Hump Day is here, friends!
An exhausted but energized mid-week mood
Apologies if this has been your entire Instagram Stories stream today, but I’ll continue to beat the drum for Campaign Zero, especially as they unveiled the “8 Can’t Wait” campaign today. This isn’t feelings, it’s not opinion — it’s data. These steps reduce the likelihood of police violence by 72%.
New Yorkers, here’s where our city stands. Rather than just complaining about DeBlasio on social media per usual, let’s give him a (civically-minded but firm) earful and push for policies to protect citizens. (And if you want to see how your city fares, the website has a very extensive search function!)
As promised, working in some COVID-related content because, well, the virus is still out there. (Someone — and I regret not saving the first time I saw it — put it succinctly: people in communities that are disproportionately affected by the pandemic know the health risk in taking to the streets to protest police brutality, and they think the virus of racism is the bigger threat.) There will almost certainly be new cases that flare up because of the protests, and SNL performer Chris Redd has organized a GoFundMe to help take care of the people who may contract COVID-19 from exercising their First Amendment rights this week. In just a day, it’s at almost $200,000 (with a goal of $250,000).
Raising your voice should not mean that you lose your voice. Please help if you can.
Now, what you came for…
DAY 83: BlacKkKlansman (available on HBO GO and HBO Max)
Trivia time! Do you know what the first movie shown at the White House was? If your guess was the KKK-glorifying white supremacist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, you were correct. (Fellow Wake Forest alumni, the author of the book the film is based on went to our university, just an FYI — apparently there’s a portrait of him hidden in storage/archives somewhere in ZSR Library.)
Like the rest of American history, the story of film is deeply intertwined with racism. The director of The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith, gets a lot of false credit for pioneering the style of cross-cutting between two scenes that is now standard cinematic vocabulary; in truth, he just popularized what was already in development for several years prior. (This is mostly just useless knowledge for you in case there’s ever a scenario in which you need to explain why, actually, The Birth of a Nation is more culturally significant than aesthetically important.) But the film’s climax uses parallel editing to establish tension that glorifies Griffith’s sick ideology: the white supremacist-upholding Klansmen ride on their horses to come rescue the damsel in distress facing a threat from a caricatured lazy, sexually voracious black man.
President Woodrow Wilson allegedly described the film as “history written with lightning.” But it was more than just a chronicle of the past. Historians widely acknowledge that The Birth of a Nation fomented the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in the 20th century. A movie can become a movement. Perhaps someone can point out a logical fallacy here, but if we accept that movies can inspire us to do great things, I believe we must also realize that they can incite people to do bad things as well.
This is a lot of background on a film that is absolutely not being recommended. (I had to sit through all 3+ hours of The Birth of a Nation for a project in college, and I would not recommend it even for canonical purposes. It’s so, so boring and foaming at the mouth with disdain for black people.) But it’s important context to really understand what makes Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman such a necessary corrective and rejoinder to the story of the art form. Lee wields Griffith’s galvanizing grammar and flips the script, using cross-cutting in a climactic sequence where undercover police officer Ron Stallworth (John David Washington in a star-making performance) must thwart the violence of Civil Rights-era Klansmen from harming innocent people. Those who fully understand his reference point can better appreciate the ways in which the film inverts racist tropes to serve an anti-racist purpose.
BlacKkKlansman is not just a film studies academic term paper come to life, though. It’s a riotously funny and grippingly thrilling story of how Stallworth infiltrates a Colorado Klan chapter by fooling them with his voice … and using the body of Jewish officer Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver, more stealthily brilliant than usual) to surveil their activities in person. I could do without a few of the obvious winks to the parallels to the Trump-era, but this ranks for me among Spike Lee’s very best works: evocatively shot, precisely assembled, cogently furious.
This has arguably the most downer ending of any film I’ve recommended through this newsletter to date. At this point, I don’t care if it makes you feel bad (sorry!) because I think we all need to sit with the way BlacKkKlansman collides directly with our world. The film jolts us out of the world of cinema and into reality with verité footage from the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville that claimed the life of Heather Heyer. We come to realize that the film depicts just another chapter in the fight against white supremacy, and our current moment represents merely the latest one. Spike Lee showed he can reverse the style of The Birth of a Nation. Now what if he could play a part in motivating a reverse mobilization to counter what Griffith unleashed on America?
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall