BlacKkKlansman

I have been given only a few filmgoing experiences in my life to equal the first time I saw “Do the Right Thing.” Most movies remain up there on the screen. Only a few penetrate your soul. In May of 1989 I walked out of the screening at the Cannes Film Festival with tears in my eyes. Spike Lee had done an almost impossible thing. He’d made a movie about race in America that empathized with all the participants. He didn’t draw lines or take sides but simply looked with sadness at one racial flashpoint that stood for many others.

– Roger Ebert; Chicago Sun-Times

Nearly thirty years later, Spike’s BLACKkKLANSMAN is at once ex post facto addenda to his criticisms of Quentin Tarantino’s co-opting of blaxploitation stereotypes as well as a State of the Union on racial relations. Twenty-five years after that master-stroke, I found myself listening to the sound of minds scrambling to rationalize the shooting of twelve year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland.  People, it seems, are still angry about Sal’s Pizzeria burning down, still failing to ask why Radio Raheem had to die.  So, here we are.

Based on the novel by Ron Stallworth, BLACKkKLANSMAN dramatizes his infiltration of the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan between 1978 and 1979.  Though enlisted to scope out an event held by civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael in the later days of COINTELPRO, Stallworth (played by John David Washington, a literal heir to his father Denzel’s X) shifts gears when his response to a Klan recruitment ad gets a bite.

He enlists the help of two other officers (renamed to protect their identities), Flip (Adam Driver) and Jimmy (Michael Buscemi).  Together, they all play Ron—on the phone and in person.  In spite of advancing the undercover op so far that Washington becomes the leader of the local Klan chapter, bureaucracy threatens to shut down the investigation.

Produced by Jordan Peele whose directorial debut, GET OUT, won accolades,  KLANSMAN has already won the Grand Prix at Festival de Cannes and is poised to open to $10 million.  It would be, to quote ML (Paul Benjamin) from the Bed-Stuy stoop in Lee’s DO THE RIGHT THING, “A damn shame,” were this film to fall on deaf ears.

Yesterday, conservative Laura Ingraham blew yet another dog whistle, claiming, “Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically, in some ways, the country has changed.”

BLACKkKLANSMAN lulls you with its satire of American race relations, only to slap you awake at the end of the third act with a montage of grotesqueries from the past couple of years—lest we forget Ferguson and Charlottesville.

Washington the younger takes up the mantel in his own style, yet retains a similar charm—vulnerability beneath poise.  He’s the diametric opposite of Lionel from Justin Simien’s DEAR WHITE PEOPLE.  There are two moments of clarity in which Lee takes you inside Black America through the eyes of Stallowrth, representing two sides of blackness:  The first, at the Kwame rally, shows us a chill Stallworth cross-dissolved with the faces of other black people in the crowd.  Lee just wants you to look at their faces, take them in, and see them as Stallworth sees them—beautiful individuals.  The second is toward the end, and it echoes the same dread Malcolm X (Denzel Washington) feels at the climax of Lee’s eponymous biography of the civil rights activist.

In attempting to parody, or rather admonish, Tarantino, Lee almost undermines his powerful message.  Racism is pervasive not because of the outliers like Dylann Roof, James Alex Fields, or even the cartoonish blowhards at Fox News.  Racism is pervasive because of what the other 99% are tolerating without even realizing it.

What Ingraham said yesterday on Fox is transparent, not insidious, but the thing that’s absent from the discourse about these derelictions of civility and empathy is the reverse of the calls upon “moderate Islam” to speak out against the atrocity of the World Trade Center attacks.  Where are the calls to White America to slap itself in the face every time someone calls the police because a “suspicious person” is at the neighborhood pool—and they’re never white.   Where are the calls to White America over an inebriated Lauren Elizabeth Cutshaw, who told officers in Bluffton, South Carolina, she was a “thoroughbred” white girl and didn’t deserve a DUI?

The challenge is that the Age of Trumpism has destroyed the effectiveness of civil discourse. Lee uses shocking images like an incensed parent uses spanks on an unruly child.  He wants to smack the stupid out of us, but you can’t do so without scarring the child.  America is just over 240 years old, less than half the age of the Roman Republic.  Will America exist in another 200 years, and if it does, would we recognize it?

I’m just over 40, I’m an immigrant in Trump’s America… and, while I’ve mastered the art of poise over vulnerability, I can’t remember my younger self…

There will be no slow motion or still life of
Roy Wilkins strolling through Watts in a red, black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion

-Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”