March 26, 2019
A month ago, the day before the Academy Awards, I watched BlacKkKlansman, a film directed by Spike Lee and produced by Jordan Peele. The only Blumhouse Productions film I had seen before that was Get Out because I am normally squeamish about horror films (although to be fair, even though Blumhouse mostly produces scary films, it has also produced dramas, such as Whiplash). Even though it’s not a supernatural horror film, BlacKkKlansman depicts a real-life horror that has traumatized Black people for centuries: white supremacy.
The film is based on the eponymous memoir by Ron Stallworth, a Black man living during the 1970s who applies for a job at the Colorado Springs Police Department and ends up becoming a record clerk there. (John David Washington, who plays Ron, was excellent in this role. He brought so much rawness to it.) His coworkers don’t see his potential to move up in his role, but after persuading them that he has credentials, they have him go undercover as a detective to investigate a Black Power movement meeting, during which the president of the Black Student Alliance calls upon Black students to celebrate having natural hair, Black-owned businesses and, first and foremost, community. Ron, while undercover, meets a young woman named Patrice who falls in love with him. However, Ron gets into another sticky situation by calling the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, the notorious terrorist group known for its explicit discrimination of minorities, and pretending he is a racist white man who wants to join the organization. Ron has his white Jewish partner-in-crime, Phillip “Flip” Zimmerman (played by the incredibly talented Adam Driver), go undercover since, obviously, if he was to go himself, he could get killed. Zimmerman starts to act like a member of the KKK while undercover, but Lee doesn’t shy away form the fact that the KKK is suspicious of Zimmerman and even has him take a lie detector test to prove he isn’t Jewish.
Indeed, Lee’s film says as much about the social construct of whiteness as much as it does about blackness. Ron constantly reminds Flip that he is Jewish, but Flip reminds Ron that most of his life, he didn’t feel Jewish because he blended in with the other white kids in his community and didn’t grow up celebrating Jewish traditions, such as having a bar mitzvah. However, as Flip infiltrates the KKK more and more, he becomes more hyper-aware of his identity as a Jewish person. This reminds me of the shooting that occurred in 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and how Jewish writers for op-ed pieces about the shooting and other anti-Semitic hate crimes were saying that the shooting caused them to question whether they really benefited from white privilege if Jewish people have had to endure so much oppression for centuries. It showed me how complicated the conversations around white privilege are, and that these conversations are not so two-dimensional once we listen to and read about individuals’ differing experiences with whiteness, particularly the experiences of Jews of color. Again, it’s a hard conversation to just put in a box, and I’m not Jewish so I can’t say anything from personal experience on the topic, but this is just something I thought was really important about the film.
(Also, side note: I saw Adam Driver in While We’re Young, What If, Frances Ha, and The Last Jedi, but seeing his performance in BlacKkKlansman was something else. The whole time I watched the film, I had to remind myself he was just acting. His performance was that good.)
Another issue that Spike Lee addresses is the complicity of white women in the KKK’s activities. In a disturbingly brilliant scene, Lee switches back and forth between the KKK induction and the Black Power meeting where Harry Belafonte is talking about the lynching of a young Black man. When all of the members of the KKK are inducted, all of their white wives rush in and congratulate them. It seems so innocent, like they’re at a high school graduation ceremony, but you realize quickly after the scene switches to everyone at the KKK ceremony watching Birth of a Nation, a racist 1919 film by D.W. Griffith that depicted white people enacting racist caricatures of Black people and performing other acts of racist violence. The wife of one of the KKK members in particular is very complicit in a lot of the KKK’s acts of terrorism. When she tries to get involved with the KKK’s activities at first, her husband Felix dismisses her, but then she quickly tells him that one day he will ask her for a favor and regret ever dismissing her like that. During the filming of Birth of a Nation, she is especially loud in cheering on the KKK’s horrific violence, and throughout BlacKkKlansman she actively participates in the KKK’s affairs.
The film also shows actual footage of the Charlottesville white nationalist rally and pays tribute to Heather Heyer, a young woman killed after a white nationalist protester rammed his car into several people, killing Heyer and injuring many others. Seeing this footage gave me chills, but it taught me that is why we need to keep having these difficult conversations about activism and oppression.
The mere words in this post simply cannot convey how powerful this film was. The score lost to Black Panther, another excellent film with excellent music, but it was still incredible how well the music production team put the music together for the film. This is one of the songs included in the film that I really love:
But then again, I’m not surprised that the film left me with a lot to think about long after the credits rolled. Spike Lee’s films are well known for talking about topics that aren’t light and fluffy. Bamboozled, for instance, is a film about how a Black man tries to get back at his racist boss by producing a show in which two light-skinned Black men don blackface and enact racist caricatures of African-American people. At first, the audience is extremely uncomfortable while watching the show, but as time goes on they start to wear blackface themselves and enjoy it. My professor held a showing of the film in the evening for his class to watch, and after watching the movie my friend and I both walked in silence, completely speechless, because the film left us with a lot on our minds. I couldn’t sleep that night. A year later I saw Do the Right Thing with a friend, and man, am I glad this friend showed me the movie because most people I knew had seen it already and I was missing out. Then I saw Chi-Raq, his 2015 musical drama in which he depicts the emotional, psychological and social toll that gun violence has taken on Black communities in Chicago and adapts an ancient poetic Greek play, Lysistrata by Aristophanes, to fit a grim 21st century reality of weapons, bloodshed and hurt. In the film, women withhold intimacy from their men so that they stop promoting gun violence in their communities. Again, not an easy film to watch before bed, but it addresses a key issue. And before seeing all three of these films I watched Lee’s film adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X after reading the book for a summer English class assignment. It still boggles me why Denzel Washington never won the Oscar for that movie even though he got nominated for it, or why Spike never won an Oscar for the movie. It was incredibly powerful.
Which is why, when Spike Lee won for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars this year for BlacKkKlansman, I couldn’t stop squealing. Although his films have received numerous Oscar nominations, none of them actually won. And seeing his reaction at winning the Oscar (as well as his purple Prince-themed suit and pants) was everything. His speech was also incredible.
Overall, it is an incredibly brilliant film worth seeing.
BlacKkKlansman. 2018. Rated R for language throughout, including racial epithets, and for disturbing/ violent material and some sexual references.
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