A Stream-of-Consciousness Blog about Do the Right Thing

After watching parts and pieces of this film and reading “A Theater of Interruptions”, there were many small thoughts involving this film, Do the Right Thing, which sparked my interest. So this blog may seem very “stream-of-consciousness”…so bear with me.

Do the Right Thing has a lot of juxtaposing ideas jumbled up in a hot and tense atmosphere (literally and metaphorically). Radio Raheem blasts Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” on his boombox and wears two four-fingered rings that say “love” and “hate”. Also, Smiley has pictures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. –quotes from both of these figures end the movie. The idea of whether or not to act in love or in hate is one of the main turmoil’s in this film. Tolerance can be seen in some of the characters, but most of the characters at the end of the film result to acts of hate and violence. Not only in this fictionalized world have we seen this conflict, but also in our reality. Should we love everyone, and not act out in violence, even those who hate our race, gender, sexual orientation, etc? Or defend ourselves with violence? 

Sharon Willis describes Spike Lee has “always provoked discord” (Willis). He has! Especially being in an artistic position of “representing the communities from which [he has] come [from]” (Willis). The audience, like with other directors such as Hitchcock and Woody Allen, are not sure the role the director plays as a director and as a character in his film. Lee in most of his films “circulates his own image…whose roles from film to film vary dramatically” and this disturbs the “on-screen and off-screen realities” (Willis). This film disturbs this reality even more because Lee also casts his own sister as a character. Breaking the fourth wall and having the director in the film makes the audience aware that the film is fictional, but also makes the “directedness” of being addressed more personal/involved with the film. We see this in the scene when the characters are “sharing some thoughts on ethnicity”. The camera zooms in close; the characters are looking directly at the camera, and they share their thoughts to the audience not the other characters. These “soliloquies” that “interrupt dramatic action and verbal exchange” through a series of vignettes makes this film seem not part of the Hollywood conventions of cinema (Willis). I really enjoy that!

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Mess around with different lenses (such as the fish-eye), personify the camera, montage editing, break the fourth wall…have fun! Be creative! It is not like I oppose the some conventional Hollywood films, but I give and extra “kudos!” to the directors who mess around and go away from the usual. Hitchcock, Lee, and Allen are all defined auteurs; it is because of their unconventionality. I just wish more of the popular films today didn’t always follow the conventions and changed it up a bit (not the same song and dance)…well maybe that is why there are called “mainstream”.