In his book, White, film theorist Richard Dyer that race in films is often observed in a way that transcends the simply visual and approaches the metaphorical. White has never been an ethnicity, per se - it is generally accepted to mean the absence of any ethnicity. Black is less of a racial classification than a social one. All this should come as no surprise to most people – America’s long-running flirtation with racial politics, or at least the lingering shadow it has left across our social discourse, will outlive everyone. Even though Dyer wrote with an eye turned specifically towards the underlying concept of zombie movies (zombification being something like buying into “The White Thing” ), the gist of his argument translates over pretty neatly to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
As Dyer puts it, the quality of being zombified is simply an overt way of articulating the much more difficult notion of whiteness – the latter being a concept that seems impossible to define without referencing itself (like trying to explain ‘to the left’ without the word ‘left’) or without creating a reference point (like trying to explain ‘to the left’ without using the word ‘right’). As Dyer would have it, a zombie’s taste for flesh is a metaphor for the free market rat race. A zombie’s shambling, herd-like movement pattern is just another visual way of explaining conformity. On the other side, Ben, the protagonist of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead – the genesis for all movies of its kind – is a black man who is willing to go to great lengths to survive. He finds his contrast in a catatonic, hysterical, helpless white woman.
While literal zombies are conspicuously absent from Do the Right Thing, the feelings that they evoke may be useful in understanding the racial subtexts of Lee’s film. The film takes place in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The people who live there (predominantly black) live with their backs against the wall in a time of widespread gentrification – a kind of creeping whiteness that is never directly mentioned in the film but the presence of which is certainly felt. Though the two main conflicting bodies in the film – the Italian-owned pizzeria and the unyielding Radio Raheem – can easily be viewed as representatives of the issue at large – a sort of entrepreneurial, patronizing (white) force being met by stiff (black) resistance – Lee invites the viewer to see things from a more thoughtful perspective. Relations do not appear to be quite so tortured as in Romero’s film. Of course, appearances prove to be deceiving; the film ends in a riot, with the pizzeria getting burned to the ground and Raheem getting killed by cops. This, of course, parallels Ben’s demise at the hands of the Sheriff and his men, who had presumably come to rescue him.
Viewers of each film are left with a certain bleak feeling. Those with the best intentions (Lee’s Sal or Romero’s Sheriff) often cause the most harm. However, while Ben’s end is tragic irony, Do the Right Thing succeeds in bewildering nearly anybody who sees it (or, as the director has since described it, succeeds in bewildering white people). The quotations that precede the credits – one demonstrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s LOVE approach to solving racial injustice and the other demonstrating Malcolm X’s HATE approach to the same – only serve to further confound the situation. However, perhaps it is significant to note that Malcolm X’s quote, about the judicious and intelligent use of violence as a means to an end, comes last. Almost as if, in the cosmic argument, hate got the last word. This reading certainly seems to support the ending of the film, even if many of the viewers don’t.
A third possibility, and the one that I favor, is that the film reflects the futility of adhering to any particular “right thing.” In defining what is right, one must consider which one of many authorities one will consult, whether that be law, religion, emotion or any other, in seeking justification. What is “right” by authority is not necessarily what is “right” by another.
The true draw of Lee’s film comes from its unwillingness to tell the viewer what to believe. Its power is in its inscrutability.
