"Do the Right Thing" Fight the Powers that Be

I personally can't think of any other film that truly captured the essence, theme, and visuals of an era, while the architect of such a film is living in the heyday of said era. It’s as if Spike Lee was able to create a period piece with "Do the Right Thing," while living in the period itself. Granted there are a plethora of other period pieces that are considerably more award worthy then Spike Lee's classic, but I still can't think of a single movie which captured an era before its height. “Do the Right Thing” was seamlessly able to capture the social injustices and subsequent underlying racial tensions in the microcosm of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Throughout the film we are introduced to a host of characterize who are most certainly made into caricatures of actual members of this elusive society, yet still portray a dream like reality of what it was like to be a minority trying to just survive in late 1980s New York . Spike Lee literally delivers to us a cultural masterpiece which, through film, holds a mirror to our prejudices and forces us to ask ourselves “am I comfortable with who I am looking at.” Over the course of the film it is obvious that Lee understands the American desire to just give the benefit of the doubt and let sleeping dogs lay, or whatever platitude people like to hide behind when presented with considerably difficult social issues. Instead Lee forces us to decide, forces us to choose, he forces us to act, but also leaves us with the question of what is the right thing to do? We can act like a collective mob who goes out and destroy that which has been created from our racially divided society, or we can appreciate the favorite pizza shop and instead look to find change within ourselves. Lee accurately portrays the frustrations which accompany the socially repressed, but he also includes the idea of alternatives, options that should meticulously be sifted through and chosen to relieve ourselves from this plight. “Do the Right Thing” as long as you know the right thing.