Young Americans

Rating: 9/10 (9 August 2019)

Glass shatters at a Brooklyn pizza joint after Mookie tosses a garbage can into his master's house. It's retribution for the blue and white murder of Radio Raheem. Mookie can't coexist in both worlds anymore. He heeds his best friend's advice. "Stay black," Buggin' Out tells the pizza delivery boy, early on in "Do the Right Thing", Spike Lee's third and best-known film, because he wants Mookie to quit his job and support the boycotting of Sal's Pizzeria. Buggin' Out despises Sal, but that pizza joint is the hangout place where he and his gang have been frequenting since they were knee-high. It's a ritual, a foregone choice everybody makes in the Bedford-Stuy cul-de-sac without self-introspection. But then you get older, and for somebody like Buggin' Out, the apolitical turns political. Suddenly, the place where you eat your slice matters. Before he takes his first bite, Buggin' Out looks at Sal's "Hall of Fame", as if for the first time. "How come there ain't no brothers on the wall?" the disgruntled patron asks Sal, adding that it's black folks, not Italians who spend "much money" at his inner-city eatery. Sal, so incensed at being tested, comes out from behind the counter wielding a baseball bat that Pino subtly removes from his father's hands. An audience may misread the older son, since his animosity towards the clientele is no secret. And yet, he staves off the inevitable until closing time, when Sal makes good on his promise: "I'm going to kill somebody today." Sal is the unabashed bigot, latent racism brought to light by circumstantial fate. Pino is not his father. When Buggin' Out suggests that Michael Jordan's likeness be inducted to Sal's hallowed wall, Pino smiles, in covert solidarity. Admiration for the Bulls guard is a bridge that the Bensonhurst native doesn't dare cross, in spite of a desire for camaraderie, because what would his friends back home say? Larry Bird fans, the whole lot, probably. Pino has more in common with the black community he purports to despise than the brownstone-owning white bicyclist donning a Celtics jersey who runs over Buggin' Out's immaculate Air Jordans with his ten-speed.
Because of peer pressure, Pino is expected to denounce Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" because of Chuck D.'s pointed takedown of Elvis Presley and John Wayne. And yet, he is curiously neutral as Radio Raheem turns the volume up on the anthemic rap song, while his father undergoes an emotional meltdown about the noise pollution. Mookie knows Pino's secret. All of his coworker's heroes are black. He puts him to the test. Sal answers: "Magic Johnson...Eddie Murphy," before Pino catches on to the methodology behind Mookie's inquiry and switches gears, claiming that "Bruce", not Prince, as his favorite rock star. The racist slurs are a cover. "Down deep inside," Pino hates his olive-skinned complexion. Mookie guesses: "I think you wish you were black," just like Vito, the younger brother, who probably uses black lingo to greet Mookie every morning. Vito is out, in regard to fluidity with racial dialects and identities. But even he can't quote Louis Farrakhan, accurately. It's Pino, more so than the Korean grocer, who can lay claim to being the "same", to being "black". When Pino quotes the Minister Louis Farrakhan: "We will one day rule the earth as we did in our glorious past," Mookie doesn't blink an eyelid. Pino's charade of flubbing the Nation of Islam's leader's name with several false starts doesn't fool him. After all, he notes, Pino's hair is kinkier than his. It's the father, not the son, who has no interest in African-American culture. Pino probably has a begrudging respect for the aesthetics of rap music. The shopkeeper and his wife, conversely, loathed Radio Raheem. The C/D battery incident, Sweet Dick Willie has no knowledge of, when he calms the angry mob with fire on their minds. "The Korean is all right," he tells his friend ML. The Korean is not all right. During the sequence in which ethnic group representatives hurl racial epithets at each other, Sonny expresses a disdain for Jewish people. The grocer imitates Ed Koch with a sustained vitriol that has more in common with a Nazi-era German than some contemporary African-American Brooklynite. "I no white," he pleads with the converging dark-skinned locals, swinging a dust mop to fend off the riff-raff. But the emigre will say anything to save his livelihood and life, by any means necessary.
"Europa Europa", the 1990 historical war drama by Agnieszka Holland, could be dubbed "Do the Prudent Thing". Life during wartime means having to modify your moral universe. Solomon Perel, a Polish Jew, is the survivor-type. When German planes attack a Bolshevik convoy, Solly hides under a truck to avoid Luftwaffe bullets. The vehicle carrying the Communist reactionaries pulls away, stranding him among the walking dead. Inna knows her comrade's fate; he will succumb to Nazi capture. She rolls Solly a red apple. Metaphorically speaking, an apple with skin intact is like an uncircumcised p****; an apple without skin is a circumcised p****. Skin is the difference between life and death. It's something to worry about in the future. But, for now, Solly tells the sergeant his name is Josef Peters, a German, of Baltic German descent, a dark-haired Aryan with Latvian roots. Whereas the Korean grocer knows enough English to bamboozle the African-American throng with his claim of solidarity based on non-whiteness, Solly is fluent in both Russian and German, which helps corroborate his tall-tale about being reprogrammed by Soviet captors and deposited in an orphanage where he received a Communist-minded education as a member of Komsomol, a political youth organization. Out on the battlefield, Solly never picks up a gun, but instead, works as a translator. He fights on the same side as the very people who killed his family. Kellerman, his buddy, gives him a haircut, which evokes the couplet: "I changed my hairstyle so many times now/I don't know what I look like," from "Life During Wartime", a Talking Heads song that aptly describes the cons of collaboration. Solly loses his religion. An accidental war hero, "Josef" is transferred to a prestigious Third Reich school, where he pledges allegiance to a bust of the fuhrer as a prerequisite for joining the Hitler Youth. He falls in love with a Nazi maiden, Leni. It's not until the Waffen-SS recruit passes a desecrated Jewish graveyard, where all the headstones are dug up to the delight of his girlfriend, does he finally wake up from an Aryan-induced trance. It's not Josef, but Solomon, his former-self, who slaps Leni. The girl from Germany, the boy from Poland learns, would slit his throat if she discovered what he was. Josef's attempt to sew the helmet back on ends in discoloration. The apple has no skin.
The Klan advertises in a Colorado Springs daily, so Ron Stallworth cold-calls the KKK, and just like that, presto, he gets Walter on the line. To fool the regional Klan leader, Ron uses the king's English in a Caucasian-accented voice as he launches into a diatribe about his hatred for "******s" and "***s". Ron's gift for impersonation is so convincing, his colleagues stop what they're doing and openly gawk at their new colleague. Where does it come from, this gift for mimicry; this performative hate monologue? It comes, no doubt, from spending a lot of time around white folks. Ron lived a sheltered life; he grew up on a military base. The ex-army brat tells Chief Bridges and a black recruitment agent that "my parents raised me the right way," coded talk for the white way. He shares with Mr. Turrentine, the characteristic of being at a far remove from the radicalism of their peers. These soul brothers; these soul sisters, grew up as targets. That's why Ron answers: "Will that happen, sir?" when Turrentine asks about his conduct should another cop call him a "******". Ron's black experience was blanched of color. For the first time in his life, he encounters the same casual racism just like any other "Negro". As a rookie, he fetches the files of "toads" in the records department, back and forth, like a trained dog. On assignment as an undercover detective, Ron doesn't know that the ex-Black Panther changed his name to Kwame Ture, the radical he has been tasked with monitoring. He wants to cut to the front. That's privilege. Patrice, the Black Student Union president, tells Ron to stand in the back of the line like everybody else. Patrice doesn't know what the audience knows, which is that this new recruit wasn't raised to fight the power. Kwame's words "stop running away from being black" hits Ron square in the mind's eye. It's what made him join the police force; to transcend his skin color. Ron realizes that he identifies with Tarzan, as Kwame did as a youngster, when it's the savages, who are the corrective analogues for blacks in the seventies. "Superfly" is Ron's favorite flick. Patrice corrects him; a pimp can't be a hero. "The image does damage to our people," she warns. Ron, however, identifies with Blaxploitation films more so than black leaders. He would rather be John Shaft than W.E.B. DuBois. Ron is the frantic Korean grocer screaming: "I black. You. Me. Same." No. Hell, no. Ron and Patrice are not the same. "Right on," the cop shouts, in unison with the students, like an awakening.
To fool the KKK, Ron needs a body to go with his voice. Flip is not only Ron's partner, but a projection of himself. In the locker room, they rehearse. Ron, a black man, instructs Flip on how to sound like a Protestant Anglo-Saxon. It's not as crazy as it sounds. Flip is Jewish. Like Pino, all of his heroes are black. Ron chants: "Say it loud/I'm black/I'm proud," as a sort of connective tissue to Pino.
Eventually, bringing down the Klan becomes a crusade for Flip, too. His awakening is ingrained in the film's title. Look at the lower-case "k".
"BlacKkKlansman".
Dig?
Pizzerias.
Crosses.
Auschwitz.