Becoming a mom makes this movie even more visceral, important...and terrifying. My own mom spent a lot of time choosing her words very carefully so as not to allow stereotyping and bias into our lives. To be honest, I'm not sure it always worked. It's hard to fight American culture and the assumptions that travel with it. But, at least, my mom did something to bring on a little awareness and sensitivity. If I'm able to do that for Stella, I'll be able to check something off in the "Good Mom" column.
Given all this, "Do the Right Thing" jumped to number six on my list.
The original post:
In the long line of pretty damn amazing Spike Lee Joints, DO THE RIGHT THING stands alone for me. The movie summons up a community of people - from Sal, the owner of a local pizza parlor, to Sweet Dick Willie, a street corner poet of sorts - who feel the forces of a hotter than hell New York summer and simmering racial tensions. All of them struggle in some way with their own prejudices and the prejudices others hold against them. And the whole thing errupts into some of the most alternately disturbing and hilarious writing ever done for film, IMHO. Maybe the height of it all is a kind of hate speech montage that outs everyone for their biases. And - in turn - their speeches are undercut by the rants of others which are full of the biases held against them:
Mookie: Dago, wop, guinea, garlic-breath, pizza-slingin', spaghetti-bendin', Vic Damone, Perry Como, Luciano Pavarotti, Sole Mio, nonsingin' motherfucker.
Pino: You gold-teeth-gold-chain-wearin', fried-chicken-and-biscuit-eatin', monkey, ape, baboon, big thigh, fast-runnin', high-jumpin', spear-chuckin', three-hundred-sixty-degree-basketball-dunkin' titsun spade Moulan Yan. Take your fuckin' pizza-pizza and go the fuck back to Africa.
Stevie: You little slanty-eyed, me-no-speaky-American, own-every-fruit-and-vegetable-stand-in-New-York, bullshit, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Summer Olympics '88, Korean kick-boxing son of a bitch.
Officer Long: You Goya bean-eating, fifteen in a car, thirty in an apartment, pointed shoes, red-wearing, Menudo, meda-meda Puerto Rican cocksucker. Yeah, you!
Sonny: It's cheap, I got a good price for you, Mayor Koch, "How I'm doing," chocolate-egg-cream-drinking, bagel-and-lox, B'nai B'rith Jew asshole.
Mister Senor Love Daddy: Yo! Hold up! Time out! TIME OUT! Y'all take a chill! Ya need to cool that shit out! And that's the double truth, Ruth!
These rants are poignant because they show how absolutely ridiculous it all is. I remember Spike Lee being criticized by some members of just about every community for this language. And - years later - Sacha Baron Cohen found himself defending the same kinds of artistic choices at a press conference after winning the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for his performance as Borat.
People kept asking Cohen how he could have something like "The Running of the Jew" in his movie when he himself is a Jew. After making a few flip comments he got around to explaining that the point for him was to show that prejudice is a delusion - a delusion that others are different and a delusion that you are better than someone else for no real reason at all.
Now, I'm not sure that Don Rickles - a.k.a. "Mr. Warmth" - would describe his standup as some sort of hyper-intellectual deconstruction of prejudicial language...but that won't stop me from doing that here. I think he makes people uncomfortable - and laugh - because he holds a kind of linguistic mirror up to people and the odd, complicated beliefs that might be hiding in the folds of their cerebella.
DO THE RIGHT THING was released during the height of the academic movement we've all come to know as political correctness and I think that's pretty important. Originally "Political Correctness" was a term flung as insult during the Marxist revolution in Russia. It meant someone who'd ceased to think for themselves and just given into the party line...on everything.
In the 1980s and 1990s, I think the reinvention of "political correctness" as a means to treat others with respect and kindness by establishing sensitivity in language was genuinely noble. It fell apart for me when members of the "political correctness" movement on campus attempted to suppress any dissent or discussion about what exactly that meant and targeted DO THE RIGHT THING as destructive and tried to ban it from playing at the campus movie theatre where they did a kind of second run/discount house combo operation that allowed students to see amazing films for just $1 each. They argued they were only trying to protect (?!) college students from the language.
The most wonderfully brave thing in this film is its ambiguous, painful third act. For those of you who haven't seen it yet - SPOILER ALERT. The next few paragraphs are all about specific plot points.
When Mookie stands outside Sal's and watches the crowd start to broil into a near murderous frenzy he makes a decision. I think it's a decision that saves the lives of Sal and his sons. Mookie realizes *something* must happen and the resigned way in which he marches over picks up a trash can and throws it through the glass window at the pizza place says to me he'd rather see the crowd take it out on the building than on Sal. It's a beautifully muddy and heartbreaking moment.
Radio Raheem gives a spotlight speech about the fight inside of every person (symbolized by the rings he wears) between their better and lesser instincts - the struggle to (you guessed it) DO THE RIGHT THING. For me these words are the best part of the film and the reason it hits the nine spot on my list. I hope you dig 'em:
"Let me tell you the story of "Right Hand, Left Hand." It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: It was with this hand that Cane iced his brother. Love: These five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: Static. One hand is always fighting the other hand; And the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, Love, is finished. But, hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes, now, that's right. Ooh, it's the devastating right and Hate is hurt, he's down. Left-hand Hate K.O.ed by Love. "
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