Spike Lee's Latest Joint
From The Ramparts
Junious Ricardo Stanton
The Latest Spike Lee Joint
A lot of black folks don’t like
Spike Lee’s films because they cover uncomfortable issues and topics they’d
rather keep suppressed from consciousness. This is a grave mistake. Martin
Luther King Jr once said, “Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
Spike Lee films make you think, that’s for sure.
My wife and I went to see the
latest Spike Lee joint, The BlackkKlansman
. Ironically there were more white folks trying to get tickets than Blacks. The
first theater we went to, I was informed the film was sold out except for the
first two rows in the front where you had to bend your neck to look up at the
screen. Most of the people in line ahead of me asking for tickets to see the
film were white. We returned home and ordered tickets Online at another
theater.
We went to the theater later that afternoon;
there were only a handful of Black folks in the audience. The theater was about half full and most of
the patrons were white.
Spike Lee looks at the world
through the lens of race (and sometimes class) and this film is no different.
It is based upon a true story about a Black man named Ron Stallworth who
secured a job as a policeman in the mostly all white Colorado Springs Police
Department that was looking to diversify the department.
Once hired Stallworth is assigned
to the record room which he finds stifling. He brashly asks the chief for a
transfer to undercover. He is initially turned down. Later the Chief comes to
him with an offer to do plainclothes surveillance when Stokely Carmichael comes
to town to speak at a college event sponsored by the university’s Black Student
Union.
I don’t want to give away the plot
but that assignment leads to another and Stallworth played by John David
Washington (Denzel’s son) offers to go undercover to infiltrate the KKK. His
request on the surface seems preposterous. But he convinces the Chief to let
him do it and being a resourceful dude Stallworth and his crew pull it off.
Lee juxtaposes the real life facts
of Stallworth’s gambit with the racial attitudes of the 1970’s and present day America Colorado Springs
Officer Stallworth is not woke
politically. He knows he is Black, he has experienced racism personally prior
to and since joining the force, but he is not a radical or a revolutionary. He
is just a guy trying to do his job. He knows how to speak “The King’s English”
and Black lingo too and when a KKK caller to the police station mistakes him
for a white guy, this incident triggers Stallwoth’s idea to infiltrate the
Klan.
Lee captures the tension between Stallworth
and Patrice the head of the Black Students played by Laura Harrier. She calls
police pigs and believes the system is irredeemably corrupt and racist.
Stallworth on the other hand thinks change can be made from the inside. This
disparity in philosophies creates a barrier to their relationship which Stallworth
tries to develop once he meets her at the university rally.
Obviously Stallworth cannot meet
face to face with the Klan members to join them so another police officer named
Flip Zimmerman played by Adam Driver (Kylo Ren of The Force Awakes and Last
Jedi fame) does all the face to face interactions.
To add to the film’s emotional tension, Zimmerman
is a non practicing Jew, who is now forced to grapple with his own heritage and
safety once he joins the hatemongers.
Spike Lee does a masterful job of
chronicling the history of the times, the racial attitudes while providing
enough comic relief so the viewers don’t become overwhelmed by the weightiness
of the subject.
Over the weekend the film did
fairly well. It came in at number five. I recommend you see it because this
film makes a clear statement about not just the past but what is going on in
this country and around the world today.
-30-
posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 2:22 PM
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