Friday, December 24, 2010
Lit & Lectures / Film / Free Shit / Swag / Books Do the Right Thing
Posted by Ed M. Koziarski on 12.24.10 at 09:44 AM
I'd started taking the El for the first time in 1989, via Metra from Beverly up to summer school at Northwestern, when billboards for Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing began popping up along my route. "It's the hottest day of the summer," they read. "You can do something. You can do nothing. Or you can Do the Right Thing."
Seeing the film was a revelation for my 13-year-old self. The Bed-Stuy milieu bore a certain resemblance to the neighborhoods around the magnet schools I'd attended in West Pullman and Morgan Park. But Brooklyn seemed different than Chicago too. Instead of going home to islands of relative homogeneity at the end of the day to talk smack on other groups amid the safety of our own ethnicity, it seemed that the New Yorkers were in each others' face 24/7, and an explosion was inevitable.
Spike tore off the cover for me, revealing an exhilarating undercurrent of righteous rage. The fiery climax presaged in miniature, or detractors would argue helped inspire, the L.A. Riots three years later. In the epilogue, Malcolm X gets the last word, with a warning we'd do well to heed today:
"I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn't mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't even call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence."
When I'm asked my favorite film, this is still the one I pick.
Spike Lee speaks and signs copies of his photo memoir Spike Lee: Do the Right Thing, written with Jason Matloff, today, Dec. 24, 4-6 p.m. at Barbara's Bookstore, 1218 S. Halsted St.
Comments (10)
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I was living in Birmingham, Alabama, the summer Do the Right Thing came out. Birmingham being, well, Birmingham, no theater in a white neighborhood would play it, so I went to a multiplex in a black neighborhood. The scuttlebutt back then was that the movie provoked black theater audiences to violence, so when the film broke down--in the climactic scene, no less, as Radio Raheem and Sal, locked in combat, burst out the front door of the pizzeria into the street--I braced myself for the worst. Instead the other patrons, like me, sat there patiently until the projection was sorted out. So much for the racial apocalypse.
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Spike Lee served up a fantasy-land ghetto to make the gullible feel better about their liberal pieties: the winos are sages, out-of-wedlock childbirth is funny not disasterous, "Tawana told the truth", and young black men are killed by The Man, not other young black men (the number one cause of young black male mortaility.) The coup de grace is the Malcom X quote, advocating violence, prior to his compatriots taking him at his word and murdering him.
"out-of-wedlock childbirth is funny not disasterous [sic]"
Hey, there's a guy who use to work for the Tribune Company who wants to tell you about a "ghetto shooting template."
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/arresting-…
Word. I'm not a big fan of the film, even though Spike Lee is technically excellent, but it was funny to watch all the white liberals at the Biograph staying to watch the credits like it was holy writ when it came out.
Of course Do The Right Thing was a propaganda film.
But it was an awesome propaganda film.
-- MrJM
Lee makes it possible for us to understand their feelings; his empathy is crucial to the film, because if you can't try to understand how the other person feels, you're a captive inside the box of yourself.
