Director: Spike Lee
Rating: R
Forward, Reverse and Vice Versa on the Issues of Racism in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Intellectually formidable is the best way to describe Spike Lee when I first heard him speak back in 2006. I distinctly remember him saying: “The worst thing a parent can do for his child is to allow him to watch television unsupervised.” Lee always had the social and political foresight when it comes to racism—its complexities, its horrors, its calamities. At a young age, he was a cinephile—perhaps credited to his mother. During the speaker event, he fondly remembers his mother taking him to see Martin Scorsese’s Mean Street. Lee later took to the media arts to create his own platform to awaken the world to race relations in America—and even to this day, he is still not at rest with the issue. His lens explore neighborhoods where there is disharmony among races due to fear and negative and hostile stereotypes. Films such as Bamboozled (2000), Malcolm X (1992) and the most notable, Do the Right Thing (1984) cemented his status as an auteur known for mirroring the disturbing and unresolved racial unrest that continues to plague America. In turn, it has left the country divided, muddled in ideologies, and dangerously destructive.
Lee’s latest film BlacKkKlansman was timely released during the one-year anniversary of Charlottesville—the event that awakened the world to the growing racial tensions that is happening today. The awakening is past due. And Lee carefully pulls together the past and the present in a narrative that does not appear as if they are two separate times. Instead, they are continual reverberations. It is hard for us to see this because of our complacency and inability to look closely at what is happening around us. In Do the Right Thing, the disc jockey played by Samuel Jackson repeatedly says “Wake Up!” In other words, we need to be more discernible in identifying racism in narratives or rhetoric that are ever-present—whether it is in history, politics, or art. Take, for example, Lee’s opening sequence from one of America’s historical films, the 1939 studio produced Gone with the Wind by Victor Fleming. Lee includes the aerial shot of Scarlett O’Hara amongst a sea of injured as well as dead soldiers. The film is an adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel. Mitchell was a Confederate who created an epic novel about the travails of a Southern belle named Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) during the Civil War. In the film, Scarlett has a childhood nurse who is also a black slave, Mammy, (played by Hattie McDaniel whose performance made her the first African American to win an Academy). Because she was not mistreated, her slavery was misconstrued as acceptable. Fast-forward to today, we are given a more realistic and accurate depiction of the horrors of slavery in the film Twelve Years a Slave (2013) by black British director Steve McQueen.
Lee’s study of Gone with the Wind as a film student was, to say the least, inadequate. There was no discussion on the history or the stereotypical roles of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen who plays Prissy, the dimwitted slave to Scarlett O’Hara. As a film instructor, the discussion on cultural, political, and social biases (i.e., pro-Confederate and pro-slavery convictions) and inaccurate depictions of slavery came later in my teachings. Ironically, the film, Do the Right Thing and the montage from Bamboozled, which provide a historical and critical look at black buffoonery and inferiority in the media, was also included in my curriculum. How could I have omitted a more thorough discussion of Fleming’s work?
Racist ideologies or stereotypes have been somewhat propagandized as the norm through sanitization. This type of media “acceptance” is also reiterated in Bamboozled. The film is a sardonically biting and disturbing look at exploited black actors performing minstrel shows for the sake of comedy. Lee makes an indignant commentary on how the historical montage reinforces negative stereotypes of blacks. Among them include Shirley Temple dancing with her black sidekicks; Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on black make-up to make themselves “ugly”; real footage of young blacks participating in watermelon eating contests. There are also rhythmic echoes of “yes ma’ams” and “yes sirs” coming from black actors in their stereotypical white servitude roles and close-ups of black faces with enlarged eyes and flopping lips underscoring the offensive, physical hyperbolic buffoonery of blacks. All of this becomes part of the media narrative that has been so ubiquitous in our history—as spectators we do not think about the negative implications, resulting in the tendency to perpetuate a long-standing misconception of the inferior “other.” As a result, the code of racism is cerebrally imprinted, which makes us less conscious of it. We are acculturated into complacency, ignorance, mental laziness, and sometimes, resignation. Racism’s reality has always been ever-present, whether it is subtle or blatant. We just need to wake up to this reality—as Lee mentions numerous times in his films.
Lee’s intellectually polemic and disturbing dark irony, especially in regards to racism catapulted by xenophobic hysteria and irrational fear, continue in BlacKkKlansman—but this time history does not simply repeat itself. Racial conflicts, especially when it comes to hate and bigotry, have never fossilized to become history. Therefore, the adage “history repeats itself ” is irrelevant. According to Lee, racism is still alive—and this theme works like an electric current throughout his narrative—intentionally created to jolt us out of our complacent or unconscious stupor. BlacKkKlansman is set in 1978 as it is based on a 2014 memoir penned by a former Colorado Springs police investigator Ron Stallworth who is credited for infiltrating the KKK. Stallworth befriends the local Colorado Springs chapter KKK president Walter Breachway by responding to a KKK advertisement in the newspaper. On the phone, he assumes the persona of an angry white man hateful towards nonwhites. Stallworth sends his white cop buddy, Flip Zimmerman, to pose as Stallworth while arming him with a wire. Flip successfully inducts himself in the Klan’s Colorado Springs chapter—even to an extent where the president is willing to promote him as his successor. Amid their investigation, Stallworth and Zimmerman both learn about their zealous preservation of the white race in a hostile and violent “us” versus “them” (or the inferior other) mentality, the so-called spiritual narcissism or entitlement in the KKK’s dictum “God bless white America,” and the perversion of Christian ideologies that gives the organization permission to hate.
What is ironic about the KKK is that their fervent hatred towards other races, especially towards blacks and Jews, is their inability to identify their “enemy”—either face-to-face or on the phone. I thought of the 1990 film by Agnieszka Holland Europa Europa. During Nazi Germany, a young Jewish boy masquerades as a Nazi and later becomes hailed as a hero. When he attends a Hitler Youth Academy, his instructor displays him in front of the class and touts him to be a “glowing example” of a Nordic man. Stallworth, astute in his own understanding of black oppression and white supremacy, has a working knowledge on how to communicate in both worlds, especially when it comes to cultural and regional linguistic expressions—in this case, “jive” (the black vernacular) and white suburban English. Stallworth’s fluency in the two languages enables him to have an ongoing phone correspondence with the Klan’s Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace). David Duke was fully convinced that he was talking to a white man because of Stallworth’s white nationalist ideologies and his impeccable pronunciation of certain consonants. He was also convincing enough as a bigoted white man that the president of the local Klan wanted to meet him. Meanwhile, Flip Zimmerman is also able to hide his Jewish ancestry by playing the role of a purebred white nationalist. The facades or masquerades may seem comedic on the surface as they are able to dupe Klan members, but it also has the potential to be perilous if they happen to lose cover.
Although BlaKkKlansman operates in a typical police genre film, where the cop buddy duo sets out on a dangerous undercover sting operation in order to put a stop to the Klan’s violent acts against a group of black college students who are not afraid of being vocal about their mistreatment, it is provocatively subversive in its exploration of the complexities behind racial identity. This is prompted by the identity switch between Stallworth and Zimmerman and the masks they must put on while doing so. Not only does Stallworth pretend to be a white man on the phone, but he also works for the “pigs” (the derogatory term for cops, especially white cops). The pejorative is dubbed by his love interest, Patrice (Laura Harrier), a vocal leader of the black student union at Colorado College who is unaware of his occupation until he tells her that the Klan is plotting to kill her. Stallworth is torn between police duty versus personal inclination. He must not forget his roots while working alongside white men, which often gets disorienting. Patrice provides a counterpoint to cops and the moral law. She also reinforces his understanding of black identity and his oppressors. Stallworth does the same for his partner, Zimmerman, a non-practicing Jew. But Zimmerman wears the unintended mask that disconnects him from his roots because his white skin allows him to “blend” in a population that is not at the bottom of the racial echelon. On the surface, Zimmerman is privileged. It is hard to detect the Star of David hidden inside his shirt. His logic is an absurdity when he tells Stallworth “for you it’s a crusade, for me it’s a job.” But Stallworth calls him out on his ancestral disconnect by telling him that he has been passing as a WASP. Zimmerman has never given a thought about his Jewish roots. With the urging of Stallworth, he is faced to acknowledge his own Jewish reality.
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Lee cinematically captures the 1970s by taking us back to Blaxploitation aesthetics, such as the use of split screens to underscore ironic juxtapositions between character foils or group ideologies. Most notably, the corridor zoom shot of both Stallworth and Patrice as they head towards a window with the sight of a burning cross by the Klan sends a provocative message about racism’s undying fervor. This image of the Klan burning a cross is juxtaposed with what Lee calls “homegrown, American terrorism” that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017[1]. He astutely splices together the film’s narrative with footage of the horrors and tragedies that occurred in Charlottesville. We see chants from white nationalists and their counter protestors and close-ups of mangled bodies lying on the streets and on top of cars. Then the footage is punctuated with a clip of a press conference with Trump, to say the least, ineffectually quelling the issues of racial hate. What we see is not a sense of foreboding; it is reality. From this, Lee gives us another jolt to become conscious of the social and political responsibilities when it comes to racism. And there is no doubt that Lee is channeling what Martin Luther King Jr. asserts in his essay “The Ways of Meeting Oppression.” King states, “To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system: thereby the oppressed becomes as evil as the oppressor.[2]”
When watching a Spike Lee film, it is important to be prepared for not experiencing a comforting resolution to the racial issues he presents. Unlike films such as Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998) and Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004) where there is somewhat of a moral tidying up at the end, Lee does not offer a simple solution. For Lee, there is only an awakening—and hopefully, this time, we do not go back to sleep.
As I look back at my face-to-face meeting with Lee during a book signing that immediately followed his speaker event, he had the look of exhaustion and restlessness. As a filmmaker, he has been telling the same story for 30 years. Part of him did not want to be at the event but felt he needed to. There were fans eager to shake his hand or say something impressive. But I was getting the feeling he was saying to all of his fans “you don’t need to be my friend; you just need to watch my films.”
September 4, 2018
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[1]Bugbee, Theo. “”It Happened Here.” Film Comment. July-August 2018: 27. Print.
[2]King Jr., Martin Luther. “The Ways of Meeting Oppression.” Models for Writers. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018. 426. Print.