I'll have a cheese pizza with extra ice.

Spike Lee's film "Do the right thing" is developed throughout with several ideas depicting racism and the struggle for racial harmony amongst a close community. In particular, I feel that temperature plays a crucial role in the film's development, in many different forms such as ice, fire, or water.

At the start of the film, we learn of heat waves bursting through the streets of Brooklyn. The moggy weather used in the film depicts a very clever metaphor to represent the harmony of races. As the heat rises, so does the temper of many, resulting in annoyance and aggrivational build up to a point of near explosion.

In Mookie's ice scene with his girlfriend, We can see clearly how the use of temperature is vital to depicting certain ideas in the film. As Mookie is black, and his girlfriend is of another race, Italian American, The ice running ovcer her body is seen as a metaphor for racial harmony. It is something which is used to soothe the hot friction between their cultural differences, but unfortunatly due to Mookie's job, there just wasn't enough time for "ice", causing aggrivation within their relationship.

One colour that springs to mind when I think of this film is red. There is red almost everywhere in the film. There are red lights flooding onto the screen in the begining where Mookie's girlfriend is dancing her heart out, bright red painted on the wall where the three old men sat to chat in their deck chairs, red in the roses which the Mayor gave so kindly to Mother Sister, red in the colour of the fire hydrant, red in the fire engine which came to douse the flames in the pizzarea. A colour of many connotations. Love, heat, passion, anger... And in almost every scene where this is shown, such comnnotations are strife.In the Mayors situation, There was a complication between the Mayors admiration for Mother Sister, as she did not entirely like him at first, unsure weather to accept the red roses or not. With the old men, they merely gaped into the asian man's shop on the corner, speaking of asians taking over their country, as he had opened his business in only a year. Situations like this were racist, and stirred unnessesary heat, as tempers rose.

Heat was a major element to the contribution to racism, being a representation of the many races in the film. African Americans, Italian Americans, Koreans, and Europeans, were the races which all lived together in the same community, however they mixed like fire and water. Hot and cold. Neither could exist freely without the other there, hounding them with racial slurr and comment. This enflamed the situation, which unexpectedly exploded into a contageous rampage. The result? A rather charred pizzaria, soaked to the bone in the very element which could possibly have cooled everybody down and saved it all.