BlacKkKlansman

I haven’t seen a Spike Lee since maybe the 25th Hour. This isn’t by accident. I skip his flicks because I don’t feel included in his audience. More than that, though, the guy has a really fucking hard time resisting his own worst and most indulgent impulses. Spike Lee Joints are didactic, less like entertainment and more like a dad who thinks he’s cool lecturing kids he thinks are stupid.

I took a chance with Lee’s new movie BlacKkKlansman, though, because the story is pretty fucking cool and it looked funny. Also, it’s not every year you get to see two movies about black guys consciously trying to sound like white guys, let alone in the same month. Fuck the Perseid Meteor Shower or Haley’s Comet. This is once-in-a-lifetime shit.

BlacKkKlansman is based on a true story about a black cop who infiltrated the KKK back in the late 60s. I’m a sucker for movies that portray the KKK as dumbasses. I know that sounds like an easy and obvious target, but I’m also a sucker for porn that has sex in it. Some things are just meant to go together.

Mostly, I don’t regret seeing BlacKkKlansman, despite the title’s stupid-ass spelling of the title--seriously, it feels like something something a board room full of old men would think sounded cool and urban. But Spike Lee is still Spike Lee, and he fucks up what could be a pretty great movie with clunky moments and a coda where he doesn’t trust his own storytelling to get his point across. Instead, its last few minutes go outside the story just to hammer home the point that, Hey! Racism is still a problem. No fucking shit.

Just a few years ago it was easy to forget the KKK still existed. They were relegated to a dustbin somewhere, an embarrassing relic of our country’s past, like that regrettable Parisian Nightsuit in the back of your closet. Maybe those assholes were still around, but they were more like redneck cosplayers than a pernicious threat. Obviously, that’s no longer the case, and racism is alive and growing fast like a boil on the butt of our country. Loud-and-proud scared old white men as well as old-at-their-tiny-black-heart cowards have come roaring back with the implicit blessing of authority. Like that Parisian Nightsuit, even the most unfortunate things eventually come back into style.

BlacKkKlansman is about an incident in the 60s when the Klan was on the decline and sought to broaden its base by escaping its redneck stereotype. Essentially, they wanted to legitimize their race baiting and fearmongering horseshit with the same tactics, by giving it a makeover: nicer clothes and softer words layered onto the same old hate. Topher Grace plays David Duke, a weaselly guy in a suit using big words and easily duping people dumber than him or those just looking for someone who dresses nice to say what they believe deep down. Richard Spencer is the modern-day equivalent.

In Colorado Springs, straitlaced black man Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) wants to be a cop, and the police are looking to finally hire someone a shade darker than the current patrol. He’s quickly asked to do some undercover work to find out if other blacks in the city are planning a violent revolution. During that work, he falls for Patrice, played by Laura Harrier (I would fall for her too), the president of the Black Student Union at the notoriously hippieish Colorado College. She’s high-minded, all about protests and speakers. But like a shitload of people in college, she seems to think that change happens by thinking really hard about it and expecting others to do likewise.

As an aside, while the true story takes place in Colorado Springs, the city is not a character in the story. There are a few establishing shots of iconic rock outcroppings, but the locales look a hell of a lot more like Pennsylvania or upstate New York, than Denver’s creepy, white cousin to the south. Doing this is sort of disrespectful and either cheap or lazy. Spike Lee apparently doesn’t care enough about where the story took place to spend any time there. It’s also a shame because Colorado Springs is full of creepy people and also beautiful. Its contradictions could have been used to good effect.

Stallworth is emboldened by meeting Patrice to do more for equality, but he’s a cop so he takes action rather than just hold up a sign and chant. He answers a Ku Klux Klan ad in the newspaper, pretending to be an angry, scared white guy on the phone, and is welcomed to come meet the locals. That’s a problem since, well, he isn’t remotely white. But his coworkers are, and thus starts a sting operation where the white and Jewish Flip Zimmerman pretends to be Stallworth in person. Stallworth maintains the phone contact.

There are a couple of opportunities that could have been explored here. First, Lee could have added just a couple lines about why the cops let the Klan operate in the open up until a black man joined the force. Second, it is never really clear why the cops need two men to play one person. Why risk everything with two distinct voices when Zimmerman could just as easily make the phone calls? That use of two people made me think the cops weren’t very good at their jobs, just that that the Klan was that much worse.

In fact, most of the movie’s humor comes from the ineptitude of the Klan. Spike Lee portrays these gullible dumbasses as just less than cartoons. Which is fine with me. It’s analogous to the way Mel Brooks portrays Hitler. Maybe part payback and maybe part the impossibility of showing evil as black as the reality. Despite their stupidity, though, the Klan is capable of hatred of unfathomable depth, and violence to match. In one moment, one of them is explaining that he knows how to use a gun by pointing it at his head. In the next, he’s plotting to kill hundreds of innocent people.

Despite levity, though, the movie is not a comedy, and Lee does a reasonable job of balancing atrocity with Keystone Kops style blundering. Harry Belafonte plays an old civil rights activist who recounts a story of nauseating horror, the true story of a lynching a century ago where white people castrated, burned and mutilated a black man, and then sold postcards of his charred body. This retelling is juxtaposed with a raucous Klan party where they watch Birth of a Nation (made the same year as the lynching).

Plot tension comes from the complications of using two cops to portray one without getting caught, as well as trying to stop the Klan from killing black students, which includes Patrice. Needless, to say, Stallworth is the hero of his own story. Also, probably needless to say, his heroics do little to move the needle in the bigger war on racist fuckers.

One of the things I liked most about BlacKkKlansman was the subtle portrayal of a man as reluctant hero. Stallworth is doing what he believes in and feels compelled to do. He feels awkward voicing his convictions and far less awkward acting on them. His solution is pragmatic: infiltrate and root out, even if it means risking his and other offers’ lives. By contrast, Patrice talks a big game, hosts lots of protests but it is unclear how she is enacting change. Yet, she’s the one who gets indignant that Stallworth is cop. The real solution probably lies somewhere in between. Education is important, but so is real action, and it takes a lot bigger balls.

Lee nearly unravels everything though with some clumsy-ass shit, the sort of stuff that someone with more restraint could have avoided. There are two clunky scenes at the end where a racist cop gets his comeuppance and David Duke is left dumbfounded when he discovers he’s been duped by a black man. These are Hollywood feel-good moments, manufactured and phony, and they undercut the bigger message about the persistence of racism.

Lee also fucks all his shit up by ending the movie not with a short of a burning cross but with real footage from Charlottesville. I became sick seeing a fucking asshole’s car plow through the crowd and watching chubby neck-bearded weasels carrying torches and chanting that Jews will not replace them. Lee puts this footage here as though he’s afraid the audience doesn’t understand this shit is once again a problem, that what he just showed us isn’t relegated to the past. We know that. We’re smart enough to understand the parallels of his story and today. I wished he’d give us credit for that and stop trying to be the cool dad who thinks we're too stupid to grow up without him.

Three Fingers for BlacKkKlansman.