June 29, 1989 | For filmmaker Spike Lee, the best defense is an in-your-face counterattack.
At the Cannes International Film Festival, where Jeannie Williams of USA Today was a conspicuously vocal critic of his film, and in several recently published sociopolitical commentaries, Lee has been brought to task for not making ghetto life ugly enough. Specifically, he has been criticized for not featuring crack dealers, marauding ”wilders” and other examples of urban blight in Do the Right Thing.
Lee has some harsh answers. Some of what he says is printable in a family newspaper.
”This film is not about drugs,” Lee insists. ”The film is about people, and racism. But when you say Bedford-Stuyvesant, you say Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, or Watts — automatically, white America thinks of rapists, murderers, drug addicts, killers . . .
”Drugs is in every level of society today in America. How many journalists who saw Working Girl or Rain Man questioned where are the drugs? Nobody. But the minute there’s a black film that takes place in the ghetto, people want to know where the drugs are. . . . They think that when you have a film about black people, you’re gonna have drugs.”
Jeannie Williams and other critics of Do the Right Thing also have accused Lee of glorifying violence. They point to Lee’s choice of a quote from Malcolm X to end the film: ”I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense. I call it intelligence.”
Lee notes that, right before the words of Malcolm X, he excerpts a quote from the resolutely non-violent Dr. Martin Luther King.
”I think it would have been a disservice to either one to only use one quote,” Lee says. ”So we use both. I think that in certain times, both philosophies, both approaches, can be appropriate.
”But in this day and age, in the Year of Our Lord 1989, I’m leaning more toward the philosophies of Malcolm X. And that’s why we chose that quote to end the movie with, instead of the Dr. Martin Luther quote. His stuff, nonviolence and all that stuff, had its time. . . .
”But when you’re being beat up the side of the head with a brick, I don’t think that young black America is just gonna turn the other cheek and say, ‘Thank you, Jesus. Hit me on the other side of the head with this brick.’ ”
