Shadow of Trump over Lee’s latest
Director’s new joint an urgent response to racial tensions simmering in US
Spike Lee has been opining for a few minutes now: Isn’t it ludicrous that people call football players unworthy of living in this country 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 about going somewhere else,” he concludes. “Along with the genocide of Native Americans, this country got built cost-free from slavery.”
It all comes down to love vs hate, he says — it always has. That is why the two words appeared on the knuckle rings of Radio Raheem, a fictional character killed by police officers 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 film-maker, 61, has faced recent hurdles in his 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 Spike Lee joint, BlacKkKlansman, attempts to capture racial tension with the same clarity as 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”. Only 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 Charlottesville, Virginia, rallies and even directly attacks the Trump Administration for perpetuating such behaviour.
Although he refuses to utter the President’s name — “Who? Oh, Agent Orange” — Lee admits that while making his new film “everything was done knowing that this guy had the nuclear code”.
In one scene, Ron declares that the United States would never elect a man like KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace) president.
A superior tells him he is remarkably naive for a black man.
“From the very beginning, Spike said, ‘I don’t want it to be a period piece,”’ co-writer Kevin Willmott recalls.
“He didn’t want to give people an out in terms of this being something from the olden days.”
News outlets disagree on whether the standing ovation BlacKkKlansman received at Cannes lasted for six or 10 minutes. 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 that 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 holds 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 Hector Babenco later told him that 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 Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, expressing their differing views on violence as self-defence against oppression.
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.
BlacKkKlansman serves as a direct response to the “corn-fed American terrorism” that killed Heather Heyer as she protested Charlottesville’s white supremacist march and is set to hit theatres a few days before the one-year anniversary of her death.
There is an urgency to this particular message, Lee says, Academy Awards season be damned.
David Duke says in the movie that he wants “America to achieve its greatness again”. Lee hopes America can achieve greatness, period.