Do The Right Thing

BFI Film Classics

by Ed Guerrero

This text discusses how the film, "Do The Right Thing" epitomises Spike Lee's powerful impact on the representation of race and difference in America, the progress of black film-making and the rise of multicultural voices in the media, and how it confonts institutional discrimination head on.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 27, 2001

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARRIVAL AT SPEED

Hollywood Shuffle 1987 (Robert Townsend)
Do the Right Thing 1989 (Spike Lee)
Boyz N The Hood 1991 (John Singleton)
New Jack City 1991 (Mario Van Peebles)
Jungle Fever 1991 (Spike Lee)
Hangin’ With The Homeboys 1991 (Joseph B Vasquez)
Malcolm X 1992 (Spike Lee)
Menace II Society 1993 (Hughes Brothers)
Higher Learning 1995 (John Singleton)

You can see that for a while there it looked like the day of the African American movie director had arrived. Nowadays, not so much. The above movies were all great and came out in a phenomenal adrenaline rush. Do the Right Thing was the greatest of these movies. 27 years later (I saw it again last year) it has lost no power.




SAL’S FAMOUS PIZZERIA

On one block of Brooklyn, there’s a single white-owned place, which is a pizza joint. Inside on one wall there’s an Italian American Wall of Fame – lotsa pictures of Frank Sinatra, Connie Francis, Frankie Valli, etc.



BUGGIN' OUT (a radical guy) : How come you ain't got no brothers up?

MOOKIE (the delivery guy): Ask Sal.

BUGGIN' OUT : Sal, how come you ain't got no brothers up on the wall here?



SAL : You want brothers up on the Wall of Fame, you open up your own business, then you can do what you wanna do. My pizzeria, Italian Americans up on the wall.

BUGGIN' OUT : Sal, that might be fine, you own this, but rarely do I see any Italian Americans eating in here. All I've ever seen is Black folks. So since we spend much money here, we do have some say.

SAL : You a troublemaker?

PINO (Sal’s son) : You making trouble?

BUGGIN' OUT : Put some brothers up on this Wall of Fame. We want Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Michael Jordan tomorrow.

UNEXPECTED CONNECTION

What connects Spike Lee with Bob Dylan? Answer : Spike’s dad Bill, who was a jazz bassist and all round session man for years, and wound up playing on a session for Bob’s album Bringing it All Back Home (1965) when Spike was 8. Spike probably doesn’t care a hoot about that but I think it’s pretty cool.

FILMTHEORYSPEAK GO STRAIGHT TO HELL

Professor Guerrero is like a drunk guy trying to walk a straight line for the cops, he mostly gives a great readable account of Do The Right Thing – like here, where he puts his finger on one of the best things about this movie:

These are the voices of complicated and flawed characters, usually more irritating and problematic than they are admirable… No particular character, voice or social orientation is supremely privileged or provides smug, final answers to the contradictions, issues and grievances raised by the film’s stream of polyphonic voices.

but then he stumbles and trips right back into filmtheoryspeak :

The sense of a universal African American visuality, replete with hip-hop fashions and black music, is perhaps this film’s most significant, and yet hardly remarked upon, contributions to building a mainstream, African American cinema practice that challenges and erodes the skin-colour hierarchy of Hollywood’s classic optical hegemony.

My spellcheck doesn't even think visuality is a word.

BOYCOTT SAL NOW!!

BUGGIN' OUT : Check this out. Y'know Sal's. I'm trying to organize a boycott of Sal's pizza joint. Ya see what I'm saying?

RADIO RAHEEM : I almost had to yoke him this afternoon. Tell me, tell me, Radio Raheem, to turn my music down. Didn't even say please. Who the fuck he think he is? Don Corleone and shit.

BUGGIN' OUT : He makes all his money off us Black people and I don't see nuthin' but
Italians all up in there, Sylvester Stallone and shit. Ya see what I'm saying, homeboy?

RADIO RAHEEM : Talk to me.

BUGGIN' OUT : We shouldn't buy a single slice, spend a single penny till some people of color are put up in there.



BLACK LIVES

The movie was made in 1989. In one crucial scene a cop restrains an angry black teenager using a choke hold administered with his baton. The teenager dies. The incident was based on several similar deaths of black youths in the 1980s. This book was written in 2001 and the author sorrowfully reports that 11 years after the film

The news continues to be consistently bad, punctuated with an unending series of suspicious deaths of people of colour at police hands… perhaps the real tragedy of Do the Right Thing is that all of its issues are still so socially relevant

16 further years down the line, this part of the book requires no amendment.

THE MESSAGE

If you never saw this movie, check it out. One of my top favourites.

[Ric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do the Right Thing is Spike Lee’s best in my opinion, so I was so glad the BFI included it in the series. I enjoyed how they talked about the controversy surrounding it (and how Spike Lee doesn’t really shy away from that in any of his films), as well as how much of a product of its time period it was. Though I think my favorite part was the focus on Radio Raheem and Public Enemy, he’s possibly my favorite character in Spike Lee’s filmography.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ed Guerrero's BFI: Do The Right Thing (2001) is another interesting discussion of a seminal film. Guerrero discussed the societal context in which the film was made as well as the reaction of critics. As usual there is a summary of the film interspersed with commentary about the film and the reactions and the context in which it came into being. It is the kind of film that one rarely comes across these days-the conversation film. I can remember talking with about what Spike Lee's message was in this film. I can remember the hype around the film and being immediately drawn in to the film with the rousing opening sequence with Rosie Perez doing a savage dance to Public Enemy's "Fight the Power." There are a number of well cast character actors in the film as well-Giancarlo Esposito who would go onto widespread fame as Gus Firing in Breaking Bad, the always impressive John Turturro, Danny Aiello, and a young Martin Lawrence among others. A provocative and though-provoking film that about issues that are still socially relevant.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the language was unnecessary, but I'm probably wrong if so many others thought it was necessary.

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a shit book for such a brilliant film. This thing is so riddled with errors that I stopped marking up my copy. One example: he consistently misspells Tawana Brawley's name ('Twana'). He uses it maybe a dozen times. There's a still from the movie in the book; the picture has the correct spelling.

How anybody writing a book can be so fucking lazy is beyond me. And by the way, he's a tenured professor of 'film studies', naturally. An intellectual fraud for a fraudulent discipline.

DO NOT BUY THIS PIECE OF SHIT; as a reference for the film, it is a failure.

[Colin Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ed Guerrero's Do the Right Thing is a short but informative exegesis of Spike Lee's seminal work, 1989's Do the Right Thing. Both politically and cinematically, Guerrero deftly contextualizes Lee's film. Furthermore, Guerrero demonstrates what rudimentary film analysis looks like, which explains why so many college-level instructors make Guerrero's book required reading when studying Lee's film.

[Russio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Low 4 this reissue in that it remains an incredible film but the BFI classic is now 20 years out of date. Not as readable as The Exorcist edition bit on a par with the Blade Runner equivalent, this provides a fly through of the film's narrative and social import but lacks a bit of the behind the scenes matter that would have provided a more rounded volume. A reasonable primer to a genuine classic.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent essay about the classic Spike Lee film, written in a straightforward and engaging way. Definitely worth looking at if you're interested in learning more about a perspective on the significance of the film, as well as some background information about the political environment of the time.

[Kenneth Buff · Rating 1 out of 5]

You learn nothing from this book you wouldn't know by watching the movie. There are no interviews with anyone involved with the making of the movie, and they are no anecdotes. It's simply Guerrero describing the scenes as they happened on screen. A waste of time.