Analysis of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing Essay

In the film, Do the Right Thing, director Spike Lee presents the audience with the theme of racism. The title represents the everyday choices that we as Americans of various ethnicities, cultures, and race. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing allows the viewers to decide for themselves the right thing to do about racism. Everyone has the choice to be accepting of cultures, or people different from them. The film portrays how an Italian American named Sal has a neighborhood pizzeria in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York. The neighborhood is primarily African American, but there is a diverse amount of other cultures made up of, Hispanics, European Americans, also there is a store owned by Koreans. This film displays the discrimination between the races and how this can lead to violence.

Director and actor Spike Lee presents his "truth" about race relations in his movie Do the Right Thing. The film exhibits the spectacle of black discrimination and racial altercations. Through serious, angry, and loud sounds, Lee stays true to the ethnicity of his characters, all of which reflect their own individualism. Lee uses insulting diction and intense scenes to show how severe racism can lead to violence.

Labeling theory. The labels that people are given affect their own and others’ perceptions of them, leading to conformity or deviance (labels can be good or bad)Most people resist the negative labels others try to give us, however, if we hear that we a thug long enough, we may finally accept that label and start living as a thug. Black race is the most stereotyped out of many races. Due to being consistently stereotyped they really become who they are being stereotyped as. In the starting of this movie

According to Henslin, racism is “prejudice and discrimination on the basis of race.” Racism is woven throughout the documentary of Lafeyette and Pharoah’s lives at the Horner Homes. All of the African Americans living in inner-city Chicago are looked down upon by the whites every day. The whites pay no attention to the existence of the lives of these people. The gangs run the streets of the inner-city

While the 1970’s and 80’s marked a decline in movies featuring black actors and a lack of black directors, the mid 1980’s through the 1990’s invited a new generation of filmmakers and rappers, engaging with the “New Jack” image, transforming the Ghettos of yesteryears into the hood of today. A major director that emerged during this time was Spike Lee. According to Paula Massood’s book titled, Black City Cinema, African American Urban Experiences in Film, “…Lee not only transformed African American city spaces and black filmmaking practices, he also changed American filmmaking as a whole.” Lee is perhaps one of the most influential film makers of the time, likely of all time. He thrusted black Brooklyn into light, shifting away from the popularity of Harlem. By putting complex characters into an urban space that is not only defined by poverty, drugs, and crime, it suggests the community is more than the black city it once was, it is instead a complex cityscape. Despite them being addressed to an African American audience, Lee’s film attract a mixed audience. Spike lee’s Do the Right Thing painted a different image of the African American community, “The construction of the African American city as community differs from more mainstream examples of the represents black city spaces from the rime period, such as Colors…, which presented its African American and Mexican American communities through the eyes of white LAPD officers.”

It is unfortunate that intolerance continues to exist in our nation (or anywhere else for that matter). Racism, one of the largest and most prevalent forms of intolerance, commonly destroys relationships and can eventually lead to violence. The existence of such hateful ideologies is so prevalent in our society that popular culture is constantly trying to challenge the ignorant basis of racial conflict. Spike Lee’s film, Do the Right Thing, connects with this concept of racial conflict that is so foreign to my past. Through the application of my social and political views, I will demonstrate how Spike Lee’s film is difficult for me to relate to and, in my opinion, conveys a misleading message.

The film Do the Right Thing is a very relevant on issues of race. The film shows how there is tension between all races. The film shows racial tension between the communities in the hottest day of the year. The heat is a theme in the film. Heat in general gets people on edge and raises tension. The film relates to W.E.B. Dubois work “The Soul of Black Folk.” Dubois (1903) work includes the concepts of the veil and double consciousness. The African Americans in the film deal with the idea of a veil. Mookie the protagonist deals with the idea of double consciousness.

In Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing, we dive head first into a world of racial and social ills. The movie is set in the African American and Puerto Rican neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on the hottest day of the year. We follow a young man named Mookie, who lives with his sister Jade, and works as a pizza delivery guy for a local pizzeria owed by Sal. Sal’s “Wall of Fame” is soon questioned by a man named Buggin’ Out, who believes that Sal should place some pictures of African American celebrities on his wall to represent the African American society he serves. Sal refuses and Buggn’ Out attempts to

In spite of the fact that Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever are both associated with social and political issues, they tend to navigate through various racial viewpoints using different cinematic elements. Spike Lee uses a variety of techniques in his film to bring awareness to events occurring in today's society. For example Do the Right Thing, is a film that tackles down the social issue of prejudice as well as the controversial issues between Italian-Americans and African Americans in New York City. The whole movie unravels around the “Wall of Fame” located inside Sal’s Pizzeria, which only features Italian actors. One day a local customer name Bugging Out, demands to have black actors, since after all the pizzeria is located within a black neighborhood. Soon enough the “Wall of Fame” becomes a symbolic representation of racism and hate which leads to a riot involving an explicit scene of police brutality. On the other hand Jungle Fever, tends to emphasise on the subject of interracial couples, as well as the controversy between Italian-Americans and African Americans and of course the usage of drugs. The movie is based on Flipper, an African American architect who has an affair with his secretary Angie, who is an Italian-American. The climax of the movie occurs when Flipper’s wife Drew, finds out about the affair and from then on society begins to reject Flipper and Angie because of social norms. Forcing them into a corner where they later learn that they were driven

In Spike Lee 's Do the Right Thing, the story takes places in 1989, another year in the long struggle for equality for African-Americans. The film portrays the racial tensions between locals of the neighborhood and an Italian-American family in the majority Black and Hispanic neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy) in Brooklyn, New York. Spike Lee shows us what a day in the life of the Brooklyn neighborhood consists of and throughout the movie he portrays several different aspects of a modern urban neighborhood, using the many unique personalities of the characters in the movie.

The movie Do the Right Thing, composed, coordinated and created by Spike Lee, concentrates on a solitary day of the lives of racially differing individuals who live and work in a lower-class neighborhood in Brooklyn New York. Notwithstanding, this common day happens on one of the most sizzling days of summer. The movie fixates on how social class, race and the ethical choices that the characters make directly affect the way individuals communicate with each other. Furthermore, in this essay I will analyses Spike Lee’s use of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound in the film.

Spike Lee's 1989 film Do the Right Thing is able to effectively explore the problem of racial conflict in America by skilfully manipulating cinematic devices such as staging, narrative, cinematography, editing and sound. The concentration and emphasis on characters' certain physical attributes with the use of photography and camera framing, the fast pace editing style and manipulation of sound all contribute to film's overall meaning. In analysing the short sequence beginning with a small girl drawing a chalk painting on the road and ending with Sal, the local pizzeria owner, making Radio Raheem, "a hulking misunderstood home-boy" , two slices of pizza, these devices are seen to illustrate the hostility between Black and Italian working

Race, privilege, and gender are three key issues addressed in Lee Mun Wah's "The Color of Fear". Different characters in the film bring out these issues and discuss how they have come about and how they are apparent in our society today. Lee Mun Wah uses different variations of visual language and compositions to show certain perspectives on the different characters. Also there is a theme of interlocking hierarchies presented in the film.

In the film “Do The Right Thing” by Spike Lee, cinematography and editing serve as critical components to emphasize the racial tensions between the various characters. Set in a predominantly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, the action of the film consists of a series of unfolding events that take place over the

Throughout the movie showed a sociological concept known as ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the means that we judge other cultures by the standards of our own and that we also believe that our own culture is better than everyone else's. For example in the movie Graham and his Latina girlfriend fight and he pokes fun at her culture by calling her Mexican even though she isn't. Ultimately Graham was mock his Latina girlfriend, assuming the superiority of his own culture. Another example would be when Officer Ryan makes a joke about the name Shaniqua which is more of a known name from the African American culture. (The Movie Crash and the Concepts of Sociology - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://voices.yahoo.com/the-movie-crash-concepts-sociology-437437.html). The movie also showed elements of Microaggression which is the idea that specific interactions between those of different races, cultures, or genders can be interpreted as small acts of mostly non-physical aggression; the term was coined by Chester M. Pierce[1] in 1970.In Crash the film director gave examples of subtle insults which would be him people telling him the film wasn’t black enough or the he advises him to tell the black characters to make his movie sound more “blacker”. These would be