I have to admit, I was more than a little confused by Spike Lee’s message here. I understand that none of the characters seem to be “doing the right thing,” with the exception of The Mayor, but he’s playing with all manner of sub-surface racial-tension throughout and he reaches for something a little deeper at the end when (mostly racial but some economic) tensions finally do explode, the sympathetic-but-only-up-to-a-point white businessman loses his business, and we finally get some black people up on those walls. Which solves what, exactly? The impoverished blacks of Bedstuy are still in Bedstuy; there is no intimation that the vacant storefront owned by Sal will become the fixture of the three middle-aged sit-around-all-day blacks’ dream; will become a black-owned and operated business. Mookie is no better at the end of the movie than he was at the beginning (apart from now being “a regular Rockefeller”); same guy, same problems, same economic and personal inabilities to fix or confront his problems. He hasn’t learned a bit from his experiences with Sal’s racist and Sal’s open-minded sons, or from Radio’s death, or from the riot. The entire cast of Do The Right Thing is static apart from the Mayor and Mother-Sister, who change in regards to how they regard one another but not perhaps in how they regard themselves. The crusade of Geeky-Glasses to get pictures of black people on the wall only comes off as absurd to me; I don’t understand, I can’t sympathize, I think he’s making a huge deal out of nothing. I get (grok?) the mob’s justifiable rage at having stood by and watched the cops kill Radio, and I inwardly groaned as Sal said completely the wrong thing in that situation (“You do what you have to do” instead of, say, “I never meant for him to die” which would have gone some way of putting him and the angry blacks on the same side instead of aligning him with the cops), and I pleaded then laughed at the antics of the frantic Korean grocer (“I like you! I black!”). I utterly failed to understand Mookie’s reasoning in chucking the garbage can through Sal’s window. Was he trying to distract the mob from tearing Sal and his sons apart? Was that supposed to be some sort of major pivotal moral moment for him?
Either I missed some things, Lee’s message wasn’t clear enough, or his message was essentially “there is no solution; there is no hope.”
No Comments Yet
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
