Do The Right Thing

Do The Right Thing is a stunning display of Spike Lee’s talents as an actor, writer, and director. The movie is in essence focused on a number of dualities it spends the length of the movie building up and inverting, intentionally going out of it’s way to force the audience to think through the issues surrounding race and racism in ways not normally considered. One of the highlights of the movie is Spike Lee’s ability to create morally ambiguous characters without diminishing the audience’s empathy for them. He himself plays Mookie, a conflicted young man living in Brooklyn during the Eighties, who barely manages to hold down his job delivering pizzas and essentially ignoring the needs of his son, whom he sees less than once a week despite living down the block from him.
Mookie is a prime example of Spike Lee’s ability to make us love without liking a character. He’s human enough that we feel for him, but also does various obviously “wrong” things that we cannot respect or like him. He like every other character in the movie has both good and bad moments. He is commendable in how he deals with his coworker Vito, yet still initiates the wrecking and burning of Sal’s Pizzeria. In the end the prime message of Do The Right Thing is one of complexity, illustrated best through the opening scene and Radio Rahim’s brass knuckles. Every person moves through cycles of Love and Hate, the best and the worst in us both come out at times, and as hateful as life seems there is still a need to make sure that Love flourishes.