I think more important thing (for this arguments purpose) I recalled about Mookie is his relationship with Sal's and his two boys. I felt like Mookie had a negative relationship with Sal. He didn't respect his job, he started fights with one of the sons Pino, and he was always in conflict with Sal, once for example when he gets upset Sal is favoring his sister. All this evidence would lead me to believe that Mookie does not like or want to be associated with Sal until the end when Sal expresses himself to Mookie and Mookie begins to realize what Sal has done for him.
My argument for the transformation of Mookie is how he reacts to the riot at the end of the film. A blood thirsty crowd is upset with Sal and how he doesn't have any pictures of any famous African Americans. The crowd seemingly wants to beat Sal and his family, and Pino is encouraging the fight. Sal becomes more and more aggressive and violence seems to be likely. In the chaos Mookie throws a trash can through the window of the Pizzaria. The crowds attention is turned off Sal and his family onto destroying the store.
I think most people would argue that Mookie could have done other things to prevent destruction, but I feel in throwing the can through the window he prevented a greater loss in the beating or murder of Sal and his family. The crowd was set on violence and possibly could not have been pursuaded, and they just needed something to revolt against and Mookie destroying the building was the push they needed. It is hard to say if Mookie did transform and realize what Sal meant to him and truly meant to save him or if he himself wanted to Destroy the Pizzaria with this actions. I think that he was trying to take the attention off Sall and did save his life and therefore went through a transformation during the film...
Thanks for this post. One of the things we will continue to think through is what makes a film transformative. Does it defy normally held convictions of difference, does it remark upon social and/or political conditions in a way that becomes a thought provoking, educational moment. I don't know that Mookie putting a trashcan through a window is transformative, especially because destroying property, even if it interrupts a worse fate (beating of Sal’s family) is progressive. The issue of the pictures on the wall is one thing, but the animosity stems from the pizza owner taking money from a community that he does not respect, as well as the racism of the sons. But Do The Right Thing contains more than it transgresses -- it presents a bifurcated narrative of revolution or passivity -- it suggests that presenting racial tensions is enough rather than working through issues to present new ways of seeing/doing. Malcolm X or Martin Luther King constitutes the film’s two diametrically opposed sides; women are at the margins of the narrative, or are objects of the phallocentric gaze. Mookie learns little and transforms even less. All that being said, it is still one of his better films. I think Spike Lee, mostly because of his sexism and neo-nationalist diatribes, is largely incapable of making a transformative film, unless it is a documentary (3 little girls, or when the levies broke, for example).
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