Do the Right Thing

Saw Do the Right Thing, a troubling and ambiguous film. It's chiefly concerned with racial conflict. One of it's opening scenes is of a street-crazy raving about a photo of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr shaking hands. The street-crazy shows up in the film again and again, always with photo in hand, like a subconscious that keeps worrying at the same issue. The ghosts of both Martin Luther and Malcolm X both hang heavy of the film. The instinct toward peaceful coexistence curdles into violence and, unnervingly, upsettingly, the violence gets the results that the peace only hoped to someday achieve. But then the film equivocates again, unsure. Did anything really change?

The protagonist is Mookie, the delivery boy at a corner pizzeria. The day is kicked off by a young dude who is spoiling for a fight complaining about a wall of famous Italians. "Why are there no black people?" He accusingly asks. The owner responds by strong-arming him about how this is his place and his wall. The dude tries to stir up a boycott but only manages to attract idiots and the insane. The film is fairly charitable, I think, in its portrayal of people's general unwillingness to jump aboard the outrage-wagon. If the internet is any indication (that's a huge if there) righteous indignation fuels some people's lives (hilarious trivia, firefox does not consider internet to be a word. Capital-I Internet is the correct spelling.)

Anyway, the day is hot and tensions rise. The film shows the comings and goings, the petty squabbles and amiable meetings, of the neighborhood all set to a strident and soulful saxophone and piano soundtrack. Mookie tries to stay sane while defending and receiving abuse from his perpetually angry boss and his boss's blatantly racist and evil son. He is undervalued and mistreated. His boss hits on his sister. He tries to maintain peace, but nothing changes. The other dude meanwhile tries to stir up trouble, but is utterly misguided. Throughout, the block community laughs and fights, loves and hates, and is incredibly colorful, vibrant and no-doubt sanitized.

This was a difficult film for me. I'm profoundly ignorant of history and racial issues. On top of this, the film seems to equivocate wildly. An old woman named Mother Sister calls for peace, then screams for the destruction of the pizza-joint in the climax, then wildly shrieks "No! No!" during the denouement. What's going on? The film's title tells us to "do the right thing" but does not tell us just what the right thing is? Everybody is justified, everything is wrong.

I am completely unable to comment intelligibly on the racial content of the film. As far as I am concerned, it was a troubling, tense, and interesting film. It doesn't do much novel mechanically speaking (the eye-searing primary colors and 80s couture remind me of a music video. The film sticks to a music-video-ish visual vocabulary) but it's the most recent film I've seen to deal with race so frankly and with such nuance. It's difficult to determine exactly who the film considers to be the bad and good guys and which actions it considers justified and which are just presented without comment. That assessment may reveal the depths of my ignorance in these matters, but there it is. Like I say, a tough film.