Polemical, didactic, confrontational, angry, trenchant - a state-of-the-nation address

Rating: 8/10 (4 September 2018)

BlacKkKlansman is a film with a lot on its mind. It opens with one of the most (in)famous scenes from Gone with the Wind (1939), before pivoting to a fictional precursor of Alex Jones lecturing the audience on the dangers of the "negroid", and later takes in everything from Kwame Ture to David Duke, before lambasting The Birth of a Nation (1915), criticising the tropes of classic Blaxploitation films, going into agonising detail regarding the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington, sardonically criticising police bureaucracy, and concluding with a montage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, intercut with Duke championing Donald Trump's presidency, and Trump's own reluctance to condemn the white supremacist component of the rally. The film then ends with an upside-down black and white American flag (a symbol for "dire distress"). Yep; this is a film with a lot to say.
Telling the story of Rob Stallworthy (John David Washington), a black police officer in Colorado Springs who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1979, at its core, BlacKkKlansman is about institutional racism in the United States. Ostensibly dealing with the 1970s manifestation of such, the film's real point is that in 2018, not only is such racism still a problem, it's now even more endemic, due to its pseudo-legitimacy in the wake of Trump's election, and the concomitant upsurge in hate crime across the country.
Co-writer/director Spike Lee's combative intent is signalled in the first scene, which is actually a scene from Gone with the Wind; Scarlett O'Hara wandering through the thousands of wounded and dead Confederate soldiers after the Battle of Atlanta, as a crane shot pulls back to show the devastation, finally coming to rest on a tattered Confederate Navy Jack. The implication is clear - this is very much the world of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the belief that prior to Reconstruction, the Antebellum South was an urbane and benign society, with the Confederacy heroically fighting the corrupt Union so as to preserve the inherently honourable southern way of life.
Lee keeps up the confrontational tack in the film's second scene, which depicts the fictional cultural anthropologist Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard (Alec Baldwin), who, in grainy black-and-white footage tries to alert the audience to the fact that the negorids are attempting to take over the country. What's especially well done here is how Lee uses D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. As footage plays behind Beauregard, his face is erased of its colour - he is literally rendered white enough to become part of the image, which depicts a narrative built around the inherently virtuous nature of being white. It's a powerful shot that clearly tells us, yes, this is a comedy, and yes, these people are ridiculous, but also alerting us to the fact that Lee is not playing around here.
But what is Lee's point? The cultural instability of the United States in 2018, with its entrenched institutional racism, an entire race of people once again being treated like second class citizens because of the amount of melanin in their skin, hateful rhetoric masquerading as national pride, the breakdown of the distinction between xenophobia and patriotism, and the transition of hate crimes from the fringes of society into the realm of social acceptability. The film suggests that organisational racism once existed half-way between the absurd and the dangerous, but in recent years, it has moved in the wrong direction. Even before we get to the chilling closing montage, Lee and his co-writers (Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, and Kevin Willmott) have dropped a few subtle allusions to Trump's presidency. In one scene, Stallworth confidently asserts that it doesn't matter how much of a legitimate businessman Duke becomes, and no matter how much he hides his racism behind more patriotic rhetoric such as immigration and crime, the country would never elect a crass, hate-filled racist as president. In another scene, David Duke (Topher Grace) explains he and the KKK are "making America great again." These two allusions would be enough to get the point across, but it would also mean that that point remains in the realm of comedy, and is therefore easily dismissed. The closing montage changes that, as it drops all pretence of humour in depicting what happened in Charlottesville, and Trump's asinine response. This is very much a state-of-the-nation address.
In relation to Birth of a Nation, of course, things are more complicated than they are in relation to Gone with the Wind. Yes, the film is horrifically racist, and yes, it was singlehandedly responsible for the 20th century revival of the KKK, but it is also probably the most important film ever made, and literally wrote the book on screen grammar. Conceivably, Gone with the Wind could be removed from the canon and no longer taught, but Birth absolutely could not. It is a foundational text, an undeniable landmark film, completely independent of its politics. Birth is based on Thomas Dixon Jr.'s 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. The second book in his KKK trilogy, the novel valorises the practises and institutions designed to oppress black people, whilst depicting emancipated slaves and Yankee carpetbaggers as the "real" villains behind the Civil War, positing that the plight of the freedmen during Reconstruction was a direct result of their liberation (i.e., they (and the south in general) would have been better off had they remained slaves). In Dixon's depiction of the lawless society of the south, created by the Union, where coloureds can walk around freely, southern whites have become the target of racial violence, with freedmen being particularly fond of raping white women. In the trilogy, the Klan are depicted as arising from this maelstrom, honourable and heroic men forced to reluctantly take the law into their own hands so as to stop the rampage. So influential was the film that the modern KKK practices of wearing white hoods and burning crosses come from it, not from the original 1865-1871 incarnation of the Klan.
Lee uses Birth twice - in the Beauregard scene, and in a later scene where his use of it speaks to the formal complexity of his own work. One of the most important of Griffith's innovations was that of parallel editing (better known today as cross-cutting), something we all take for granted in everything from films to commercials to music videos. In a nutshell, parallel editing is when two separate actions from two separate locations are intercut to suggest they are happening simultaneously, often, but not always, to heighten tension. It's one of the most fundamental components of screen grammar, so much so we don't even think about it today - we just take it as given. However, Lee's genius in this scene is that he uses Birth to mock the Klan by way of, you guessed it, parallel editing. As the KKK sit down to watch Birth, Lee intercuts their enjoyment of its absurdities with Jerome Turner (Harry Belafonte) telling the story of the barbaric lynching of Jesse Washington, which saw a crowd of over 10,000 people in Waco, Texas, cheering on as his testicles and fingers were cut off, after which he was slowly burned to death by being continually raised over a fire. Lee uses parallel editing here so as to have one scene comment on the other - he is literally using Birth's own innovations against it and what it represents. Birth may be politically abhorrent, but Lee is savvy enough to not only recognise its technological importance, but to co-opt that importance and use it for his own ends, showing us the stunned reaction to a vicious murder contrasted with a celebration of the conditions which led to that murder.
As all of this may suggest, yes, the film is preachy, but that's because Lee is preaching. He makes no apology for such. This is polemic filmmaking, and the move into heavy didacticism in the final montage is completely earned.
All of this is not to say the film is perfect, however. For example, how he employs the double dolly shot (which he has used throughout his filmography to suggest characters' inability to control their own actions as they are inexorably pushed forward, divested of the contextualisation of their environment), raises some interesting problems, suggesting, as it does, that orthodox black activism and underground black militancy must combine forces in the face of hate. The film also glosses over Stallworth's time in COINTELPRO, where he worked to sabotage radical black organisations, because this doesn't fit into the overarching theme the film is constructing. Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), Stallworth's partner, who poses as him during face-to-face meetings with the Klan, being Jewish is also problematic (the real person he was based upon is known only as Chuck, and all we know about him is that he definitely wasn't Jewish). Is Zimmerman supposed to represent Republican voters who abhor the KKK as much as the political left do? Who knows, because beyond being Jewish, there's no further character development; he's more of a rhetorical device, a meme rather than a person with an inner life. Similarly, the fictional explosion towards the end of the story serves to distastefully simplify everything, once more making the KKK look foolish, something which is wholly unnecessary at this point in the film, whilst also positing Stallworth as a clichÃ©d movie hero, something Lee has avoided up until this point.
These are relatively minor complaints, however. Look, Lee is far from my favourite filmmaker. I really disliked Malcolm X (1992), for example, probably his most celebrated film, and he has justifiably been accused of racism himself on multiple occasions. None of that, however, changes the fact that this is an hilarious, powerful, insightful, and frightening piece of work.