Aaron Wolff
Mrs. Kolb
Intro to film
27 April 2026
Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’ is one long, boiling hot day in Brooklyn. There isn’t a lot in the
film in terms of plot but a lot in terms of dialogue, fights and common household jokes. This
means that the real issue of division within society comes across clear. Because of this extreme
heat the level of anger rises, making it crucial that every person be heard.
One of the best aspects to this film is seeing the opinion of every single character and never
knowing which idea you should embrace. Everyone from Mookie, Sal, Radio Raheem and
Buggin Out all have very differing views on how this should play out, and every character gets to
unleash their anger to ensure there’s not one person who will come to the viewer with an answer
because every dialogue is complex. It can be seen all throughout the film and most clearly within
Sal’s Pizzeria, the core issue of the film is to show what’s at the heart of it.
Within Sal’s Pizzeria the topic of who is right, who is wrong and how can two cultures have the
right to inhabit the same city comes into play. The need of Buggin Out to be on the Wall of Fame
is a way of representing who or what people hold high in society and who receive recognition.
Sal feels like the business is his since he lives there but everyone within that society believes that
in a society made up of all the people within the neighborhood, the business should represent
them as well. What seems like a simple misunderstanding by the end becomes much more
complex than one would imagine.
What made this film stand out above others visually was its use of color, the vibrant yellow,
orange and red combined with the camera panning so close and the quick cuts can really make
any physical interaction feel incredibly personal, not to mention one of the most shocking things,
that every now and then a character would stare directly at the audience and shout an insult
directly at them.
What starts as a disagreement about racism comes to an abrupt and tragic end with the death of
Radio Raheem at the hands of the police, showing that the whole situation underlaid the deeper
issue of police brutality and racism. There’s not a single clear answer as to why Mookie did whathe did whether it was because he was angry or was simply looking for the rest of the people at
the situation to feel like they got their point across because, like many things in the film, there’s a
lot of ways to look at it.
The end of this film has two very contrasting views which come in the form of two different
speeches by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to demonstrate that there is no obvious
conclusion to these problems and that this entire film comes about because no definite answer
exists to whether something was the right or wrong thing to do.
This film comes across so perfectly in this regard and elevates what would seem like a trivial
disagreement, to represent who our society is, it provides with the context of what would affect
an individual in this kind of situation but on a massive scale.