Do the Right Thing

      Robert Ebert's article spoke a lot from a perspective different than the normal critic, even my own, and from the article i got the sense of the perhaps "real" message that Spike Lee was trying to express. That message, being fairness. Throughout the film each race is portrayed and good and bad in different ways. The african americans are posed as victims when Raheem is killed viciously and unfairly by a cop, and by not having their picture on the wall, otherwise they are portrayed as sort of the villans in the way that Raheem talks to Sal, disrupts his shop with the radio, etc. Each other race is also portrayed at different times as the innocent victim and also as the disruptive villan. By doing so, this movie says more than a message about racism, but also largely that no one is largely the victim and every race has to do with part of what is going on.
     Lee's film says not only a lot about different races and how they all suffer in their own way, but also a lot about America and how other races look at each other. For example, in the film, there is a scene where each and every race takes about 30 seconds slurring another race into the camera saying every racial name in the book. The purpose of this scene was to emphasize the many different levels of slander each race could sue against one another. Not one race is the victim, not one race is the villan, but at times each race all equally dislikes another. Races blame each other for things beyond their control and fight very violently and crudely throughout the entire movie. At times the blacks and the hispanics are against the asians, at other times the hispanics and italians collide against the blacks, and at the end of the film the blacks, asians, hispanics all end up being against the italians and white guys.
    One of the characters from the film (Mookie) is the main character besides Sal and perhaps one of the  least racist characters throughout, even though his actions do not fully seem justified to show it at times. By Mookie throwing the trash can through the window of Sal's place, he is destroying a part of Sal in his spirit because Sal had built the place from the ground up and had raised most of the neighborhood on his food for nearly 25 years. In a different perspective, Mookie was doing something smarter than anything anyone else had done which was directing the anger being taken out on Sal away from himself and rather onto the shop so the violence would stop. I think this once scene alone is the meaning of the title, buy asking did Mookie "do the right thing"?
     In Robert Ebert's review, he states "he'd made a movie about race in America that empathized with all participants." in saying that there really was no right or wrong answer, no super racist class, no victimized race but rather race as a whole was being targeted by everyone in the film at different moments. This article changed even my own perspective on the film by saying that the right thing was not what you would have expected to come from such a disasterous situation, but rather an understanding of one another as a whole. I think the meaning of the last scene summed up the entire movie as a whole, and had more meaning than maybe any other scene for me.