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Doing the Right Thing? Toward a Postmodern Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Allan C. Hutchinson
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“We have learned the answers, all the answers: It is the question that we do not know.”

—Archibald MacLeish (1928)

Joel Handler would have had big problems with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, It is an auteurial tour-de-force by way of a postmodern fable for the ages that is self-consciously perplexing and inconclusive. While focusing on the competing imperatives of the pacificism of Martin Luther King's assimilationist politics and the violence of Malcolm X's cultural nationalism, Lee poses the more general and debilitating dilemma that faces those committed to decisive action in an opaque world. In a pivotal scene, the flip and up-and-coming Mookie is harangued by a local and elderly busybody. In hushed and conspiratorial tones, he advises Mookie to “Always do the right thing.” The exasperated Mookie complains, “That's it? Do the right thing? O.K., I got it. I'm gone …” As the film advances to its climactic and chaotic denouement, Mookie is forced to confront the excruciating accuracy and infuriating elusiveness of this absolutely trite piece of sage advice. Determined to “do the right thing,” he acts in a way that both he and almost everyone else will forever question and second-guess. In this appropriately cryptic manner, Lee suggests the fecundity and fragility of political action in a postmodern world.

Type
Comments on Presidential Address
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , 1992 , pp. 773 - 787
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Many thanks to Harry Glasbeek, Pam Carpenter, Brenda Cossman, Lynda Covello, and Rose Della Rocca for comments and support.

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