What Is The Theme Of Do The Right Thing By Spike Lee

Spike Lee’s film, Do the Right Thing takes place in a neighborhood in Brooklyn on a hot summer Saturday. It opens on the local radio disc jockey starting his morning show and announcing that the day’s weather will be extremely hot. The scene then goes to a disabled man named Smiley trying to tell anyone walking by about why Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are still important and why racism still needs to be fought, which becomes important later in the movie. The scene cuts to the main character, Mookie, waking his sister up before he leaves for work.

In the fighting and rioting scenes toward the end of his 1989 film Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee uses the misc-en-scene and camera angles to demonstrate that racial tensions are still strong between the white police officers of Brooklyn and its black citizens. He accomplishes this through the various actions the police officers take depicting their poor handling of the situation and the effects of it taken on by the black rioters.

In the movie Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee dramatizes the racial tensions in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of New York City on a hot summer day back in 1989. The question Lee poses is: “What is the right thing to do?” Each character plays an essential role in the escalation, leading up to the confrontation at Sal’s Famous Pizzeria that ends in violence, death and destruction. A fire breaks out at Sal's, which necessitates police intervention. The police grab Radio Raheem and kill him using the chokehold. Despite the rising pressures by their community to partake in the vandalism and violence, both Da Mayor and Mookie managed to do the right thing after Raheem's death. Lee presents varying shades of right and wrong within the film. By analyzing each of the characters’

On the hottest day of the year, director Spike Lee's, Do the Right Thing, paints a compelling picture of racial tensions in one of the most diverse cities in the country. Lee’s style of cinematography is shaped specifically to emphasize the racial tensions between the characters, and he accomplishes this by using first-person and direct-address narration, camera angles, camera movements and distance.

This wasn’t well received everywhere but the film is ahead of its time because Lee does not tell you what to think about it, and deliberately provides surprising twists for some of the characters, this movie is more open-ended than most. Ebert writes, “The good feelings and many of the hopes of the 1960s have evaporated, and today it no longer would be accurate to make a movie about how the races in American are all going to love one another… Do the Right Thing" tells an honest, unsentimental story about those who are left behind (Ebert Do the Right Thing)”. By not requiring the viewer to pick a side it hit home about how unfair society really is and you are required to come to your own conclusion about how to handle it

Do the Right Thing (1989) is about a young black man, Mookie, living in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn with his sister. He works at a local pizzeria, Sal’s Pizzeria, and has a girlfriend named Tina with whom he has a kid with and his name is Hector. Sal can been seen as racist in some scenarios, but not nearly as racist as his son Pino who also works at the Pizzeria. Pino dislikes African Americans, but most of his favorite celebrities are black. Sal has another son, Vito, who also works at the Pizzeria and is friends with Mookie.

When people discuss and negotiate how a recent event should be handled, they rely on their values and beliefs about morals as well as their role in the negotiation process to make both conscious and unconscious strategic choices and moves. Negotiating occurs when an incident has multiple point of views. These views are shaped by the principle that disputants are adversaries where if one wins, the other must lose. The riot scene in the film Do The Right Thing took place when the protagonist, Mookie, threw a trash can through the window of Sal’s restaurant. This destructive action caused Mookie’s boss, Sal, to be saved from the angry mob that held him responsible for the death of a neighborhood friend, Radio Raheem. I believe Mookie deliberately

3).Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing provides, through the medium of direct address, insight into the characters of the film’s personal racial qualms with other members of their community. This is especially powerful because up until the middle of the film wherein these direct addresses take place, viewers are left to individually come up with their own conclusions about the racial tensions within the film’s community. After these addresses, however, it becomes much easier to understand what prompted the violence and destruction that occurred at the end of the film.

In the film "Do the Right Thing" basically shows the differences in each race. In this film Lee shows characters as a stereotype via their clothing, languages, environments, and their culture. He had an African American with a necklace on and they were carrying a boom box down the street, listening to rap music. Puerto Ricans were listening to salsa while speaking Spanish at their apartment. The

Spike Lee has a distinct, visually bold cinematic style. He is known for a dramatic use of angles, color, and framing. Do the Right Thing utilizes countless Dutch angles throughout the film. Dutch angles are typically used to display tension, and in the film the angles are thoroughly used when building up to the film’s combative climax. The angles in the film also have other purposes as well. Beyond the tension, Dutch angles also communicate instability, unrest, and danger. Dutch angles are also utilized as a perfect interruption from realism, the shot is unnaturally slanted to remind the audience that it’s not real life, they are watching a film.

Spike Lee does not advocate violence but believes that the days of silence are over. In Do the Right Thing blacks riot because they are bitterly angry. Rioting allows them to act out their pent up rage and frustration. It dispels the notion that they cannot have a voice in the affairs of their community even if the end result is the destruction of the community. For these individuals, rioting is a form of physical protest in an unjust society where essentially too many "police investigations" of "the police" end with a verdict of not guilty

Individuals of America nationals tried to overlook the issues that were occurring in America, yet Spike lee constrained them to look confront reality. Ethnicity, a racial stereotyping, has been around. Therefore, Lee is just going to publicize the truth of it. Meanwhile, the characters that appear in the film are altogether battling against each other and confronting similar issues. A few Americans tried to disregard the endless issues that exist in America, yet Do the Right Thing is an extraordinary case of the diverse instances of narrow-mindedness, discrimination, and inequality. Lee's movies employ diverse reason to meditate on basic issues that grieved the contemporary world. Lee supposed in filming movies based on real-life situations. Do the Right Thing creator influenced America to understand that many individuals are confronting police ruthlessness and racism.

After, viewing Spike Lee’s feature film Do the Right Thing (1989) a viewer might ask her/himself if Lee is exploiting race by relying on stereotypical characters or if he is using stereotypes in a positive way to expose the intricate web of problems Americans create when they use stereotypes such as skin color to define individuals. Lee’s film is set in the mixed race/class neighborhood where he grew up, Bedford Stuyvesant of Brooklyn, New York. His characters represent mainly minority races, and he uses each in a positive way to direct his audience’s attention to the many behaviors that create the race-based problems plaguing far too many individuals in cities today. By creating well rounded stereotypical characters whom viewers sympathize as types, Lee alerts viewers to the fact that each individual is part of the problems created by racial injustice and that if they continue that path they are allowing a tragic history to repeat itself.

Viewers of the movie Do The Right Thing will be familiar with questioning the meaning of “justified,” because the main character carries out a controversial action. Mookie, a black man, threw a trash can into the window of a white man’s pizzeria and started a riot where the whole block destroyed the restaurant. This was a reaction to seeing his black friend, Radio Raheem, murdered by the police in front of the town, while he was protesting racial injustice. Riots like this broke out during the civil rights movement, and those are still controversial today as if they helped or hindered their cause. Today, Black Lives Matter is known for holding riots in protest of racial injustice that are also controversial. In this case, Mookie’s action was justified because he was understandably angry and frustrated, and he knew everyone taking it out on the restaurant itself was the best way to let out this frustration.

In his 1989 film Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee uses elements of film style, including mise-en-scene and cinematography, to present the narrative theme of the film, which calls attention to the consequences of racial tensions in a Brooklyn neighborhood. These stylistic techniques are particularly prominent in two scenes where an African-American member of the community, Radio Raheem, encounters neighborhood residents of other races: Korean-American fruit-and-vegetable shop owners and an Italian-American pizzeria owner named Sal.