Dialectical oppositions frequently occur in movies, but they have never been used to such a great extent as they have been in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The reason for this style of story telling in the film is to basically show ideological and cultural opposition. The film primarily deals with the racial tensions that many different ethnicities were experiencing in
The dramatic interplay of different races (and partially the same races) interconnecting and colliding with one another is all for the purposes of showing the tensions that result when different races live in the same neighborhood. There can either be complete apathy towards the person of the opposite race, or something in the opposite extreme. Generally, the person that wants to get along with the opposite race tries to cease the arguments that other people from his or her race have with that person. In this film, this figure (Da Mayor played by Ossie Davis) is a Martin Luther King type of individual, and he is someone who is more altruistic than a person like Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) who believes that the only way to solve the racial tensions of that part of the neighborhood, by the name of Bedford-Stuyvesant, is to incite violence against the opposing race. Buggin Out represents the Malcolm X characteristic of a man. All of this drama revolves around Sal’s Pizzaria, which is owned by a racist by the name of Sal (Danny Aiello). It’s Mookie (Spike Lee) the only black man who works at Sal’s who is in the middle of this difficult situation. He’s not exactly an interlocutor between the two races; he’s more confused and ambivalent about just exactly how he feels about the situation.
The ways the shots are composed in the film are the aesthetic devices that Lee utilizes in order for the audience to understand the different ideological positions that each person in the neighborhood has. The framing of the shots and the way they are composed also alert the audience to the tensions in the neighborhood; when two different races make their points to each other in the movie, their “conversation” to one another is not merely a conversation but rather a very tense shouting-match that always feels like it’s going to spill over into violence. Mookie is merely just trying to get through the day, and just trying “to get paid.” He’s not a stagnant character, and the way the camera tracks when he walks through the streets of his community, emphasize this quality of Mookie’s. He doesn’t have time to become incensed about the situation that he is in; he’s merely trying deliver the pizzas so he can eventually make enough money to get out of the community. The camera never tracks for any other character (until the end of the film when the whole situation has gotten out of control). This is a depiction of how these individuals (basically everyone in the film) are content with their estimation of the other ethnic communities in the area.
Mookie is more ambivalent about Sal and his sons’ racist tendencies; at the same time he does side with Buggin Out’s estimation that there should be pictures of some black people on the wall of Sal’s pizzeria. After all, mostly black people do eat at that establishment. However, believing in someone’s beliefs and actually physically doing something about it, in other words carrying out the belief, are two different things completely. Mookie leaves his fellow brother hanging and kicks him out of the place, because his boss made him.
The framing and particularly lighting of the shot is particularly important. “Do the Right Thing employs an array of lighting techniques that at first may seem naturalistic but through the course of the film are directional in particularly dramatic ways. Especially through the lighting, heat becomes a palpable feature of this mise-en-scene.” (Corrigan/White, page 63). The way the shot is composed, along with the lighting by Ernest Dickerson, conveys the conflicts and torn attitude that Mookie is feeling at that moment. The shot is a deep focus image of Mookie and Sal inside the pizzeria, while Buggin Out is in the background of the frame, outside in the sweltering heat. The dark lighting inside the pizzeria, opposed to the bright look outside conveys the conflicts in Mookie’s character; that of cool white apathy and black passion. The same moment is much more subtly conveyed when Mookie is delivering a pizza. He comes up the stairs and leans against the apartment building’s wall out of sheer exhaustion. The lighting on one portion of Mookie’s face is a dark, while the other half of his face is illuminated from the light coming from the stairwell. This is another aesthetic example of Mookie’s inherent confusion in terms of doing the right thing. Is he exhausted from the heat, or is it because of the danger that he is feeling towards the whole racial upheaval in his neighborhood?
A person who does know how he feels about the situation is Da Mayor. He wants to help his fellow man out, which does not include any class distinctions. He’s usually shot in medium shot to close up shot proximity, and this is for the purposes of not showing the environment around Da Mayor. The implication that Lee raises in this film is that altruistic black people, despite their good intentions cannot fully face the sad aspects of black culture, a culture that’s ultimately ensnared by the white culture, or else they would not be as caring towards the other race.
Both mother sister (Ruby Dee) and Mister Senor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson) are also very respectful to the white race, but ironically enough are always confined by their spaces; either the radio booth or the apartment. They never face Bedford-Stuyvesant and the troubles contained in the town out of fear that they may indeed change their viewpoint of the white culture residing there (along with the Puerto Rican and Asian culture also residing there). They may even start to become hateful, and this conflict of emotion is conveyed in a very similar shot from the previous two mentioned above. Mother Sister is sitting in the windowsill of her apartment; the inside of her apartment is shot very darkly while the outside environment appears very bright. Rather than staying inside like the previous two shots, Lee has the camera track forward out of the apartment. Lee simply doesn’t want to deal with Mother Dee’s particular insight into believing that nothing can be done; he wants her and all black people to face the outside world and all the horrors implicit in that vision. It’s only after the destruction of Sal’s place and the death of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) when Mother Sister comes out of her house for the first time in the film.
Da Mayor experiences racial tensions from his own ethnic group when they say that he should get a job. The black people in the neighborhood respect Mookie’s position because even though he works for white people, at least he’s making a profit from them. They become incensed towards Da Mayor because he doesn’t have an excuse for liking white people.
Characters who are very vocal about their hatred of white individuals (or at least racist ones) are both Buggin Out and Radio Raheem. Especially in the case of Radio Raheem, he’s usually shot in low canted angle shots that make him look frighteningly imposing and dangerous, not to mentioned incensed. A person would assume that Lee would not make Raheem look as terrifying as he does, considering the fact that as a filmmaker he is on his side. Radio Raheem eventually becomes a senseless victim of police brutality and is killed. However, what Lee attempts in this film is a complex form of Brechtian filmmaking; that is, showing the audience an exaggerated form of a character without giving them in a sense humanistic tendencies. This caricature rather represents an ideological element or idea. The idea present in the depiction of Radio Raheem is that this is the way the white culture view him, and their assumption of his character is false. After all, Raheem wears both hate and love knuckle guards. Lee is setting up this dialectic of instilling into the audience base assumptions; if they fall for them than they are indeed racist. Other instances of dialectical elements in the film occur whenever there are spray painted messages on the brick walls behind characters, and whenever there are instances of humor in the film. These elements all pertain to the idea that points are deliberately noticeable in the film, all in order for the audience to notice them.
The way the different races stare into each others faces is highly embellished and disturbing to the audience, because characters like Radio Raheem and Sal are staring at the audience just as much as they are staring at our opponents. When Sal says to Radio Raheem, “You are disturbing me! You are disturbing our customers,” the disturbing element of the scene is that he is staring right at us. Lee at this moment is trying to break racial tensions in the audience. Everyone feels Sal’s vindictiveness and it doesn’t matter what color their skin is. These and the racial monologues in the movie, are the only instances when Lee ironically enough doesn’t strive for finding dialectical opposition in his film.
The clincher in Do the Right Thing is that it’s not so much the racial opposition that Lee is trying to dialectically depict, but rather the opposition of the police to the black people in the community (make that any community). When Radio Raheem is killed, he for the first time is shot in normal angles, and in medium shot rather than close up. When he falls to the ground, it’s the police that are shot in low angles; Lee is saying to the audience that these are the monsters we should be looking at. The tragedy of the story is that Raheem realizes this too late and ultimately dies. Lee must have come to the realization while making this film that while races may never peacefully co-exist, the more prescient issue is that the police force is the destructive element to his culture. What Lee as filmmaker is declaring to the black people watching the film is that they have to do the right thing and fight the power i.e. police force. The only way to do that, to not in a sense get distracted, is to “chill out” in Mister Senor Love Daddy’s words in terms of fighting other races.
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