Stallwell is black but his phone voice can pass for white, so as a skilled code-switcher, he negotiates for membership, while Zimmerman shows up when it’s time for face-to-face training. Together, acting as the same man, the African American and the Jew take on the KKK. Previously, Stallwell had met Patrice (Laura Harrier), the president of the Colorado College Black Students Union, who has invited the Black Panther Stokely Carmichael (Corey Hawkins) to speak on campus. Stallwell is there, also undercover, to hear the provocative Carmichael and report any potential criminal behavior, such as inciting to riot. Carmichael, now known as Kwame Ture, delivers a passionate, incendiary speech on black power and black identity, revealing that as a child watching movies he had himself cheered for Tarzan to defeat and destroy the African natives. Stalwell is slowly being radicalized, sort of, then falls for Patrice, so we’re set up for numerous conflicts of interest.
And the two buddies, one black and one Jewish, find their own ethnic consciousness raised as they are increasingly sucked into the dual orbits of the black power movement and the KKK. Oddly though, Washington as Stallwell plays him so low-key and subdued that our lasting image of his performance is not his acting chops but the super-exaggerated Afro that he's always patting and picking. It’s Driver as Zimmerman that impresses us most as he struggles with his own secular Jewishness in light of the rabid antisemitism that’s also a part of the KKK's vile, venomous package.
This storyline is the basic thrust of the film, and we marvel at the machinations — some funny, some sad, some bizarre, some bone-chilling — necessary to make this outlandish effort pay off without somebody getting hurt, or worse.
As has been commented, Lee is a director who both keeps score and intends to settle them, too.
It’s with this framing device that Lee is at his most polemical, and that’s both good and bad. Good in that this is a historical story we need to hear, but bad in that this movie is not likely to change anyone’s mind about anything. Good in that we need to be reminded that this country is not just for white Christians, but bad in that Trump’s blatant fulminating bigotry is such an easy target. Good in that we need heroic stories where justice prevails, but bad when the film's fiery political rage overwhelms the story.
BlacKkKlansman opens with a faux 1950s public service announcement, narrated by a spluttering, stumbling radio-voiced Alec Baldwin, ranting and raving about integration and miscegenation, racial purity and Jewish puppets on the Supreme Court. This segment includes a lengthy clip from 1939's Gone With the Wind, the sequence where Scarlett O’Hara works her way through dozens of wounded soldiers at the makeshift field hospital. The camera pulls up and back to reveal that it’s not dozens but apparently hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of Confederate dead and dying. It’s a stunning sequence whose last frame is then filled with the flapping and snapping stars and bars of a Confederate flag. The PSA continues with clips from D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, about the horrors of Reconstruction and glorious rise of the KKK, a movie shown at the White House and characterized by Woodrow Wilson as “writing history with lightning.”
Thus Lee throws down the gauntlet in the opening moments of his movie and stays bitter and unrelenting until the end, more than two hours later. Watching it is like getting a cinematic education in America's media-promulgated black inferiority and white supremacy. It's a fascinating college class focused on the deplorable depictions of African Americans in cinema, but like many educational endeavors, it's also grinding and grueling.
From GWTW to The Birth of a Nation to blaxploitation movies of the '70s where badass Harlem pimps and pushers strutted their way against The Man, popular culture has done more to perpetuate racism than eradicate it. We return to D.W. Griffith again during a sequence toward the end of BlacKkKlansman when the KKK members — gathered in a church-hosted party celebrating the installation of new associates getting their hoods while standing under a massive stained glass window of a beatific non-Jewish Jesus, whom we are reminded again and again was killed by the Jews — gleefully watch that silent film, adding their own ignorant and benighted hooting and hollering. This sequence is crosscut with shots of Harry Belafonte speaking to the BSU assembly about a true story of Jesse Washington, victim of a Waco, Texas lynching in 1915, the year The Birth of a Nation was released. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition of silent film hysteria, now experienced in a contemporary context, with a historic race crime contemporaneous to the film as now narrated to college students decades later.
In an appended coda added after the film was initially completed, Lee brings us full circle to our own up-to-the-minute time as BlacKkKlansman ends with the chilling news coverage of the Charlottesville "alt-right" conflict of August 11, 2017. More clips of young white men marching with torches, shouting “Jews will not replace us,” while Trump declared there were good, well-meaning people on both sides, then clips of David Duke praising Trump. Lee includes excruciating footage of Heather Heyer being killed by the car that intentionally careens into the gathered crowd of protesters, ending the film with a RIP (Rest in Power) shoutout to Heyer and her family, superimposed on an upside-down American flag, the familiar symbol of a nation in distress.
Lee hammers home the bloody reality of racist hate that connects Birth of a Nation to Gone With the Wind to the KKK to Trump's 2018 America.
Who is the intended audience? Is it reinforcing what we already know? Does it move us any steps forward? Sideways? Backwards? What does all this sound and fury signify? Has Lee written his own history in lightning with this film the rumbling thunder and the ongoing aftershock?
Ben Wiley taught literature and film at St. Petersburg College. At USF/Tampa, he was statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are film, theater, books, and kayaking Florida rivers. He also writes the BookStories feature in Creative Loafing Tampa. Contact him here.
This article appears in Aug 2-9, 2018.