How BlacK­kKlans­man joins the dots between our racist past and present

If ​“the his­to­ry of the black man in Amer­i­ca is the his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca,” as accord­ing to James Bald­win, then Spike Lee has spent decades as a his­to­ri­an, telling the sto­ry of the black man (and woman) in the US through both doc­u­men­tary and nar­ra­tive film, com­pli­cat­ing the notion­al bound­ary between the two in the process.

The major­i­ty of Lee’s films show a con­cern with the his­to­ry of African-Amer­i­cans and their posi­tion in Amer­i­can soci­ety, whether tak­ing on mon­u­men­tal events of the past in the likes of Get on the Bus, 4 Lit­tle Girls, When the Lev­ees Broke and Mal­colm X, or rep­re­sent­ing the emo­tion­al response to real-world racism in Do the Right Thing, which, as well as being a whip-smart, vibrant, often hilar­i­ous por­trait of a tight knit com­mu­ni­ty, oper­ates as a mul­ti-faceted expres­sion of frus­tra­tion and anger at racial hatred and police brutality.

His lat­est fea­ture, BlacK­kKlans­man, and his bit­ing turn-of-the-cen­tu­ry satire, Bam­boo­zled, are both con­cerned with rep­re­sen­ta­tions of black­ness in tele­vi­sion and film, past and present, keep­ing in con­stant dia­logue with oth­er works through the use of inter­cut archive images. The direc­tor also intro­duces footage of actu­al events into the mix, which appear as they would in a tra­di­tion­al doc­u­men­tary, with tes­ti­mo­ni­al made by a char­ac­ter which is then sup­port­ed by the pre­sen­ta­tion of this doc­u­ment as evi­dence. Each film blends and con­trasts height­ened fic­tion with extra-tex­tu­al mate­r­i­al and cul­tur­al doc­u­ments in order to show the psy­cho­log­i­cal and social state of both the char­ac­ters in his work, and African-Amer­i­cans in general.

Lee clash­es his fic­tion­al world with our real one at mul­ti­ple points in BlacK­kKlans­man. The film draws out the sim­i­lar­i­ties between the Klan in the ​’70s and the alt-right today, and the dif­fer­ent ways we’re suck­ered into not regard­ing them as a threat – specif­i­cal­ly through Topher Grace’s por­tray­al of white suprema­cist leader David Duke, who ditch­es the hood for the suit and tie in an attempt to mask his vile hatred. Bam­boo­zled also aims to speak to its cul­tur­al con­text, but draws its line between the past and the present between the ongo­ing use of black­face, com­par­ing it to how cor­po­ra­tions have dis­tilled and lever­aged images of black­ness for their own gain.

One stand­out moment in BlacK­kKlans­man sees Har­ry Bela­fonte tell a room full of Black Stu­dent Union mem­bers about the lynch­ing of Jesse Wash­ing­ton. As Belafonte’s char­ac­ter recalls the details of this noto­ri­ous race crime, Lee cuts between the room of stu­dents and a Klan screen­ing of DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, once praised by Pres­i­dent Woodrow Wil­son (“Like writ­ing his­to­ry with light­ning […] my only regret is that it is all so ter­ri­bly true”) and now right­ly con­demned as a racist pro­pa­gan­da film part­ly respon­si­ble for the resur­gence of the Ku Klux Klan, the vil­lains of Lee’s peri­od piece. Clips from The Birth of a Nation are inter­cut with pho­tographs from Washington’s lynch­ing, Lee offer­ing a rebut­tal to those who would hold up the film for its his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance and ignore its debil­i­tat­ing effect on people.

As Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), frus­trat­ed TV pro­duc­er and chief pro­tag­o­nist of Bam­boo­zled, lies debil­i­tat­ed at the film’s con­clu­sion, he watch­es a clip reel of min­strel shows and oth­er racist stereo­types of black­ness cul­ti­vat­ed by white peo­ple. It’s a moment that the film hints at ear­li­er on, in a scene where a group of white writ­ers com­ment on their favourite black char­ac­ters. Lee jar­ring­ly cuts rel­e­vant clips from each quot­ed show into the scene. One white writer ago­nis­ing­ly stum­bles through his descrip­tion of ​‘The Jef­fer­sons’ as ​“my first expe­ri­ence of the black peo­ple of, uh, Africa”. Like Ron Stall­worth (John David Wash­ing­ton), BlacKkKlansman’s under­cov­er cop, Delacroix is the only black per­son in the room, bit­ter and resent­ful of the net­work and the mono­lith­ic images of African-Amer­i­cans that it believes in and projects.

The frus­tra­tion of being pigeon­holed – of being made more sell­able – explodes out in the film’s pow­er­ful end mon­tage. As Ash­ley Clark observes in his book ​‘Fac­ing Black­ness’, ​“Lee pur­pose­ful­ly streaks the screen with unhealed psy­chic scars, and demands that the view­er join the dots between the past and the present.” BlacK­kKlans­man is a resur­fac­ing of this spe­cif­ic method. This time, the film lulls its audi­ence into a false sense of secu­ri­ty, with an end­ing so uncan­ni­ly tidy you could prac­ti­cal­ly put a bow on it. But Lee desta­bilis­es this sense of accom­plish­ment, his sig­na­ture dol­ly shot trans­port­ing us from the main nar­ra­tive to events wit­nessed from afar just one year ago in Charlottesville.

As Clark says of Bam­boo­zled, ​“the mon­tage would be pow­er­ful enough viewed in iso­la­tion”, but this is in addi­tion to the rest of Bam­boo­zled and BlacK­kKlans­man – both films being vivid dis­plays of anger that take place in a height­ened fic­tion­al world that is equal parts absurd, hilar­i­ous and hor­ri­fy­ing. These final moments bring us crash­ing back down to earth with an under­stand­ing of how real the worlds of Lee’s films actu­al­ly are. We are forced to con­nect the dots between past and present, fic­tion and real­i­ty – there’s no remove allowed, and any solace found in the tri­umphant nar­ra­tive con­clu­sion has long since dissipated.

In 1992, Lee opened Mal­colm X with footage of the Rod­ney King beat­ing – an appalling moment still fresh in the minds of view­ers at the time of the film’s release – using it to recon­tex­tu­alise Mal­colm X’s rea­sons for protest and resis­tance, remind­ing us that those rea­sons are just as valid as ever. It is noth­ing short of trag­ic that in 2018 Lee is still hav­ing to employ the same tech­nique, as though his repeat­ed calls to ​“wake up!” have fall­en on deaf ears.

One hopes that 26 years from now, BlacK­kKlans­man might feel like a time cap­sule for when an overblown real­i­ty star was elect­ed to the high­est pub­lic office in gov­ern­ment. Con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics, how­ev­er, isn’t offer­ing much hope that this will come to be. Even look­ing back just on Lee’s career, the fact that the events of many of his films – whether it’s Radio Raheem’s mur­der in Do the Right Thing or white pro­duc­ers com­mod­i­fy­ing black­ness in Bam­boo­zled – ring true with such alarm­ing famil­iar­i­ty is damn­ing. At the very least, we’ve still got Lee to doc­u­ment and reflect this luna­cy back at us.