DO THE RIGHT THING Decoded. No Easy Theses, No Simple Solutions

The heat pours from the sky, reflects off the street pavement, and from the early hours of the morning, it warms the entire neighborhood to an unbearable temperature, exhausting both body and mind. This sets the scene for one of the most important films in the history of Black American cinema, which remains an anti-discrimination classic to this day, addressing racism and the portrayal of African Americans in society and culture with a rebellious freshness. Do the Right Thing is probably the most significant film in Spike Lee’s entire career—a figure who himself is an icon of African American emancipation, with a body of work that defies stereotypes and conventional approaches to the subject of racism in film. His second work is a manifesto film aimed at social segregation, a grassroots voice of dissent, and at the same time, a perspective on racism that overturns canonical, hierarchical views. As it turned out shortly after its release, and still remains true in 2024, Lee’s rebellious work touches on the essence of the issues it portrays and—sadly—has not lost its relevance.

For the sake of clarity, I should note that in this text, I undertake an analysis of the film, discussing key elements of its plot—so be warned of spoilers.

In Do the Right Thing, Lee shows the everyday life of Brooklyn, where the local micro-community lives through the same routine day after day, sweating in the summer heat from dawn to dusk. Everything happens in a familiar, lethargic rhythm, lazily and accompanied by complaints—as laborious as it gets on a hot day. In this nonchalant way, Lee paints a picture of the realities of a poor New York neighborhood—most residents spend their day wandering around, gossiping, arguing, or goofing off. Most residents are unemployed and young. Most residents are Black. At the heart of their urban microcosm, two small businesses operate, both run by “outsiders”—a convenience store opened by a Korean couple and, of course, the Italian Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. Most of the story revolves around the pizzeria, which seems—somewhat paradoxically (or perhaps not at all)—to be the center of life in this Brooklyn micro-community.

Lee portrays the environment with meticulous realism, while also balancing on the edge of satire. His film is populated by characters that are more or less exaggerated, often embodying stereotypes—the work-shy African American in Lycra, the hot-tempered Italian, the talkative Black elder, the neighborhood loudmouth, and so on. The vices, both real for certain groups and those invented or exaggerated by popular culture, are used in Do the Right Thing to characterize American racial and class relations. Lee spares no irony-laden criticism for his characters, but above all, he strikes at the cultural normalization of tensions and aggression. He takes on the task of bringing to the screen a real cauldron of tensions and presents it in a somewhat ambiguous form of satire, showing a grassroots view of what can be called the condition of the Black community in the USA. He weaves a cinematic tale that imperceptibly crosses the invisible line between comedy and drama, combining experiences of structural relationships into a bitter but not humorless social commentary.

The director uses a polyphonic narrative convention in Do the Right Thing, creating a complex panorama of the Brooklyn “block” through intertwining stories of its individual residents. For most of the film, these are loosely interwoven micro-narratives, occasionally coming together, not so much driving the plot forward as subtly painting the context of the situation, whose deepening essentially replaces the main intrigue. All these threads ultimately converge, forming in the climax a meticulously constructed critique of both institutional and everyday racism from seemingly unrelated elements. The central narrative drive—though this only becomes clear by the film’s end—is the tension between Buggin’ Out, one of the Black customers of the pizzeria, and its owner Sal, over the “Wall of Fame,” which, according to Buggin’ Out, lacks African Americans. A seemingly trivial argument escalates by evening into a tragic conflict when Radio Raheem, a towering boombox enthusiast, gets involved. His intervention leads to a physical confrontation and a fatal police intervention. To understand the significance of the film, it’s best to look at these parts individually, from which the whole emerges.

Mookie

The central character in the film is Mookie, played by the director himself—a young man working at Sal’s pizzeria who drags himself through the sun-baked streets with an eternally tired or jaded expression (it’s hard to tell which). Mookie ties all the other narrative threads together—his extended pizza deliveries (he works as a delivery boy at Sal’s) create opportunities for encounters with all the other, often more static, characters. It is his movement, though seemingly sluggish, that sets Mookie apart from his neighbors. He is one of the few Black people shown on screen who has a steady job, situating him in a specific social position—intermediary, mediating between Sal and his sons (who possess wealth and the social advantage it generates, a kind of power) and the Black people who frequent the pizzeria. Additionally, the bravura performance by Lee creates a Mookie who embodies the first stereotype presented in Do the Right Thing—the sluggish Black worker who is more often slacking off than actually working. This situates him in an ambiguous light and makes him an intriguing protagonist with a fairly fluid characterization, juggling class affiliations and ethical stances. In other words, Mookie is a relatively flexible person, capable of taking on many potential roles, and it is for this reason that he is the leading protagonist of Do the Right Thing. The titular call to “do the right thing” is directed specifically at him (the words are spoken to him in the morning by the Mayor, then still sounding like the trivial “wisdom” of an aging drunk), as a representative of a group balancing on the edge of various social roles for (Afro)Americans. Over the course of that fateful day, Mookie will have to take a stand, choose the right stance in response to the evil his micro-community experiences. He will also have to confront his approach to life—a strategy of avoidance, of fleeing from responsibility.

Sal

Sal is the leading white character in the film, and simultaneously its protagonist and antagonist. The Italian-American businessman who has run the pizzeria in the Black neighborhood for years is a person seemingly free from prejudice, at times strict but fair, and often playing the role of the voice of reason amidst the shouts of hot-headed young men. However, he also has a darker side—aware of his advantage, stemming from owning the popular establishment, over the local community, he sometimes loses his temper, and his benevolent facade gives way to the threat of violence. On the one hand, one could say that Sal is simply defending what is his, but on the other, it is hard not to see in his boastful statement, “In my place, I am the boss,” a conviction rooted in a hierarchical structure of his superiority. This also comes to light in the key scene of the film, when, agitated by the confrontation with Buggin’ Out and Raheem, he utters the n-word, which has been lurking at the tip of his tongue, and as the owner, he destroys someone else’s property, provoking the tragic conclusion of the story. Sal’s attitude is also ambiguous in his relationship with Mookie. He treats him with clear affection, says he sees him as a son, but it could be suspected that his attraction to Mookie’s sister plays a role in this. This, in turn, would reveal a patronizing and self-serving attitude of the pizza specialist towards his neighbors, especially since he admits at one point that the Black neighborhood is an easier market for him. Sal symbolizes the white middle class in Do the Right Thing—a minority that appears friendly on the surface but is in fact misled by its own class interest and adopts racist thinking frames—patronizing, feeling superior, and justifying violence (both symbolic and physical). As someone who comes into direct contact with African Americans, he embodies the entire white community for them, even if he cannot be blamed for all its wrongs. He is the immediate opponent against whom the young people from the streets rebel—so he suffers for both his own sins and those of others, as well as for negligence.

Radio Raheem

Silent and imposing, Raheem proudly strides through the sweltering streets, marking his presence and symbolic dominance over the neighborhood with the sound of Public Enemy’s Fight the Power playing on a loop from his boombox. Though enigmatic, this hulking figure is a key and iconic character in Do the Right Thing. His significance stems from two key aspects: first, his monologue about love and hate, delivered to Mookie, where Lee, through the words of Bill Nunn, explicitly expresses the film’s philosophical message about the inseparable intertwining of extreme emotions and the looming threat of violence within the Black community in the United States. The second reason Raheem’s role is pivotal lies in the climactic events—his confrontation in the pizzeria and the attack on Sal, which tragically ends with a police officer’s baton on his throat and a heavy thud as he falls to the pavement. Raheem’s fate, as a fictional representative of all victims of police brutality—like Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Griffith, Arthur Miller Jr., Edmund Perry, Yvonne Smallwood, and Michael Stewart, to whom the film is dedicated—reveals structural inequalities and exposes the underlying power struggle in which all the characters are engaged. For a young man from a poor, ethnically and class-stigmatized neighborhood, the ostentatious flaunting of rap, deeply rooted in his streets, was a performance of ownership over space, an assertion of his agency and independence. Destroying the radio struck at the core of Raheem’s fundamental feelings, and the police’s brutal reaction to his outburst of anger proved that he ultimately did not possess the rights he proclaimed. In his confrontation with Sal, Raheem, who symbolically manifested his agency, clashed with the physical manifestation of power—faced with the destruction of his emblem of strength, he turned to real violence, but this was a gesture doomed to fail as he encountered the brutal, hostile machinery of systemic “law and order.” In Raheem’s tragic story, Lee captures the drama of minorities doomed to both inflict and endure violence, desperately trying to carve out their place in society. He doesn’t portray them as spotless martyrs but shows them as ordinary people, with flaws and virtues, who humanly experience injustice.

Vito and Pino

In a completely different way, Sal’s sons, Vito and Pino, who work with him at the Famous Pizzeria, must grapple with their heritage. Condemned to the family business, they adopt opposing attitudes toward their situation and, consequently, the surrounding African American community. The younger Vito is friends with Mookie, seems gentler and more open, enduring jibes and verbal aggression from Pino. Pino, on the other hand, is openly hostile towards the work he despises and the customers—he is the one who hurls racist remarks with sincerity, revels in his small (or even half) step of class superiority, and escalates aggression in several moments, which Vito and Sal try to avoid. The young Fragione brothers are essentially two faces of the same stance, a stance of white individuals unconsciously absorbing racist prejudices and a sense of superiority inherited from previous generations, to some extent detached from the real problems and situations of the people among whom they live. Vito adopts a more conscious, reflective approach, genuinely offering hope for a dialogue based on respect and potential change. However, he lacks the will and courage to stand up to his brother’s aggression, becoming an involuntary witness who squanders his chance to act. In this sense, Vito and Pino represent two aspects of Sal himself—empathetic and looking beyond prejudices, yet simultaneously susceptible to impulses rooted in the internalized sense of superiority that comes with class and ethnic identity. The brothers thus showcase two potential outcomes—hope and its absence in the context of changing social antagonisms.