Last nite I went to the premiere of BlacKKKlansman in Stevens Point, WI.. a town of 26,000 people..
Last nite I went to the premiere of BlacKKKlansman in Stevens Point, WI.. a town of 26,000 people. Point being Point, there were 6 folks in the theatre...more the pity. It was spectacular...I am still on a high from the film. I don't think I have ever seen a Spike Lee film all the way thru. I appreciate he is a genius nonetheless....he weaves many moments of levity in BlacKkKlansman. It continues a tonal balance that has been one of Lee's greatest strengths as a filmmaker; he understands the cinematic medium as both intellectually serious and pure entertainment.
The entire premise of BlacKkKlansman is one that's gleefully played, in a nod to the exploitation films of the 1970s, as absurd and unbelievable. The notion of a black man in 1972 joining the Ku Klux Klan in order to infiltrate it from the inside is comedic and almost too nuts to be true—John David Washington plays the real life Ron Stallworth. John does not resemble his pop Denzel..he is round faced, huge smile, huger eyes, and his frame shorter and stockier.
The film opens with Alec Baldwin( cannot be by chance!!) showcasing racist films. He stands before the screen and the scenes play on his face. Then we meet Ron. He is the first black to be hired on the CO police force. He decides the file room is not for him. He phones the local KKK guy and schmoozes him....after he returns the orientation papers it is time to meet in person. Now, of course, he can't show up. So he solicits his tall white Jewish partner Flip Zimmerman to become the 2nd Ron Stallworth. Flip is wired.
Lee's drama becomes a true crime thriller when Zimmerman ventures, on his own, into the dark underbelly of Colorado Springs—a setting that's so far from the typical racist hotbeds of the American South that it cannot simply be a narrative coincidence. Lee's film breaks the rules by placing the most obvious avatars of American white supremacy—the Ku Klux Klan—outside the South's borders and thousands of miles above sea level. These aren't Appalachian hillbillies or down-in-the-Delta farmers expressing their hatred for their black neighbors; rather these are men who are over a century and thousands of miles removed from the battlegrounds of the Civil War. Lee refreshingly posits white supremacy as an American problem instead of a Southern one.
The local head guy is a slimey skinny creep and he is married to a short haired Mama Cass 5x his size, who is jonesing to do something important, like the men. She gets her chance later on with a bomb. Even Topher Grace mines his great TV sitcom awkward charm for his portrayal of the savvy, yet dim, David Duke. But while Duke and his comrades are ultimately goofs, BlacKkKlansman doesn't let us forget just how dangerous they are—and how the Klansmen use their tactics with different ways to manipulate and terrorize their enemies. The doofus with a gun is still an armed man—one of an army of angry white guys who aim their rifles at images of black children in the woods while dreaming of cleansing the earth of the minorities they see as a threat to their righteous visions of American identity. Duke, too, weaponized his dorky Ned Flanders-style persona to ensure that white supremacy remained normal and harmless.
Ron begins a romance with an Angela Davis girl, drop dead fine boned face, gold rim eyeglasses, and an Afro at least a foot high. There are a lot of Afros and all colors. She is introduced as an emissary for Stokely. And she is the president for the local students' revolution..Ron is wired, but later on reveals who he is...one powerful scene has Harry Bellafonte speaking to the college kids about lynchings he witnessed, while the KKK are robed and speechifying themselves. BAM!!
By BlacKkKlansman's end, the villains' plan has been foiled; David Duke has been blissfully humiliated. There's even a cathartic scene in which a racist cop on the Colorado Springs force gets his due—a cinematic fantasy, yes, but happy endings are nice sometimes, too.
But Spike Lee doesn't give us a true happy ending, because the real-life events of the film didn't put an end to racism in America back in 1972. The film's opening coincided with the one-year anniversary of the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia...
So our movie is done, but we sequey to Charlottesville and the real David Duke and Trump saying "on both sides" and real footage of the chaos between the pro-white groups and those protesting their marching. Lee shows us, from multiple angles, the car that drove into the crowd leaving one protester, 20-year-old Heather Heyer, dead. The last scene is a pic of her with flower memorial.
With the inclusion of President Trump's comments after the conflict—the infamous remark about "very fine people on both sides"—is hardly overwrought. BlacKkKlansman shows the double-pronged threat of white supremacy, both the short game and the long con. Stallworth and Zimmerman manage to stop the small-time racists who attempt violence against Colorado Springs' innocent black residents, but they can't stop David Duke, a figure who maintained low-level racial rhetoric within the fabric of American society.
Forty-five years ago, it may have seemed improbable that the American public would elect a president who openly expresses white supremacist ideals with such nonchalance rather than behind closed executive office doors; there's a scene in the film in which the fictional Stallworth expresses his incredulity about that VERY possibility in a scene in which Lee winks to his audience, offering up a historical gag and a lesson that Trump's ascendancy didn't come out of nowhere. ANOTHER BAM!! For Stallworth, Trump would have been as laughable as the contemporary notion of a black cop joining the Ku Klux Klan in the early '70s.
Yet both of those things have happened, despite how preposterous they may be. BlacKkKlansman reminds us that the absurd is possible, and it's dangerous, and we can't simply laugh it off and assume the joke won't ultimately make history its punchline. Everyone in America, or at least the DU folks must see this movie.
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