‘Do The Right Thing’ still resonates

updated 2:00 p.m. ET June 29, 2009

NEW YORK - Twenty years later, the trash can is still crashing through America's window.

At the climax of Spike Lee's 1989 drama "Do The Right Thing," the eternal battle between love and hate teeters on a razor's edge. The young black man Radio Raheem has been choked to death by white police after a fight with a Brooklyn pizzeria owner. A seething crowd gathers in front of the shop.

Lee's character, Mookie, a black pizza deliveryman, stands between the crowd and the shop. He's shoulder-to-shoulder with Sal, the shop's Italian owner. They exchange looks of confusion, betrayal and regret.

The crowd stares at Mookie. He's on the wrong side. Mookie moves over to his brothers, rubs his face, wrestling with the weight of the moment. Then he decides.

"Hate!" screams Mookie as he hurls the metal can through the pizzeria's plate glass window. The dam bursts. The mob destroys the shop in a frenzy that was both inevitable and completely avoidable.

Much has changed since "Do The Right Thing" announced Lee's special gifts to the world. The police choke hold that killed Radio Raheem — a fictionalization of the real death of Michael Stewart in New York City — has long been outlawed. Life on the ravaged Brooklyn block where Lee filmed the movie has improved. Ronald Reagan has given way to Barack Obama.

Seth Wenig / AP Director Spike Lee answers questions about his 1989 film “Do The Right Thing" on June 15 in New York. “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the can through the window,” he says.

But for every measure of undeniable progress, "Do The Right Thing" also points to the divides that remain.

In May, a black New York City undercover cop who was running after a suspect with his gun drawn was shot to death by a white officer. Boarded-up buildings, broken windows and jobless young men still populate that Brooklyn block. And Lee, who wrote, produced and directed the film, insists the racial disconnect at its heart still exists.

"White people still ask me why Mookie threw the can through the window," Lee said in an interview. "Twenty years later, they're still asking me that."

"No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why."

Something new to say
That question is what made "Do The Right Thing" so explosive. Some writers speculated, erroneously, that it would incite riots.

"People were fearful of the backlash," said Rosie Perez, who played Mookie's Puerto Rican girlfriend, Tina. "A lot of things happening in the movie were happening in real life. People were afraid when the truth, although a little exaggerated, was put up on the screen for everyone to see."

Meanwhile, Lee got rave reviews from many influential critics. Roger Ebert cried after watching it at the Cannes Film Festival, where it lost to "sex, lies and videotape."

Audiences definitely were not prepared.

Most serious films about race, like "In the Heat of the Night," "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "The Defiant Ones," ended with understanding or even brotherhood. And for every ambitious movie like "Watermelon Man" or "Black Like Me," there were a half-dozen violent, sexy ghetto shoot-em-ups — "blaxploitation" flicks.

Lee had something new to say. "In just three feature films," critic Gene Siskel wrote then, "Spike Lee has given us more genuine and varied images of black people than in the last 20 years of American movies put together."

Today, Ebert says "Do The Right Thing" should have won the Oscar for best picture. "It was so honest about the way people really feel," he said via e-mail. "No hypocrisy. It generated grief and left us with a central question of American society."

The best picture of 1989, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: "Driving Miss Daisy," about the friendship between a white Atlanta woman and her black chauffeur.

It ends on a Thanksgiving in the 1960s, with the chauffeur feeding Miss Daisy a piece of pie.

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