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conclusion fashioning a new screen violence from the old in the s in the introduction, I noted that the 1980s closed with a series of blockbuster action movies—Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Lethal Weapon 2—that topped the box-office charts in the summer of 1989 and epitomized how the major Hollywood studios tended to treat screen violence throughout the 1980s: as one of many components in a high-concept package explicitly designed to attract as many of the most sought-after demographic as possible while simultaneously avoiding controversy and public outcry. Each of these three films is a slick, polished, well-crafted action vehicle with big stars, big budgets, and at best minimal attention paid to the real-life consequences of their many violent actions. Batman’s hyperbolic, film-noir-on-steroids vision of a world infested with crime is not terribly far removed from Indiana Jones’s cartoonish Nazi villains and Lethal Weapon 2’s nefarious South African diplomat-criminals . Each film is bulging with violent action and death, yet by 1989 such content was expected, if not routine, in Hollywood productions. Yet, 1989, the same year that gave us the largely trouble-free, audience -pleasing violence of Batman, Indiana Jones, and Lethal Weapon, also produced a handful of studio-produced films that suggested a return to a more troubling and thought-provoking use of violence on the big screen. If one had to mark a specific moment when it seemed that the tide might turn, it would have to be the premiere of Spike Lee’s incendiary Do the Right Thing at the Cannes Film Festival. Lee had made one independently financed film (1986’s She’s Gotta Have It) and one studio film for Columbia that was unceremoniously dumped in theaters (1988’s School Daze), so it was something of a gamble that Universal Studios, which had a pair of 204 CONCLUSION 205 top 10 box-office hits in 1989 with Back to the Future Part II and Parenthood , was willing to finance and distribute Do the Right Thing, even on its modest budget. It was a film that had great potential for generating the kind of controversy the studios had mostly avoided since the first few years of the 1980s;1 in fact, one could argue that Lee designed the film specifically to evoke controversy, which is exactly what it did. The divisiveness the film created among viewers is neatly encapsulated in the opening paragraph of the liner notes Roger Ebert wrote for the film’s release on laser disc by the Criterion Collection: Leaving the theater after the tumultuous world premiere of Do the Right Thing at Cannes in May of 1989, I found myself too shaken to speak, and I avoided the clusters of people where arguments were already heating up. One American critic was so angry she chased me to the exit to inform me, “This film is a call to racial violence!” I thought not. I thought it was a call to empathy, which of all human qualities is the one this past century seemed most to need. That Do the Right Thing could be understood by one viewer as a “call to racial violence” and another as “a call to empathy” is evidence of its profoundly complex nature, which finds its fullest realization in the violent climax in which the death of an African American youth at the hands of white police officers tips the film’s boiling racial tensions into a fullscale riot. When answering questions from the press following the film’s screening at Cannes, Lee summarized his approach to cinema in a way that both immediately reverberates with the troubling 1970s-era cinema of Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, and others and also rejects the primary thrust of the majority of mainstream Hollywood cinema: “It isn’t the job of movie makers to offer solutions. All we can do is to present the problems” (qtd. in Canby, “Spike Lee”). Thus, while Bruce Wayne, Indiana Jones, and Martin Riggs were solving the country’s problems with violence, Lee was presenting it as a question to be pondered. In Do the Right Thing, which takes place over a single blistering hot summer day in a small area of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn , Lee uses violence—physical, verbal, and emotional—to examine the boiling-point nature of race relations. Throughout the film, Lee plays with the film’s tone by...

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