Spike Lee's late-career masterwork is both a warning and a call to action for a nation teetering on the precipice.
Although it takes place in 1972, not many films have embodied the current zeitgeist in the United States with quite the same precision that
Spike Lee’s 2018 comedic crime-drama
BlacKkKlansman has – and much of that may be because, for Black Americans, the zeitgeist has never really changed (rapidly increasing technology has only given it more awareness). The same inequalities still exist, and the battle for Black liberation still rages on in the face of violent oppression and white supremacy. What makes
BlacKkKlansman even more notable is the chosen profession of the protagonist. In the midst of a seemingly endless series of viral videos of police officers committing brutal and fatal acts of violence against Black people; as the
Black Lives Matter movement – a clear successor to the
Black Power movement of the 60s and 70s – focuses its momentum on defunding, and eventually abolishing, the police as an institution;
BlacKkKlansman, a film clear in its intention of showing Black unity and unearthing the shallowly buried power structures of white supremacism – with unintentional irony – features an idealistic police officer as its lead character.
The story is based on the eponymous
memoir and experiences of real-life cop
Ron Stallworth, a Black man who infiltrated the
Ku Klux Klan while undercover with the Colorado Springs Police Department. In a star-making performance, actor
John David Washington charismatically portrays Stallworth during this time where, with the aid of a few brothers-in-blue who functioned as his physical surrogates, he became a certified member of the KKK and subversively “buddied up” with infamous piece of shit,
David Duke. While one can’t take the danger posed by the former Grand Wizard lightly,
Topher Grace has one of the most low-key brilliant supporting performances I’ve ever seen as Duke, and his characterization of him as a vapid dweeb feels extremely satisfying.
[Spoilers] The film’s dramatized version of the story climaxes with Stallworth foiling a bomb plot against Black activists by the KKK (which backfires and takes out a few vile KKK members instead), and the cherry on top of the justice sundae has the clever detective wiring himself with a hidden mic and duping the cartoonishly racist cop on the force into admitting misconduct on tape, at which point the racist caricature immediately gets arrested by the chief who was also in on the game. Stallworth is then celebrated by the other officers in his department as a hero (high-fives for everyone!), and they crank call Duke again for their own amusement.
Artist and activist
Boots Riley (
Sorry to Bother You [2018])
criticized the film after its release for its quixotic and misleading portrayal of the police as “allies in the fight against racism.” At the time I remember thinking that the critique was rather unfair, and that surely there must be some cops who would ally with the people against white supremacy, but after seeing the unbelievably violent and frequently sadistic reactions of police officers towards protesters over the past few months in the wake of the unrest that’s followed the indefensible murder of
George Floyd – BY THE POLICE – it’s hard to disagree. Especially because if you choose to look, you can still see those brutal actions occurring day-after-day against protesters throughout the country on Instagram Live and other platforms. The parallels that the film makes between past eras and our current situation is just as disturbing, and its overall message remains deeply powerful, but it’s impossible not to view the more romanticized portions of the plot through an exceedingly more skeptical lens on the point that Riley makes, as police in the this country treat anti-racism and anti-police brutality protesters with the same inhuman cruelty that racist cops have inflicted on people of color throughout our history. What exactly are they protecting?
On that basis it seems more than fair to say that the whole system is corrupt. The whole system is racist. The whole system is starved for power and thrives on brutality and oppression. Its own shallowly buried power structures have become readily apparent. It also seems fair to say that any cop that isn’t speaking out or breaking rank to ally with protesters is complicit: racist by association (noticeably, since the wave of protests began, I have not seen a single piece of footage of a cop trying to prevent their coworkers from beating on or pepper-spraying or tear-gassing peaceful protesters). Stallworth’s character alludes to this notion in the film as well. He asks his white partners why they tolerate the harassment and brutalization of Black people by racist cops on the force, and they answer with the stereotypical, “Because we’re a family,” and, “…right or wrong we stick together,” to which Stallworth replies, “That reminds me of another group.”
Regardless of the aspects that don’t hold up as well on repeat viewings,
BlacKkKlansman is still a phenomenal piece of both commercial and conscious cinema - and one of my favorite movies of the previous decade - as pioneering filmmaker Spike Lee’s entire artistic repertoire gets exhibited throughout the film. His direction is just as playful and energetic as when he first began making films; his ability to control tone and combine levity with unflinching social themes remains sharp as ever; and the stylistic dynamism that he cultivated early in his career has hit masterful levels, entirely deserving of the legendary reputation that he’s earned since the 1980s.
Spike Lee is also among those few directors who I think always finds a compelling way to shoot close-ups of faces. It’s a type of shot that I typically don’t find all that noteworthy in general because of how basic it is, but there’s something very electric and alive about the way Lee films faces. That craftsmanship is on full display in the
Kwame Ture speech scene where Lee weaves together a montage of fed up, hopeful, inspired, and stoic audience members looking on at Ture with rapt attention as he delivers a rousing call-to-action. The images seem to crackle with life, with sincere emotion and shared experience, with a reality that’s just as true today as it was in the 1970s.
In other scenes Lee shoots his close-ups at
canted angles, supplementing the actors with visual information from his discerning shot selections rather than constantly shooting straight ahead and relying entirely on the actors’ performances to communicate the emotion in a shot, scene, or sequence. That steadfast ability to shoot deeply expressive close-ups is among the many reasons why Lee deserves to be in the pantheon of great American directors: regardless of the strength of his stories, his trademark zeal and passion captivates audiences with every frame. There’s no question that, entering the fourth decade of his career, Spike Lee still loves what he does.
Extremely vivid imagery often abounds in Lee’s films as well, and though
BlacKkKlansman is no less colorful, the colors are more bold than bright, and
Chayse Irvin’s dark but well-defined lighting reminds me a lot of the moodily grounded compositions you might see in a
David Fincher film – especially his interior and nighttime scenes. In media, previous decades are often viewed through rose-colored lenses where everything is meant to look carefree, but there’s a solemnity to Irvin’s cinematography that’s adeptly in-line with the film's generation-spanning story of suffering and racial injustice. As evidenced by the righteously furious and staggeringly powerful
ending, with
BlacKkKlansman, Lee seems to be bludgeoning a nationwide panic button with a sledgehammer, attempting to jolt the audience out of complacency, and into action, recalling lines from Kwame Ture’s impassioned speech from earlier in the film: “If not now, when? And if not you, who?”
Comments
Post a Comment