that Sid’s life experience has been characterized by exclusion and racial discrimination. Whatever the explanation, the characters of DRT are overwhelmingly aware of how their racial identity contributes to their exploitation at the hands of non-blacks.

In its exploration of the theme of outsiders controlling the administration of non-white communities, DRT addresses property ownership as well as consumerism. In an early scene, an aggravated Buggin’ Out calls out the white Clifton for having accidentally scuffed up his expensive sneakers. The Larry Bird jersey that he wears in this scene marks Clifton as an outsider in this black community — Bird was one of very few white NBA stars at this time, and he was generally seen as a hero for white fans seeking an alternative to the black Magic Johnson.[41] Buggin’ Out demands, “Who told you to walk on my side of the block? Who told you to be in my neighborhood?” Clifton gestures to the building behind him, “I own this brownstone!”[42] Lee’s choice of words here is significant, because it contrasts Clifton’s apparent living situation with that of his black and Puerto Rican neighbors and it emphasizes his ownership, rather than just his habitation, of the brownstone. The homes that we see in the film — Mookie’s, Tina’s, and Mother Sister’s — are cramped apartments, all of which seem to be significantly smaller than Clifton’s townhouse. This scene is again reminiscent of Ture’s colonial paradigm because, as a white outsider owning land in a black community, Clifton is being depicted as a member of the “white power structure,” and his presence clearly vexes his black neighbors.

In minimizing the presence of traditional scapegoats for social strife, Lee’s portrayal of urban poverty addresses questions of agency. DRT refutes myths regarding the “culture of poverty” and focuses instead on economic exploitation at the hands of outsiders. Implicit in this understanding is the notion that inner-city communities of color should not be considered responsible for their impoverished conditions. Instead, the film seems to suggest, blame should be assigned to political leaders who allow for situations like these to develop. This message is clearly visible in the way that DRT demonstrates disdain for then-New York Mayor Ed Koch.

Koch’s mayoralty was characterized by a tense relationship with the city’s black communities, especially in Brooklyn in the Bronx. When he came into office in 1978, he was taking the reins of a city in the middle of the worst economic crisis in its modern history. Koch’s platform for economic recovery included a number of conservative reforms, such as making cutbacks to social welfare and infrastructure programs. These cutbacks disproportionately affected the outer boroughs.[43] Another element of his plan was centralizing bureaucracy to more effectively control budgeting.[44] Re-allocating decision-making power to the mostly white, Manhattan-based city government offended the residents of East Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods, who perceived the decision as a sign that Koch did not trust black neighborhoods to self-govern.

The foremost reason why Mayor Koch alienated New York’s black communities, however, was his handling of tensions caused by racial violence toward the end of his mayoralty. The most notorious example was the Howard Beach incident. In late 1986, three black men were driving through Queens when their car broke down. Walking through the white neighborhood of Howard Beach, the men were assaulted by a group of white youths in front of a pizzeria. When 23-year-old Michael Griffith tried to flee, he was fatally struck by a car. During the public outcry that followed, Koch suggested that black protesters should not march through white neighborhoods like Bensonhurst to avoid upsetting their Italian-American populations, a decision that drew a firestorm from the city’s already-outraged black communities.[45]

Lee, already an outspoken critic of Koch, infused DRT with a heavy anti-Koch message. In the scene where Buggin’ Out, Radio Raheem, and Smiley are conspiring to confront Sal, the building in front of which they congregate has been graffitied with the message “Dump Koch.”[46] Additionally, Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy is covered in campaign posters from Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential bid, which Koch had vehemently opposed, much to the resentment of the city’s black Democrats. The most obvious indication of DRT’s anti-Koch message, however, comes at the very end of the film. As the radio jock Mr. Señor Love Daddy effectively narrates the aftermath of the previous night’s riot, he mentions that City Hall is putting together a taskforce to figure out what happened in Bed-Stuy. The line implies that Koch and his inner circle is completely oblivious to the problems faced by inner-city non-white communities, blissfully unaware of the realities of modern racism that set the stage for such violent unrest. Lee’s frustration with Koch comes into even sharper focus a moment later when Mr. Señor Love Daddy reminds his listeners that the mayoral primaries are just a few weeks away and they need to get out and “vote, vote, vote.” Lee has said in multiple interviews that he hoped his film would inspire black New Yorkers to vote Koch out of office, and his wish was fulfilled three months after DRT’s release, when David Dinkins beat Koch and went on to become the city’s first black mayor.[47]

In the context of DRT’s message that, rather than a “culture of poverty,” neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy are exploited by forces outside of their control, the film’s criticism of Koch takes on a double-meaning. Similar charges of indifference to the plight of non-white communities could easily be levied against politicians across the U.S. The references to racial tensions in the New York political scene, even at the time, were esoteric and would have been unfamiliar to mainstream audiences. Because of DRT’s broader emphasis on the pressures affecting poor urban communities in general, though, viewers unfamiliar with Koch could interpret him as an almost symbolic figure: he represents the antagonism from political leaders everywhere that contributes to the plight of neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy.

Another way that Lee addresses the question of agency in his exploration of black urban strife is with the motif of heat. Throughout the film, heat serves as a metaphor for the psychological pressure of racism. The sense of deep discomfort that heat-related imagery conveys to the audience is analogous to the stress that simply living in an environment like Bed-Stuy imparts. In making DRT, Lee was obsessed with finding ways that he could emphasize the brutal temperatures affecting the minds of his characters. “For this film,” Lee has reminisced about DRT, “I also wanted to do something that took place on the hottest day of the summer. I’d never read any study or anything, but I knew things just got crazy in New York once it hit 95 degrees.”[48] In the behind-the-scenes documentary, Lee mentions to members of the film crew that in preparing for the film, he came across a statistic about how the murder rate in New York goes up during weeks where the temperature nears the mid-90’s.[49] Marketing materials for the film also emphasize Lee’s desire to have heat be an integral part of the film-viewing experience. Newspaper advertisements read, “It’s the hottest day of the summer. You can do nothing, you can do something, or you can… Do the Right Thing.” Clearly, Lee did not want the motif of extreme heat to escape his audience’s understanding of the film, and the cinematographic techniques that he employed to fulfill this goal made sure of it.

The film’s color palette is the most effective tool employed by Lee and his team in making the audience feel the heat. Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson recalls that when Lee informed him of his aspiration for the film to accurately convey the sensation of extreme heat, he worked closely with the set design team in order to use colors to their advantage.[50] Dickerson’s team made sure that, for all the façades that the production team either constructed or painted over for principal photography, they relied primarily on shades of red. The lighting used for numerous interior scenes, such as those taking place inside the apartments of Da Mayor, Tina, and Mookie, also rely on orange-red hues.

Naturally, the movie’s content also emphasizes the degree to which the heat weighs upon the characters. A notable scene early in the runtime takes place in a convenience store. The camera pans over a display of assorted newspapers and periodicals. Every front page headline screams at the reader in bold typeface about the heat wave and record-breaking temperatures. For good measure, the soundtrack at this moment plays “Can’t Stand It” by Steel Pulse, whose chorus sings, “I know you can’t stand it/ You can’t stand the heat.”[51] Also, throughout the film, every close-up shot on a character shows their face glistening with perspiration.

The effect of all of these technical decisions is to convey that, because of the sweltering heat, the characters are operating under severe pressure, a sensation that Lee ensures that the viewers share with the characters. As this message sinks in with the audience, it forces the viewer to reconsider their psychological evaluations of the characters. Lee’s fascination with the relationship between temperature and violence speaks to a larger belief that individuals’ basic character can be altered through enough exposure to enough external pressures. The lengths to which he and Dickerson went in order to simulate the heat for the audience indicates that they were aiming to imply that the characters’ hostility towards each other — and ultimately their decision to destroy Sal’s Famous Pizzeria — is not entirely a matter of choice. The mental load placed on the Bed-Stuy residents by the heat is partially responsible for fostering such animosity that culminated in violence. Through its use of the heat motif, DRT seeks to make its viewers understand that the struggle of impoverished black communities cannot be merely explained as a problem of individuals’ moral failings. If individual will power and agency can over-ridden by forces outside of an individual’s control, then the “culture of poverty” paradigm’s emphasis on personal responsibility is misplaced. Heat as a metaphor is a principal component of Lee’s strategy for simulating the effects of oppression on the residents of his Bed-Stuy.

Similarly, in DRT, Lee illustrates the feelings of exploitation and discrimination through his re-imagining of Bed-Stuy. Beyond the absence of a noticeable drug problem, DRT’s version of Bed-Stuy differs from its real-life counterpart in a number of significant ways. In her essay “The Cinema of Spike Lee: Images of a Mosaic City,” film historian Catherine Pouzoulet attempts to address this disparity by pointing to the ethnic makeup of the film’s neighborhood.[52] She points out that it would have been impossible to find a white-owned pizzeria in Bed-Stuy, as well as to see white police officers regularly patrolling the area, in the way that the film depicts. After addressing these departures from reality, though, she simply moves on to her larger discussion of how DRT reflected the growing role of urban issues as a subject of popular culture entities. What Pouzoulet fails to understand is that the alterations that Lee made to his version of Bed-Stuy are necessary for the film’s goal of simulating the effects of racial tensions. The director has made plain on numerous occasions that he wanted his work to pay tribute to the tragedy of the Howard Beach incident.[53] By effectively transplanting the white-owned pizzeria where the assault took place into a black neighborhood, Lee is able to focus on what he calls “the love-hate relationship between African-Americans and Italian-Americans” as well as other sources of strife in black communities whilst maintaining continuity of location.[54] Similarly, by placing a Korean-owned convenience store across the street from the pizzeria, and by stationing white police officers down the block, Lee is effectively creating a neighborhood where his characters can simultaneously confront a plethora of the sources of discrimination that residents of real Bed-Stuy face regularly, if not concurrently.

It is through this technique that Lee simulates the experience of oppression for his viewers. As the film goes on, we witness a succession of racially charged confrontations between characters that continue to escalate until the climactic riot and the assault on Sal’s. The mental weight of discrimination is only possible because continuity of place enables the viewer to believe that all these confrontations could feasibly take place in such quick succession. One scene, for example, features two white police officers engaging in a resentful stare-down with three elderly black characters seated in the shade. Once the police cruiser passes, though, it leaves the Korean-owned convenience store across the street in plain sight to the men. The character of ML then starts pontificating about the injustice of there being so many businesses in the neighborhood that profit off of black customers, but virtually none that are actually black-owned. The blocking of this scene makes for a completely logical flow of events, and it implants in the viewer’s mind the notion that these characters have to put up with oppression not only in the form of mistreatment by law enforcement, but also in the form of economic exploitation from non-blacks running the majority of commercial enterprises in black neighborhoods. Through the use of his fictionalized version of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Spike Lee is able to effectively present his message about how the pressures of discrimination in all its forms can add up and lead black communities to express their unrest in violent ways.

DRT’s portrayal of racism as a structural rather than individual problem is best exemplified in the film’s climax. Officer Long’s murder of Radio Raheem is clearly neither premeditated nor intentional, and it occurs while Officer Ponte pleads, “That’s enough, man!”[55] The imagery of this scene is reminiscent of the 1983 murder of Michael Stewart, a young black man from Brooklyn who, according to witnesses, was killed when white police officers placed him in a brutal chokehold.[56] Stewart’s death turned police brutality into a hot-button issue in New York in the mid-1980’s, and the parallels in this scene would have resonated with contemporary audiences. However, by shining an almost sympathetic light on the officers responsible for such brutality, Lee is suggesting that they are not necessarily deserving of the community’s wrath. Indeed, similar to the way that the acquittal of the officers responsible for Stewart’s death inspired dialogue about racism as a systemic problem, DRT’s characters direct their rage at Sal’s pizzeria.[57] To the residents of Bed-Stuy, Sal’s is a symbol of their status as a colonized people because it is an agent of their economic exploitation, and Radio Raheem’s death simply lit the powder keg of their anger. While DRT undoubtedly portrays police-community relations as a force of oppression on Bed-Stuy, it resists the urge to depict officers as outright villainous. In doing so, it shifts its focus back to structural forms of discrimination.

The 2016 Academy Awards ceremony, twenty-six years after DRT’s snub, was bookended by plays of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” The rap anthem played for the first time as host Chris Rock took the stage and delivered a monologue in which he sharply criticized the Academy for the lack of diversity among the films and actors it had chosen to recognize that year (not a single non-white person had been nominated for any of the four categories for acting).[58] Rock later ended the ceremony by showing solidarity with a civil rights movement, declaring, “Black lives matter!” As music began playing to signal the end of the night, he chanted “Brooklyn!” right before the credits began rolling to the sound of “Fight the Power.” For those aware of the song’s connection to Spike Lee’s masterpiece, it served as a powerful reminder of the how the Academy’s diversity problem had led to one of its most notorious snubs and of how little had changed in the intervening two and a half decades. Not only does Hollywood continue to resist supporting non-white filmmakers who seek a voice in the American cultural landscape, but its elite circles also still fail to give well-deserved credit to artists of color whose work challenges popular notions regarding the social hierarchy.

At this moment of heightened racial tensions, when we regularly see uprisings in black communities like those in St. Louis, Baltimore, and Cleveland, Spike Lee’s magnum opus is as relevant as ever. In the wake of riots like these ones, the mainstream American media’s response is often predictable: pundits and columnists express shock and ask whence came such violent anger;[59] others argue that protesters’ actions are incomprehensible because in causing such destruction they are effectively tearing away at the livelihood and social fabric of their own communities.[60] Do the Right Thing offers a powerful rebuttal to these tired refrains. While a riot may be sparked by a particularly heinous injustice, it is rarely apt to call it reactionary. The people taking to the streets to express their anguish are doing so after a lifetime of repression and as a means of pushing back against overwhelming feelings of powerlessness. DRT’s structure, seeming at times to favor vignettes over a single linear narrative, effectively conveys this message to the audience. By depicting for the viewer a wide variety of encounters that reflect the characters’ respective standings the social hierarchy, the film compresses the long-term experience of discrimination.

Notes

[1] “Kim Basinger presents Best Original Score (Academy Awards 1990),” filmed March 1990, Youtube video, 2:42, posted July 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8bclKPuuE0

[2] DRT in text.

[3] “The Snubbed Are ‘Nominated’ at the Podium,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 27 March 1990. Accessed 26 March 2016, http://articles.philly.com/1990-03-27/entertainment/25905599_1_nominees-for-best-director-screenplay-picture-award

[4] Roger Ebert, “Do the Right Thing,” Chicago Sun-Times, 30 June 1989, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/do-the-right-thing-1989.

[5] Stanley Crouch, “Do the Race Thing,” The Village Voice, Vol. XXXIII, №25, 20 June 1989, pp. 73–74.

[6] Michael T. Kaufman, “In a New Film, Spike Lee Tries To Do the Thing,” New York Times, 25 June 1989, accessed 26 March 2016, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/film/062589lee-thing-profile.html.

[7] Michel Marriott, “Raw Reactions to Film on Racial Tension,” New York Times, 03 July 1989, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/03/nyregion/raw-reactions-to-film-on-racial-tension.html

[8] Nancy Williamson, “Spike Lee; Lost Vision,” New York Times. 23 July 1989. Accessed 10 February 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/23/movies/l-spike-lee-lost-vision-800689.html

[9] William Grant, “Reflecting the Times: Do the Right Thing Revisited,” in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ed. Mark A. Reid, pp. 17.

[10] Thulani Davis, “We’ve Gotta Have It,” The Village Voice, Vol. XXXIII, №25, 20 June 1989, pp. 68.

[11] Scott Feinberg, “Honorary Oscar Recipient Spike Lee Also a Frequent Critic of the Academy,” The Hollywood Reporter, 27 August 2015, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/honorary-oscar-recipient-spike-lee-818143

[12] Spike Lee, The Making of Do the Right Thing, Do the Right Thing, dir. Spike Lee, produced by Spike Lee, 1989, Universal Pictures, DVD, 2009.

[13] Goutham Gnanasekaran, “Scene Breakdown | Do the Right Thing (Part 1),” filmed May 2015, Youtube video, 7:58, posted May 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIy2cHpzUy8&index=17&list=WL

[14] Spike Lee, The Making of Do the Right Thing.

[15] Do the Right Thing, dir. Spike Lee, Universal Pictures, 1989, 0:20:20.

[16] Pamela McClintock, “CinemaCon: African-American Moviegoers Increase for First Time Since 2009,” The Hollywood Reporter, 25 March 2014, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cinemacon-african-american-moviegoers-increase-691170

[17] DRT, 0:47:00

[18] Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Washington, D.C., Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.blackpast.org/primary/moynihan-report-1965

[19] Ken Auletta, The Underclass (New York: The Overlook Press, 1982), pp. 72.

[20] Kay S. Hymowitz, “The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies,” City Journal, Summer 2005, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html

[21] DRT, 1:13:55

[22] DRT, 0:45:00

[23] DRT, 1:49:00

[24] Lou Cannon, “Turning Point,” Chapter 18 in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public Affairs, 1991), pp. 488–520.

[25] John Fialka, “Reagan’s Stories Don’t Always Check Out,” Eugene Register-Guard, 09 February 1976, accessed 26 March 2016, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19760209&id=Y9ZVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=K-ADAAAAIBAJ&pg=4138,2275149

[26] Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (New York: Free Press, 2004), Web., accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.amazon.com/The-Mommy-Myth-Idealization-Motherhood/dp/0743260465, pp. 178.

[27] Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., “The ‘Welfare Queen’ Experiment,” Nieman Reports, Vol. 53, №2, pp. 49–52, Web, accessed 26 March 2016, http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/216747912?accountid=11311

[28] DRT, 0:13:24

[29] DRT, 0:44:17

[30] George H.W. Bush, “Presidential Address on National Drug Policy” (speech, Washington, DC, 5 September 1989), C-Span, http://www.c-span.org/video/?8921-1/presidential-address-national-drug-policy.

[31] Grant, 28.

[32] Danny Aiello, quoted in Spike Lee: Do the Right Thing (Los Angeles: Ammo Books, 2010), by Jason Matloff and Spike Lee, ed. Steve Crist, pp. 16.

[33] Spike Lee, quoted in Matloff, pp. 34.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Davis, 68–70.

[37] DRT, 0:43:47

[38] Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, “White Power: the Colonial Situation,” Chapter I in Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 2–33.

[39] DRT, 1:00:05

[40] DRT, 0:40:24

[41] “Bird: NBA ‘a Black Man’s Game,’” ESPN, 10 June 2004, accessed 26 March 2016, http://espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=1818396.

[42] DRT, 0:36:02

[43] Jonathan Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

[44] Michael Harrington, “When Ed Koch was Still a Liberal: Memories of a Man and His Times,” Dissent, Section: Memories and Impressions, Fall 1987, pp. 595–602.

[45] Soffer.

[46] DRT, 1:27:25.

[47] Logan Hill, “How I Made It: Spike Lee on ‘Do the Right Thing’,” New York Magazine, 07 April 2008, accessed 26 March 2016, http://nymag.com/anniversary/40th/culture/45772/.

[48] Spike Lee, quoted in Matloff, pp. 9.

[49] Spike Lee, The Making of Do the Right Thing.

[50] Ernest Dickerson, “#31 — ERNEST DICKERSON — Director/ (DP) Cinematographer THE FILMS OF SPIKE LEE — DO THE RIGHT THING — MALCOLM X,” Interview, Audio blog post, The Road to Cinema Podcast, Jog Road Productions, 23 April 2015, iTunes, accessed 26 March 2016.

[51] DRT, 0:25:34

[52] Catherine Pouzoulet, “The Cinema of Spike Lee: Images of a Mosaic City,” in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ed. Mark A. Reid, pp. 31–49.

[53] Lee, quoted in Matloff, pp. 9.

[54] Ibid.

[55] DRT, 1:34:57

[56] Jane Gross, “Witness Says Officer Used a Choke Hold on Stewart’s Neck,” New York Times, 22 August 1985, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/22/nyregion/witness-says-officer-used-a-choke-hold-on-stewart-s-neck.html.

[57] Isabel Wilkerson, “Jury Acquits all Transit Officers in 1983 Death of Michael Stewart,” New York Times, 25 November 1985, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/25/nyregion/jury-acquits-all-transit-officers-in-1983-death-of-michael-stewart.html?scp=1&sq=%22michael+stewart%22+jury+white&st=nyt&pagewanted=all.

[58] Chris Rock, “Chris Rock — Oscar’s Monologue 2016 (Eng Subs),” filmed February 2016, Youtube video, 11:00, posted March 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NU31kz8r4k.

[59] Julia Craven, “Wolf Blitzer Fails to Goad Protester Into Condemning Violence,” Huffington Post, 29 April 2015, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/29/wolf-blitzer-baltimore-protests_n_7168964.html.

[60] Charles Blow, “Violence in Baltimore,” New York Times, 29 April 2015, accessed 26 March 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/opinion/charles-blow-violence-in-baltimore.html?_r=0.

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