two-paths-reasoning-do-the-right-thing Do the Right Thing (1989)

Working notes for a Two Approaches analysis of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. The film is a hard test for the framework: it foregrounds an ensemble block, the protagonist Mookie spends most of the runtime avoiding a project, and the climactic act is a single decision (the trash can) preceded by a witnessed killing he did not choose. Below I work through Steps 1–11 to settle the structure.

Step 1. Famous lines and themes

The lines worth weighting:

Da Mayor to Mookie: "Doctor — always do the right thing." Mookie's reply: "That's it?" Da Mayor: "That's it." This is the prompt the title names. It is delivered to Mookie specifically, in the morning, by the block's resident moral pressure-figure.
Sal: "This is my pizzeria. American Italians up on the wall only." Defended again, more violently, in the boombox-bat scene.
Pino to Sal: argues to leave the neighborhood; Sal refuses — "these people grew up on my food. They're gonna grow up on my food." The pizzeria as paternal-territorial claim.
Mookie–Pino exchange: Pino's favorite athletes, comedian, musician are Magic, Eddie, Prince — Pino's racism survives the contradiction by claiming they are "more than Black."
Buggin' Out: "Boycott Sal's!" — the boycott is the legitimate-channel version of the response.
Mister Señor Love Daddy roll call of Black musicians from late in the film, and his "Y'all take a chill" plea during the heat wave.
Smiley sells hand-colored photographs of MLK and Malcolm X side by side; speaks haltingly; sticks the photo onto the wall of Sal's after the fire.
Closing King quote (paraphrased): violence is impractical and immoral; it ends in bitterness. Closing Malcolm X quote (paraphrased): I am not against violence in self-defense — I call it intelligence.
Radio Raheem's right hand / left hand speech: love and hate are in a perpetual fight; sometimes love wins, sometimes hate wins, but the story ends in a draw — delivered to Mookie outside the pizzeria.

Themes that surface from these lines.

The "right thing" is being asked of someone whose role is structural, not moral. Da Mayor's prompt is to Mookie — the one Black man who works inside Sal's, who is positioned between the block and the pizzeria, and who is the only character who can make a decision that has structural consequences for both sides.
The block is a system of small irritations under heat. Wall of fame, boombox, sneaker scuff, fire hydrant, the Korean store, the white brownstoner — each subplot is a low-stakes friction event. The film's structural project is to track the cumulative pressure on this system until it fails.
Love and hate as a draw. Raheem's parable announces that the climax will not resolve cleanly toward either — and the film's closing pair of quotes ratifies the refusal to score.
The wall of fame as paternal-territorial claim. Sal owns the photographs; Sal owns the front room; Sal owns whose face hangs there. The boycott is a claim that the wall should reflect the customer base. The dispute is over who defines the public space inside the private business.
Violence in self-defense vs. violence as politics. The closing diptych is the explicit framing — Lee places the philosophy on the screen as text, not as plot.

Step 2. Three theories of the gap

I am locating the protagonist as Mookie, with the block as the field he is positioned inside. The film is an ensemble, but Mookie is the one character who (a) appears in nearly every venue, (b) carries Da Mayor's title-prompt directly, and (c) makes the single act that converts the killing into a riot. The framework's note on ensembles licenses this — Mookie is the dominant arc.

Theory A — Approach as technique: avoid sides, take wages, stay between. Mookie's initial approach is non-aligned wage labor. He works for Sal but hangs with the block. He defers to Pino verbally, hangs out with Vito, evades Tina, half-engages Buggin' Out's boycott talk, ducks Da Mayor's moralism. The gap is between this conflict-avoidance and an active stance the block's situation will eventually require. The midpoint would be a moment where the avoidance posture becomes untenable; the climax would be an action that picks a side.

Theory B — Approach as understanding: the pizzeria is a neutral business; race is incidental to commerce. Mookie's initial understanding treats Sal's as a workplace whose racial composition is not load-bearing — Sal is a guy with a job, the wall is a quirk, the customers buy slices, the block runs. The gap is between this read and the film's gradual reveal that Sal's is the racial geography of the block, that the wall is not a quirk but a claim, and that Sal's paternal warmth toward Jade and his sons' contempt for the customers are two faces of the same proprietorship. The midpoint would be a moment where the racial structure of the business becomes legible to Mookie as not-incidental. The climax would be an action whose meaning is racial-structural rather than personal.

Theory C — Approach as goal: keep the wage, keep the block, keep both. Mookie's project at the start is to hold both relationships — the paycheck from Sal, the standing on the block — without choosing. The gap is between this dual-loyalty goal and a situation that, by the end of the day, will not allow both. The midpoint would be a moment where the dual-loyalty goal is shown to be impossible. The climax would be the goal-collapse: an act that sacrifices one side of the loyalty for the other.

The three are not orthogonal — they could be three components of a single approach (technique, understanding, goal) — but they predict different midpoints and different climax-readings, so they are useful to test separately.

Step 3. Four candidate climaxes, tested against the three theories

Candidate 1 — Sal smashes Radio Raheem's boombox with the bat. This is the moment the day's frictions become physical. It is high-stakes, it is the precipitating violence of the night sequence. But it is not the destination of the film; it is the trigger. Raheem's death and Mookie's act are still ahead. Fails criterion (a) — feels like a turn, not the end.

Candidate 2 — Officer Long chokes Radio Raheem to death. This is the highest-stakes individual event in the film. It is also the event the film's dedications point at (the named victims of NYPD violence). It feels like a climactic event in stakes (someone dies). But it is something that happens to the protagonist's field, not something he tests himself against. Theory A's climax-prediction (Mookie picks a side) is not satisfied — Mookie watches. Theory B's climax-prediction (the racial structure is acted on) is not satisfied — Mookie watches. Theory C's climax-prediction (the dual-loyalty goal collapses) is not satisfied — Mookie watches. The chokehold is the escalation event that forces the climactic decision; it is the world raising the stakes, not the protagonist meeting them. Strong on stakes, fails on "Mookie's test."

Candidate 3 — Mookie throws the trash can through Sal's window. A single bounded act. It feels like the destination of the film — Da Mayor's morning prompt ("do the right thing") is finally answered with something, and the film has spent two hours setting up which "right thing" Mookie's day is going to produce. It is what the riot pivots on; it is what Sal's sons see; it is what the block follows. Stakes: the act ends the pizzeria as a business and the relationship with Sal as it has been. Tests criteria (a) and (b). Each theory makes sense of it: Theory A — Mookie picks a side (the block); Theory B — Mookie acts on the racial-structural reading of the wall and the killing as one connected fact; Theory C — Mookie sacrifices the wage-and-employer side for the block side. All three theories produce this scene as the climactic test, and the scene itself is a single tightly bounded action.

Candidate 4 — The next-morning return for the wages. Mookie comes back, demands his $250, takes $500 thrown at him, hands $250 back, leaves. Quiet, paired with Sal in the wreckage. It is climactic in tone and resonant — but stakes are low (it is a transaction in the rubble), and the test it stages is not the test the film built. This is the wind-down, not the climax.

The strongest candidate is the trash can. It satisfies both climax criteria, all three theories produce it as the test of the post-midpoint approach, and it is a single bounded act. I will set this as the climax.

Note on staging. Some readings would place the climax across the whole riot — boombox, chokehold, trash can, fire. The framework requires a narrowly formed rivet. I am locating the climax proper at the trash can: the protagonist's bounded test of the post-midpoint approach. The chokehold is the escalation event that forces the test. The fire is the consequence. Treating the climax as the trash can is the cleanest reading of "the protagonist's test," even though the chokehold has higher absolute stakes — the framework is about what tests the protagonist's approach.

Step 4. Midpoint under each theory and theory selection

Under Theory A (technique — avoid sides). The midpoint should be the moment the avoidance posture becomes untenable. Candidate: the Mookie–Pino "favorite Black celebrities" scene on the stoop, ~midway through the film. Mookie pushes Pino on his hypocrisy and Pino's defense (they are "more than Black") makes the racial logic of the pizzeria visible inside the pizzeria's family. This works analytically — it is the moment Mookie names the contradiction he has been working inside — but it does not by itself collapse the avoidance posture. Mookie continues to avoid for the rest of the day until Raheem dies.

A second candidate under Theory A: the Pino–Sal stoop conversation that Mookie overhears (or the parallel scene where Pino tells Sal to sell), where Sal articulates "these people grew up on my food" — establishing the paternal-territorial frame Pino has been pushing against. This makes the racial geography of the pizzeria explicit, but again Mookie is a witness, not yet repositioned.

Under Theory B (understanding — race is incidental to commerce). The midpoint should re-specify the racial structure as load-bearing. Strongest candidate: the racial slur direct-address montage — Mookie, Pino, the corner men, the Korean grocer, the white cyclist all face the camera and deliver slurs about another group. This is a non-diegetic structural intrusion: the film breaks frame to make explicit that the block runs on racial categorization at every angle, not just at Sal's wall. Mister Señor Love Daddy then yells "Y'all take a chill!" and pulls the film back into the day. This is the moment the film tells the audience that the wall-of-fame complaint is not a sub-plot — it is the structure of the entire block. It re-specifies the read for both Mookie and the viewer.

Under Theory C (goal — keep both). The midpoint should be the moment the dual-loyalty goal is shown to be impossible. Candidate: the Mookie–Pino scene again (Mookie sees that the family that pays him would prefer he not exist as a category), or the slur montage, or the moment Mookie has to physically interpose between Buggin' Out and Sal during the boycott confrontation. The dual-loyalty goal is shown to be increasingly stressed across the day, but no single bounded scene cleanly collapses it.

Theory selection. Theory B's midpoint candidate (the slur montage) does the most work because (a) it is a single bounded sequence, (b) it is structurally marked by the film itself with a non-diegetic device — the direct-address camera and the radio interruption — which is the film flagging the midpoint diegetically, and (c) it re-specifies the read for both Mookie and the audience simultaneously. Under Theory B the climactic trash can is the moment Mookie acts on the now-legible reading: the wall of fame and the chokehold and the boycott are one connected racial-structural fact, and the response is the one the closing Malcolm X quote names. Theories A and C are symptoms of Theory B in this reading — Mookie's avoidance and his dual-loyalty goal both rest on the prior understanding that race is incidental to the commerce; once that floor is gone, the avoidance and the dual-loyalty become visibly untenable, and the chokehold is the event that forces the decision. Theory B nests A and C. Selecting Theory B.

Set the midpoint at the slur montage (with Mister Señor Love Daddy's intervention as its closing beat). Set the climax at the trash can.

Step 5. Quadrant

Once the midpoint and climax are fixed, the quadrant question becomes: is Mookie's post-midpoint approach (act on the racial-structural read; refuse the dual-loyalty position; choose the block over the wage) better tools or worse tools, and does the climax show the new approach as sufficient or insufficient?

The film deliberately refuses to score either axis cleanly. The closing diptych is the device — King says violence is impractical and self-defeating; Malcolm X says self-defense is intelligence. Lee places both on the screen and refuses to tell the viewer which one the trash can satisfies. This is the film's central formal choice.

If forced to a single quadrant, the strongest reading is better tools, ambiguous-to-insufficient — the Chinatown / sound-tools-defeated cousin, with two qualifications:

The post-midpoint approach is "better tools" in the framework's neutral sense — Mookie sees the structure he could not see before, and he acts. The earlier dual-loyalty stance was a refusal to see. Whether the new approach is morally better is exactly the question the film leaves open.
The climax's sufficiency depends on what is being tested. If the test is "save the pizzeria" — failed (it burns). If "save Radio Raheem" — failed (he is already dead). If "redirect community rage from a Korean-owned business or other neighbors toward a target connected to the killing" — partially succeeded (the mob's energy goes into Sal's rather than the Korean store, which is spared by Sweet Dick Willie's intervention). If "make a public claim on the racial structure of the block, at any cost" — succeeded.

The film is closer to subverted comedy / sound-tools-defeated in the Chinatown sense than to tragedy: Mookie's growth (from non-alignment to alignment) is real and arguably moral, but the world the act lands in absorbs it — the next morning the pizzeria is rubble, Mookie is collecting his pay, Sal is exhausted, and nothing structural has changed. The dedication frame (Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, etc. — all real-world chokehold and police-violence victims) makes the political-fatalism reading explicit: even the right answer arrives at the same recurrent destination.

I'll mark the quadrant as better tools, ambiguous on sufficiency — the film's formal device is the refusal to score. If asked to commit, I'd land on better/insufficient (sound-tools-defeated) with the wind-down's pay-collecting framed as the new equilibrium that re-absorbs the act into the same block, the same heat, the same forecast.

Step 6. Escalation points and early-establishing scenes

Escalation 1 (pre-midpoint). The candidate is the Buggin' Out sneaker scuff — a white brownstoner on a bicycle steps on Buggin' Out's Air Jordans. Buggin' Out demands compensation, the brownstoner says "I own this brownstone," the corner men weigh in. This is the first explicit articulation of the block as a contested racial territory, and it is the event that kicks Buggin' Out into boycott mode at Sal's. It accelerates the wall-of-fame complaint into an organized boycott attempt, which is what carries forward into the night. It places stress on the avoidance/dual-loyalty approach by forcing Mookie to handle a Buggin' Out who is now in motion.

A second candidate: the fire hydrant scene where the kids open the hydrant on the block, the white driver's car is doused, and the police shut the hydrant. This stages the recurring pattern (Black neighborhood activity → police arrival → hydrant closed) and introduces the cops as a presence. It accelerates the system toward the night's police arrival.

I'll take Escalation 1 as the sneaker scuff because it is the event that drives Buggin' Out's project — and Buggin' Out's project is the proximate cause of the night-confrontation that produces Raheem's death.

Escalation 2 (post-midpoint). The candidate is the Sal-with-the-bat-on-the-boombox sequence: Buggin' Out and Radio Raheem walk into Sal's at closing with the boombox at full volume; Sal calls Raheem racial slurs and smashes the boombox with a baseball bat; the room ignites. This raises the stakes from verbal-and-territorial to physical, shifts the field of play from "block under heat" to "fight at the pizzeria with police inbound," and is the bounded escalation that produces the conditions for the chokehold and the trash can. It stresses but does not yet test Mookie's post-midpoint approach (he is in the room but does not yet act); it changes the field.

Early-establishing scenes.

Tina's apartment — Mookie visits his girlfriend and their son, ducks her demands. Establishes the dual-loyalty pattern: present, partial, evasive.
Jade's morning — Mookie's sister visits the apartment they share; he is dismissive. The sister-protectiveness theme is planted (will recur when Sal speaks to Jade in the pizzeria and Mookie reads it as predatory).
Da Mayor errands — Da Mayor on the block, picked at by the kids, sweet-talking Mother Sister, intervening when a kid almost gets hit by a car. Establishes the moral-witness role and the title-prompt vector before he delivers it to Mookie.
Mister Señor Love Daddy at the WE-LOVE booth — establishes the radio voice that runs above the block all day and will be the chorus that comments on the heat, the music, the violence, and the next morning's forecast.
Sal opens the pizzeria with Pino and Vito — Pino sweeping, Vito amiable, Sal in the patriarch chair. Establishes the wall before any complaint is made about it. The framework's "starting tools" for the antagonist-side: Sal's ownership of the room.

These scenes establish the field. The protagonist's starting tools are Mookie's evasion-and-non-alignment.

Step 7. Equilibrium and Inciting Incident

Equilibrium. The film's opening Tina-credits sequence (Rosie Perez dancing to "Fight the Power" against red backdrops) is a non-diegetic title sequence — it sets the temperature, but it is not the protagonist in his element. The equilibrium proper is the morning at Mookie's apartment: Mister Señor Love Daddy's voice on the radio waking the block, Mookie counting his money in bed, Jade telling him to get up, Mookie eventually heading out for work. This is Mookie operating with his starting tools: paid by the slice, lives with sister, deflects, moves through the block on foot. The equilibrium is mobile rather than static — Mookie's stable state is moving between venues without committing to any of them — and the morning establishes that mobility.

Inciting Incident. The strongest candidate is Buggin' Out's first complaint at Sal's about the wall of fame. He sits down with a slice, looks up, and asks why there are no Black people on the wall. Sal tells him this is his pizzeria and Italian-Americans only. Buggin' Out escalates, Sal threatens with the bat, Mookie pushes Buggin' Out out of the store and onto the sidewalk. This is the day's first event that disrupts the block's equilibrium — it converts a piece of standing decor into a contested object, and it produces Buggin' Out's boycott project, which carries through to the night.

There are weaker candidates: the kids opening the hydrant; the sneaker scuff (placed at Escalation 1 above because it accelerates the wall complaint rather than initiating it); Smiley's first appearance with the photo. The wall-of-fame complaint is the strongest because it creates the project that the rest of the film tracks, and it disrupts the protagonist (Mookie has to physically remove a customer-friend at his employer's instruction — the dual-loyalty position takes its first stress).

The inciting incident is tailored to Mookie's approach: the dispute is exactly the one his evasion-and-non-alignment cannot resolve, because it requires him to act as either Sal's man or the block's man, and his policy is to be both.

Step 8. Three candidates for the Commitment point

Chronologically, the commitment sits between the inciting incident (wall-of-fame complaint) and the rising action / Escalation 1. After the wall-of-fame ejection, Buggin' Out works the block trying to recruit a boycott — Mookie, Mother Sister, the corner men, kids on the block. The commitment must be Mookie's, since he is the protagonist.

Candidate 1 — Mookie ejects Buggin' Out from Sal's at Sal's instruction. Mookie chooses Sal's side in the moment. But this is not a project commitment — it is conflict management, and his policy resumes immediately afterward.

Candidate 2 — Mookie tells Buggin' Out "do what you gotta do, but leave me out of it" during the recruit attempt on the street. Mookie commits to the non-alignment posture itself. This is a commitment to the initial approach: he will not pick the boycott side, he will not pick Sal's side, he will keep working the slot between. It is articulated on the sidewalk as a small bounded scene.

Candidate 3 — Da Mayor delivers "always do the right thing" later in the morning, and Mookie does not commit to anything in response — he says "that's it?" and walks. The non-commitment is itself a commitment to the non-alignment approach.

The strongest candidate is Candidate 2 — Mookie's bounded refusal of Buggin' Out's recruitment. It is a single scene. It commits the protagonist to the initial approach (work the slot, take no side). It explains the rest of the day's behavior — the favorite-celebrities tease at Pino, the bench-sitting with Vito, the deflections of Tina. It locks in the dual-loyalty project the midpoint will eventually crack.

The Da Mayor "do the right thing" scene serves a different structural role: it is the prompt the film holds open over Mookie's head for the rest of the day. The film's title is the question; Mookie's answer is the trash can. The prompt is part of the resistance/debate phase rather than the commitment.

Step 9. Full structure (first pass)

Quadrant: Better tools, ambiguous-to-insufficient — sound-tools-defeated in its political-fatalism mode, with the closing diptych as the formal refusal to score.

Initial approach: Work the slot. Stay in motion between Sal's, the block, Tina, Jade, Da Mayor, and Buggin' Out. Take no side. Take the wage.

Post-midpoint approach: Act on the now-visible racial structure of the block as a single fact connecting wall-of-fame, slurs, sneaker, hydrant, boombox, chokehold. Refuse the slot. Choose the block.

Equilibrium. Morning at the apartment. Mister Senor Love Daddy's voice on WE-LOVE radio announces the heat forecast; Mookie counts cash on the bed; Jade tells him to move. Mookie in his element — mobile, evasive, between.

Inciting Incident. Buggin' Out's first wall-of-fame complaint at Sal's. He asks why the photos are all Italian-Americans. Sal answers: my pizzeria, my wall. Buggin' Out escalates; Sal raises the bat; Mookie pushes Buggin' Out out the door. The dispute that the dual-loyalty approach cannot resolve is named.

Resistance / Debate. Buggin' Out tries to recruit a boycott from the block. Da Mayor delivers "always do the right thing" to Mookie on the sidewalk. The corner men weigh in on the Korean grocer. Smiley sells his MLK-and-Malcolm photograph for a dollar. Mookie moves through the day taking the prompt and refusing to act on it.

Commitment. Mookie tells Buggin' Out he is out of the boycott — "do what you gotta do, leave me out of it." The non-alignment posture is articulated as policy. Mookie commits to the slot.

Rising Action / Initial Approach. The slot in operation. Mookie's pizza deliveries. The Mookie–Pino "favorite Black celebrities" stoop scene; Pino's "they're more than Black" defense. Mookie at Tina's apartment with the ice cubes. Mookie ducking Jade's questions about Sal. Vito and Mookie walking the block with Smiley, Mookie urging Vito to stand up to Pino. The day's deflections, working.

Escalation 1. The sneaker scuff. A white brownstoner on a bike runs over Buggin' Out's Air Jordan; the brownstoner says he owns the brownstone three doors down. The corner men weigh in; the block's territorial dispute is named on the street, not just in Sal's. Buggin' Out's boycott project intensifies — Radio Raheem will join him by evening. The slot is under stress.

Midpoint. The racial slur direct-address montage. Mookie, Pino, the corner men, the Korean grocer, the white cyclist face the camera in turn and deliver slurs about another group. The film breaks its diegetic frame and stages the racial logic of the block as the structure, not as decor. Mister Senor Love Daddy's voice — "Time out! Y'all take a chill!" — closes the sequence and pulls the film back into the day. The dual-loyalty floor — the assumption that race at Sal's is incidental — is gone; the wall-of-fame complaint has been re-specified as the structure of the entire block.

Falling Action / Post-Midpoint Approach. Heat past sundown. Mister Senor Love Daddy's roll call of Black music. Da Mayor's last interventions. Buggin' Out and Radio Raheem combine forces to take the wall complaint back to Sal's at closing. Sal welcomes Jade in a way Mookie reads as predatory; Mookie pulls Jade out and tells her not to come back. Mookie is no longer fully working the slot — he is starting to read Sal's pizzeria the way he'll read it after the chokehold.

Escalation 2. The boombox confrontation at Sal's. Buggin' Out demands the wall changes; Radio Raheem's boombox plays "Fight the Power" at full volume; Sal calls Raheem a racial slur and smashes the boombox with a baseball bat. The pizzeria's verbal-territorial dispute becomes physical. Raheem comes over the counter at Sal; the fight spills onto the sidewalk; the police arrive. Mookie is in the room but has not yet acted; his post-midpoint reading of the block is in place but his post-midpoint approach has not been tested.

Climax. Officer Long chokes Radio Raheem to death on the sidewalk; the police hide the body and pull away. The block is silent. Mookie crosses the street alone, picks up a metal trash can, walks back, and throws it through the front window of Sal's. The crowd follows; Sal and his sons are pulled out; the pizzeria burns. The single bounded act tests the post-midpoint approach: Mookie has acted on the now-visible racial structure of the block, sacrificing the wage and the relationship with Sal for an alignment with the block. The crowd's energy is redirected from a target it might have otherwise found (the Korean grocer is approached and turned away by Sweet Dick Willie's intervention) into the structure that produced Raheem's death by proxy.

Wind-Down. The next morning. Smoke off the wreckage. Smiley walks into the burned room and sticks the MLK-and-Malcolm photograph onto the soot-blackened wall where the wall of fame had been. Mookie returns to collect his pay. Sal sits in the rubble with his sons; the men exchange the $250-versus-$500 dispute; Mookie takes his money and walks. Mister Senor Love Daddy's voice on the radio: today's forecast — cooler. The block resumes. The closing King and Malcolm X quotes scroll on screen — King: violence is impractical, immoral, and self-defeating; Malcolm X: in self-defense, what some call violence I call intelligence. The diptych is the wind-down's formal refusal to score the climax.

Step 10. Stress test

Walking through the structure, the parts that fit cleanly:

The Equilibrium-Inciting-Commitment chain reads naturally. The wall-of-fame complaint is the day's first event that produces a project; Mookie's bounded recruitment-refusal is a real commitment; the slot-policy explains the day's behavior.
The slur montage as midpoint is supported by the film's own non-diegetic marking — direct address, broken frame, radio-voice closing. The film flags this scene as structural.
The trash can as climax satisfies both criteria and is a single bounded action.
The closing diptych functions as the formal device that holds the quadrant open — the wind-down does not score the act, and the framework can describe that as the film's central choice.

What I want to test:

Is the protagonist Mookie? The film is famously ensemble. But the Two Approaches framework is built for single-protagonist arcs and licenses ensemble shifts. Mookie is the only character who (a) carries the title-prompt, (b) is positioned at every venue, and (c) commits the act that pivots the climax. Buggin' Out, Radio Raheem, and Sal each have arcs that intersect Mookie's; none of them carries the trajectory the film's structure measures.
Is the slur montage the midpoint or is the boombox-bat the midpoint? The boombox-bat is more eventful and physical. But it is part of the chain that produces the chokehold and the trash can — it is the escalation that forces the climax, not the structural pivot the rest of the film bends around. The slur montage is the moment the film tells the audience how to read the rest. Locating the midpoint at the bat-smash would force the trash can to function as the falling action, which it doesn't — it's the highest-stakes test. Slur montage is the right call.
Is the climax the trash can or the chokehold? The chokehold has higher absolute stakes (someone dies). But the climax tests the protagonist's post-midpoint approach — and the chokehold is something that happens to the protagonist's field, not something he tests himself against. The trash can is the protagonist's bounded test. The chokehold is Escalation 2's terminal beat — the world raising stakes to force the test that comes next.
Is the wind-down's quadrant placement defensible? I marked it sound-tools-defeated with the closing diptych as the formal refusal to score. The dedication frame (real-world chokehold victims) reinforces the political-fatalism reading: even the right answer arrives at this same recurrent place. The film has been read in all four quadrants by different critics — which is exactly what the framework's "ambiguous wind-down" note predicts about films that sit on quadrant boundaries.

The structure holds. No remap needed.

Step 11. (skipped — Step 10 reinforced the structure)

Sources used in this analysis

Wikipedia, Do the Right Thing — plot summary and dedication context
Wikiquote, Do the Right Thing — Da Mayor, Sal, Buggin' Out, Mister Señor Love Daddy lines
IMDb, Do the Right Thing — cast/character list
plotexplained.com — chronological plot ordering
TV Tropes, Do the Right Thing — scene-level notes
David Sterritt's Library of Congress essay on the film (loc.gov) — scholarly framing
Deep Focus Review's Definitives essay on the film