Sarah Jett Rayburn, Ph.D. Candidate "Everyone wants to know the whole truth but no one possesses it."

Answer 1 B)

I think both Spike Lee and Ben Affleck uses Mookie and Patrick as their central characters in their films respectively. Both of them are placed in a position to make very difficult decisions that have very profound effects. Both the characters are asked to ‘do the right thing’. In “Do the Right Thing” Mookie was forced to choose between his loyalty to his employer Sal and his loyalty to his own race and his responsibilities as a black person. We see this conflict throughout the whole movie and at the end his decision to stay on the side of the crowd causes a very significant impact inside the community. In the movie “Gone Baby Gone” we see Patrick is faced with the dilemma of choosing the future of Amanda. Both the characters have their own strong moral principles, which they refuse to compromise in any way. Patrick just could not shake away the fact that Helene, no matter how bad she is as a mother, she has the right to get back to her child; even though this could possibly be a bad thing for Amanda. Mookie on the other hand, strongly believes in justice and could not let his friend Radio Raheem’s death go away without being answered.

Answer 2 B)

I think listening to the soundtrack of “Gone Baby Gone” would be limiting than watching it muted with captions. In the movie the director uses a number of visual scenes to narrate the story and to establish ethos which would be totally lost if one would just hear the soundtrack. For example, in the movie it was very clear that Amanda’s mother was a very irresponsible parent by the way she treated Amanda and her body language. The movie would have had a very different impact on the audiences if we didn’t get this important message. Also towards the end of the movie, we could see that Amanda was actually very happy to be away from her mother and with her new family. So if we just listened to the soundtrack of the movie, we could have reached the wrong judgment of whether Patrick made the right or wrong decision and totally missed the argument the director is trying to make.

Answer 3 A)

The movie “Do the Right Thing” is basically trying to say that violence is never the solution to the problems of the Afro-American community. For instance, the movie tells how Radio Raheem got killed when he and Sal starts fighting. If Radio Raheem acted with reason and not in such a brute manner, he would have never gotten killed. Also the aftermath of the riot ideally wasn’t a very good thing for the community as well. Mookie lost his job and everybody else lost a very good and friendly pizza joint, which served them good food at a reasonable price. The violence only made the lives of the black people harder, because if anything the police will come down on them harder for burning and destroying private property.

The movie, I feel, however did not make the argument successfully. There was a sense as if the riot made the black people victorious and better off, which is not true. Smiley, for example hangs one of the picture of Martin King and Malcolm X on the wall when the whole place was in flames , which was the original demand and cause for the fight. The next day, everybody goes to do their business as usual and behaves as if whatever happened, happened for good. The movie does not highlight any of the negative consequences of the riot. Spike Lee was probably more biased to Malcolm X’s points of view than Martin King’s because he ended the movie with a quotation of Martin King and then with a quotation of Malcolm X, leaving the audience feeling that violence might actually be good in some ways. The intended audience for the film is probably anybody interested in these kind of racial issues as the film portrays a sharp picture of the political and philosophical problems facing America at that era.

Answer 4 B)

The defining moment in “Do the Right Thing” was when Mookie smashed a window of Sal’s pizza place, triggering the angry crowd to rampage the restaurant. I think the whole movie was unraveling into that very scene, when Mookie decided to forget his loyalty to Sal and join in the crowd to avenge one of his friends death.

In “Gone Baby Gone”, I think the defining moment was when Patrick found Amanda with the Police captain Doyle. That was a very critical point because until then the audience was let to believe that Amanda was either murdered or died in some accident. It is also that scene where Patrick is first forced to choose the right decision: whether to let Amanda live happily with her new family or return her to her true mother.