“Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee

Introduction

Do the Right Thing captures a sense of history and community that is essential to identity but doesn’t provide a thorough portrait of Bedford-Stuyvesant. In this Brooklyn neighbourhood, it is located. The protagonists in the film are aggressively portrayed through expressive exaggeration; they are not people with a fully realised psyche but rather ones who wear the wounds, traumas, and symbols of history, as well as the weight of the police and white gaze. His style gives a unique glance at black people’s lives—and at life in general from a black person’s perspective—just like Lee’s script does. This paper aims to examine the cinematography and mise-en-scène deployed through the lens of social and political context to pass the theme of oppression, race, and discrimination towards African Americans.

Film Elements

Cinematography

The movie Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing utilised cinematography to its best to help it pass the message to its audience. The movie has received nominations for Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay at the Oscar Awards (). The film employs a variety of cinematic angles and techniques to capture the movements, enhance the visual appeal, and accentuate the film’s mood. The movie has utilized cinematography to add and remove power to its characters. There are a combination of low camera shots, high camera shots, Dutch angles, and zooms in the film.

The camera’s location is the most straightforward due to portraying the contrast between people in cinematography. Spike Lee’s film is noted for its strong camera motions and angles. Shooting a character from above easily depicts the character to the audience as a little bit weak. Changing the angle to shoot the character from below shows the character is a bit powerful (Marshall 2). Lee has used this technique a couple of times on Radio Raheem, whenever the character converse with another character (Lee 13:53). In situations with chaos and skewed reality, Lee has utilised the Dutch tilt to cause disorientation and take the viewers out of their comfort zones (Lee 20:20). The camera closes in on Mookie and a few other individuals in one scene as they utter a series of racist epithets, highlighting racial strife as they rattle off numerous prejudices about different ethnicities (Lee 48:25).

Mise-en-scène

The striking set design captures the heightened realism shown in the movie. This is shown in the highly stylized usage of attire and the meticulous attention to detail, where the choice of the incorrect or appropriate trainer is given significant weight. Pictures of notable Italian-Americ are displayed in Sal’s Pizzeria, serving as the foundation for the film’s central conflict (Cooper 5). These need to be substituted, according to Buggin’ Out, with images that showcase all notable African-Americans, from Malcolm X to Michael Jordan (Lee 1:00:44). Comprehending this struggle is predicated on what these artefacts stand for and is essential for understanding the film’s finale (Marshall 2). The block’s environment is given much attention, heightening the drama of the events in the movie. Throughout the plot’s timeline, the movie doesn’t divert from this.

Do the Right Thing alternates between the Bed-Stuy actors in terms of structure and visuals, developing via a dialectic the ambiguities and tensions that permeate Lee’s settings and ideas. The way the movie is structured lends a theatrical feel to it as if the entire complex were the stage. From scene to scene, Lee switches the lights from one location to another. This movie is made entirely of pauses, breaks, asides, and alone moments. Throughout most of the film, Lee doesn’t focus on one character. He switches between separate scenes with Sal, Mookie, Buggin Out, and kids on the pavement cooling and playing in an outdoor fire hydrant (Lee 26: 15). Rarely do the shifts happen suddenly, but rather as Dickerson’s smooth camera shots follow one scene and then refocus on another when a new character emerges from a different part of the neighbourhood.

However, Lee frequently switches back and forth between antagonistic characters within the same scene in an editing technique known as mirroring, highlighting the tension. The argument becomes more heated and more profound the cut (Marshall 2). Early in the movie, when Buggin Out makes the first appearance in Sal’s, Mookie sequence his argument with Sal about the price of additional cheese—a relatively uncontroversial subject—with both personas in the same shot. The cutting changes to a harsher back-and-forth with an interval of a cut between each retort a second later as their dispute over Sal’s “Wall of Fame” intensifies, signifying their antagonism as the fight grows more severe (Cooper 5). Lee emphasises the ties and places of rupture among Bed-Stuy residents through these visual rhythms.

Context

Political

With the conclusion of the Reagan administration and the beginning of President Bush Senior’s administration, the movie is set during a time when Republicans dominated US national politics. Locally speaking, the political climate in New York during the period is just as fascinating (Russell 2). After New York was on the verge of bankruptcy in the middle of the 1970s, Mayor Koch oversaw the city’s recovery. However, the city’s poor Hispanic and Blacks hadn’t truly profited from this. There is an implied message in the movie that audiences should “do the right thing” and support the black (and ultimately victorious) candidate David Dinkins. The film was released in the run-up to the 1990 municipal race.

Social

Do the Right Thing would never have come at a more challenging and advantageous time. Numerous racially tinged occurrences, such as the mob murders of Yusaf Hawkins and Michael Griffiths mentioned at the movie’s start, have shaken New York City. The film is also profoundly prescient in aspects of how, as a result of a series of shootings of defenceless African Americans, the interaction between black youth and US police departments has worsened over time (Lee 1:30:41). The continued growth in hip-hop and rapping culture’s appeal is also significant. The most politically engaged of these musicians was by far National Enemy, who expressed their rage at living in what they perceived to be a racially segregated America.

Influence on Society and Culture

The film presents two opposing forces, love and hate, that affect society and culture. Spike Lee raises awareness of the bigotry that black Americans encounter regularly and the destructive impact it has on disadvantaged communities by narrating the tale of a tense, catastrophic day in a Brooklyn community. In a broader sense, Lee investigates violence as a reaction to subjugation. He shifts the national conversation about social equality from Malcolm X’s self-defence standpoint to Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolent protest. One of the movie’s last moments reflects on current concerns of society and race in America, underscoring the relevance of Lee’s message in today’s divisive culture.

Conclusion

To conclude, the paper has critically analysed Lee’s Do the Right Thing by looking at the cinematography and mise-en-scène that have been deployed through the lens of social and political context to pass the theme of oppression, race and discrimination towards African Americans and its influence on contemporary culture and society. The film uses a combination of low-camera shots, high-camera shots, Dutch angles, and zooms. The paper has explained how various camera tilts have been used to describe the might of some of the characters that exist in the film. Similarly, mise-en-scène exists in the highly stylised usage of attire and the meticulous attention to detail, where the incorrect or appropriate trainer is given significant weight.

Works Cited

Cooper, Brenda. “’The White-Black Fault Line’: Relevancy of Race and Racism in Spectators’ Experiences of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.” Howard Journal of Communications, vol. 9, no. 3, 1998, pp. 205–228., Web.

Lee, Spike. Do the Right Thing. Universal Pictures, 1989, Web.

Marshall, Kelli. “Forming a Critical Sense of Race with Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing.’” JSTOR Daily, Web.

Russell, Stuart J. Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality. MIT Press, 2003.