The world according to Spike Lee.

Do the Right Thing' seriously addresses today's urban problems-or does it? Spike Lee has blended the thought of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X-or has he? Not only does Lee avoid giving us answers, he artfully frames his questions so as to dodge the real issues.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK-No whites allowed at the Slave Theater, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I'm admitted only after presenting press credentials and undergoing interrogation by the Fruit of Islam, Louis Farrakhan's private security force. It's a hot July night and Spike Lee's new movie opens tomorrow. Right now Lee-auteur and star of Do the Right Thing-and his pals, the popular rap group Public Enemy, are getting their First Amend-ment rights trampled on-at least according to Reverend AI Sharpton and radical lawyer Alton Maddox, who are here to do something about it.

Public Enemy provided the theme song and leitmotif for Lee's movie with the rap tune "Fight the Power." They are currently at the zenith of a high-visibility self-destruct curve, which began when a member of their private security force gave an anti-Semitic interview to the Washington Times. But this talk of black anti-Semitism is just "a tactic," Sharpton tells the packed theater. "This ain't no promised land!" Sharpton cries out. "This ain't no haven of justice! Spike Lee told the real deed . . . and he won't apologize for telling the truth. Public Enemy put the message to music! Public Enemy had music to inspire!" Sharpton gets a standing ovation. Within 24 hours, he will be indicted on 67 counts of fraud and larceny.

Tawana Brawley's graduation picture is pinned to the podium. In case anyone has forgotten, Miss Brawley was Sharpton and Maddox's ticket to national prominence. The black teenager created a sensation by claiming she was raped by a gang of white racists; exhaustive examinations found precious little evidence to support her charges. Most of the black community consider the Brawley affair a deep embarrassment. Not Spike Lee. "Tawana told the truth!" is emblazoned across a wall in his movie. She sets Spike's radical-chic heart thumping. .

Lee's use of themes pioneered by Sharpton & Co. only begins with Tawana Brawley, Both Sharpton and Lee, for instance, employ Martin Luther King as a cover for quite different causes. "Those who came out of the King movement," Sharpton declared at the Bedford-Stuyvesant meeting, are now "hand in hand with those trained by Malcolm X." It is the first and last time King's name is mentioned, though Malcolm X's name and brand of rhetoric will be heard throughout the evening. Alton Maddox sums it up, his face strained with passion, "We should welcome war! I'm looking for a long hot summer. We'll bring that day forward! The fire next time! Burn, baby, burn!" The crowd is on its feet, roaring its approval.

Why is Sharpton here supporting Spike Lee? A Sharpton spokesman tells us that Lee treats Sharpton in his movie as "one of the three credible black leaders," along with Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson. "Reverend Sharpton's position is that our young artists have a right of expression. This is a First Amendment issue"-though with Lee's movie opening in dozens of theaters nationwide, it's difficult to see how.

BEDFORD-STUYVESANT is a blasted zone of the urban landscape. Down Bedford Avenue, down past the burned-out tenements, down past the knots of suspicious young men, past the crazed crack-heads and cooleyed teenage hookers, past the mothers shooing their kids away from the condoms and crack vials in the gutter, past all that and across the East River, the gleaming silver towers of mid-town Manhattan seem to pose an ethereal rebuke to the citizens living along these mean streets.

Lee sets Do the Right Thing on a single block in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the summer. Throughout the fictional day, as John Simon relates in greater detail [see p. 45], tensions build between the black community and a white pizza-parlor owner and his sons. At the end of the film a young black man is killed by white cops, and the block riots, destroying the pizza parlor. The idea for the movie, Lee writes in his film journal, published by Simon & Schuster, "arose for me out of the Howard Beach incident." (In 1986 a black-white fracas outside a pizza parlor in Howard Beach, Queens, led to a black man being chased by a gang of white thugs onto a highway, where he was run over and killed.)

The film's ending triggered a small blizzard of media criticism, something Lee was quite prepared for. "No doubt," he writes in his journal, "this film is gonna get more heat than any other film I've done." Indeed, in shaping the movie Lee seems to have closely followed the example of one of his heroes, Martin Scorsese, in The Last Temptation of Christ. Both films were low-budget affairs ($6 to $7 million), both were financed by Universal Pictures, both contained controversial scenes sure to attract attention, and both are suffused with parlor leftism.

Most of the film's critics faulted it for endorsing violence and being, in both a political and anintellectual sense, thoroughly incoherent. Some commentators claimed it would spark a riot, but the only movie violence so far this summer occurred at a screening of Batman-a shootout over the last carton of popcorn. The jury at the Cannes Film Festival turned Right Thing down for top honors, suggesting the film was simplistic and irresponsible; Lee called them racists; Lee calls a lot of people racists. The left-wing Village Voice ran a whole series of articles on the movie. In one, Stanley Crouch blasted the young filmmaker: Lee "either lacks the intelligence, maturity,- and sensitivity necessary for drama, or hasn't the courage to give racial confrontation true dramatic complexity. At heart, he is for now a propagandist." New York columnist Joe Klein called Lee "a classic art-school dilettante when it comes to politics. His film . . . is more trendoid than tragic." Klein suggested that the movie could seriously damage the prospects of black mayoral candidate David Dinkins, who now would have to respond to tbe "dangerous stupidity" of Lee's mixed-up messages.

New York's mayoral politics unquestionably figured in Lee's plans. "We've got to get Ed Koch into" the movie, Lee notes in his journal. Koch is "one of the main reasons race relations are so strained in New York City."

Beyond dumping Koch, what were Lee's intentions? Lee writes that Right Thing is about the "black underclass in Bed-Stuy, a community that has some of the highest unemployment, infant mortality, and drug-related homicides in New York City. We're talking about people who live in the bowels of the social-economic system, but still live with dignity and humor." He conveyed the dignity and humor, but not much else. "I'm still deciding whether to include some stuff about drugs," he notes in his journal. "Not to acknowledge that drugs exist might be a serious omission in the film. The drug epidemic is worse than the plague."

Apparently it was an omission Lee felt he could paper over. "Lee creates a fantasy Bed-Stuy neighborhood," Crouch complained, accurately. "No villains such as drug dealers ever appear to complicate things, nor any middleclass would-be street Negroes like the filmmaker himself." In real life, Lee turned to Louis Farrakhan and the Fruit of Islam when he needed a Bed-Stuy street cleared of crack dealers and crack dens to shoot his movie. ("Last night I went to see Brother Minister Farrakhan at the Friendship Baptist Church," a journal entry reads. "He gave a rousing speech and made positive remarks about my work.") Today, the crackheads are back on Spike Lee's "set." He, of course, is long gone.

The omission of drugs is far from accidental. Wish them away, and the people become victims of outside forces entirely beyond their control-in a word, racism. As Spike Lee sees it, moreover, racism is embodied not just by brutal white cops but also by well-meaning pizza-parlor owners . In the movie, the people are more threatened by pizza than by drugs.

Lee's artful exploitation of racial tensions in New York is best reflected in his cynical use of King and Malcolm X. Anyone even slightly familiar with black struggle in this country knows that the two men could not have been further apart. In the film, a severe stutterer named Smiley sells copies of the famous photograph of King and Malcolm X together-the only time the two met and, as Lee knows, a chance encounter. As the pizza parlor goes up in flames, Smiley pins the photo to the burning wall: King and Malcolm and inarticulate black rage in the figure of Smiley all coming together to burn down whitey. Not exactly the dream that King had.

Moments later, the film is over and King's quote condemning violence as "descending spiral ending in destruction" scrolls up the screen, followed by Malcolm X: "I don't even call it violence when it's self-defense. I call it intelligence." Lee defends his use of the two quotes. "It's not an either/ or situation," he told the New York Post. "I think that one can definitely be a follower of Malcolm and Martin at the same time." But how? As David Garrow noted in Bearing the Cross, while King and other movement leaders "always stressed the nonviolent nature of their protests, [Malcolm X] repeatedly suggested that only physical violence could defeat American racism. These provocative statements deeply angered King."

'IN ALL OF the earnest, solemn, humorless discussions about the social and political implications" of the film, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, "an essential fact tends to be overlooked: it is one terrific movie." He's right. Do the Right Thing wonderfully captures the bounce and flow of life in New York City, the language is bright and funny, and the plot zips along. Lee is a genuine American success story, capitalist version. At 32, he has completed three motion pictures and consolidated a small and energetic production company devoted to expanding not only Spike Lee's power but the power of young black filmmakers and technicians. Emblematic of American drive and creativity, he's done the right thing. Why won't he persuade other people to do the same?

Two themes run through his journals, published as guidebooks for getting ahead in the film world. One theme is Lee's ceaseless energy in producing his films. The other theme is racism. "Universal is d------ me around. They won't budge from the $6.5-million budget, won't go a penny over it. It's ridiculous. White boys get real money, f--- up, lose millions of dollars, and get chance after chance. Not so with us." Poor Spike! Only $6.5-million! Racism is to blame for just about everything and he, a product of Atlanta's elite Morehouse College and New York University's ultra-hip citadel of radical aesthetics, the Graduate Film School, is all too frequently racism's victim.

Perhaps Lee's black-and-white, us-and-them world view explains his refusal to condemn scoundrels when they happen to bc black: manipulators like Sharpton and Maddox, demagogues like Farrakhan, and hate-filled sloganeers like Public Enemy-"my favorite politically conscious rappers," Lee calls them. In Spike Lee's world the politically correct artist knows that the enemy of my enemy is my friendand racist white imperialist America is the enemy.

Spike's patter is not unfamiliar. Make wild statements about racism and violence-that's commitment, man. Find yourself asked to justify them-hey, you're not a politician, you just make movies. That's the line of the Artful Dodger.