Walking down the hallway a few weeks back in an Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, my friend and I were flanked by a hall-length row of posters featuring a man in a white hood with his fist raised. At first glance, this was an eerie image, especially duplicated again and again the full distance of the hallway. Looking at the posters again, you can see an afro pick in his hand and the black skin on the fingers of the fist. Less threatening to race traitors like us, but no less provocative: a reminder that we were about to see a Spike Lee movie.
If you peruse Spike Lee’s filmography, you’ll be taken aback by how long it has been since he made a truly relevant work of fiction. Chi-Raq came close, but it was a thematic mess, and audiences, critics, and awards alike ignored it. 2006’s Inside Man was relatively popular, but that’s light fare for Lee. He Got Game, 20 years ago, is the last time that his stories held any weight in the culture, and that was largely only because Jesus Shuttlesworth is a genius name to call a fictional basketball player. Lee certainly hasn’t been in any awards conversations since six years before that with Malcolm X. It’s been 26 years since anything he has made has resonated into Oscar season.
But he’s a respected filmmaker who always has something to say, and BlacKkKlansman is his biggest hit since Inside Man, so it’s worth paying attention. The movie tells the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), an African-American cop who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs in the 1970s by code-switching to a “white” voice on the phone with the chapter’s leaders. He uses his real name, which is nuts, and a white man on the force with him (Adam Driver) goes undercover as a part of the investigation, leading to some tense scenes of distrust, since they suspect Driver’s character, Flip, of being Jewish.
Remarkably, Lee stayed pretty true to Stallworth’s memoir. The character of Patrice (Laura Harrier, quietly stealing all of her scenes with Washington), the president of the local Black Student Union, is a mostly fabricated character who functions as a romantic interest for Stallworth, but is also the driving force of the protest-minded black community in the town. Indeed, most of the movie’s interesting ideas come from Ron’s and Patrice’s mini-debates on a range of topics including the offensiveness of Blaxploitation films to if a black cop can help the cause from the inside.
Similarly, Adam Driver’s character, Flip Zimmerman, is an amalgam of a couple of different cops that went undercover in the KKK as part of Stallworth’s team. In the movie, he’s of Jewish ancestry, though he isn’t practicing and always thought of himself as white. This part is not in the memoir, yet Lee milks this idea for some of the movie’s most interesting conversations, with Stallworth accusing him of passing as white to motivate him to care more about their undercover case. Driver gives an understated performance, and his relationship with Washington’s Stallworth is the fulcrum of the movie.
Recently, Boots Riley, director of indie hit Sorry to Bother You, spoke out against BlacKkKlansman, claiming that Stallworth, as a cop and someone who has gone undercover in Black Power organizations, is the enemy. Riley also called out Lee specifically for making a movie about a black cop that portrays the police as part of the fight against racism, rather than a part of the system that sustains racism. His note is more nuanced than what I’m able to convey in a paragraph, but he is upset at what he sees as the political motivations to portray a cop as a hero against racial violence.
Another criticism I’ve seen of BlacKkKlansman is that it lets white people off the hook. Sure, the villains are the Ku Klux Klan and as stereotypically white trash as you could imagine. My favorite critic, Alissa Wilkinson, argues that the movie puts too much of its villainy in characters that feel like caricatures of racism rather than anything resembling real life, so that no one in the audience can identify the racism they see on screen with the racism in their own minds. The movie ends with a montage of Donald Trump’s racist commentary with footage from the protests and counterprotests from Charlottesville last year. Wilkinson argues that the inclusion of this footage isn’t supported by the movie itself, because the story itself invites us to laugh at the KKK instead of challenging us to look at ourselves.
Both of these arguments are compelling, and I really wrestled with both of them, because I loved BlacKkKlansman. Upon first viewing it, I found it exhilarating, as well as masterfully directed and edited. After reading these arguments, I wondered if I wasn’t coming at the movie from my white liberal perspective, and if that’s why I liked it. Self-awareness is always a good thing, and it’s very possible that I lacked it while watching BlacKkKlansman. I’d hate to have liked the movie mostly because I felt good about not being one of those white people.
But I don’t think that’s what happened. Watching the scenes featuring the Klan and its members directly, I didn’t feel pride at not being one of them, I felt disgust to be a part of a world that allows this. I agree with Wilkinson that Lee’s broad strokes in painting them could lead to some white liberal self-righteousness, but I’m not sure it’s Lee’s job to craft his movie around this possibility. He clearly wanted to paint the Klan as cartoonishly evil, which would be appropriate if your goal was to draw some clear lines around what evil is.
Those clear lines help Lee to introduce nuance elsewhere. Sure, as Riley points out, white cops get to join Stallworth in being heroes against racism, and that’s decidedly not the story we see playing out day after day in the news. I could get behind Riley’s argument if it was merely claiming that now is not the time for a movie about racism with cops as the heroes. That makes sense to me. But I found more nuance in the cop scenes. Driver’s Jewish cop, while among the white cops who we are likely supposed to identify with, doesn’t have as much skin in the game as Stallworth, and there is an effective scene in which Zimmerman has to come to terms with the fact that he has passed as white (really, non-Jewish) his whole life.
And there are too many amazing scenes lifting up Black Power and black beauty or lamenting black oppression by the establishment to assume that Lee means for the cops to be the heroes. Lee has been uncharacteristically quiet in response to Riley’s criticism, only saying that “black people are not a monolith.” I wonder if this is because he wants the film to speak for itself. Some scenes he could submit in response: when Kwame Ture (f.k.a. Stokely Carmichael) speaks at a Black Student Union rally, Lee superimposes black faces over the screen while Ture extols the virtues of black beauty; when Jerome Turner (Harry Belafonte as an elder activist, fittingly) tells the story of Jesse Washington’s lynching, Lee juxtaposes it with the Klan’s initiation and a screening of the worst movie of all time, The Birth of a Nation; when Stallworth is about to apprehend the Klan member planting a bomb, two cops interrupt him and handcuff him on the ground, setting up the potential for disaster.
There are some scenes you could quibble with Lee on if he’s assigning too much credit to the police, such as one at the end in which they entrap a racist cop in a bar. This scene played as cathartic, and I could see why Riley or other critics would be frustrated by the laughter of the cops in this scene, as if they just beat racism. Another near the end, in which Stallworth finally reveals his race over the phone to David Duke, who is left speechless, is also played for laughs.
But Lee then ends his movie with two scenes that negate the catharsis you’ve just felt, and there’s no way this wasn’t intentional. The final scene is a montage of the scenes from Charlottesville last year cut with Donald Trump’s racist remarks. It’s as chilling as it is angering to see the movie’s clear evil so prevalent in the news of today. The montage is effective, but it’s the scene right before it that contains the movie’s core.
Patrice and Ron are sitting in her house, and Patrice is telling Ron that she can’t see him anymore, because she can’t be with a cop. There’s a knock at the door along with some suspicious noises. Lee cuts to an image (the one at the top of this post, natch) of both Patrice and Ron standing side by side, guns pointed at the door. Lee slides the hall backward around them while they stand still, then cuts to the door opening to a cross burning in the distance. Then he begins the Charlottesville montage.
This scene is the clearest rebuke to the movie’s criticism. It implies that whatever the cops did that appeared to have worked was ineffective. After the two scenes of catharsis, the message here is clear: nothing was solved, nothing was ended, nothing is over. I didn’t feel good about myself as a “good” white person after BlacKkKlansman, nor did I come out of it feeling as if the white cops were heroes. My friend who I saw it with turned to me and said, “Everyone needs to see this movie.” I was till processing, so I didn’t respond. But my thought as I walked back past the hooded figures on those posters in the Alamo Drafthouse: “There is so much work left to do.”
Coulda Been a Contender 