Do the Right Thing, while centering towards the end of the film about the brutality and abusers of a black community in New York, what I really enjoyed about the film was its portrayal of the community. The dialogue and the sense of community that Lee establishes is beautiful. Rarely do we get to see black communities just being normal and joyful. While there still were the racist police scattered throughout the start of the film, the street was still relaxed and making the best out of a hot day. I want to connect this to a film of a very different genre, Us by Jordan Peele. Peele’s portrayal of a Black family at the start of the film, just living domestically, is something that Peele says he wanted to portray because we so rarely see Black families just living.
In Do the Right Thing, I was particularly stuck on the scene in which Mookie throws the trash can into the window. At first, I had taken the perspective that maybe this action was meant to divert the attention away from Sal and his sons, making the crowd hurt the store rather than them. Looking back on the film however, and listening to interviews with Lee himself, I realize that this opinion negates what the film is showing in this scene. This is a scene in which Mookie and his community are hurting. Mookie does not care about Sal in this scene, nor does he care about Sal while visiting him at the ruins of his store. That’s because Sal will be okay no matter what; Sal was never going to be truly hurt. Yes, he was attacked by Rahim, but Sal, as a white man, was protected no matter what by the law enforcement, by the insurance, by the establishment he created. Mookie does not need to care about Sal. Spike Lee says in an interview that it is white people who often ask him about what that trashcan meant. Lee says he isn’t asked by Black viewers because they know that Mookie threw the trash can because his friend was just murdered and he was angry and upset—it doesn’t have to be more. What the audience members really need to focus on is not that Mookie threw a trash can, but that Radio Rahim was brutally killed in front of our eyes for no reason.
This video helped me realize this because it used interviews with Spike Lee as well as clips from the 2016 film Southside With You in which the characters react to a white man describing the riot scene of Do the Right Thing as obviously Mookie being upset and not needing a real reason to react the way he did. This video also brought up the 1992 Los Angeles Rodney King riots. These were riots in LA that occurred after the officers responsible for kicking and beating Rodney King senselessly after arresting him for what ended up being a charge for driving under influence. These riots occurred nearly two years after the release of Do the Right Thing, and the media has only seen the recurring brutality from officers who continually get acquitted for their actions.
Here is an article as well about the riots in LA from NPR that I pulled a lot of information from: