[8.7/10] It’s there in the beginning and the end. It permeates the very soul of the film. The dichotomy at play. There’s the picture of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X side-by-side turned from a running gag into a powerful statement. There’s the two men’s dueling quotes on the utility of violence. There’s Mookie and Sal, standing face-to-face on opposing sides of the frame. There is love, and there is hate, in equal measure.

Those are the symbols for the two forces at play in one living, breathing stretch of Brooklyn, New York captured on celluloid by writer/producer/director/star Spike Lee. On the one hand, Bed-Stuy is a melting pot, where people of different races and backgrounds and ages and histories break bread with one another, do business with one another, and form bonds with one another. It is the neighborhood where Lee’s Mookie has a child with Tina, where he’s friends with Vito, where Sal declares him “like a son.” It’s a place where working class folk live together in a fragile but functional harmony.

On the other, it is a place where Sal’s son, Pino, feels lesser for having to make his living serving black people. It’s a place where ML complains about the Korean grocery store that opened on the block. It’s a place where, in one of the film’s signature sequences, a quintet of people of different ethnicities hurl an assortment racial and ethnic invectives directly into the camera, insulting Italians, Black People, Latinos, Koreans, and Jews. These moments highlight how tenuous this peace is, how that laudable cross-pollination of different cultures and peoples is likewise freighted with tensions that exist barely an inch below the surface and explode out in particularly fraught moments.

But those affections and resentments exist within the people who make up this community, and perhaps the greatest achievement in the film is how real they, and by extension, it quickly feel. Lee constructs this ecosystem, where everybody’s role and place and hopes and anger within it make sense.

We see how Mookie intersects with so many different facets of the neighborhood. We see Sal and the two sons who represent his best and worst side. We see Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem and Smiley, a holy trinity of characters who walk up and down the sidewalks. We see the Korean bodega-owners having timid or aggressive interactions with the rest of the community. We see the trio of gabbers who diagnose and assess all the world’s problems from their umbrellas across the street.

We see Mother Sister keeping the world in line from the window of her brownstone. We see a quarter of teenagers beating the heat and making mischief. We see Da Mayor trying to work his way into the good graces of the former and earn the respect of the latter. We see Tina, the mother of Mookie’s son, trying to get the time of day from him. We see Mookie’s sister challenging him to get his life together. We see Latino communities sitting on the stoop, and police making their presence felt, and radio deejays surveying it all.

While all of these introductions and interactions build to a clear inflection point, Lee could have left the movie as a slice of life picture, just bouncing back and forth between these disparate interests and intersecting personalities, and still have made a bravura film. He spends so much of his time weaving the web that connects each of them, and it pays off when the film reaches its climax.

He also uses his camera as the ultimate tool in that regard. *Do the Right Thing* feels like the cinematography of Old Hollywood, with sweeping shots that pull out of windows and shift onto the street, or capture the widespread chaos in a moment of unraveling. He crafts striking tableaus, with his various characters arranged within the frame in ways that subconsciously communicate their relationships to the audience. And he also uses his most potent technique -- shooting so many of his characters head on, using dutch angles or other ways to skew the perspective -- which makes their insults or challenges or explanations seem more direct and immediate, when it seems as though they’re talking directly to the audience. It’s when he shifts from that elegant, classical style to the more straight-up blocking and shooting that sells how easily the shaky harmony of the neighborhood can turn to discord.

That is the heaven and hell of *Do the Right Thing*’s depiction of Bed-Stuy. One minute, Da Mayor is received warmly by Mother Sister for his good deeds. One minute, Mister Señor Love Daddy is speaking the good words to all of his listeners. One minute, Sal is talking about planning to stay in this neighborhood forever, how Mookie will always have a place here, and letting in a pack of boisterous teenagers from the neighborhood even though he’s closed.

The next he’s railing against Radio Raheem’s “jungle music.” The next there’s racist taunts hurled back and forth over the restaurant's “Wall of Fame.” The next Sal is brandishing a bat and using it to destroy the treasured object his contentious would-be patron can hardly live without.

And then, not long after, the restaurant is gone and Radio Raheem is dead.

What cuts so deeply about *Do the Right Thing* is not just the violence that ensues in these moments, the sense of peace disrupted, the hopes and dreams on both sides of the divide gone up in flames. It’s how quickly it all deteriorates, how rapidly that delicate peace crumples, how fast that tinderbox of racial resentments and longstanding prejudices ignites.

There’s an unspoken, WASP-y shadow cast over all of this -- as the traditional wielders of power in the city are the one major presence in this movie that is keenly felt but hardly seen. Instead, Lee invokes the police as their proxy, one more accelerant thrown onto the conflagration, an outside force exerting itself on a broken community. The fire starts from an argument over a picture, one that represents both the racial tensions in Bed-Stuy and the conflicting ideologies that run through it.

The picture becomes the radio. The radio becomes the bat. The bat becomes the brawl. The brawl becomes the nightstick. The nightstick becomes the trash can. The trash can becomes the riot. The riot becomes the flame. The flame becomes the fire hoses. The fire hoses become another avenue for violence. And that violence becomes one more deep wound inflicted on this neglected corner of the world.

Lee spends so much of *Do the Right Thing* setting the terms of Bed-Stuy, establishing the tangles of love and hate that run through it, that by the end of the film, that terrible chain of cause and effect feels as earned as it does horrific. In two hours, we know these people; we understand why they do what they do, and we understand the pity and pathos of why it all came to this.

In short, we understand that frail balance -- between understanding and resentment, between acceptance and rejection, between doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing -- so easily disrupted and tilted from one side to another. What makes *Do the Right Thing*, and the block of Brooklyn it vivifies, feel so alive is the way those two conflicting elements pulse through it all times, in every interaction great and small.

Those two forces, on Lee’s account, are destined to do battle forever: in fractious communities, in diverse neighborhoods, and even in the hearts of humble delivery boys and their employers. The movie offers little hope that the conflict could end anytime soon, only the certainty that there’ll be more skirmishes, and more casualties.