The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Spike Lee · a film · 1989 · the theatrical cut, about 120 minutes · written, produced and directed by Spike Lee
Mode
Ensemble comedy of a neighbourhood that becomes political tragedy; social-problem film made from inside, polemic and popular entertainment in one
Mythos
The city on its hottest day: elders, a chorus, a voice of the city, a holy fool and a sacrifice, all on one ground
Phase
One day from the morning call to the block to the fire at night, with a short coda the next morning
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 120 minutes, in English; about a dozen principal figures in many short scenes; one block, with two shops built into it
Register
From Rosie Perez boxing to an anthem through the credits to a man’s feet lifted off the pavement; comic, warm and loud, then grave
Scale
One block, one day, a dozen claims on the same ground
Governing Proposition
On one block of Brooklyn, on one day of heat, a dozen people each make a small claim on the same space, and by closing time the claims have become a killing by the police and the burning of a pizzeria. The wager of the film is that the catastrophe is not the anomaly of a bad day but the outcome of an ordinary one, built from people each of whom is partly right, and that a film can show this without deciding who is right.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins before its day does. Through the credits Rosie Perez boxes and dances alone to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” in front of painted Brooklyn facades. It is an overture, and it states the burden. The anthem was written for the film, and it will be carried through the day on Radio Raheem’s box until its silencing ends the day.
Then the block. The whole action is held to one block of Stuyvesant Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and to one day, from morning to the fire at night, with a short coda the next morning that does not leave the block either. On it stand Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, a Korean grocery, brownstones, a corner where three men sit, and the apartments of the people who will meet there. Ernest Dickerson photographs it in reds, oranges and yellows, the brick painted for heat.
Spike Lee wrote, produced and directed the film for his company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, and Universal released it in the United States on 30 June 1989, after its premiere in competition at Cannes that May. Barry Alexander Brown edited it, Wynn Thomas designed it, Ruth E. Carter dressed it, and Bill Lee wrote the score. Lee plays Mookie; Danny Aiello plays Sal, John Turturro and Richard Edson his sons Pino and Vito, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee the elders, Giancarlo Esposito Buggin’ Out, Bill Nunn Radio Raheem. It received two Academy Award nominations, for its screenplay and for Aiello.
Movement II
Mister Senor Love Daddy, played by Samuel L. Jackson, wakes the block on the radio: “Wake up!” He is the voice of the city, and the film gives him its first word and, the next morning, its last broadcast. At another hour he gives a roll call of Black musicians, name after name.
The figures come out one by one. Mookie, who delivers pizza for Sal for wages and stays out of everything, spends his day going between the pizzeria and the block. Sal is proud of having fed the neighbourhood for twenty-five years; Pino hates the block, and Vito is Mookie’s friend. Da Mayor, a drunk elder, and Mother Sister are at the edge of every scene. Smiley, who stammers, sells photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X that no one buys. Da Mayor tells Mookie to always do the right thing. The title is spoken by a drunk old man, and Mookie takes it as a joke.
Inside the pizzeria hangs the Wall of Fame, photographs of Italian-Americans. Buggin’ Out demands Black faces on it, on a block where Black customers spend their money. Sal answers that it is his pizzeria, and his wall. Both are partly right, and the claim, spoken first as a complaint, is not withdrawn. The day has its first grievance.
Movement III
The heat climbs, and the claims multiply. Radio Raheem walks the block with his box playing the anthem, and stops before the camera to explain the two rings on his hands, LOVE and HATE, the speech of The Night of the Hunter delivered into the lens. Then the film breaks its own frame: one speaker after another turns to camera and pours out a string of slurs against another people. It is a terrible comedy, and it says aloud what the day is doing.
A fire hydrant is opened against a white man’s convertible, and the police arrive early. Clifton, a white newcomer who owns a brownstone, scuffs a young man’s sneaker. The three men on the corner laugh at the Korean grocer, who has made a business there in a year while they sit. Da Mayor rescues a boy from a car and earns, at last, Mother Sister’s regard. Each scene is small, and each loads a claim on the same ground.
Some scenes are pauses. Mookie runs ice cubes over Tina, the mother of his child, in the heat; he quarrels with his sister Jade over Sal’s attentions to her. As the afternoon goes on Dickerson tilts the frame further from level, and Bill Lee’s score, lyrical and often fine, sometimes asks for a sweetness the day has not earned. By evening every grievance on the block has been heard once, and none has been answered.
Movement IV
At closing time the claims arrive together at Sal’s. The radio, loud, is smashed with a bat, and its silence is the trigger. A fight spills into the street, the police come, and an officer holds Radio Raheem in a chokehold until his feet are lifted off the pavement. He dies. The car pulls away with his body, and the crowd stands silent.
Da Mayor stands between the crowd and the pizzeria. Mookie walks toward the window with a trash can and throws it through the glass. The crowd turns on the building, and the pizzeria burns. Whether he betrayed Sal or saved his life by turning the crowd on the building, the film leaves open. The hoses come. The Korean grocer saves his store by declaring himself Black.
In the burning pizzeria Smiley pins his photograph of King and Malcolm to the Wall of Fame, among the Italian-Americans, and the flames take it. The demand of the morning is met, by fire. The film has gone from sketch comedy to death without leaving its block or changing its law: a claim spoken as a joke, then as an insult, then as force.
Movement V
Morning. Love Daddy speaks to the block again, now of what he has seen. Mookie goes to Sal for his wages, and they haggle. The money is thrown, and picked up. The coda completes the form: after a killing and a fire, two men who were partly right quarrel over money on the same ground.
Then the film puts its question in words. Two epigraphs appear on the screen: one from Martin Luther King Jr., against violence, and one from Malcolm X, on violence in self-defence. They contradict each other, and the film does not choose. A photograph of the two men together follows, and a dedication to the families of people killed in New York in police and racial violence.
The film asks which loss its audience will mourn, a man killed for noise or a building burned in answer, and it closes without telling them. The questions it posed have stayed open: whether Mookie did the right thing, whether Sal is a racist or a father, which epigraph the film endorses. When Eric Garner died in a chokehold in 2014, it was read as a repetition of Raheem’s death, and the film was there to be read.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The spine is a day of heat, and the parts that carry the pressure toward closing time are required: the Wall of Fame and Buggin’ Out’s demand; Radio Raheem’s box, carried through every scene he enters until its silencing is the trigger; Pino’s hatred of the block and Vito’s friendship with Mookie; Da Mayor’s rescue of a boy, which earns him the right to stand between the crowd and the pizzeria; the opened hydrant, which brings the police early; Smiley’s photograph, which ends on the burning wall. Most vignettes load a claim cashed at closing time. The method is accumulation, and it permits as well as compels: the corner men’s three scenes repeat one function, the scene with Tina is a pause, and the quarrel with Jade is paid only in part.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it has held. A killing by the police and a riot are not anomalies of a bad day but the outcome of an ordinary one, built from small claims on the same space by people each of whom is partly right. When it comes, the state kills a man for noise and a crowd answers by destroying property, and the film asks which loss its audience will mourn. It refuses the consolations on both sides: Sal’s decency, real for twenty-five years, does not survive a radio and an insult; Mookie, who stayed out of everything, throws the can. Every later chokehold has been read through the film, and the disclosure has held each time. What limits it: the slur montage and the epigraphs announce in words what the action has already shown.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The register is comic, warm and loud, and its elevations are of three kinds. Exhilaration: Rosie Perez boxing to “Fight the Power” before painted Brooklyn facades; Love Daddy’s roll call of Black musicians, name after name. Direct address that breaks the frame: the slur montage, each speaker turned to camera, a terrible comedy; Radio Raheem’s speech of the two rings, LOVE and HATE, after The Night of the Hunter, delivered into the lens. Dread and grief: Raheem’s feet lifted off the pavement in the chokehold; the crowd’s silence after the car pulls away with his body; Smiley pinning his photograph to the burning wall. Held at its figure because the summits gather in the last half hour, the long middle rises rarely, and Bill Lee’s score sometimes asks a scene for a sweetness it has not earned.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The structure built into the film is the polis on its hottest day, and it bears weight: a single place where every faction lives, with elders, a chorus, a voice of the city, a holy fool and a sacrifice. Da Mayor and Mother Sister are the old couple at the edge of every scene; the three men on the corner are a chorus in the Greek sense, commenting and never acting; Love Daddy wakes the city and at the end tells it what he has seen; Smiley, who stammers and sells photographs no one buys, carries the sacred image into the fire. Radio Raheem is built as the victim, LOVE and HATE on his hands. The heat makes the day an ordeal, and the particular stays particular. The limit: the chorus and elders frame more than they bear, and the sacrifice founds nothing, by design.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the Hollywood social-problem film on race, from The Defiant Ones (1958) to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night (both 1967), in which a white audience is shown its prejudice and reconciled; beside it, the blaxploitation picture and the American one-day ensemble film. The turns are large. The race picture is made from inside a Black neighbourhood by a Black writer-director, with no reconciliation and no white conscience at its centre; the likeable, idle hero commits the act of destruction; the film closes on two contradictory texts. Old devices from Brecht and Godard, direct address, a painted set, tilted frames, are put to new use, and a hip-hop anthem is its burden. The stake was real: a studio picture by a director with two features behind him, released amid warnings in the press that it would incite riots.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that the riot belongs to no one and to everyone, and the form is the instrument of that knowledge: a mosaic of short scenes among a dozen figures, none of them the centre, so that by closing time every grievance has been heard and none outweighs the others; one block, so that every claim is a claim on the same ground; one day, so that the heat is a clock. Told as a melodrama with one protagonist, the film would have to choose a side. The design carries the temperature, in Dickerson’s reds, oranges and yellows and a frame that tilts more as the day goes on, and the coda completes the form with a quarrel over wages. Held below the top because Mookie as connecting thread is a convenience, and some vignettes are sketch comedy filling the mosaic.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over thirty-seven years. The questions stay open and are still argued: whether Mookie did the right thing, and whether his act was betrayal, protest or the saving of Sal’s life; whether Sal is a racist, a father, or both; which of the two epigraphs the film endorses; whether it blames the police, the block or the heat; what it means that the Korean grocer saves his store by declaring himself Black. Each killing by the police has sent viewers back to the film, and it has borne the return, Eric Garner’s death by chokehold in 2014 read as a repetition of Raheem’s. Formally it yields in rhymes: the Wall of Fame and Smiley’s photograph, Love Daddy’s call at morning and night. The limit: much of the yield is the world returning to the film, and the questions are the few the film itself posed.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the film put Black urban life, its speech and its music, at the centre of American cinema as a subject of tragedy and politics rather than of crime or comedy, and showed that a film could be a polemic and a popular entertainment at once without resolving the polemic. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the wave of Black American films of the early 1990s, Boyz n the Hood (1991), Juice (1992, directed by Dickerson) and Menace II Society (1993), and the studios’ willingness to finance them; the one-day neighbourhood film made a form; the hip-hop anthem made part of a film’s form; its standing as the reference for every film about police violence since. In a decade of the blockbuster, few films changed more what could be made. Some of the opening belongs to She’s Gotta Have It (1986), which came first.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-seven years. Form: the film survives whole as released, in one version; restorations are repair. Presence: continuous and wide, in repertory, on television and every home format, in the National Film Registry, in teaching across film studies, American studies and law, and returned to in public argument at each killing by the police; its reach passes beyond cinema into political speech. Surface: the film is fixed to its summer in its sneakers, its radio, its slang, its Mayor Koch and its graffiti, and that surface is charged. It has outlived the conditions that produced it by being confirmed by them again and again, and the period now reads as a period, not as a fashion. Presence carries toward the top of its span; the surface holds it at 8.6.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight across the whole: Ernest Dickerson’s saturated photography, which makes heat visible and turns the block into a stage without losing the street; Wynn Thomas’s design, the pizzeria and the Korean grocery built into an existing block so that the set reads as found; Barry Alexander Brown’s cutting of the mosaic, which keeps a dozen strands moving and accelerates without strain into the riot; the ensemble, Aiello’s Sal above all, with Turturro, Nunn, Davis, Dee and Esposito each exact in a few scenes. The riot is staged with command: the can, the fire, the hoses, the crowd held in one space. The charges fall on real shares: Lee’s own Mookie is thin as acting, some vignettes are broad, and the score underlines or softens where the image needs neither.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the three men on the corner, laughing at the Korean grocer who has made a business on the block in a year while they sit, and Radio Raheem dying under a police baton. One law governs both: everyone on the block makes a claim on the same space, and the claim is spoken first as a joke, then as an insult, then as force. The Wall of Fame, the hydrant, the radio, the scuffed sneaker and the slur montage obey that law, and so do the riot and the coda’s quarrel over money. The range is wide, from sketch comedy to death, and the comic opening and the tragic close are one physics of heat and territory. The strain is bounded: the montage and the epigraphs step outside the fiction under the same law; the scene with Tina belongs to a looser film; the score’s sweetness pulls against the image.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a film of about two hours on one block can hold, and it holds many orders in one plot. The family, in Sal and his two sons, Mookie and his sister, Mookie and Tina and their child; labour, in a delivery job and its wages, the pizzeria’s twenty-five years, the corner men’s idleness and the grocer’s work; the economy, in who owns the businesses on a Black block and who spends in them; the state, in two police officers and a chokehold; history, in the Wall of Fame, King and Malcolm, and the dedication to the dead; ethnicity, Italian-American, African-American, Puerto Rican, Korean and a white newcomer, each with a stake; age, in elders and the young. The riot is all of them at once. What holds it lowest: interiority is shallow everywhere by design, the sacred appears only as a photograph and an old man’s dignity, and the city beyond the block is offstage.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, and The Swerve at 8.8. A disclosure that a killing and a riot are the outcome of an ordinary day built from claims each partly right, which every later chokehold has confirmed; a reach that opened American studios to a wave of Black films and made the one-day neighbourhood film a form; and a race picture made from inside, without reconciliation, at a real stake.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: the film holds the family, labour, the economy, the state, history and ethnicity in one plot, but interiority is shallow everywhere by design, the sacred is a photograph and an old man’s dignity, and the city beyond the block is offstage. Above it, The Inevitable and The Sublime at 8.2: a design of required parts with a margin of permitted ones, and an elevation that gathers in the last half hour.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, The Made at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it at 8.5 exactly. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.2, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Do the Right Thing as released, the theatrical cut of about 120 minutes, in colour and in English, the one version in circulation, from the credit sequence to the dedication: written, produced and directed by Spike Lee for 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, premiered in competition at Cannes in May 1989 and released in the United States by Universal Pictures on 30 June 1989, photographed by Ernest Dickerson, edited by Barry Alexander Brown, designed by Wynn Thomas, with costumes by Ruth E. Carter, music by Bill Lee, and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” written for the film. Later restorations and the home editions, the Criterion editions among them, are repair and not a different film, and are weighed only as part of its survival. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and otherwise described. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the budget, the scene and shot counts, the dates of shooting, how the sets were built on the street, the year of the film’s selection for the National Film Registry, the names and number of the dead in the dedication, and the debts later films have acknowledged to it, are not given.