It’s cold at Major Spoilers HQ, but it is a very hot day in Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do The Right Thing.
It’s the hottest day of the summer. You can do nothing, you can do something or you can…Do the Right Thing. The controversial story centers around one scorching inner-city day, when racial tensions reach the boiling point in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood.
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1 Comment
You all raise excellent points for the film – one thing that I might add is the discourse on materialism and popular (black) culture, and how the film’s score ties this to hip hop. Spike Lee presents the younger characters’ devotion to materialistic symbols in a critical light: Buggin’ Out’s (a “righteous black man”) reaction to having his fresh Jordans scuffed, etc. The title track Do The Right Thing came out in 1989, just as hip hop was first breaking into white radio audiences, and record labels were pushing to create “the formula” to cash in on this new market. As strange as it seems now, resistance to commercialization was a fairly prominent theme in late 80s rap – Public Enemy’s politically-charged militant persona came up in this context.