CROSSES TO BEAR
Blackkklansman takes a hard and wry look at race relations
Spike Lee has been opining for a few minutes: Isn’t it ludicrous that people slam football players for kneeling during the national anthem, he says, when the first American who died during the Revolutionary War was a black man?
“So nobody can tell black people s--- about going somewhere else,” he says. “Along with the genocide of Native Americans, this country got built cost-free from slavery.” Seated on a bright purple couch in the Brooklyn office of his company, 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks, Lee eventually pauses. It all comes down to love versus hate, he says — it always has. That is why the two words appear on the knuckle rings of Radio Raheem, a fictional character some police officers kill at the climax of Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing. Some claim Lee is on a soapbox, but he really just wants to be on the loving side of history. The provocative filmmaker, 61, has recently faced hurdles in his everlasting pursuit of this goal: Da Sweet Blood of Jesus opened to less-than-lukewarm applause in 2014 and the satirical depiction of violence in 2015’s Chi-Raq insulted some Chicago natives. But the latest Lee film, BlacKkKlansman, attempts to capture racial tension with the same clarity of Do the Right Thing, which Roger Ebert wrote came “closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time.” This time, he attempts to do so using a story from the past. BlacKkKlansman, which took home the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Grand Prix in May, tells the real-life story of a black Colorado Springs cop named Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s by pretending to be a white man over the phone. But it also connects the Klan’s racism to what spurred last year’s violent rallies in Charlottesville, Va., and even directly attacks the Trump administration for perpetuating such behaviour.
Lee held such “precise opinions” throughout the project, co-writer Kevin Willmott says, that make today’s rant seem comparatively scattered. He frequently trails off in the middle of sentences, gazing off through his orange, thick-rimmed glasses. There is simply too much buzzing in his mind. From where he stands, hypocrisy among those in power, whom he dubs “snake oil salesman,” has reached an almost unfathomable level. Although he refuses to utter the U.S. president’s name — “Who? Oh, Agent Orange” — Lee admits that while making BlacKkKlansman, “everything was done knowing that this guy had the nuclear code.” In one scene, Ron says the United States would never elect a man like KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace) as president. A superior tells him he is remarkably naive for a black man. News outlets disagree on whether the standing ovation at Cannes for BlacKkKlansman lasted for six minutes or 10. Lee isn’t a numbers guy, so he doesn’t know which is accurate. What he does know, however, is what a relief it was to discover the festival audience understood his film.
“It didn’t have to be that way,” he says. “People get booed at Cannes.” They also get snubbed for awards, which Lee still maintains happened to him in 1989. He doesn’t have any beef with Steven Soderbergh, whose Sex, Lies, and Videotape beat front-runner Do the Right Thing for the Palme d’Or, or even the festival itself, but rather with the president of the jury: German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Lee says jurors Sally Field and Héctor Babenco later told him Wenders overlooked Do the Right Thing because he considered Mookie, Lee’s protagonist who incites a riot after Radio Raheem’s death by throwing a garbage can through the window of a pizzeria, to be unheroic. The film ends with quotes from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, expressing their differing views on violence as self-defence against oppression. By comparison, Lee says, “If you look at the main character of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, the guy was masturbating watching videotape.” There is no denying the heroic qualities of Stallworth, played by Washington, son of Denzel. “The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Lee says of his natural talent. Washington spoke weekly with Stallworth, who swung by the set one day and passed around his KKK membership card, which Washington says “made it even more real and scarier.” “Signed by Mr. Duke,” he says, incredulous. “Are you kidding me? This is bananas.”
Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), an activist college student and Ron’s love interest, tells him in the movie he “can’t change things from the inside. It’s a racist system.” Lee says he and Willmott wrote the line with W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness in mind: Ron is black, but, as a police officer, he also works a job with a history marred by violent racial oppression. “It’s gotta be difficult for brothers and sisters who are police officers, because they’re not blind — they’ve gotta see what police forces are doing, shooting down black people left and right,” Lee says. “Knowing that black folks ain’t really feeling you, just because you’re black but you’re also a cop ... in a lot of ways, Ron’s character is feeling that, too.” Despite this inner turmoil, Ron orchestrates the undercover mission, persuading his colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to be his white stand-in at Klan meetings. He boldly calls up the KKK and proclaims to hate anyone who “doesn’t have pure white Aryan blood running through their veins.” He does so while working alongside a white officer who once shot a black child and continues to abuse his power.
Lee still has the tiniest of bones to pick with this year’s jury president, Cate Blanchett, whom he says he loves dearly. After BlacKkKlansman won the Grand Prix, she described it as “quintessentially about an American crisis.” The film does end with footage from last year’s neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville and U.S. President Donald Trump’s response, but “this is not just America,” Lee counters. “It was happening in England, with Brexit. This rightwing thing is happening all over the world.”