Do The Right Thing Is A Beautifully Intense Film Directed By The Talented Spike Lee

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. The biases reflected through Do the Right Thing model those of today which has kept society in a constant feud for so long. In Oprah Winfrey's dynamic episode, "The Color of Fear", Mr. Mun Wah projects his strong opinion when he states, " . . . that racism is still going on today, that we've got to stop to hear the anguish

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.

The movie I chose to do my scene analysis on is Do the Right Thing. The scene I chose in the movie is the scene of the 20 “D” Batteries. The scene of the 20 “D” Batteries reflects the movie and the scene because it betrays the ethnic and racial tensions between each race and the cross-cultural communication between them. Throughout the movie the filmmaker Spike Lee uses wide variety of angles but in this scene he uses high angle and low angle. The character Radio Raheem is walking down the sidewalk listening to “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy on his Boom box, the director Spike Lee uses a low angle to make Radio Raheem seem as if he is powerful. In contrast when Radio Raheem walks into the store we see the little Asian boy

Spike Lee’s camera technique in “Do The Right Thing” enhances racial tensions between characters. uses a lot of canted frames, tracking shots, close-ups, high and low angles, parallelism, and music to achieve this. The heat wave going through Brooklyn is exemplified in many ways: on the radio, through discussion between characters, people’s dress, and actions, etc. Lee also uses cinematography to get across how hot this day really is. For example, the film begins with a montage of people in the neighborhood trying to cool off, struggling to get through their morning routines: a shot of someone taking a cold shower, cuts to a shot of someone sticking their face in ice, to someone sticking their head in the freezer, men drinking beer, someone

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

Both Lee and Singleton strive to give an authentic picture of how black youth interact with people of other races. For example, the Korean show owner from DO THE RIGHT THING saying: “I no white. I black, you, me, same. We same!” tells the black youth that other minorities in America have their own battles with civil injustice from white authority.

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) portrayed an important social problem of the time period – interracial rivalry. The movie was one of many ghetto action films made during the era. In the article “Producing Ghetto Pictures” by Craig Watkins, he says that the movies of the ghetto film cycle committed much of their storyline to that of the relationship between young, poor black males and the ghetto (170).

Author Guthrie Ramsey states in Musing New Hoods that the music used in Do The Right Thing depicts a range of associations that include “black male and female subjectivity, ethnic identity, a sense of location, emotional and mental states, a specific historical moment, and the perspectives of age groups” (Ramsey 314). The various characters in Do The Right Thing such as radio host Mister Señor Love Daddy (played be Samuel L. Jackson) and Radio Raheem (played by Bill Nunn) use hip-hop music to establish a sense of location, emotional states, and ethnic identity that is present throughout the movie. In one scene, Radio Raheem is shown in a confrontation with a group of Latinos playing Salsa music. Radio Raheem proceeds to blast his hip-hop music at full volume in order to outplay the Latinos’ Salsa music. This is another example of how music is used in the film to display the ethnic identities of individuals, as well as the various emotional and mental states that music can create. In addition to hip-hop music, Spike Lee implements a variety of music genres in Do The Right Thing in order to create a certain ambiance and feeling. The use of orchestral music throughout the film plays an important role in establishing specific emotions during scenes. Jazz and soul music are also used to display emotion during various exchanges between characters. According to Victoria E. Johnson, the music used in Do The Right Thing “serves to convey a romanticized vision of community in the ethnically mixed neighborhood in which the story takes place” (Ramsey 315).

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.

Do the Right Thing is a dramatic comedic film that was directed by Spike Lee. The movie was released in 1989. Lee served in three capacities for the film: writer, director and producer of the movie, Ernest Dickenson was the cinematographer and Barry Alexander Brown was the film’s editor. For this film, Lee garnered together some notable actors and actresses, including Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Rosie Perez, Samuel L. Jackson, John Tuturro and Martin Lawrence. The setting of the movie is in Bedford-Stuyvesant; which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. This particular neighborhood is made up of several ethnic groups that include African Americas, Italians, Koreans, and Puerto Ricans. The movie takes place on a particularly hot day

Do the Right Things begins with the Rosie Perez dancing scene with the music “fight the power”. The four minutes scene shadows the later plot of the film, in which the continuously changing of the outfits and the intensified movement of the dancer may imply how the tension between different racial identification increases. Both the color and the movements of the dancer have strong visual impact. Rosie first appears wearing a red dress with a black belt. Next shot, she is wearing a blue leotard and a jacket and then a boxing outfit. Later, she takes off the jacket of the boxing outfit showing us the black sports bra, the white short and the red gloves, which may be an indication of the rising tension between the black and white. The dancer moves with the music in an anxious and angry mood and we can particularly feel that when the camera zooms in to show her facial expression.

The creative yet simplistic aggression in the movie “Do the Right Thing” lends itself a strength that is necessary in tackling controversial issues such as racial prejudice. Spike Lee, a known genius in the art of film directing, eloquently shaped the story so that the audience is able to see the dynamics of a multi-racial community without holding any bars. Lee advocated for a society that is more open to constructive conversations about social embargos. This movie was a daring platform that shows just how distorted ones opinions can be when clouded with personal and emotional interests.

Out of several centuries and decades of racial unrest, one of the most recognizable and influential revolutions took place. This is now referred to as the Black Power movement placed in 1960s and 1970s. Figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks took to leadership positions in the movement for the earlier portion of the  movement, followed by the Black Panthers and Young Lords parties. The classic piece from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is reflective of the racial unrest, and necessity for black liberation and hope prevalent in the time. Throughout the music video there are images of hordes of black people flooding the streets for a large scale block party with posters of influential names and group to the black power movement. In addition, some of the lyrics directly target the issues at had during the time. For example, Public Enemy performs through