Seeing "Do the Right Thing"

Abstract

Jerome Christensen is not the first to find countercurrents that trouble the ostensible progressiveness of Spike Lee's ambitious art (p. 583). Like many of the early reviewers of Do the Right he discovers deep problems with the film's apparent messages on politics, race, and economics. Christensen thinks the film signifies contempt for sustained political activity, that it expresses a racialist, perhaps even racist appeal to an essentially black identity, and that it is an immoral sellout to the consumerism of corporate capitalism. My view is that the film addresses all these issues (and others, such as gender), but is not reducible to a determinate or specifiable message about any of them. I've argued that the film aspires to the condition of a work of art, presenting a vivid ensemble of words, images, and sounds that articulates the central controversies of our time: issues of race and ethnicity; of poverty, private property, and public civility in an ethos of consumer capitalism; issues of political and ethical principle, of responsibility to one's tribe, neighbors, brothers, and to others more generally considered (see Mitchell, Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing, Critical Inquiry 16 [Summer 1990]: 880-99). I've never argued that Spike Lee has a politically correct position on any of these issues. So far as I can tell, Lee is a much better filmmaker than he is a political commentator or talk-show interviewee, and I suspect that we would disagree on a number of issues. But that is not the point here. The question is whether Do the Right Thing repays the sort of respectful attention (p. 582) I want to give it, whether it dramatizes political issues in a significant way, asks the right questions, expresses the relevant views, and presents the emotional dynamics in the encounters among multiple ethnic