Perhaps I was too idealistic, but it seemed to me that any openminded member of the audience would walk out of the movie able to understand the motivations of every character in the filmÑnot forgive them, perhaps, but understand them. A black viewer would be able to understand the feelings of Sal, the ItalianAmerican whose pizzeria is burned by a mob, and a white viewer would be able to understand why a black manÑwho Sal considered his friendÑwould perform the action that triggers the mob.

It is this evenhandedness that is at the center of Spike LeeÕs work, and yet it is invisible to many of his viewers and critics. Because he is black and deals with anger, he has been categorized as an angry man. But it is not anger, but a certain detached objectivity that I see in his best work. His subject is the way race affects the way lives are lived in America. More than any filmmaker before him, he has focused his stories on AfricanAmerican characters, considering not how they relate to the white society, or it to them, but how they relate to each other. School Daze is no less about skin color because all of its characters are black. Jungle Fever is not only about a romance between black and white, but about all of the social, class and educational factors that race stands in for. Malcolm X is about a man who never abandons his outrage at racism, but comes to understand that skin color should not define who he can call his brother.

In Do the Right Thing, the subject is not simply a race riot, but the tragic dynamic of racism racial tension and miscommunication, seen in microcosm. The film is a virtuoso act of creation, a movie at once realistic and symbolic, lighthearted and tragic, funny and savage; one of the reasons we recoil at the end is that we thought, somehow, the people of this neighborhood, this street, whom we had come to know, would not be touched by the violence in the air all around them. We knew them all, Da Mayor and Radio Raheem as well as Sal and his sons. And they knew each other. Surely nothing bad could come between them.

And yet something bad does happen. Radio Raheem is murdered; SalÕs Pizzeria is destroyed. Spike Lee has been clever enough to make us sympathize with Sal, to like him and his pizzeria, so that it is not an easy target but a shocking one. And Lee twists the story once again, making the instrument of SalÕs downfall not a ÒnegativeÓ character but the one we liked the most, and identified with: Mookie, the delivery man played by Lee. The woman who found the move a call to violence was most disturbed, I suspect, because it was Mookie who threw the trash canÑMookie, who the move led her to like and trust. How could he do such a thing to Sal?

The answer to that question is right there on the screen, but was elusive for some viewers, who recoiled from the damage done to SalÕs property but hardly seemed to notice, or remember, that the events were set in motion by the death of a young black man at the hands of the police. Among the many devastating effects of LeeÕs films, certainly the most subtle and effective is the way it leads some viewers (not racists, but thoughtless or inattentive or imbued with the unexamined values of our society) to realize that they have valued a pizzeria over a human life.

I have written here more about LeeÕs ideas than about his style. To an unusual degree, you could not have one without the other: Style is the magicianÕs left hand, distracting and entertaining us while the right hand produces the rabbit from the hat. ItÕs not what Lee does that makes his film so devastating, but how he does it. Do the Right Thing is one of the bestdirected, bestmade films of our time, a film in which the technical credits, the acting, and LeeÕs brazenly fresh visual style all work together to make a statement about race in America that is all the more powerful because it blindsides us.

Do the Right Thing was the finest, most controversial, the most discussed and the most important film of 1989. Of course, it was not nominated for an Academy Award as Best Picture (that award went to Driving Miss Daisy, which had a view of race in America that was rotated just 180 degrees from LeeÕs). To an extent, I think some viewers still have trouble seeing the film; it is blurred by their deep seated ideas and emotions about race in America, which they project onto Lee, assuming he is angry or bitter, when on the basis of this film it would be more accurate to call him sad, observant, realistic or emphatic.

Roger Ebert

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