Do The Right Thing, 2020 edition, Ed Guerrero, reviewed

Review of Do The Right Thing, 2020 edition, Ed Guerrero, published by Bloomsbury.

Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989) is one of the most popular and celebrated examples of the African-American new black film wave. Set during the hottest day of a hot summer in New York City, the film’s ensemble cast, including Lee himself, brilliantly play out the edgy negotiations and dramas of a racially and culturally diverse working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Contrary to Hollywood’s markedly cautious treatment of ‘race’ and its confinement to the South and the past, Do The Right Thing offers a nuanced portrayal of black urban life.

From hip-hop fashions, Afrocentric colors and rap music, to police brutality, gentrification, non-white immigration, de-industrialization and joblessness, Do The Right Thing depicts it all, from a contemporary, African-American point of view. In his insightful study of the film, Ed Guerrero discusses how it epitomizes Spike Lee’s powerful impact on the representation of race and difference in America, the progress of black film-making and the rise of multicultural voices in the media.

This new edition includes a foreword by the author reflecting on Lee’s subsequent film-making career and on an America in which African-Americans still contend with racial discrimination and police brutality.

Guerrero emphasizes Lee’s especially timely understanding of black film-making as a complex act, mixing the skills of art, politics, and business in order to fashion a creative practice that confronts institutional discrimination and power relations head on.

Do The Right Thing, 2020 edition, Ed Guerrero, reviewed

This was a striking, breathtaking, kick-arse

Thisfilm when it came out in 1989. It is also a smart book to have had a 2020 update too. Black lives mattered in 1989, a shocking 31 years later, black people are still being killed by the police in the US for trivial and arbitrary reasons. For all the flack that Spike Lee received back in 1989 in terms of, misguided, claims that he was trying to stir up ‘race issues’ it is more than clear, that, more than three decades later these issues have not been resolved.

This movie was striking and yet also thoughtful and nuanced when we watched it in Washington DC in 1989, at the time in the middle of a drugs and murder surge which averaged more than one murder per day. It is a film that is well worth watching again and Guerrero does a great job in exploring the various subtle, and nonobvious aspects that Lee explores in this film. It is an engaging and thoughtful book that encourages us to give the film a second viewing, especially as much has yet to be successfully resolved in terms of racial equality and the fact that #blm is as important an issue as ever.

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