Day 95: Do the Right Thing (1989)
Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” really knows how to bring the heat, both figuratively and literally. As hilarious as it is intense, Lee’s vision of urban life blasted onto the screen in 1989 and created a watershed of discussion between all parties concerning racial tensions in America. While films like “In the Heat of the Night” and even “To Kill a Mockingbird” had looked at race before on the big screen, “Do the Right Thing” took it a step further, drawing less on simple bigotry and more on the anger that comes from several races and their cultures colliding day in and day out in the close quarters of their Brooklyn neighborhood.
In “Do the Right Thing,” director Spike Lee also plays our main protagonist, Mookie, a young man living in a black Brooklyn neighborhood with his sister Jade, who wants nothing more than for him to move out. To make ends meet and take care of his girlfriend and child, Mookie delivers pizzas for Salvatore “Sal” Frangione (Danny Aiello) and his local pizza joint, but spends most of his days shirking his work and chatting with Sal’s two sons, Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson).
On one particular day, as the city’s temperature reaches record highs, the entire neighborhood is sweating it outside and tensions between everyone begin to rise. A drunk called Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) is constantly bothering Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), though he wants nothing but her affection. A large man called Radio Raheem blasts his boombox wherever he goes, getting on the Latino gangs nerves as they try to play their own music. Smiley, a mentally disabled man, bothers everyone while trying to sell hand-colored pictures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Without a doubt, the town is simmering under the heat and when the black Radio’s stereo is smashed by the white Italian Sal, anger grows to a fever pitch and Mookie finds himself in the middle of it- stuck between his race and his boss.
From “Do the Right Thing’s” very beginning, tension is brought to the table. As the opening credits roll, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” plays and its understood quite clearly that this will not be a tale of minorities standing up for themselves in the face of oppression, but bringing the fight to the oppressors. All throughout the film, music acts as a key player in both explaining and mediating the racial climate that is rising. To do this, Lee gives the neighborhood its own radio station and DJ, Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), who sets the different tones of the film with his music, almost as if marking chapters in the film’s story. In a way, this role could be compared to Wolfman Jack in “America Graffiti,” as both men seem to oversee the action in the film as more of a narrator than anything else and comment accordingly with the songs they play.
With Jackson’s Love Daddy, he certainly stands as the film’s voice of reason. While everyone else loses their temper in the heat, Love Daddy stays inside his air conditioned studio and reminds everyone to “chill,” which can be taken in many ways as the anger in the film grows. In fact, in one of the film’s most popular scenes, Mookie, Pino, and several others look directly in the camera and shout out racist words of hate about one another, only to be stopped by Love Daddy who raises his hands in his studio, stares directly into the camera and says, “Yo! Hold up! Time out! TIME OUT! Y’all take a chill! Ya need to cool that shit out! And that’s the double truth, Ruth!” Though Lee leaves his film’s view on race relations vague, ending it with quotes from both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, it maybe Love Daddy who is stating the story’s true point of view. Maybe we won’t ever get along completely, but we won’t at all if we just don’t “take a chill.”
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