I saw last night, with my favorite teen-ager, the Ebert to my Siskel, Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman," which we both enjoyed. You've probably heard that it's based on the book by Ron Stallworth--played in the movie by John David Washington, son of Denzel--who in the 1970s became the first African-American on the Colorado Springs police department. After a stint in the records department, Stallworth infiltrated (by phone) the local chapter of the KKK, and for obvious reasons sent a colleague for the in-person interactions. In one scene, Stallworth advises the chief, who's skeptical about whether this scheme can work, that he (Stallworth) is bilingual, having mastered both the King's English and jive--which, if you want to overanalyze the humor, is a little off inasmuch as speaking the King's English is not a prerequisite for representing oneself as a plausible KKK recruit. In another scene, Stallworth's white substitute, who happens to be Jewish in a completely casual way until he finds out how much these Klan guys hate Jews, is discussing his circumcision status with one of them, only the Klan guy asks whether he's "circumstanced."
This reminded me of the running joke in "All in the Family" wherein vocabulary mix-ups repeatedly throw Archie off the train of the Meathead's logic. I remember that in one episode Archie's reaction to an accusation of "proselytizing" indicated that he thought he was being accused of something illegal in almost all jurisdictions outside of Nevada. I just wanted to get that in, because after the show I almost told the teen-ager about it, but then cut myself off in order to avoid the look of disdainful indifference that my ancient enthusiasms invariably elicit. Back when we lived with each other, I could sometimes hear her rolling her eyes at me from behind her closed bedroom door.
Anyway, I also want to say that I think that for a lot of Americans just the name "Spike Lee" sets off small fires in the frontal lobe spelling out something like "black guy with an attitude, obsessed with race, I don't like him." Actually, Lee's movies about racial conflict are suffused with sympathy for disputants on most sides. He certainly loves to knock off anyone of any color who tries to ride too tall a horse. In "Do the Right Thing," Sal owns a pizzeria in Brooklyn and hangs pictures of his Italian-American heroes on the wall, DiMaggio, Sinatra, others. But the neighborhood has changed, no Italian-American customers anymore, and the African-American teen-agers who come in would like to see people "who look like us" on the walls. Sal says, no, it's his pizzeria, he'll put up whatever pictures he wants, and a kid with a funny haircut decides that this regrettable attitude merits a boycott. So he starts recruiting, whereupon he is soon told by one of the other kids--this is in my top three movie speech acts ever--"Boycott Sal's? Shit. Only thing you ought to be boycottin is that barber that fucked up yo' head." The analog in "BlacKkKlansman" is Stallworth's relationship with the leader of the black student group at Colorado College. They meet at a Stokely Carmichael event that Stallworth is working undercover, in order to assess whether the "radical" students are a threat to the peace. He falls for her, but her rigid and unforgiving outlook, including her habit of referring to cops as "pigs," irritates him. After all, he's a cop, though she doesn't yet know it. Interestingly, this is one area in which Lee departs from Stallworth's memoir, since in the book the author's girlfriend is barely mentioned.
Stallworth's story has, in the movie, bookends: it begins with a panoramic crane shot, from "Gone with the Wind," surveying Confederate casualties near Atlanta toward the end of the war. This is followed by a vicious monologue by a vintage 1950s bigot, played by Alec Baldwin. At the end, we get to see again last year's tiki-bearing marchers in Charlottesville chanting, "Jews will not replace us." And our president announcing his assessment concerning the many fine people on both sides, and the car driving into the crowd, killing the young woman named Heather Heyer. I take it that Lee's point is same shit, different day, but I think he should have left out all the bookends. As professors sometimes wrote in the margins of my college essays, "logical connection weak."
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