Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1988) garnered critical acclaim and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. As such, I was curious about the director behind such a celebrated movie. It was brought up in class that he made commercials for the Air Jordans before he made Do the Right Thing, so I found one of them, titled “It’s Gotta Be the Shoes”.
This Nike Commercial (1991) stars Michael Jordan and Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon, a character from another of his movies She’s Gotta Have It (1986). In it, Mars asks MJ what makes him the best player in the universe, eventually concluding, “It’s gotta be the shoes!” It’s a question of why Spike Lee, a director primarily concerned with critiquing cultural ideology, made these types of commercials in the first place. Was it money? Exposure? Whatever the reason, Spike Lee’s commercials were credited as the main reason Nike and Air Jordans became so popular, with millions of dollars in shoe sales. One such article tells a fun anecdote about Lee’s time working with MJ: https://www.basketballnetwork.net/off-the-court/when-michael-jordan-called-spike-lee-an-mfer-in-1988
Spike Lee founded a production company called 40 Acres and a Mule, and is still active in the film industry today. He has made several documentaries and a TV show called She’s Gotta Have It (2017-2018) based off of his earlier movie of the same name. He also taught a filmmaking course at Harvard in 1991, later joining NYU/Tisch as part of their faculty in 1993. He was appointed as Artistic Director in 2002, and still works there today a tenured professor in the graduate film program.
Spike Lee exhibits the simple manipulation of truth in a less than three minute sequence in Do The Right Thing (Lee, 1989) that barely stands out in a film rich in commentary on American race relations. The scene unfolds as a young boy runs in front of a car excited for ice cream, and Da Mayor jumps out to save him, toppling both the child and himself. What the boy’s mother and other viewers of the incident see is the drunk mayor attacking a small child, and when the mother asks her son what happened, he does not want to admit that he ran in front of a car, so he lies and allows the belief that he was attacked to ensue. Da Mayor defends himself, and to his luck the mother believes him, but this simple scene represents exactly what historians, or anyone listening to a story for that matter, have to grapple with when understanding the past. The third party viewer, the mother, has to examine the evidence given to her, one that is true and one that is not, and determine what she believes to be true. If she believed her son, than that would be known as the perceived truth, regardless of what the actual truth of the story was.
Da Mayor in Do The Right Thing
This filmed is filled with examples of stories that can be easily manipulated, and have been. Each character’s perception, biases, and lived experiences influence how their outlook on society is. This is why Lee so urgently addresses throughout the film that the notion of a monolithic African American experience is not true, and that the idea of the “right thing” to do varies in generation, gender, class, age, and relation to those around you. It can be argued that many of the actions throughout this film were not the correct thing to do, because of what they led up to, but it can very well be argued with the contextualization of their singular perspective that they did the only “right” thing that they could in that moment.
Furthermore, Spike Lee shows the manipulation of truth and justice through music, physical objects, and celebrities in media. The distinct differences in how characters view the world around them, both contrasted between races and within races, highlights how stereotypes are harmfully used to categorize groups, while remaining inaccurate. One person cannot represent all stereotypes at once. Still, this film is brimming with a multitude of themes and representation. There are moments of action and tension coupled with moments of connection and romance. This display of African American representation in film is still rare in today’s standards, and incredibly rare at the time of this film’s release. Lee is able to “fight the power” in his own medium, film, by directly addressing the large extent of experiences and attitudes held by communities in this neighborhood.
My questions while watching this film were: what do you think the public reaction to this film was after its initial release, and how do you think that it translates to today’s society? Do you think that watching this film a second time would lead to a different perspective or clearer understanding on the character’s internal motivations, especially regarding the incidents leading up to the riot at the end? When do you know something in history is a complete objective truth, and when does this film feel like a commentary on the objective truths of its time and subjective truths of its time?
During class today, we discussed the idea of ideology and how present it is in every aspect of our lives. Directors have, and will continue to voice their own ideologies and opinions through their films.
There were two things I wanted to talk about today, both stemming from this morning’s conversation. We also touched on conspiracy theories and how, though extreme, they can reinforce current beliefs or stem from past experiences.
Spoiler warning for Bugonia.
Bugonia, which I watched last week, is a movie oozing with ideology. Teddy, a rural bee farmer, manipulates his mentally disabled cousin, Don, into helping him kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO. He believes the CEO, Michelle Fuller, is an Andromedan alien sent to destroy Earth.
At first, I felt Teddy’s methods were outlandish and cruel. He was so insistent that Fuller was an alien, he went at lengths to prove it. For example, he shaved her head and even lathered her in antihistamine cream to prevent her from “communicating with the mothership”.
But as the film goes on, we start to understand where he’s coming from, and even sympathize with him a little. We realize that Auxolith, Fuller’s company, was developing a medication to fight opioid addiction. Teddy’s mother was a voluntary test subject for this product and was sent into a coma as a result. Multiple other childhood incidents are mentioned throughout the movie offhandedly, often through a single line that never gets addressed again. Teddy mentions how he and Don have been “chemically castrated” by Auxolith while talking with Fuller. The town sheriff (also Teddy’s childhood babysitter), Casey, continuously tries to befriend Teddy, apologetically referencing a sexual assault he had committed against Teddy as a child.
All of this childhood trauma acts as a weight on Teddy’s shoulders. As far as we know, he never sought any assistance for his presumably unstable mental state. Trying to figure out why all these things are happening to him, Teddy turns to the internet. He falls into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, and because of internet algorithms, finds himself in an ideological echo chamber. This echo chamber feeds him more and more conspiracies, ultimately turning him into the man he is today.
What’s interesting to me is as weird as this film’s premise is, Teddy’s conspiracy theory transformation happens to people every day on a smaller scale. Because of past experiences and their interactions with other people, people’s worldviews change (albeit usually not as extreme as Teddy’s).
Bugonia’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos, even talks about this himself in this interview (https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/bugonia-interview-2025) with film critic Roger Ebert. He says how he’s ” always interested in the ways people’s interactions with themselves or others affect their nature.” He also says this about Teddy: “…he’s someone who has created a story, which is, by the way, not entirely untrue–but I think he’s someone who, like a lot of us, has not been told a better story that’s true from the powers that be…He’s been abused by the system that keeps talking without doing anything–or at least doing anything that’s helping him in some way.” This film could also be Lanthimos heeding us a warning about the slippery slope of politics, and how one can easily find themselves in an echo chamber and alienate themselves from the other side of the political spectrum.
All-in-all, Bugonia is a wonderfully bizarre film about how one’s past can shape their current worldviews. It satirizes the modern internet-conspiracy culture and is hilariously unpredictable at times.
