Thomas-Sox-WorldSeries wrote:
Do the Right Thing was made for people in 80s Naperville. Sorry, Brad, Chip, Taylor, and Brooke, it was a decent film (and it's not the film's fault that it is still over-hyped), but it's fake-complex, like most Spike Lee movies.
Do the Right Thing is an early example of a liberal neoliberal aesthetic. The movie's experimental cinematography, groundbreaking soundtrack, and bold racial dialogue signify the film's "revolutionary," or anti-systemic aspirations. Ultimately, though, the movie doesn't attempt to think around the system of racialized and racist capitalist exploitation at the film's center; rather, the whole narrative thrust is built around finding a place within the system--both for Mookie and, by extension, for other presumably talented blacks like him (And it's crucial here that Mookie's character is played by Spike Lee, who seems to view himself as a kind of contemporary embodiment of DuBois' talented tenth, a racial (proto-Leninist?) vanguard that would lead the black masses to traverse and demolish the "color line"). The film's revolutionary aesthetics are thus undermined by its reformist message, which abandons anti-systemic politics in favor of a politics of representation. Put simply,
DTRT tells us that there's no reason to fight a system of exploitation when you can occupy a position of power within that system. Why bother to
fight the power when you can wield it instead?
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Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.