A week after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer, Spike Lee premiered a short film entitled 3 Brothers on a CNN special hosted by Don Lemon. The film, which is still available on Lee’s Instagram account, is only 94 seconds long. It opens with five words in red juxtaposed against a black background: “Will History Stop Repeating Itself?”
For a minute and a half, footage of the real-life killings of George Floyd and Eric Garner is interspersed with the fictional death of Do the Right Thing’s Radio Raheem (played by the late, great Bill Nunn). All three clips depict unarmed Black men, suffocated and killed by white police officers. Each episode is filled with a chorus of desperate pleas from horrified onlookers. They are eerily similar scenes. Like three instruments playing the same tune in three different octaves.
What makes 3 Brothers so affecting is the morose timelessness of the source material to which it is indebted. Released in 1989, amid the turbulence of the Reagan-and-Bush-era war on drugs, Do the Right Thing is an examination of trauma, community, and uprisings as a form of political action. Starring Lee as the protagonist Mookie, a delivery man at Sal’s Famous Pizzeria—the only white-owned business in the neighborhood—the film takes place over the course of one day, on a single block in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy. Set in the midst of a record heat wave, it focuses on the minutiae of everyday life in the neighborhood, only later revealing how vulnerable the Black and Brown bodies that populate it are to police violence.
Lee builds Do the Right Thing into a rolling boil, emphasized by the day’s temperatures but felt especially in Mookie’s interactions. A pair of police officers stalk the neighborhood from their patrol car, like predators eyeing prey. A run-in with a white man in a sweat-stained Larry Bird jersey foreshadows the looming threat of gentrification. A petition, organized by Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), demanding that Sal honor not only Italian Americans on his “Wall of Fame” throws Mookie headfirst into fraught debates about race and ownership. Mookie argues with Sal’s oldest son, Pino, a virulent racist, about the inherent contradictions of “hating” Black people while idolizing Black artists and athletes. He protects Da Mayor, an old man with a drinking problem, after police officers question him about a group of kids who’ve sprayed water into a white man’s convertible. Up until the end of the movie, Mookie even tries to mediate the conflict between Sal and Buggin’ Out. For most of the film, he is the bridge between his community and the forces that constrict it.
As the torrid sun gives way to a muggy night, the neighborhood’s tensions overflow. When an altercation breaks out between Radio Raheem and Sal—over the former’s refusal to turn down the volume of his boombox—police officers arrive and immediately subdue Raheem. One officer lifts him off the ground, pinning a billy club against his neck, choking him, until his feet dangle lifelessly in the air. As an uprising swells in response to the killing, Mookie joins in, throwing a trash can through the plate-glass window of Sal’s Famous, after which the pizzeria is burned to the ground. The movie ends with two quotes—one from Martin Luther King Jr. and another from Malcolm X—on the utility of violence as a means to achieve liberation.
Despite its more recent placement within the pantheon of contemporary filmmaking, at the time of its release Do the Right Thing was met with controversy and resistance from white critics. The movie lost out on the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or because the jury president found Mookie “unheroic.” Nine months later, it was nominated for just two Oscars, famously losing Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy, a film whose message of racial reconciliation—a well-worn Hollywood trope in which white characters are redeemed of their racism by virtue of their friendship with a Black counterpart—was the antithesis of Lee’s sprawling drama. White critics and Hollywood elites even debated whether or not the film would cause mass rioting in Black communities. In a review for New York magazine, Joe Klein wrote a screed warning readers of the “violent” ramifications that would come if the film spread to Black audiences.
Beyond the casual racism that suggests Black audiences are incapable of consuming incendiary art without erupting into a rampage of mindless violence, the common thread among the initial criticisms of Do the Right Thing was an ignorance of what “rioting” is about and the manner in which it operates in Lee’s narrative. That same ignorance is as much a staple of moments of social upheaval as the upheaval itself. “Spike was dealing with studio executives that didn’t understand how violence was incited and why it’s incited,” says Ruth E. Carter, the film’s costume designer, who would win an Oscar years later for her work on Black Panther. “They think something as simple as a movie like Do the Right Thing that has a riot scene in it is the thing that tips the temperament of the Black community. But it’s much deeper than that.”
About two-thirds of the way through Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, the final text that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote during his tectonic life, King describes visiting Watts, California, in the wake of the infamous 1965 Watts Rebellion. Just a few days earlier the city had been engulfed in flames as the uprising hit historic proportions. Amid all of this upheaval, King and his associates traveled the city looking for answers:
For a minute and a half, footage of the real-life killings of George Floyd and Eric Garner is interspersed with the fictional death of Do the Right Thing’s Radio Raheem (played by the late, great Bill Nunn). All three clips depict unarmed Black men, suffocated and killed by white police officers. Each episode is filled with a chorus of desperate pleas from horrified onlookers. They are eerily similar scenes. Like three instruments playing the same tune in three different octaves.
What makes 3 Brothers so affecting is the morose timelessness of the source material to which it is indebted. Released in 1989, amid the turbulence of the Reagan-and-Bush-era war on drugs, Do the Right Thing is an examination of trauma, community, and uprisings as a form of political action. Starring Lee as the protagonist Mookie, a delivery man at Sal’s Famous Pizzeria—the only white-owned business in the neighborhood—the film takes place over the course of one day, on a single block in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy. Set in the midst of a record heat wave, it focuses on the minutiae of everyday life in the neighborhood, only later revealing how vulnerable the Black and Brown bodies that populate it are to police violence.
Lee builds Do the Right Thing into a rolling boil, emphasized by the day’s temperatures but felt especially in Mookie’s interactions. A pair of police officers stalk the neighborhood from their patrol car, like predators eyeing prey. A run-in with a white man in a sweat-stained Larry Bird jersey foreshadows the looming threat of gentrification. A petition, organized by Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), demanding that Sal honor not only Italian Americans on his “Wall of Fame” throws Mookie headfirst into fraught debates about race and ownership. Mookie argues with Sal’s oldest son, Pino, a virulent racist, about the inherent contradictions of “hating” Black people while idolizing Black artists and athletes. He protects Da Mayor, an old man with a drinking problem, after police officers question him about a group of kids who’ve sprayed water into a white man’s convertible. Up until the end of the movie, Mookie even tries to mediate the conflict between Sal and Buggin’ Out. For most of the film, he is the bridge between his community and the forces that constrict it.As the torrid sun gives way to a muggy night, the neighborhood’s tensions overflow. When an altercation breaks out between Radio Raheem and Sal—over the former’s refusal to turn down the volume of his boombox—police officers arrive and immediately subdue Raheem. One officer lifts him off the ground, pinning a billy club against his neck, choking him, until his feet dangle lifelessly in the air. As an uprising swells in response to the killing, Mookie joins in, throwing a trash can through the plate-glass window of Sal’s Famous, after which the pizzeria is burned to the ground. The movie ends with two quotes—one from Martin Luther King Jr. and another from Malcolm X—on the utility of violence as a means to achieve liberation.
Despite its more recent placement within the pantheon of contemporary filmmaking, at the time of its release Do the Right Thing was met with controversy and resistance from white critics. The movie lost out on the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or because the jury president found Mookie “unheroic.” Nine months later, it was nominated for just two Oscars, famously losing Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy, a film whose message of racial reconciliation—a well-worn Hollywood trope in which white characters are redeemed of their racism by virtue of their friendship with a Black counterpart—was the antithesis of Lee’s sprawling drama. White critics and Hollywood elites even debated whether or not the film would cause mass rioting in Black communities. In a review for New York magazine, Joe Klein wrote a screed warning readers of the “violent” ramifications that would come if the film spread to Black audiences.
If Lee does hook large black audiences, there’s a good chance the message they take from the film will increase racial tensions in the city. … It is Spike Lee himself—in the role of Sal’s deliveryman—who starts the riot by throwing a garbage can through the store’s window, one of the stupider, more self-destructive acts of violence I’ve ever witnessed (if black kids act on what they see, Lee may have destroyed his career in that moment).New York magazine’s David Denby, a film critic and current staff writer at The New Yorker, similarly assailed the uprising scene, writing that Lee was “playing with dynamite in an urban playground” and that the “response to the movie could get away from him.”
Beyond the casual racism that suggests Black audiences are incapable of consuming incendiary art without erupting into a rampage of mindless violence, the common thread among the initial criticisms of Do the Right Thing was an ignorance of what “rioting” is about and the manner in which it operates in Lee’s narrative. That same ignorance is as much a staple of moments of social upheaval as the upheaval itself. “Spike was dealing with studio executives that didn’t understand how violence was incited and why it’s incited,” says Ruth E. Carter, the film’s costume designer, who would win an Oscar years later for her work on Black Panther. “They think something as simple as a movie like Do the Right Thing that has a riot scene in it is the thing that tips the temperament of the Black community. But it’s much deeper than that.”
About two-thirds of the way through Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, the final text that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote during his tectonic life, King describes visiting Watts, California, in the wake of the infamous 1965 Watts Rebellion. Just a few days earlier the city had been engulfed in flames as the uprising hit historic proportions. Amid all of this upheaval, King and his associates traveled the city looking for answers:
Touring Watts a few days after that nightmarish riot in 1965, Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young and I confronted a group of youngsters who said to us joyously, “We won.” We asked them: “How can you say you won when thirty-four Negroes are dead, your community is destroyed, and whites are using the riot as an excuse for inaction?” Their answer: “We won because we made them pay attention to us.”Uprisings like the one King describes, or those that have surged across the country for the past eight weeks, are not thoughtless outbursts of untethered rage. The fact that they ignite in the heat of a specific episode of police violence does not mean that they are fueled by that episode alone. They are attempts to force the wandering gaze of state power to acknowledge a community and their struggles, and they are calculated responses to specific grievances, accumulated, in some cases, over generations.
by Lex Pryor, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Nate Creekmore
