Director: Spike Lee
Date: 12 August 2018
jamesintexas rating: ****
BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee's broadside attack against the deeply rooted racism within our country, takes place in the 1970's with its heart firmly in 2017-2018, thus offering a critique of our own times through the lens of history. Lee's work here is astounding because of its cinematic daring, its audaciousness, and its willingness to take on all-comers: the white power structures encoded in and enabled by police departments, political narcissists on a path towards respectability, meetings of klansmen in basements and hidden churches, and those who love them. Lee pointedly pivots to social critique at several moments in the film, resulting in explosive laughter and gasps, the solid recognition that his points have hit home. Released on the one-year anniversary of the Charlottesville Marches, BlacKkKlansman opens with the famous zoom out shot of Scarlett O'Hara searching through the wounded Confederate soldiers in the hospital from Gone With The Wind, a stunning shot in its size and scope, which ends with a tattered Confederate flag blowing in the top left of the frame. By directly referencing the deeply racist themes of Gone With The Wind and the inflammatory Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith, Lee is confronting Hollywood and cinematic history as well, holding it accountable for its images, its resurrection of the Klan, and its potency. At one point in the film, characters view that iconic film, and a speaker references President Woodrow Wilson screening it at The White House and approving. Of the film, President Wilson stated, "This is like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Here, the target is not merely President Wilson or President Nixon. President Trump's appearance at the end of the film has been forewarned by white supremacist statements and imagery, narrow definitions of patriotism, and the bamboozling of portions of the populace.
After a Patton-esque series of close-ups on Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard (Alec Baldwin, never not oozing a bit of President Trump) who coughs, flubs, and practices his way through a proto-scientific lecture on eugenics and white supremacy with images and words superimposed over his face, Lee brings us to the 1970's. Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) joins the Colorado Springs Police Department as their first African-American officer and is placed in the Records Room by Chief Bridges (Robert John Burke) where he endures the stinging, casual racism of fellow officers requesting files on "toads," an epithet for African-Americans. Hired because of his stalwart response to such hatred, Stallworth struggles under the day-to-day assault from his peers, engaging in a fantasy Kung Fu attack gestures when alone. Stallworth's recruitment by Chief Bridges to go undercover on the Black Student Union's bringing of outspoken leader Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael (Corey Hawkins) to town leads to him attending the rally and connecting with Black Student Union President Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), while observing the reaction to Ture's rhetoric. Lee's film offers Stallworth as a bit of a cipher: he graduated college, feels ambivalent about the war in Vietnam, does not reference a family or his past, and seems without a crystallized sense of consciousness about the world. His drink with Patrice after a terrifying interaction with the local police stopping her car with Ture for some harassment and threatening makes him consider his role as the Jackie Robinson of "the pigs" and the work that must be done within his own ranks. Ron pulls Patrice to the dance floor, and a Soul Train-style dance sequence begins, gorgeously shot with tight close-ups, call and response singing, and dazzling footwork all set against a disco ball. The chance reading of a Klan recruitment ad in the paper leads Ron to make a phone call, leave a message in his best white voice, and instantly receive a call back, all to the amazement of his fellow officers who listen to his incendiary remarks, all uttered matter-of-fact.
Ron's rapport with the Klan turns into face-to-face meetings, necessitating undercover officer Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to play the white Ron Stallworth. So, they will be speaking with Ron over the phone but meeting with Flip in person. "With the right white man, we can do anything" he reasons. Infiltrating the Klan becomes thornier and thornier, with Flip needing to keep his stories straight with Ron's, as well as his quick-trigger collusion with the ugliest possible racial sentiments of his company. Scenes become fraught with tension as Flip must calmly talk his way into being trusted. Simultaneously, Flip's Jewish identity means according to Ron that he's "got skin in the game," but he has never had to really deeply quantify what his identity means to him. His epiphany is a quiet one of realizing to the extent that he has been passing. Meanwhile, Patrice pushes Ron, who vaguely tells her he is in construction, to consider how deeply he is entrenched in the work for black liberation. She speaks of DuBois's double-consciousness of being both an American and a black American, and for Ron, there's at least a triple consciousness of him posing as a white American, and a possible quadruple consciousness as the sole representative of his race on the police force.
The film's most powerful sequence involves cross-cutting between the pageantry of the secret Klan rituals held in an underground church, complete with iconography, holy water, and hoods and a Black Student Union meeting inside of Patrice's home, where witness Jerome Turner (Harry Belafonte) recounts his youthful experience hiding in an attic and seeing a neighborhood friend brutalized, castrated, burned, and lynched in the street, all while the crowd gathered, police and politicians and children, to watch, to take photos used and sold for postcards later, and to desecrate the body by taking it as souvenirs. In its robes and hoods, its statues and grandiloquence, Lee reveals how easy it is to misconstrue what is really at stake here: the brutality and subjugation of black Americans. He projects footage from Birth of a Nation, with its inexcusable racial caricatures and directives, a film that I remembering studying in college for its technical mastery of the elements of cinema while being simultaneously repulsed by everything about it. Here, the klansmen gorge on popcorn, laughing along to the film as it is a sort of playbook of their philosophy: comfort food. Lee's alignment of these two scenes is most potent because he uses the iconic Belafonte's strong voice and stark black and white photos as counterpoint to the soaring, empty rhetoric of the white supremacy movement. "If not now, when?" he offers. "If not me, who?"
The Klan members whom we meet are a disjointed group. Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser), the burly, bearded, distorted in speech and appearance, and incoherent member, is also ironically the most literate. Felix (Jasper Paakkonen) seems the most vicious and quick to violence, quick to spout the rhetoric of Duke which is playing on a loop in his pick-up truck. Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), Felix's wife, seems content with their relationship and desirous of being a part of something greater than herself, happily serving cheese plates at their meetings but hungering for something more. Walter (Ryan Eggold), is Ron's contact point with the Klan and seems a bit more thoughtful, more practical than the others, aware of Ron's leadership capabilities and his own inadequacies. And there are other, more shadowy members, whom Lee reveals through some Mr. X-JFK-like developments, offering up another level of fear when considering how high up in the country Klan members operate. There's omnipresent beer bottles and weaponry, target practice set against metal figurines only shockingly revealed at the scene's conclusion. Ron must lurk in the background during some of these scenes, armed with his Nikon and his wits, and when talk turns to explosives and retribution against The Black Student Union, the stakes increase exponentially for Ron and his team.
Washington carries this film, doing incredible work as Stallworth, and Adam Driver remains one of our most exciting actors to watch. Driver and Michael Buscemi (whom I swear was his brother Steve in this) offer the resigned approach to crooked cops in their midst. Yeah, he's a jerk, one offers, but I'm not going to the sergeant to rat him out. Stallworth powerfully states how the police remind him of another organization. As in the work of any auteur, there are touch points to many of Spike Lee's other films. A discussion about their favorite athletes leads Flip and Jimmy to discuss Willie Mays and OJ Simpson, in a direct through line to Mookie and Pino's discussion in 1989's Do The Right Thing. The film's provocative ending utilizes one of Lee's favorite film techniques, the free floating dolly that puts his characters on a cart and wheels them through scene in a powerful moment of realization. They are both moving and still, a powerful metaphor to end this film and to consider the state of our country in 2018. Like Malcolm X's inclusion of the Rodney King beating by the LAPD footage in its opening scene, BlacKkKlansman's powerfully uses real life footage from Charlottesville, the violent car crash into the crowd of demonstrators, and the aftermath with President Trump infamously intoning "I think there is blame on both sides" in his speech. This film made me shake my head, horrified at where we are as a country, while also being thankful for artists like Spike Lee who energetically use their art to confront the status quo, to render up an America that showcases its implicit inequality and brutality as a part of its true heritage. This film continues threads from Do The Right Thing, 4 Little Girls, When The Levee Breaks, and Chi-Raq most notably.
In my freshman year at Kenyon, I read Black No More, George S. Schuyler's scathing satire of a black man transformed into a white man who infiltrates the South and its infamous Knights of Nordica. Schuyler states, "When one-third of the population of the erstwhile Confederacy had consisted of the much-maligned Sons of Ham, the blacks had really been of economic, social and psychological value to the section. Not only had they done the dirty work and laid the foundation of its wealth, but they had served as a convenient red herring for the upper classes when the white proletariat grew restive under exploitation....The deep concern of the Southern Caucasians with chivalry, the protection of white womanhood, the exaggerated development of race pride...were all due to the presence of the black man. Booted and starved by their industrial and agricultural feudal lords, the white masses derived their only consolation and happiness from the fact that they were the same color as their oppressors and consequently better than the mudsill blacks.” Lee hints at this stratification in the more polished, well-dressed David Duke (Topher Grace, excellent), a man who always strove to be photographed in a suit, not a hood, while espousing vile hate speech, white supremacy, and eugenics. Duke is the man collecting the money from the klansmen, sending out laminated membership cards, attending ceremonies in a place of honor, and positioning himself for a run at higher office. "National director," he reminds Ron during one of their many powerful phone conversations where Duke is unaware of to whom he is speaking. His comeuppance is one of the film's delights, but there is both mockery here and menace. Yeats' lines from "The Second Coming" ring true here: "The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." The inclusion of 2017 footage of David Duke in Charlottesville speaking to his beliefs in conjunction with President Trump's campaign promises are pointed and sharply rendered. As is a toast delivered by Duke near the end of the film: "America first."
A Police Captain offers that the Klan's goals include polishing up its members for higher office and political movements around immigration, affirmative action, and more, to which Ron replies, "America would never elect a President like that," earning the guffaws of the modern audience. His Captain tells him, "When are you gonna stop being so naive?" Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman offers a dismantling of the naivety by plunging us straight into the waters of 2017-2018, where we must consider how racist thought, white supremacy, and systemic injustice undergird much of what America is built upon and subsists upon, from African-American NFL players kneeling at the national anthem and being called "sons of bitches" by President Trump to his coded, dog whistle language from the debates about "Chicago violence" (the site of Lee's most recent classic Chi-Raq) and the Inauguration line about "American carnage." The specter of Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority haunts the back of several scenes in a re-election poster just as Donald Trump haunts this film. "The centre cannot hold," Yeats reminds us, and the confrontation of what America is and what America has been make Spike Lee's incendiary and passionate film the best film of 2018.
