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Sunday, February 20, 2011

Do The Right Thing

I am reviewing Spike Lee's films; I consider "Do The Right Thing" to be a unique masterpiece that will endure forever. I like his other films, but none of them makes me feel as if I were sitting next to Socrates and Aristotle, watching a Greek tragedy by Aeschylus (not Euripides!), or being in the company of great visions being recounted by heavenly griots from some mysterious clime of genius.

A scene with Ossie Davis and Spike Lee, Ossie sitting on the stoop of a house when Mookie (Spike Lee) walks by delivering a pizza, Ossie is "The Mayor" and he refers to Mookie as "Doctor".

Mayor:  Doctor! Come here, this is the Mayor talking.
Mookie:  Ah right, ah right. What is it?
Mayor:  Doctor... always do the right thing.
Mookie:  That's it?
Mayor:  That's it.
Mookie:  I got it. I'm gone.

Part of the genius is in the perception that we almost never do "the right thing". We do the expedient thing, the profitable thing, the thing we think we should do, the thing we think celebrities would do, the thing that people with big smile on the cover of their books tell us to do, the thing we ideologically believe we should do...

...but how often do we do the right thing?

I think part of the enormous effect this film has is the sudden awareness that our lives are based on "almost" not "is"; we never do the right thing until everything explodes into our faces.

2 comments:

Professor 0110 said...

I think we've been given consciousness for a specific reason, and that reason is tied up with doing the right thing...why else can we reason? But we seem to be failing at that...think about trees for a moment. They're living things, and they are do the right thing all the time, and seldom hurt each other...think of all the trees packed peacefully together in forests. Trees are doing a much better job than us, and what about ant colonies all working together?

Ben

Montag said...

Right... or consider the lilies of the field, who neither toil nor spin...

Ant colonies bring up the notion of "sheretz" (its a Hebrew term and you won't be familiar with it... yet) which I am going to write about today.

"Better job"... I would have agreed until yesterday when I read about the situation in the Tropics in this hemisphere where trees are giving way to vines in many places.
We may not be able to make evaluative judgments about "alien" entities - like trees. We just have to choose to live together or not; other judgments may be beyond our capabilities.