Thank you, Mister Bank Robber

Rating: Null/10 (18 September 2012)

"Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one?" - Brecht
"Even if you get out, you're still in prison" - Baines (Malcolm X)
Spike Lee directs "Inside Man". If opening shots of roller-coasters indicate that this is one of the director's rare forays into popcorn filmmaking, the subsequent blasting of a Bollywood/Hollywood fusion of "Chaiyya Chaiyya", which plays over shots of masked terrorists, assures us that Lee is playing by his own rules. The film belongs firmly to the "con" and "bank heist" genres, but Lee skewers genre convention at every turn.
Lee's opening music conveys a sense of a melting pot, multi-ethnic New York city, but it also plays to the preconceptions of those who conflate "terrorism" with anything vaguely "Other". Of course it then turns out that the film's terrorists are white, not really criminals, and that this music is Indian. But so what? Gotta be suspicious around those A-rabs.
Post 9-11 paranoia infuses the entire film. Robbers invade a bank and hold several customers hostage. Victims and victimisers then repeatedly change clothes, an act which Lee uses to critique racial profiling by challenging us to distinguish criminals from innocents without the benefit of knowing skin colour. Outside the bank, Detective Frazier (Denzel Washington) battles his own cocktail of confusing cultural diversity, white power and racial discrimination. Everyone's speaking another language, whites and blacks repeatedly lock horns, ethnic identities lead to rivalry, and nobody knows the difference between Armenians and Albanians. Sikh's, meanwhile, are beaten down for being "Arabs" and anyone with a beard or a turban is viewed with suspicion. Our detective heroes are themselves not spared (intollerant, accepting bribes etc).
The film's title refers simultaneously to our bank robber (played by Clive Owen), hero (homeboy Washington sticking it to "da Man" from inside the "systim") and Arthur Case, a wealthy Jewish banker who acted as an "inside man" for the Nazis during World War 2. Case, it turns out, revealed to the Nazis the whereabouts of Jewish families in hiding, profited from their deaths and started up a chain of banks. As Jewish symbols and totem litter the film, some have accused Lee of anti-Semitism. But it was primarily the "Allies", during WW2, who salivated over Hitler and, in an attempt to preserve their own power, sought the death of Jews and Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, in the real world, Jews overwhelmingly occupy positions of power within financial institutions (0.2 percent of the world's population are Jews, whilst over half its billionaires are Jewish). This "success" has been attributed to everything from ethnocentrism, good parenting, strong personal/cultural values, hard work, conspiracy, genetics and incessant persecution.
Others point out the fact that ancient religions/cultures forbid money lending, interest, usury, and typically looked down on tax collectors and money movers. The Bible itself (its passages with Judas the Treasurer are blatant anti-Semitic tracts) views anyone who extracts money from money alone as being a heathen. Artist's like Dante even went so far as to consign usurers to the seventh circle of hell. Jews, however, had no qualms charging interest to non-Jews. Flash forward some decades, and Jewish banking takes off. Over time the stereotype then develops that "Jews are parasites". With the start of another recession and the shady dealings of prominent Jews like Bernard Madoff, a new breed of 21st century anti-Semitism has erupted. Ironically, while there exists an image of Jews as "successful capitalists", in intellectual circles Jews (Marx, Lassalle etc) have written some of the premiere critiques of capitalism. What these works do, and Lee doesn't, is steer away from personalisation and focus instead on systems; capitalism is inherently parasitic, everything is now usury and we are in a sense now all Jews.
Still, Lee's banker bashing and Wall Street fury are at times funny. The film's last act consists of Denzel strutting about like a blaxploitation hero, part Superfly/Shaft, part vengeful Kunta Kinte. Dressed in hat and suit and with the tenacity of a pit-bull, Washington takes the fight back to the white man (and a woman, surprise surprise, called Mrs White). Lee's in his element here. The rest of the film is overlong, but Lee nevertheless teases out interesting moments; the robbers turn out to be righteous, the banker is villain rather than victim, images deliberately evoke Guantanamo Bay, George Bush's many unlawful detentions, arrests and renditions and the film tries to play with Balzak's old adage: "behind all fortune is a great crime". Indeed, many of today's top industries and figureheads (the film's release coincided with revelations of the Bush family's own Nazi ties) owe their wealth to crime and/or war profiteering.
Lee is black, but "Man's" scriptwriter, Russell Gewirtz, is Jewish. The film is clearly rooted in both its creators own ethnic identities. And if Lee's films tend to hinge on sociological entrapment – being stuck, both physically and mentally - "Man" does likewise. Washington's stuck and unable to climb the ranks, Case wants to erase his past while our bank robbers function more as dialectical operators. Most interesting, though, is the way the film inter-cuts its crime in the "present" with suspect interviews in the "future". Crime and visibility are traditionally linked, but Washington's entered a new arena. Who is guilty? What exactly is the crime? What are we overlooking? How do we now go about separating people into distinct torturer/victim groups? If society integrates based on wealth and ambition, how can it deny that it excludes based on the same? For Washington, confusion becomes the permanent impasse of the contemporary and crime, suspicion and the suspension of civic rights are revealed to be not an aberration but inherent to neo-liberalism. Owen's "terrorism" does not provoke executive measures (Patriot Act/authoritarianism etc), rather, the suspension of human rights is already present, is a priori, since the accumulation of capital and the political system protecting power (wealth, private property etc) explicitly depend on it.
8.5/10 – Interesting.