Retrospective: Do The Right Thing (Patreon)

CW: lynching, anti-Black racism

Screened in 35mm at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester, NY, courtesy of the Eastman Museum.

Last time I was in Bedstuy, it seemed like honkies occupied every last brownstone on the block. There were no small grocery stories I could see; just big chain-owned shops shat out by some genius who considered Wegmans insufficiently white. I spent time with a white lady who I later found out was paying for music by neo-Nazi black metal bands. There was a sense of defeat: like Bedstuy had failed in its attempt to clone Bushwick.

Everyone is right that part of the tragedy of Do the Right Thing is how little has changed. We know that amiable business owners still order the lynchings of Black men, and that panicked honkies will sic the police after entire neighborhoods for spraying a little water on them. The names of Michael Griffith and Eleanor Bumpurs have been erased from popular history. There’s more to learn from Do the Right Thing than “hasn’t America stayed racist?”, but the fact that a 35th anniversary screening on 35mm film felt so current is a damning indictment of this country.

There’s also a lot of joy in Do the Right Thing, something the white critics who insisted Spike Lee was going to start a riot deliberately ignored and couldn’t appreciate. Spike Lee brought together one of the all-time great ensemble casts in American film. Any other movie would be remembered for having Mother Sister, Da Mayor, Radio Raheem, Buggin’ Out, or Sweet Dick Willie. That one movie has all of those characters is a miracle that probably no American film has rivaled since.

Do the Right Thing is an incredibly funny movie too — “you wanna boycott someone? You ought to start with the goddamn barber that fucked up your head” had me cackling. But it’s not funny in addition to being poignant — its genuine comedic brilliance is the core of its power. As warped and evil as white supremacist society is, Spike Lee knows that it can be pretty fucking funny.

And Lee clearly knows the exact blind spots of white Americans too — including some that I hadn’t consciously clocked. When John Turturro’s character rants to his father Sal, played by Danny Aiello, about his hatred of working in a Black neighborhood (boo-hoo, gentrifier), Sal simply asks “why you got so much anger in you?” And look, as an Italian-American, I’ve heard relatives talking like someone’s problem is that they’re pissed off, rather than that they’re using the N word. This isn’t a documentary, but one suspects Spike Lee used some NSA technology to listen in on some of the conversations that Italian Catholic Boomers have at home.

There’s just so much to address in Do the Right Thing. The knowledge that people like Mother Sister and Da Mayor aren’t welcome in Bedstuy anymore, because people like Sal gentrified the whole neighborhood (Mookie still works there, but his domicile has been outsourced to Queens). There’s just how stupid every character in the movie is, a truth more comforting and awards-courting Movies About Race shy away from. Or you can talk about the greatest James Bond opening credits sequence of all time, with Rosie Perez boxing and dancing to Public Enemy. The fact this got made is tremendous. That it just had a 35th anniversary screening on an original print is nothing short of miraculous. Let’s hope that a restaurant owner in Bedstuy is getting haunted by the ghost of Radio Raheem.