A Word About "BlacKkKlansman"

Dir. Spike Lee
Scr. Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee
Pro. Jason Blum, Spike Lee, Raymond Mansfield, Sean McKittrick, Jordan Peele, Shaun Redick
Starring: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace

Our United States knows it's racially divided, yet we can't reconcile who fired first, and which side, if any, deserves retribution. In BlacKkKlansman (2018), Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is asked to go undercover and investigate the potentiality of violence in Colorado Spring's Black Student Caucus. After he determines no threat, he is transferred to intel where, in a stroke of ingenuity and madness, he calls the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and asks to be a member, his skin color be damned. And so, with his white partner Philip "Flip" Zimmerman (Adam Driver) in hand, Stallworth is embedded into the organization, makes an acquaintance with Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace) himself, and works to uncover a bomb plot done in the name of a God Blessed White America.

Spike Lee is a famously political director, and in this picture he takes many political stances through BlacKkKlansman's script, characters and ideologies. Take Stallworth's love life. While hiding his race from the Klan, he hides his occupation from Caucus president Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), an outspoken activist who refers to cops as "pigs" and regularly confronts the secret officer if he's "down for black liberation." This conflict, questioning if law enforcement is inherently racist and its pretense is irreconcilable with black freedom, is left unresolved.

Lee is more concrete in his perspective of the Klan. While one caucus speaker rhetorically grandstands on the death of racist cops, Zimmerman's white power pals hold shooting galleries of iron-plated, afro-headed black children, tout the love of their childhood Mammies a la Gone with the Wind's Hattie McDaniel, and force their members at gunpoint to take a "Jew-Detector Test." These deeds, combined with an old man lamenting the lynching of his black friend and the unlawful pull over of Patrice by the Thin Blue Line, ensures the audience perceives the Klan not as a reputable organization, but as a hate group in the lineage of the U.S.A's white supremacist history.

Ultimately, the film is primarily an espionage thriller, where Stallworth and Zimmerman face impossible odds, a mysterious threat, many close calls, and gain a sense of comradery along the way. The film opens up with the title card, "Dis joint is based on some fo' real, fo' real sh*t", handing us the permission to take this film seriously, but to treat it as a fiction as well. It is a well-told, entertaining yarn speaking truth to power, but then faces its shortcomings in including actual footage from the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally in August 2017, including the terror attack which killed protester Heather Hayer and cemented the Alt-Right's resurgence into America's conscience. This end is the most powerful part of the picture. It is also separate from the picture, in style and in impact. BlacKkKlansman is a narrative with an end to be reached and villains to quash, but Charlottesville was an American scab ripped wide open. In making his art, Lee could have lifted up the nation in gospel or settled down and documented its pain. Instead, with this movie, he wrote a paperback.