On BlackkKlansman

Spike Lee’s BlackkKlansman ends with footage from Charlottesville, where anti-Semitic, white supremacists, echoing chants and rituals of the KKK clashed with anti-fascist protesters in the streets. Included in this footage is the devastating, but important sight of a car running into the anti-fascist protesters. An act which we know killed Heather Heyer and resulted in Donald Trump labelling both sides as bad. This is moving footage, especially when Heyer’s name appears on screen. It is even more moving when anchored by the preceding two hours.

BlackkKlansman is a protest film. A film taking broad and unsubtle swipes at the Trump administration and the racist organisations that support him, including David Duke and the resurgent KKK. Lee has never been subtle in his career, but this doesn’t mean he isn’t brilliant, or masterful. BlackkKlansman is replete with his trademark style; he is here to entertain, but also to educate and the lecture style delivery and symmetrical framing alongside the isolated faces of those listening is again, recreated powerfully, especially with the inclusion of activist and performer Harry Belafonte. Whether you’ve heard it before or not, Lee’s dialogue and the performances here are not to be overlooked. And, anyone who is a fan of Lee’s work will delight in hearing the familiar Blanchard score and struggle to suppress their enjoyment from the dolly shot towards the end, here carried off with more weight than we have seen recently.

Within his script Lee finds the space to address issues of passing, therefore addressing the responsibility we have to fighting these evils. Washington’s character talks of light skinned black people passing as white and Driver’s Jewish office, Flip, admits to passing his life as non-Jewish, a reality he can no longer ignore. Is this a challenge for us all to wake up to a very real and present evil? It’s inclusion in the film is certainly one that raises further questions. Racial passing is a sensitive topic, and whereas a novel like Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) can explore it in intricate detail, Lee places it carefully into BlackkKlansman, at a quiet moment, allowing its connections to slavery and antebellum America to sit there, waiting to be explored further, drawing a line from then to now.

Lee expertly manages the humour in the film, allowing us to laugh, rightly so, at some of the KKK figures without ever forgetting their very real danger. And this is why the news footage at the end is so powerful. For two hours we’ve laughed at some of the incompetency’s of the KKK as well as been shocked by their violence and rhetoric towards black and Jewish people and moved by the historical accounts of lynching and violence against black people. Yet, the film has been rooted in the safety of the 1970s. A fact Lee is very aware of. This may be a protest film. It may be a clear criticism of the Trump ideologies, but it doesn’t look or feel like now and there runs the risk of becoming only a ‘film’. The footage at the end does not allow this to happen. It takes the preceding two hours and injects it into the zeitgeist. It warns us against viewing this as historic only. It reminds that while we may have been entertained, this is real and it is happening again.

BlackkKlansman is the work of a filmmaker who has lost none of his energy or his anger. This should not be surprising. Lee’s work may have been absent from mainstream cinemas, but it is out there and it remains relevant. His Netflix show She’s Gotta Have It (2017) was inventive and felt so much of the time that you questioned how he could have made something so quickly that felt so pertinent to questions of gender. BlackkKlansman is impressive in the same way. There may be the occasional narrative misstep, or questions of accuracy with the reality, but Lee achieves what he set out to. A ‘fuck you’ to Trump and Duke and all those that support him as well as a vital reminder of what is happening in America today.