I recently re-watched Do the Right Thing and found the ending a little shocking. No, not the violent part – which has, sadly, only become more familiar in the quarter century since 1989 – but the actual last scene.
The morning after the movie’s climax, the camera shifts up and away from the street while in voiceover we hear the storefront DJ, Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson). He has served throughout the film as a kind of Greek chorus and now he’s the last voice we hear, after the assault and the murder and the burning of Sal’s, and he says … “Register to vote. The election is coming up.”
Which struck me, in 2015, as awfully anemic. Is that really the conclusion we’re meant to draw, after all that heat, after repeated invocations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X? Register and vote?
I wondered if maybe Jackson’s performance had thrown me off and made me expect more of Love Daddy than I should have. After all, Jackson’s real talent is for the veneer of geniality over the threat of violence (see Jules or, in a different register, Nick Fury) – for conveying hidden weight, in the manner of a lead-filled sap with a polished leather finish.
But those roles came later. Maybe Mister Señor Love Daddy is supposed to be a bit of a buffoon. After all, during the climax of the movie, the camera catches him in his window, and his response to the police turning firehoses on his neighbors is to yell and … change his hat. Maybe we’re supposed to see him as impotent, inept – the kind of guy who would, on reflection, respond to brutality by delivering the Polonian advice, “Register to vote.”
Or maybe Spike Lee meant it seriously. There’s evidence he does, or did. On the twentieth anniversary Blu-ray, you’ll find an interview in which Spike Lee mentions he wrote and filmed Do the Right Thing in the midst of Ed Koch’s administration – but now, he says, everything’s different.
Those were heady days, 2009, to be sure, when maybe elections could fill you with hope and change. But: enough to, in retrospect, justify that flat-footed ending? “Vote”? After a movie that began with Public Enemy urging, “Fight the Power!”, and whose first line of dialogue had Love Daddy himself shouting, “Wake up!”?
{ 32 comments }
Main Street Muse 02.09.15 at 9:49 pm
What would have been a better ending? (If I remember correctly, voter turnout was pretty bad back in those days but perhaps my memory is wrong.)
I have not seen this movie in forever – I remember that it was widely talked about when it was first released in 1989 (GHW Bush was president – economy still wounded from the death of the Rust Belt.) Apparently this was what Barack & Michelle did on their first date – they went to see this film. I remember when Spike Lee started making films – it was fantastic to see a cast of people you rarely got to see outside of Spike Lee films.
Eric 02.09.15 at 9:53 pm
Including Martin Lawrence, in his film debut …
Matt 02.09.15 at 9:58 pm
Not exactly on topic (I’ll admit I didn’t exactly remember the “register to vote” part until you mentioned it, despite this being one of my favorite films) but I showed a small clip from the film (the “boycott Sal’s!” part) to my business ethics students, when discussing consumer boycotts, and exactly 1 of them, out of about 90 students, had seen the film. I found it pretty depressing. If the numbers are as bad this semester, I might organize a movie night, though I’m afraid that some people might take offense to some of the language and get me in trouble that way.
TheSophist 02.09.15 at 10:31 pm
Completely unempirically, just based on remembered feelings from those days, wasn’t there more of a sense that if “we” all turned out to vote then “we” could move the country in the right direction? Voting => change seemed perhaps less naive/utopian then than now.
I’m reminded of the Zizek bit about elevators. (Paraphrasing) The “open door” button in the elevator doesn’t actually make the elevator doors open any faster. It doesn’t really change anything. All the button does is give the button pusher the illusion of some degree of control. Just like voting.
mpowell 02.09.15 at 10:53 pm
I don’t really know what you’re looking for here. I think the film kind of highlighted the uselessness of ‘fight the power’ type of messages. The violence the residents of the neighborhood are capable of inflicting is mostly on themselves or the people who are actually making their lives better by providing them business services. Once Sal’s is gone, where are they going to get pizza? There’s no clear and simple line of action. The only clear unsympathetic actors are the police. Maybe the juxtaposition of the Love Daddy’s commentary and recent events are meant to highlight the frustrations of the neighborhood and the impossibility of easily improving their situation. And yet, to a certain extent, they offer the best course forward. That and making movies of this type which, I guess, were shocking in 1989. I only watched it recently myself but by now police brutality is pretty widely understood as a thing, even if some members of the public would seen nothing wrong with police behavior (either in the film or elsewhere). But at least people are now pretty aware of what the behavior can be.
js. 02.09.15 at 11:10 pm
I don’t think this is at all clear actually. As I remember, the film ends with competing quotes from King and Malcolm X., and there’s _no_ suggestion that the film is endorsing one of the quotes, and the corresponding approach, over the other. It’s been a few years tho, so if I’m misremembering this, I’m open to correction.
In any case, I had forgotten about this last bit. Maybe it just seemed too incongruous!
bianca steele 02.10.15 at 12:17 am
David Dinkins? Jesse Jackson? Al Sharpton? (I don’t remember exactly who was supporting Marc Green at the time.) What’s the argument, that the movie has extreme views on race and should therefore be associated with the extremes of the left?
But it’s been a long time since I saw the movie.
FL 02.10.15 at 12:36 am
This reminds me of Chappelle’s “I know black people” game show, in which correct answers to “how will black people rise up and overcome?” include “stop cutting each other’s throats” and “I don’t know, will they?” but the only wrong answer is “get out the vote.”
AB 02.10.15 at 12:52 am
Well, three years later Lee made Malcolm x which concludes with scenes of black American and South African children rising from their chairs one by one to declare “I’m Malcolm X”, as the Soweto school teacher, played by Nelson Mandela, recites Malcolm’s “any means necessary” speech.
So there’s that.
mattski 02.10.15 at 2:07 am
Why are all these people busting on voting?
Bloix 02.10.15 at 3:03 am
Ferguson is 70% black. Only 6% of the eligible black voters voted in the last municipal election- 17% of the white eligible voters did. Ferguson’s police department is 95% white, its city council is 80% white, its mayor and police chief are white.
If even 10% of Ferguson’s black voters had managed to get to the polls, Michael Brown would probably be alive today.
robotslave 02.10.15 at 3:23 am
Perhaps Spike Lee, like so many other black people, doesn’t think much of white leftist radicals’ revolutionary programs?
At the time, black radical politics meant Louis Farrakhan. Is that the sort of political messaging you’re expecting at the end of the film?
robotslave 02.10.15 at 3:29 am
@11
In Ferguson’s last municipal election, the highest office on the ticket was the Mayor, and there was only one name on the ballot. You’re quoting voter turnout numbers for an uncontested election.
Not that that isn’t a problem in itself, but the kind of people who really love to repeat those turnout numbers never seem to mention the fact that the top of the ticket was uncontested.
js. 02.10.15 at 3:39 am
I can’t speak for Eric (obviously), and as I mentioned, I’d forgotten that’s how the film ends. But I do think that in the context of the film,it seems like a rather odd ending. About as odd as if there were a song on It Takes a Nation of Millions exhorting people to vote.* In that sense, “anemic” sounds appropriate.
More generally, I’m not sure why people are defending voting in general, or voting on the part of minorities. No one’s objecting to that, surely. The question is simply how that sort of exhortation plays at the end of that particular film.
*Black Votes in the Hour of Chaos, anyone?
TheSophist 02.10.15 at 3:42 am
Speaking only for myself, and not putting words into the mouths of SZ or any of the worthies here, my lack of faith in voting to produce what I would view as positive change is based on a number of factors. In no particular order they are:
Citizens United
Gerrymandering
The antidemocratic nature of the US Senate
The Roberts court
The Overton window (candidates espousing views I’d actually vote for don’t get within miles of the ballot.)
Winner-take-all FTPT elections (see above)
The fact that Joe Arpaio is the duly elected Sheriff of Maricopa County
I’m sure there’s more, but that’s a good list to start with.
js. 02.10.15 at 3:51 am
My last was way clipped, and I think I kind of failed to respond to the quoted bianca steele bit more or less entirely. The thought is something like: If you think about the film’s apparent attitude towards Malcolm X—not outright endorsing, but certainly not rejecting either—and if you think about certain strains of ’60s and post-60s Black militancy, you wouldn’t at all be surprised if the film took a jaundiced view of voting. But I think what you’d expect would be for it to take a rather ambivalent attitude towards it. And you really wouldn’t expect, I think, an outright exhortation at the end. None of this requires an allegiance to or association with “the extremes of the left” more generally.
mattski 02.10.15 at 4:33 am
The nice thing about voting is that it’s an option we can exercise in the world as we know it. Not that one round of good turnout is going to make a huge difference. Of course it won’t. But one round of good turnout will be noticed by politicians and other powers that be.
Positive change is going to involve a lot of other factors besides voting. But would it hurt to look at showing up at the polls as a way of priming the pump?
Watson Ladd 02.10.15 at 5:11 am
@robotslave: The fact that no one contested the election is significant in and of itself.
I think there is a misreading of history in the OP. The Civil Rights Movement did not prevail upon the Democratic party to pass the Civil Rights Act. Rather, by registering black voters in Mississippi in the face of KKK violence, they provoked a split within the Democratic Party. Today that’s unimaginable: the Rainbow Coalition was the last sort of effort. (Yes, I’m aware that Cornell West has opposed Obama. But that’s not the same as organising in opposition) Spike Lee is working against a different political background in 1989, one where voting doesn’t mean vote for Clinton yet.
Harold 02.10.15 at 5:36 am
The civil rights movement began as a voter registration movement.
Watson Ladd 02.10.15 at 5:39 am
@Harold: Also wrong. It may be true that in 1964, the Freedom Summer was about registering black voters in the South, but that was not the start of the Civil Rights Movement. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was in 1955, and the Woolworth’s sit-in was in 1960.
Harold 02.10.15 at 5:48 am
Technically you are right Watson, but the voter registration movement preceded freedom summer. I am thinking of the various initiatives of the Highlander folk school — though I need to look it up.
Harold 02.10.15 at 5:53 am
Look up Septima Clark and the Citizenship Schools she founded.
Sean Nelson 02.10.15 at 5:55 am
Because of this post, I decided to watch the film for the first time; but because of the reductionism (having watched it) that I had always heard about the movie (which includes this post), I had never really wanted to watch it; the way people talked about it, putting so much emphasis on the destruction of Sal’s, made the movie seem like it would be propaganda. Thankfully, I actually watched it, and it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen, and incredibly invigorating. I like Ebert’s Great Movies review of the film, but I disagree with him that the central emotion is sadness – I haven’t seen a movie made after the neo-realists that seemed so full of life, and love of life. The dialogue is like a ballet of different vernaculars; the characters, while being symbolic of various views on life, so strongly drawn; the cinematography and design of the film both almost its own character, and there to help forefront the actual characters. Has any neighborhood ever seemed to have come alive in a film like this one does?
For me, this isn’t a political movie, it’s a movie about all of life, with all of its contingencies, and politics just happens to be part of life. The movie seems to be completely against the sort of reductionism that would take a neighborhood, label it a problem, and try to find a solution to it. That’s why the ending mentioned in the OP seemed to me to be ironic – what is voting but reducing all of our loves and lives and desires and experiences into a handful of candidates with slogans that will never fit the haphazard narratives that create events and neighborhoods? The mayor of New York will visit the neighborhood the next day, diagnose it, and try to solve it. But what needs solving here in the movie? Rather, if we all learned to love life and love its contingencies and not try to fit it in a particular narrative, then slowly, maybe, I think probably, the sort of violence that occurs at the end of the movie might be reduced (though never eliminated – that’s what dystopias bring about) while the soul of a neighborhood and of the different people within it will still be allowed to flourish. This isn’t to knock voting at all (quite the contrary, for me personally), but to place it within the full scope of lived experience, and lived experience is what matters.
Meredith 02.10.15 at 5:59 am
I watched the movie again recently and was struck by how smart it is on a number of fronts. The sexual is one (big one): the sister and the pizza father. He is so vulnerable. Is she? Is she working him? Maybe. I think she also likes him. Life is complicated that way. But the pizza man has sons, with their issues. And the delivery boy (whose sister gets to the pizza father) has own issues of sex, responsibility. All very sure and smart, and sad in the end. This is a very sad movie. Yet somehow hopeful: love maybe could find a way….
Saurs 02.10.15 at 7:28 am
*Jerk off motion*
An American Anthropologist in Germany 02.10.15 at 9:58 am
True, voting is a highly limited form of political action, and it is limited for deeply structural reasons (see, inter alia, Bernard Manin’s _The Principles of Representative Government; Steven Luke’s _Political Ritual and Social Integration”)… and it would certainly be nice if something more momentous or heroic were in the offing.
But to dismiss voting as totally useless, a la Zizek, seems shortsighted. First, it is not an either-or thing; getting out the vote does not preclude pursuing other, more ambitious programs in parallel. Second, if having more blacks vote really were so useless, why would Republicans be putting so much money and effort into preventing them from doing so? Nor is this just a matter of Republicans versus Democrats (choosing the lesser of two evils). It is also a matter of empowering better Democrats, and shaping political discourse. One is certainly disappointed with Bill de Blasio in some respect (though not nearly so disappointed as one is with Barak Obama), and Elizabeth Warren, too, has her limitations. But the more non-elites vote, the more political discourse will have to address their concerns. This will not only create more Warrens and de Blasios, but move the Overton window. The rightward shift of that window is not a pre-ordained historical necessity. It is the result of conscious effort and strategizing by Republicans, that to a great extent benefits the Hilary Clintons of the world, too. That’s why they regard increased turnout as a mixed blessing. They need it to get elected over Republicans, but they want only just enough of it to get them into office, even as they fear its potential to undermine business as usual.
Again, I’m not saying voting is some kind of panacea. A huge increase in turnout has *potential* to change the, but it is only that: a potential. There are no guarantees. Chance comes only through sustained struggle, and voting is just one small (but in my view, absolutely necessary) part of it.
Jeff R. 02.10.15 at 7:20 pm
“Vote” always has implictly included “If there’s nobody to vote for, recruit someone or run yourself, possibly by way of getting involved in the internals of the most acceptable party.”
rea 02.10.15 at 8:12 pm
What’s the alternative to voting, then? Killing people?
js. 02.10.15 at 8:26 pm
I hadn’t realized that every film needs to end with a PowerPoint slide of actionable items and deliverables.
mattski 02.10.15 at 8:50 pm
@ 27 & 28
Yes and yes.
This is a bit speculative, but as a thought experiment: Even without getting a preferred candidate on the ballot [which would be ideal] if voter turnout suddenly increased in a particular district/city/state, and came down predominantly on ‘our’ side of the spectrum–whether that means the D’s or a third party or both–it would almost certainly draw the attention of powerful people. Highly probable this would precipitate a rush of private polls to investigate what these new voters were up to, what they were looking for. And it would influence which candidates choose to run in subsequent elections.
Roughly speaking, turnout is low now because people perceive the process as broken. And it’s an objective fact that the process IS broken. It might be a difficult sell to discouraged Americans, but I think it remains true that just showing up at the polls and voting for the closest thing available is both within our grasp and potentially a catalyzing act.
ragweed 02.10.15 at 10:21 pm
It has been a long time, but my memory is that the vote thing at the end was less of a proscription for a way forward, than an attempt to try something else. In the ashes of yesterdays tragedy, you pick up the pieces and get back to work. Voting wasn’t THE ANSWER.
I think the more important message was “Malcolm, Martin.” The two leaders were not opposites, but complementary approaches to the a problem that did not have one answer. Though, in that context, voting could be seen as the solution both moved towards. By 1965, Malcolm X was a voting advocate. His later speeches were quite brilliant that way.
Main Street Muse 02.11.15 at 1:44 am
I’m in a state that enacted significant voting restrictions the moment SCOTUS repealed key Voting Rights provisions last year. Urging people to vote is not a bad call to action – but an act made increasingly difficult by members of the GOP.
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