Over at The Nation there’s an interesting little retrospective about Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which you may have heard turned 20 this year. The title of the piece astutely describes the film as a being a “racial rorschach”, which almost all on its own makes this one of my favorite articles on the film that I’ve read.
Something that many of the pieces that I’ve read looking back on the historic film have forgotten to account for the factor of perspective when it comes to examining the movie. Ultimately, whatever you are going to take from watching Spike’s movie, you’re going to have gotten only after viewing it through the lens of your own experiences. Interestingly enough, it seems that this tendency to overlook different viewpoints seems to have been something in that has plagued viewers and critics from the very day that the film was released twenty years ago. In the piece Spike explains that white viewers have often come up to him on the street and asked him why it was that Mookie chose to throw the trash can through the pizzeria window, they just couldn’t understand. He also notes that he has not once received with question from a black viewer.
Now, I don’t mean to insinuate that the film is in its essence divisive, merely that different people can gleam different things form watching the same events unfold, and this is an important part of understand each other and having a complete view of the world that we live in today. I think that why the piece is particularly relevant is because it speaks to the way in which we can still differ as a nation– and perhaps this has been best highlighted by the recent confrontation between the Cambridge Police Department and Professor ‘Skip’ Gates. Opinions on the incident were so passionate and set in stone that it quickly became something larger than life in many ways, not so unlike Spike’s movie itself.
This is not lost in the Nation piece, but it also acknowledges that the film in many ways raises more questions than it answers. However, I think that the ultimate value of the movie is that at the time it allowed for a discourse on race to take place without the pure resentment that comes from a real life incident, and that’s a service that it can still provide to this day. Take a look at the piece for yourself and read what the people who weighed in had to say, you might just surprise yourself and get something new out of material that you’d thought you had already digested in full.
Leave a Reply