Movies Are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings by Josh Larsen

Author:Josh Larsen [Larsen, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2017-05-08T12:55:56+00:00

--- CHAPTER Seven ---

MOVIES AS PRAYERS OF RECONCILIATION

We’ll never really know why Mookie threw the garbage can.

At the climax of Do the Right Thing, at the end of a blistering hot day in New York City’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Mookie (Spike Lee) is closing up the family-owned pizza shop where he works. It’s been a good day, says the owner Sal (Danny Aiello) to his two sons and Mookie. He’s proud of them and makes a point to tell Mookie “you’ve always been like a son to me.” When a group of teens starts banging on the door, demanding slices, Sal says to let them in. “They love my pizza.”

Soon after, three other young men barge in, blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” from a boom box and reiterating a demand they made of Sal earlier in the film: put some pictures of black people on the wall, not just Italian Americans. Tempers flash. Sal smashes the boom box with a bat. Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) drags Sal out into the street and begins to throttle him. When the police arrive, they grab Radio Raheem, put him in a chokehold, and kill him.

The cops flee, leaving Sal and his sons standing in front of their pizza shop facing a crowd of Radio Raheem’s family, friends, and neighbors. The temperature begins to rise again, until Mookie, of all people—small, sleepy-eyed, Sal’s other “son”—picks up a trash can and hurls it through the shop’s window, inciting an uprising that will leave Sal’s Famous Pizzeria ravaged and burned.

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