Scarlet Masque Theatre Journal New Beginnings and Fond Farewells Vol. 1 | Page 71

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Kunen actually took a trip to Bed-Stuy to observe a block for a day, he would not see a
drug-addled society filled with ripped jeans and handguns. Rather, it is okay to show a
community like Bed-Stuy in a better light. Indeed, it might serve audiences everywhere well to
see these neighborhoods represented in ways counter to their presumptions. It might widen
their perspectives. Lee himself has answered this criticism as well in an interview with David
Sterritt, saying:
If this film were done by a white filmmaker, it would have been all dark. There would’ve
been no loud colors. It would have been raining every day, and in complete
despair—with no humor but [with] rapists, crack addicts, drug dealers, pregnant
teen-age mothers throwing their babies out the windows (Sterritt 1989)
Interestingly, and apart from ​ Do the Right Thing ​ , but still pertinent to the representation
of “the hood,” when Spike Lee does do what Corliss and Kunen suggest and take a grittier
approach to his portrayal, he faces criticism for it still. When he made the film ​ Clockers ​ nearly a
decade later, Kenneth Turan’s ​ Los Angeles Times ​ review claimed that it made audiences
confront a “cold, pitiless” world (Turan). It is a wonder whether Lee will ever be able to portray
Brooklyn to a satisfactory standard.
The final aspect of Spike Lee’s Brooklyn in ​ Do the Right Thing ​ that critics disagree with is,
in fact, its racial composition. Sterritt relates this judgement as saying that the film “downplays
Bed-Stuy’s growing diversity, focusing on conflict between blacks and whites at the expense of,
for instance, the neighborhood’s Asian-American population” (Sterritt 47). This criticism,
Sterritt concedes, is actually justified, but it is not necessarily relevant. Like the inclusion of