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Spike Lee Do The Right Thing

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The movie “Do the Right Thing” starts with the loudness of “Fight the Power”. When we are still immersed in the rhythm and lyrics of the song, and before we even realize, Spike Lee has already taken us into a tiny block in an ordinary Brooklyn neighborhood, into a horrifying miniature of the noisy American race conversation, into a battle between love and hate.
This block might be tiny, but it is not simple because of the people who live here. There is Mr. Senor Love Daddy, the local DJ and troubadour; there is the block’s old couple, Da Mayor and Mother Sister, who can never stop arguing with each other; there is Smiley, the mentally disabled guy who sells pictures of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who always gets shoved around by everybody; …show more content…

long-term residents. From my point of view and understanding of the film, I think that Lee does a good job in depicting the relationship dynamics through race/ethnicity, social strata, age, gender, and immigrant status. However, the depiction of police authority could have been better, or in other words, it could have been expressed in a way that is more understandable for the audiences. As I recall, there is a scene in the film that depicts the three men sitting at the street corner while the police drive by and comment at them “what a waste”. From this detail we can see the division between the police and the powerless inhabitants due to power and authority, which eventually leads to the final boil. Details like this seem to make sense when it is on its own, but what does not make sense to me is the overall purpose that Lee wishes to accomplish while depicting the police officers. If Lee’s purpose of portraying the police is just to criticize police brutality and black oppression in the way that they often treat Blacks with extreme means, then why Lee plants the scene in which the black kids soak the white man’s antique car but don’t get in trouble. Even though Spike Lee chooses a generally implicit style while shooting this film, the depiction of the police authority seems to be one of the aspects of the film that is too implicit to understand, at least for general

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