Resource: John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-4LwAuTw7k&t=1381
For this week’s theme of ideology and critique I turned to John Berger BBC series Ways of Seeing, something I watched in middle school and never forgot. Even though it came out more than 10 years before Spike Lee’s movie, Berger’s central argument (that every image embodies a way of seeing) helped me understand the film not just as a narrative about a neighborhood but as an ideological construction that challenges how we read images, bodies and power on screen.
This first episode focuses on painting and photography but its core message applies directly to cinema: images are never neutral. This also reminds me of a second youtube video I watched as I searched something for this post that said “Every single film is political”. Images reinforce values, hierarchies, ideological assumptions of the society that produces them. Berger shows how perspective, framing, and even “realism” itself are cultural choices shaped by power. He says that every image contains an argument, as in Do the Right Thing Lee uses visual form not just to tell a story but to reshape the viewer’s way of seeing race, space, and conflict in America.
Berger also talks about how images can be manipulated or recontextualized to change meaning — a point that immediately reminded me of the Wall of Fame in Sal’s pizzeria. The photographs are curated, selective, aspirational, and ideological: they reflect Sal’s claim to cultural authority in a space that is not culturally his. When Mookie pins the photograph of Malcolm and Martin at the end, it functions exactly the way Berger describes the “reframing” of images: it shifts the entire power dynamic of the space. A wall that once reinforced Sal’s control becomes a site of resistance, a new way of seeing public/private space through a Black political lens.
Beyond that, I found that the cinematography and mise en scene of the movie do a great job together by creating such aesthetically pleasing images in a way that deepens its politics. Berger argues that style is never separate from meaning. The saturated reds and yellows, the symmetry of the block, the theatricality of the heat, the way the camera moves like it’s part of the neighborhood’s rhythm — these choices aren’t ornamental. They construct a world where tension is visible in the color palette.
Finally, Berger’s insistence that viewing is always shaped by context made me rethink how Do the Right Thing ends. The film leaves us with two quotes — Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — that embody two different ideological “ways of seeing” violence and resistance. Berger would say that Lee is showing us the impossibility of a single, stable interpretation. The film, like an image, changes depending on where you stand. That ambiguity isn’t a flaw; it’s the film’s political strategy. This movie is an intervention on how we see American race relations,
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