'Do the Right Thing' Anniversary

I'm not a fan of Spike Lee, the director. He's a loud, angry bigot. Yes, he's quite talented but that means I put him in the same category as Oliver Stone - their clear talent just makes it easier to effectively transmit their myopic anger. It's odd how a movie-director, whose expertise is in image and spectacle can see the world in such simplistic and monochromatic (in Spike's case literally) terms. When I see one of their films, I feel that I'm being lectured by a loud and stupid co-worker. Thankfully, I can just turn the movie off (not so with work), and therein could be a joy I should find with them: I'll rent their movies just so I can turn them off, achieving a grace that the rest of life denies me.

Note, Lee & Stone's talent is manifest; unlike other screed-screamers (e.g. Michael Moore), their movies need to be taken seriously by movie-buffs. And since I am a self-declared cinefile and I felt it necessary to at least see one Lee film. I had already subjected myself to Stone's Platoon - which was quite good if not simplistic - and Wall Street, whose misapplication by Reaganite greedheads shows Stone's unskilled didacticism, and I was turned off him utterly when I saw a few minutes of Natural Born Killers, an experience I revisit whenever I want to make myself nauseous. Since then, no Stone and I'm a happier and smarter man for it.

Everyone acknowledges that Do the Right Thing is Lee's best film, so while I may have seen it when it came out, I saw it again back in the late 90s. And it's terrible. Seriously bad. The characters are caricatures as imagined through Manichean blinders, the "messages" are telegraphed and dangerous, the portrayal of women sexist, and it's knowledge of human behavior flawed. It's a well-made, yet stupid, movie.

But that's my opinion - and I need to recognize that many people think it's Teh Awesome. It has a 98% ranking at Rotten Tomatoes and for African Americans of my age cohort, the movie said very important things. I acknowledge the movie's power, it's ability to speak to people who are different from me. 1989 was a weird time - we were 9 years in Reagan hell with no end in sight, Apartheid was still the law of South Africa, crack and AIDS were wreaking havoc, and - as stated clearly in the movie - incidents like the Howard Beach 'lynching' was in the minds of the black community.

Yet Lee seemed to just become the cinematic arm of Al Sharpton - and the late 80s was filled with Sharpton's most wicked acts (e.g. Tawana Brawley was 1987). And while it's conventional wisdom that there were false accusations by those 'white people' who claimed that Do the Right Thing would result in riots, just because the movie theatres didn't erupt, is it wrong to connect the call to arms in the movie with the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom or the Rodney King riots in 1992?

Yeah, I know. As a sociologist-in-training how can I claim that a movie that premiered in 1989 lead to riots 2 and 3 years later? Well, uh, if a movie is beloved + advocates, in some measure, violence by young black men as a vehicle for reacting to oppression + young black men react to perceived oppression by rioting soon after = a serious possibility of linked behavior.

Note, I dislike the movie as a piece of art without getting into the real-world misery it may have caused. But I would like to believe that comic book morality can be exposed for what it is and recognized.

All that said, there was a recent interview in New York Magazine with Lee on the 20th anniversary of his movie. And despite all I wrote above, I sympathize with his sentiment here: Q&A With Spike Lee on Making 'Do the Right Thing' -- New York Magazine:

[NY Mag] Do the Right Thing never won an Oscar.

[Spike Lee] Remember what Kim Basinger did? Onstage she said, "The best film of the year is not even nominated, and it’s Do the Right Thing." I didn’t even know her. But when Driving Miss Mother[---]king Daisy won Best Picture, that hurt … No one’s talking about Driving Miss Daisy now."

He's right and not only in this one occasion.

I've written elsewhere about how the Oscar "Best Picture" is often a flash-in-the-sky weepy which moves the maudlin high-school dropouts who populate the 'academy.' Do the Right Thing is no Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, but it was sick irony that a movie about Southern race hierarchy (DMD) beat Lee's movie about race rebellion (and it doesn't help that DMD's nice white people are Jews, that must hurt).

Yet, just to say, Glory was better than both.

And of the big movies of that year, I still watch/own The Abyss, Batman, Hard to Kill, Major League, Say Anything..., Tango & Cash, Uncle Buck, and When Harry Met Sally... This is just to say that popular, effective, films don't often win awards.

First pic of the movie cover, found everywhere. Second pic of the pogrom, found here, third pic from the Wiki. Backpost finished 2009-11-30.