{"id":2925,"date":"2019-02-01T18:01:51","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T22:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/drealfmgrenada.com\/?p=2925"},"modified":"2019-02-01T18:01:51","modified_gmt":"2019-02-01T22:01:51","slug":"spike-lees-best-picture-academy-awards-nominated-blackkklansman-a-deadly-serious-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drealfmgrenada.com\/index.php\/2019\/02\/01\/spike-lees-best-picture-academy-awards-nominated-blackkklansman-a-deadly-serious-comedy\/","title":{"rendered":"Spike Lee\u2019s Best Picture Academy Awards-Nominated \u201cBlacKkKlansman\u201d \u2014 A Deadly Serious Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Vershawn Ashanti Young<\/strong>
\nContributing Writer<\/p>\n

\"Black<\/a>Spike Lee\u2019s\u00a0BlacKkKlansman,\u00a0<\/em>which was nominated for the Academy\u2019s Best\u00a0Picture Award, this year, delivers more than a brilliantly entertaining story. Officially,\u00a0BlacKkKlansman<\/em>\u00a0is about Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, son of actor Denzel Washington), the first African-American police detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan with the help of a white proxy.<\/p>\n

The film is based on actual events discussed in Stallworth\u2019s 2014 memoir,\u00a0Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime<\/em>. The actors humorously and yet believably drive home the film\u2019s strong racial irony.<\/p>\n

\"Black<\/a>Stallworth\u2019s operation upsets a string of Klan meetings and attacks, including a comically rendered attempt to bomb the female head of the Black student union.<\/p>\n

<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Stallworth dupes the \u201cGrand Wizard\u201d of the KKK, David Duke (Topher Grace). Stallworth and Duke have a series of phone conversations about Stallworth\u2019s feigned white nationalist beliefs and the upcoming ceremony marking his initiation into the \u201cOrganization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drama and hilarity abound when Stallworth is assigned to personally guard Duke at the event and Duke is unable to make any connection between his new initiate and the police officer.<\/p>\n

What makes this film good is not that it successfully delivers the story it promises, but that it also exposes how our racial past has only changed its bell-bottoms for straight-legs. Or put another way,\u00a0BlacKkKlansman<\/em>\u00a0showcases how past racism still operates in the present.<\/p>\n

Using the past to illuminate the present<\/strong><\/em>
\nSpike Lee, who was nominated for an\u00a0Academy Award for Best Director, offers a parody of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson\u2019s enthusiastic endorsement of the 1915 box office hit,\u00a0Birth of a Nation<\/em>.\u00a0Birth of a Nation<\/em>, based on a novel by\u00a0Thomas Dixon, Jr., and unabashedly titled\u00a0The Clansman, an Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan<\/em>.<\/a>, is set just after the American Civil War. Both book and movie were used as propaganda to depict the Klan as saving the white race from the newly emancipated Blacks, rendered in the film as crazed rapists and criminals.<\/p>\n

Lee successfully uses the past, as he has done in movies like\u00a0Do the Right Thing<\/em>\u00a0(1989)<\/a>, to artistically quash the anticipated criticism that a film by a Black director that portrays white racism is guilty of being anti-white.<\/p>\n

<\/figcaption>In contrast, by integrating the facts about\u00a0Birth of a Nation<\/em>, Lee explodes this phoney critique and points to the real racial irony: That films depicting white supremacy are likely to be wildly popular, even praised by presidents of their time, while a film that depicts the personal and professional impacts of racism, particularly on Black people, is subject to petty but popular criticism that the film is inherently anti-white.<\/figure>\n

Lee does not tread lightly, but marches into this racial terrain at the end of the movie by explicitly invoking images of\u00a0U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s equivocation that some white nationalists are very fine people<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Comic relief; deadly serious<\/strong><\/em>
\nTo artistically execute this heavy history in a film that runs two hours and 15 minutes is no easy feat. But Lee does not disappoint.<\/p>\n

Lee deftly offers comedy as a necessary relief. For example, Connie Kendrickson, (Ashlie Atkinson), the wife of a Klan member, Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Paakkonen), is an eager-Jane, reminiscent of a classically uncool, geekish, eager-to-please teenager. She dresses up \u2014 rather badly \u2014 in a two-piece, too loose, bright red pantsuit to pursue her first terrorist act of planting a bomb. She foils the plan and the result is pure humour.<\/p>\n