Racial Justice With a Hollywood Ending
There never was an Officer Andy Landers, but, as conceived by Spike Lee, he’s a villain with a destiny as awful as it is seductive. In Mr. Lee’s summer hit, “BlacKkKlansman,” based loosely on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado in the 1970s, Landers is the cretin within, an unreformed racist among Mr. Stallworth’s own ranks.
But the cretin gets his comeuppance. Mr. Stallworth and his girlfriend, Patrice Dumas, a black power activist who had been groped by Landers, secretly record him in a bar boasting of his misdeeds. Moments later, he’s taken away in handcuffs while Mr. Stallworth, Ms. Dumas and two white colleagues toast to justice served.
The scene is meant as a chaser of racial harmony after what is essentially two hours of high-proof bigotry and recrimination. As Hollywood endings go, it’s standard issue.
What’s notable is that it’s Mr. Lee behind the camera, a man whose early films, including his landmark, “Do the Right Thing,” so often eschewed such tidy suturing of America’s most persistent wound.
But that was then. Among several films that have reckoned with the story of racial justice in America in 2018, “BlacKkKlansman” is far from alone in extracting a hopeful resolution from the despair.
“The Hate U Give,” “Blindspotting,” “Monsters and Men” and “Black Panther” all answered the demand for movies about the black experience. But their dependence on the tropes of superhero stories and revenge fantasies suggests the difficulty of making reality-based cinema out of the history we’re living through.
The superheroes in “The Hate U Give” and “Monsters and Men” are young and black in present- day America. Both films serve up the kind of cocktail — unarmed black man, white police officer, the awful weight of history — that audiences recognize from similar-sounding news reports.
In “The Hate U Give,” directed by George Tillman Jr., Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), a gifted black student navigating a largely white high school is present when a random traffic stop ends in a police officer killing her childhood friend.
A grand jury declines to indict the officer. Starr is bereaved, angry and disoriented, but also uncommonly resilient. She leads a climactic protest against the officers in which she emerges grazed but triumphant — an activist vowing to “light up the darkness.”
But in efforts to imply an arc to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s moral universe, the film ends up endorsing nearly as much magical thinking as Marvel’s cinematic one.
The film asks viewers to see the conscription of young bodies into ancient conflict as a point of hope instead of shame; that the oppressed aspire to be superhumans; that viewers not dwell on what ultimately happened to King. It’s noble for a student to commit her life to the enduring cause of racial justice. But the plot gets lost when that commitment substitutes for the thing itself.
When he released “Do the Right Thing” in 1989, Mr. Lee wasn’t interested in progress, nor resolution.
Mr. Lee’s project was to sound the alarm — to force people to recognize that the past wasn’t really past. And so he ended his story where today’s dramas begin: unarmed black man, white police officer, the awful weight of history.
In the movie’s climax, “the riot after the death of Radio Raheem feels earned,” said Justin Gomer, a film scholar and assistant professor of American studies at California State University, Long Beach. “The movie never sacrifices the intensity of the emotions that the community is experiencing — it validates them. It says, ‘ You know, if we’re being honest, there is no Hollywood ending available here.’ And Spike was willing to just put that onscreen and convince you. ”
Nearly 30 years later — in the age of the dash cam video — the status quo isn’t a lack of awareness of sys- temic racism; it’s indifference to the racism.
A new generation of filmmakers has chosen a different — and, in some ways, more perilous — task than Mr. Lee’s in 1989, and even Mr. Lee has altered his tune. The new project is not simply to illuminate recent events, but to marshal the alchemy of the silver screen to meaningfully amend recent events.
Revenge fantasies aim to provide catharsis where reality has missed the mark. The problem is that those accustomed to the short end of the racial justice ledger are naturally wary of counterfeits.
“These are not just historical traumas, they’re still fresh,” said Wesley Lowery, the author of “They Can’t Kill Us All,” a book about the Black Lives Matter movement that is being adapted for television by AMC.
“So I understand the feeling of, ‘If I’m going to ask you to relitigate this experience with me, I need to give you something back,’ ” he continued. “But what’s hard for me as a viewer is that it can feel empty to then receive what feels like a cheap emotional payoff.”
Movies inspired by the police shootings of unarmed black men.