Lone Star (1996) Analysis

 Lone Star embodies both simplicity and complexity. With quiet, watchful, and soft-spoken intelligence, director John Sayles displays broad social and political awareness, without ever losing sight of the human scale. He focuses on macro-political issues that he intertwines with the personal, demonstrating how universal concerns affect the lives of ordinary individuals.

At some point during the first act of the film, a scene seemingly unrelated to the rest of the movie takes up a considerable amount of screen time. This is a school meeting where disgruntled parents argue about which textbook would be more appropriate for their children’s history class. Pilar (Elizabeth Pena), the teacher, is desperately trying to appease them by explaining that all she was trying to do was present her students with a more complete picture. “Now that’s what’s gotta stop,” a concerned mother blurts out. What they are actually arguing about in the racially diverse and intolerant small town is whose version of history they should cover. And everyone in Rio County seems to remember the past a bit differently. The director is also bent on showing us, the viewers, the complete picture in this multi-layered narrative of the present and past of this disjointed community, from multiple points of view. Brief, meaningful encounters like this make up the movie, which plunges us directly into the action and lets us figure out on our own exactly how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Like Citizen Kane, Lone Star brings us closer to the truth through each vignette, while Sam (Chris Cooper) acts as our go-between, our guide.

Do the Right Thing (1989) Analysis

In Do the Right Thing, writer/director/actor Spike Lee chronicles the lives of working class Brooklyners in the ethnically diverse Bed-Stuy area over a 24-hour period, on the hottest day of the summer. Lee gives a sense of the film’s energy and aggressiveness as early as the opening credits. As Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” blasts, sound and images are combined into a brilliantly edited sequence filled with bright colors, attitude, and anger. Shot by long-time collaborator Ernest Dickerson, the film seems about ready to burst with its palette of strong, saturated colors and emphasis on bright fiery reds and warm oranges and golds that create a visual representation of heat. As temperatures escalate, so do the conflicts between characters; tensions flare up and ultimately explode in racial violence.

Lee treads the fine line between the personal and the political, making his singularly unique characters more than just stand-in representatives for their class and race, but at the same time refusing to focus simply on the individual, instead reflecting on the wider social tensions that come to shape the characters and their actions. From the first shot of the film, a closeup of a ringing clock and Samuel L. Jackson’s character’s first words—“Wake up!”  (which also happens to be the closing line of Lee’s previous film, School Daze)—it’s obvious the director is pleading with the audience as much as the characters to open their eyes and see the urgent need for interracial respect and understanding. Lee’s is a clear, level gaze at American politics of race, from a distinct, African American perspective. His films pose questions that evade easy answers; he offers no solutions. By the ambiguous ending of the movie, it is up to us to decide what “the right thing” is.