When reading the Ella Shohat article, I immediately saw the genius of Spike Lee’s movie. We have been seeing a lot of films lately where, as stated in an older article, white people are just thought of as “people”, while black individuals are thought of primarily as being “black”. Spike Lee managed to break down each and every ethnicity in Do The Right Thing, making white just as much a set ethnicity as black. The normally marginalized ethnicities remained so but white was no longer the norm due to its portrayal in the film. The only white individuals in the film were police officers, and every police officer in the film was white. This served to make sure that white people were considered a part of the whole, not simply the norm. Spike Lee made a lovely little soup of different ethnic groups such as blacks, whites, Italians, Koreans, etc.
Relationships devolve for no real reason. Lee’s emphasis on the differences of the groups serve to show the viewers the tensions evident due to those differences. This tension leads people to see slights and insults where there are none and things spiral downwards from there. This change is mainly signaled by the lighting. The movie starts in the morning and everyone seems cheerful and viewers are tricked into thinking that this is going to be a happy film. As the day progresses, more and more issues arise and people who were so pleasant earlier in the day turn vicious. The police who let the men playing with the fire hydrant get off easy strangle a man. Those who were unwilling to boycott Sal’s help destroy his store. Tensions escalates and tempers flare until the situation becomes explosive. The next morning, life goes back to normal and everyone is cheerfully frolicking in the street again.
This film really upset me so in answer to the question as to why Mookie threw the garbage can, I will draw from the reading, Mosaic City. He did it to draw attention away from Sal so that people would focus their destructive energies on the shop instead of on Sal. I would really like to believe in enduring loyalty, respect, and love between individuals and groups despite external influences.
