Blackkklansman

This movie frustrated me. I wanted to like it more than I did. It seemed to flirt with greatness, only to slip into predictability and artistic complacency. The story concerns a wild set of (mostly) true events from the early 1970s where a black police officer in Colorado Springs ends up insinuating himself into the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), entirely over the phone, and the subsequent investigation he leads using that access. It grows to involve a WASP-passing Jewish cop who acts as the white face of the undercover persona, exposure of racist police officers, a conspiracy to commit acts of domestic terrorism against the local black student union, David Duke’s efforts to make the KKK’s racist rhetoric more mainstream palatable, and ultimately the systemic failures of governments and law enforcement institutions that would rather bury the perceived “embarrassments” of what happened than let justice be served. All in all, extremely compelling stuff. The movie is at times wildly funny, at times as tense as any good thriller, and at times deeply affecting. So why was I so frustrated?

Core to the film’s story is the tensions that exist between each of its main factions. The film often, intentionally or otherwise, draws direct comparisons between the black student union and the KKK, and not in as clear cut a way as you might expect. For example, when, early on, our main character attends a speech given by Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) in which Ture’s description of preparation for the coming race war and the inherent incompatibility of blacks and whites to live together sounds an awful lot like rhetoric we hear only a few scenes later from KKK members about the necessity of segregation and need for violence to protect the sanctity of a racial identity. It’s true that Ture expresses his positions with a learned air and the KKK with vitriol and racial slurs, but the core ideas are not that far apart.

However, I don’t think the film’s point is that somehow these two are equal or the same. This is a Spike Lee joint after all, a director who is not only black himself but, historically, a big supporter of black empowerment. The film is not, strictly speaking, invoking the horseshoe theory. Rather, I think the film is asking its audience, who likely have preconceived notions of these groups, to reexamine those notions through the questions the film raises, even if they end up exactly where they began. Do you readily accept one group but not the other when, at least on a philosophical level, they both expect (or even desire) a race war, trade on bigoted views of the “other,” and believe racial harmony and racial mixing is an impossibility? Why? Is the leader of the black student union’s unwillingness to accept the possibility of a reformed police force, even after the police uncover and attempt to thwart a terror attack that threatens her life, justified and pragmatic or stubborn and closed-minded? How does the fact that what ultimately saves her life is (spoilers ahead) more the incompetency of the attackers than the efforts of the police factor into that? Again, ultimately, the film frames the black calls to violence as a form of self defense and the white calls to violence as the aggressor, but within that framework I think it invites you to interrogate that premise in its entirety. That’s the kind of thing great art can do.

In that sense, it reminded me a little of Lee’s most famous work: Do The Right Thing. That film is built around a split within philosophies on how to achieve black empowerment; the peaceful approach a la Martin Luther King Jr., and the violent one a la Malcolm X. When Radio Rakeem shows his Love and Hate knuckle adornments, that isn’t just to add flavor to his character, it’s the very thesis of the film. In the end, Do The Right Thing offers no easy answers. Peaceful coexistence fails to survive the pressure of deep-seated tribalism and racial distrust, and when that boils over into violence, who suffers the most in the flames of that rage isn’t always who most deserves it. Blackkklansman is dissimilar in that it offers a much clearer position on what is right and what is wrong, but it is similar in that it isn’t afraid to ask difficult questions like: What should be allowed and what should be tolerated if we are to live in a civil society? When is stochastic terrorism just words and when is it truly dangerous?

With a plethora of high quality anti-racism movies to choose from, it was this exploration combined with its tense, almost crime thriller pacing and structure that initially had me ready to sing its praises. In particular, as the film approached its climax, I was thinking how much I appreciated the film’s lack of obvious didacticism. It allowed, up until that point, any parallels to modern times and any moral messages the film carried be subtextual. It trusted the audience to figure it out on their own. The denouement, however, throws that all out the window in favor of hitting you upside the head with the message over and over again until your skull hurts. Gone are the intellectually deep compare and contrasts of the black empowerment and white power movements. Set aside are the moral complexities and no easy answers of how one can make a better society in the future while carrying the emotional scars of the past.

Obviously, the black side was always going to be the victims and white power the villains, so when the movie strips away some of its weightier philosophical pondering in favor of a more direct story of good and evil, I had no problem with that. Rather, it is when the movie introduces the context of the present, or at least the times in which it was made, that it loses me. The way it chooses to do this is where that lack of obvious didacticism is replaced with a kind of absolute and unadulterated didacticism, which in turn puts the film’s artistry on death row. In short, the subtextual is made textual.

For example, early in the film a character explains that one of David Duke’s goals is to put a charismatic face for mainstream racism in the White House. This exchange is chilling and also extremely well crafted, as it works on multiple levels. On one level, there is a diegetic irony in the discussion, since presidents like Jackson and Wilson have already shown the country’s willingness to vote a version of mainstream racism and/or white supremacy to the nation’s highest office. The second level is the dramatic irony that, the film’s insinuation that Duke’s dream was eventually made manifest in Trump (who was in his first term when the movie was released). In the denouement, they just show Trump speeches. The movie spends two hours crafting a compelling story about the insidious nature of racism, ending with a cogent point about how institutional problems lead to cover ups and racist rot from the inside out that makes reform difficult. This leads the audience to think about how they have seen, heard about, and/or possibly experienced these kinds of institutional failings via the modern conversations about police brutality, Black Lives Matter, the emergence of groups like the Proud Boys, and more. Then the denouement just shows you clips of white power marches and famous events of racial violence from the late 2010s. It’s almost insulting how much the film acts like it needs to hold the audience’s hand while presenting its ideas in its conclusion. The art was already making your point, I don’t also need a lecture at the end just in case I didn’t get it. It is so absurdly patronizing.

This is possibly just a part of a growing trend, where creatives spend too much time online and have seen too many people misinterpret the things they make, so they adjust, or perhaps even overcorrect, and feel compelled to spell everything out lest anyone be left with the wrong idea or suggest the piece is problematic. This is disappointing from the perspective of someone who values the artistry of art, and ultimately, I think, a futile gesture since even the art that spells it out can’t seem to avoid online misinterpretation. Either way, Blackkklansman suffers from this instinct or trend. For my money, what could have been a powerful movie, one that Trojan horses complex, deep, rich contemplations on race in America via a compelling and unique crime thriller; that balances humor, tension, and pathos extremely well; is instead undercut by its own need to spell out its thesis in the final frames, turning it instead into something both frustratingly preachy and annoyingly paternalistic.

Would Recommend: If the 90% of the movie that blends taut crime thriller storytelling with an exploration of the nature of racialized political movements sounds like something that would appeal to you.

Would Not Recommend:: If the 10% of the movie that devolves into a moral lecture that has no faith in you, the viewer, to glean the subtext of the film on your own sounds like a massive turnoff.