‘BlacKkKlansman’ gets real
Spike Lee’s film is a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth
In the middle of BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee’s new joint — his best non-documentary feature in more than a decade and one of his greatest — Ron Stallworth and his sergeant have an argument about the future of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s the early 1970s, and Ron (John David Washington), the first African-American officer hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department, has infiltrated the local Klan chapter and chatted on the phone with David Duke (Topher Grace) the organisation’s national director.
That title sounds more respectable than the traditional grand wizard, and Sergeant Trapp (Ken Garito), who supervises the department’s undercover unit, insists that the smooth-talking, telegenic Duke has his sights set on the political mainstream. Duke and his allies are developing an electoral strategy based on potent, divisive issues like immigration, affirmative action and tax reform that could eventually lead to the White House. Ron laughs. The guys he is tracking are potentially dangerous, but also patently ridiculous. “America would never elect somebody like David Duke president,” he says. The sergeant asks, “Why don’t you wake up?”
His plea is something Lee’s fans have heard before — remember the last scene in School Daze? — though rarely from the mouth of a white character. It has less to do with the iffy, easy-to-satirise concept of “wokeness” than with the urgent need to see what is right in front of you.
And beyond its stranger-than-fiction, somewhat embellished real-life story — the actual Ron Stallworth actually did infiltrate the Klan, and wrote a book about it — BlacKkKlansman is a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It’s an alarm clock ringing in the midst of a historical nightmare, and also a symphony, the rare piece of political popular art that works in all three dimensions. (The soaring, seething, luxuriant score is by Terence Blanchard, Lee’s frequent and indispensable collaborator.)
As the movie reminds us — right at the end, when it makes a harrowing transition from re-enactment of the past to raw, present-tense video — we currently have a president whom David Duke likes very much. Rather than add his voice to the chorus trying to explain how we got here, Lee (who shares screenwriting credit with Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott) muses that we might have been here all along. Which doesn’t mean that
nothing has changed, but rather that the racist attitudes and ideas Ron finds among the Klansmen (and around the police department’s station house, too) are durable and tenacious facts of life in the US.
While Ron reaches out to the Klan over the telephone — “whitening” his voice in the manner of countless stand-up comedians — he can’t very well show up at meetings. That job falls to Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), who starts hanging out with local stalwarts of “the organisation.” These include a square-jawed bureaucratic type named Walter (Ryan Eggold), a clever devil named Felix (Jasper Paakkonen) and a drunken doofus named Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser). With the help of another detective, Jimmy Creek (Michael Joseph Buscemi), Flip and Ron keep tabs on a terrorist conspiracy evolving amid all the posturing and slurslinging.
Lee has often been a gleeful curator of racial invective, and he observes the Klansmen with a fascination that stops only a few degrees short of sympathy. They are monstrous and clownish, but more than just figures of fright or mockery. Understanding what makes them tick is as much Ron’s mission as bringing them down.
And though the dramatic crux of the film is Ron’s predicament, his is hardly the only racial identity crisis under scrutiny here. Throughout his career, Lee has frequently turned his attention to the souls of white folks, to the volatile mix of pride, resentment, defensiveness and denial that motivates characters in (most notably) Do the Right Thing, Summer of Sam and 25th Hour. When Flip criticises Ron for treating their undercover work as a crusade — “for me it’s a job,” he says — Ron brings up Flip’s Jewish background, and the virulent anti-Semitism that accompanies the Klan’s anti-black bigotry. Flip says he never thought much about being Jewish: “I was always just another white kid.”
“Just another white kid” is an all-purpose alibi, and public discourse abounds in code words and dogwhistles that allow bigots to pass as concerned citizens without a racist bone in their bodies.
Maybe not everyone who is white is a racist, but racism is what makes us white. — New York Times News Service
Lee has often been a gleeful curator of racial invective, and he observes the Klansmen with a fascination that stops only a few degrees short of sympathy.