Mookie is a self-absorbed pizza deliverer, able to control himself admirably in the face of offensive racism from the boss' son, but drawn to incite violence against his employer when the police kill one of his friends.
The police are the most shallowly drawn characters, representing the bad guys with no explanation--besides the fact that they are racist--for their hostility.
THE real tragedy in this movie is that the neighborhood Blacks see no recourse for the murder of a Black teenager by police but to destroy the only white business in the neighborhood. Their anger cannot be directed at the real source, the police, because of their powerlessness. But their frustration and anger needs to be vented in some way.
The frustration of the Black community is the central topic of this film, and Lee outlines the external and internal causes of its fragmentation.
The external causes--the small value placed on Black lives by police and others, the lack of economic opportunity or alternative visions--are more obvious.
But Lee tackles the internal reasons as well--the frequency of fatherless Black children, the self-defeat of internalized racism, the misplaced hostility towards easy victims who are not the real causes of oppression, the misdirected activism towards dead-end causes.
The film is far more than entertainment; it is social commentary.
FOR audiences used to neat Hollywood endings that tie up all the strings, offering lasting solutions to unsolvable dilemmas after two hours, Do the Right Thing will be shocking in its complex representation of real life, where things are not that simple.
There are no easy solutions offered in this film, and no absolutes. Lee instead blurs all the dividing lines. There is no right and no wrong, and even the lines of race, around which all of the tension is developed, are left blurred at the end. The Korean man, fearing that his shop will be the next one gutted by fire, proclaims that he is Black.
As if the climax of the film is not enough, the final ideas left for the viewer to ponder are a pair of quotes from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. King explains why violence is always destructive for everyone, and Malcolm X describes why violence may be necessary sometimes.
Lee does not point to either and say this is right. He leaves much up to the viewer to decide. Do the Right Thing is a difficult film because it forces all members of the audience to think--hard--about their personal positions about race relations and come up with their own conclusions. And, like the final quote from Malcolm X, the movie has a very disturbing, depressing end.