Blackkklansman directed by Spike Lee. Image courtesy of Focus Features.
Blackkklansman is Spike Lee’s first major film produced during the living nightmare that is Donald Trump’s presidency. Until the very end, when he shows raw footage of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville and then counter-protestors being run over with a car, the film is surprisingly subtle in what it has to say about race in America today. Spike Lee’s work has sometimes leaned a little too hard into righteous indignation for mainstream audiences - the first time I saw Do The Right Thing, I remember thinking “Mookie didn’t have to throw that trash can through that window” and I am quite sure many people felt that way. But there has never been a time in recent American history when it was so obvious how justified the anger that percolated in his early films really was.
On November 8, 2016 a bunch of middle class white people everywhere stood around their TVs, clasping their berets and boat shoes and shouting: “Oh shit, Spike Lee was right - America is fucking racist!” So it shows an interesting level of restraint that he should indirectly frame his commentary on race in modern America through the lens of the 1970s. I think this is actually a pretty clever idea and it works really well because the story he tells in this film, about a young black detective posing on the phone as a white supremacist to infiltrate the KKK, is pretty interesting and funny just for how weird it is.
You would think that now that Donald Trump is president, Spike Lee might come out the gate swinging, making a film laced with acid and anger excoriating the currents in our society that elevated this imbecile to the highest office in the land. But this film is actually quite funny, treating the KKK members often as objects of ridicule and buffoonery, who are dangerous mainly due to their own incompetence. The levity is anchored by moments of great emotional weight, like a bravura scene of Harry Belafonte recalling the details of a lynching, or the way faces in a crowd are tilted up in a gentle glow as they watch activist Stokley Carmichael deliver a fiery speech. It is a solid, if restrained effort.
I think what Lee is saying in this film is that Donald Trump is merely a symptom of something that has been submerged in America for as long as we’ve been a country. Institutionalized racism, beliefs and prejudices are deeply embedded in the social fabric of this country and always have been. They were fighting the Klan in the 70s, and those ideas and thoughts and feelings didn’t just simply go away. They may have retreated for a while, but they didn’t go away and while people like me, middle class whites, liked to think that they did, people like Spike Lee were always aware that they hadn’t because they had to live their live in this America every day.
So instead of making a film that serves as a fiery response on the Trump administration and the rise of white nativism, he made a more restrained and lighthearted film that basically said, “But of course you stupid dipshits, this is the way it has always been in America. They just aren’t bothering with the dog whistles anymore.” I think that is clever. I think it’s effective. And I think it’s a terribly sad commentary on the fucked up state of affairs in America.