I am ready to collapse in a heap, and take at least one night off from watching movies. (Well, exactly one night, as I am already scheduled to see Mother! on Wednesday night so I can podcast about it on Thursday.)But before I do that, I must wrap up Cat's Away 2, the second nearly week-and-a-half-long personal film festival I've run in the past two months while my wife has been on trips out of the country.
When the first Cat's Away ended, I explained that I chose Pulp Fiction for closing night over Do the Right Thing because Pulp Fiction was "more fun," or maybe even just "fun." One intrepid reader challenged me on that, explaining (correctly) that Do the Right Thing is also fun in its own way. "Cat's Away 2 is when you realize Do the Right Thing IS fun," he wrote.
Well, I rose to the challenge.
Spike Lee's 1989 masterpiece is one of my most long-neglected films. I currently rank it #10 on my Flickchart, but it's been since sometime in the late 90s, I would guess, since I've seen it. And I suppose the sense that it's "work," that its confrontations about race are not something I'm always eager to sit down with, have contributed to the delay in revisiting a movie I obviously love. Part of that love, I suppose, is a belief in the film's importance, which can make a film great but maybe not always something you want to unwind with. But Do the Right Thing is a film that needs to be revisited more often than every 20 years.
What struck me on this viewing is that the film is not as "realistic" as I may have considered it. Certainly, Lee works in a general realm of realism in recreating a combustible Bed-Stuy neighborhood on the hottest day of the summer. But this movie is more an impressionistic view of racial disharmony than probably an accurate depiction of the ways people really relate to each other. The racism we view in our everyday lives -- with notable exceptions like Charlottesville -- tends to be more subtle, more of an undercurrent, nothing so confronting as we see here.
But Lee's role as a filmmaker is to confront. He's giving us a direct feed into the rage he feels as a black man in America -- and boy do I wish that rage were something that the 28 years since then have helped heal. But Do the Right Thing feels as relevant in 2017 as it ever has, which makes it even more worth revisiting.
This movie is not just about rage, though, and that's where the "fun" part comes in. Lee does deceptively complicated work of setting up a whole neighborhood here, one that feels composed of real people who have real relationships with each other, and not always contentious ones. Moreover, they have fun together. There's a lot of humor, love and mutual appreciation in this film, which keeps it bouncy and not as ponderous as you might expect from a finale like this one has. Even after its finale, though, it shows gentleness and love -- Mookie and Sal, who should logically hate each other after what has transpired, end on terms of a kind of mutual respect. This is a neighborhood with ties that bind, even if deep-seated prejudices keep them apart.
Usually I rebel against cinematic adaptations of plays because I think it's too easy to see the film's stage origins, which often contribute to making it feel small. But when a film is not adapted from a play, as Do the Right Thing is not adapted from a play, but only feels like it might be adapted from a play because of its setting and scope, that's something different. Part of Lee's method is to be intentionally theatrical, as you would on a stage, and it's part of what makes the film so affecting. When I think of Mother Sister letting out those desperate wails at the end -- "No! No! No!" -- I think of a piece of drama that is intentionally constructed as something like Greek tragedy. Even within itself, her reaction is not "realistic." Just moments before, she had gotten caught up in the rage directed at Sal's Pizzeria, yelling "Burn it down!" with the rest of the crowd. That she is bemoaning what has happened, as if she played no role in it or tried to prevent it, is not therefore "realistic." Instead, her cries are like the cries of the wounded soul of the American psyche, and in that regard they are incredibly powerful.
As we wrap up, here's a chronological list of my viewing:
Inception
Silence
Trainspotting
T2 Trainspotting
Schindler's List
Personal Shopper
Moana
Blow Out
To Die For
Song to Song
Peeping Tom
Spring Breakers
Singin' in the Rain
The Lego Ninjago Movie
Watchmen
Do the Right Thing
That includes:
- Seven movies that were new to me
- Nine rewatches
- All sixteen movies in English except for some random German (Schindler's List) and Japanese (Silence), and some thick Scottish accents
- Eight movies from the 2010s
- One movie from the 2000s
- Three movies from the 1990s
- Two movies from the 1980s
- One movie from the 1960s
- One movie from the 1950s
- Five library rentals
- Three movies from streaming
- Three movies from my own collection
- Four iTunes rentals
- One movie in the theater
- And a variety of different genres and styles
Will there be a Cat's Away 3?
At the moment, not that I can see, and that's fine with me. Intense periods of film watching like this are great, but would I want them to last longer than they do? Not really. By the end I'm exhausted. And two in the space of two months just increases the exhaustion factor. Ready for a return to regular life.
My wife is indeed going out of town for three nights at the end of October, but three nights does not a film festival make.
But will I be watching movies those nights?
You betcha.
