AFI Top 100: Do The Right Thing (#96 in 2007; not listed in 1998) (spoilers)

I really can't believe I had never seen this movie but I've seen it now and won't forget it. It was really hard to watch at the end. I knew it started as a comedy(-ish) and ended on a darker note but I wasn't really ready to watch Radio Raheem be murdered by the police in front of a crowd of people. The people started chanting "HOWARD BEACH" and I had to look it up but there were several African-American young men beaten to death in NYC all around the same time, and one of the events occurred at Howard Beach. One of the murders happened the year this film was released. The Howard Beach incident was the one that inspired the film in part, with the location in a pizzeria as a clear reference to the actual event (although in that event, the murderers were a group of white teenagers, not the police).

In the Do the Right Thing: 20 Years Later special feature on the DVD, Spike Lee says that NYC has greatly improved since then (this special was filmed in 2009) but watching Radio Raheem die in a chokehold is just too similar to all of these videos of other black men being murdered by police for me to feel like it was a different time.


This Independence Day I just have to wonder if we will ever be able to live in a place where the murder of an uncharged (read: INNOCENT) person by the police is seen as a statistical anomaly or a freak event. If not I just don't see how police departments will ever earn back our trust. I appreciate them risking their lives but nobody ever said being a police officer was easy or safe.

Before he was murdered, Radio Raheem was at the center of a big fight and I was thinking to myself how glad I was that no one was carrying guns, and what a surprise that was to me. "Thank goodness this was before everyone carried a gun," I thought. "Or something very serious would have been happening." Then the police showed up.

I hate that our children are growing up in such a lethal environment. I can't help but think there must be a better way for us to live together. The Washington Post published a really good article about the film and the connection to present-day events after the death of Bill Nunn, who played Radio Raheem.

Rest in Power.