Sitting down at my hostel dining table in Portland to begin this article, moments after walking out of the theatre, I look to my left and a newspaper captures my eye picturing the right-wing demonstration and resultant anti-fascist protest that occurred in this very city exactly a week ago. But this is no anomaly, it was only one of 15 in the last year. Sitting within a national crowd still shaking in the aftershock of these events undoubtedly enriched and amplified the films propaganda for peace and equality, and although I remain an outsider to the heart of the issue I felt the audience’s relationship with the text really shaped my experience. Let’s unpack how.
[From this point onwards there may be a number of spoilers, especially to events late in the film, so if you are going to see it please watch it first.]
Let’s split this explanation into three sections: comedy, reference and the ending.
Comedy:
Comedy so often finds difficulty transferring itself between cultures, and this example (for me at least) was no exception. As I have discussed previously in reference to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, I find racist, sexist, and other discriminatory comedies very distasteful when they are thrown around too easily and thus the film only squeezed a single laugh from me—yet the audience around me filled the auditorium with roars of laughter. Obviously the nature of such black comedy is to run this exact line between distasteful repulsion and roaring ironic laughter, and maybe it is only those who really understand and are surrounded by the issue who can take a step back from the seriousness and step back to laugh about it. If this were the case it would clearly explain the difference in our reactions to the comedy, placing me as an outsider to the issue. However I find it hard to believe that laughter is a just reaction to an exact line likely to have been said by one of the right-wing marchers who have left a number hospitalised just streets away from the theatre a week ago. If it were documentary footage we would shake our heads so why if it is fiction do we laugh? But let’s not touch on that here.
Reference:
BlacKkKlansman is a film telling the story of the 1970s, but takes a strong and certain aim at US issues in 2018. It openly references Trump speeches putting the words “America first”, among others, into the mouths of the klans-members. However, being only somewhat in contact with the US of today and of the 1970s, I missed a number of these references—but that’s exactly where the context came to help (and a talkative neighbour). Laughs were sounded at seemingly irrelevant spots, but they were of a different tone—we all know the chuckle of ‘I see what you’re doing there’. Thus simply being in the company of nationals furthered my understanding of the film, as it is very clearly a film directed towards nationals. It referenced Nixon elections, names, government structures, and many more I only understood were references (but not what the reference was). Such surroundings thus gave me a small window to peep into the national context of the film and how it is really dealing with an America of today, something I would have only got a hint of in any other setting.
The ending;
[If you are still reading and still haven’t seen the film please, please watch it before reading this section]
The film’s narrative draws itself to a close on a high. Ron reveals his racial identity to the leader of the KKK over the phone that drew a roar of laughter from the audience, then we move towards an almost Blaxploitation-like close on sex but wait, a knock at the door. The characters surreally fly down the corridor without moving their bodies. They’re confronted by a burning cross surrounded by bowing KKK members, and then we cut. We cut to documentary footage. KKK rallies in Virginia contrasted against Black Lives Matter rallies (as cleverly edited as in the film) then we are thrown into footage of true terrorism—cars plowing through a group of equality protestors, and we can only assume it is driven by someone with far-right views we have been told to laugh at throughout the film. Brief interviews are followed by a still of a protestor who was killed in that very shot we saw moments before. I don’t recall any film which has reduced a rowdy crowd roaring with laughter to silence and tears as quickly as this. Undoubtedly a powerful ending, but is it one that was enriched by the national audience? One could argue either way; the filmmaking here was strong amplifying the emotion by the switch from laughter to tears as I outlined, reducing me (the outsider) to the same state. However even if the national context didn’t effect the understanding of this section it definitely intensified the urgency of the message, I felt the tears harking to the immediacy of the issue not only in Virginia (on the opposite side of the country) but of those very events last week and earlier in the year in this very city. So here it would be naïve to say the context didn’t intensify the message as a whole, firstly if I were not here I may barely know of the events in Portland, but more importantly if I were not here I may not have been surrounded by an absolutely silent theatre bar the intensely encompassing sound of crying. And because of this context the documented events on screen morphed from year-old footage into something truly contemporary, pressing and needing to be addressed today.
But here we reach an interesting question, if the documentary footage is the most affective, immediate and important part of the film is the film worthwhile as a whole? The answer is clearly yes, and this is where my earlier comment about the ‘distasteful’ black comedy being thrown around falls apart. The key lies in the switch. An audience is shown ‘it’s OK to laugh at this’, then we are presented with the real thing and it reminds us how wrong we were to laugh (but this is nothing new). The key difference here is that we switch from fiction to documentary, and as we said before we find it easy to laugh at fiction as we know these words are read from a script and not formulated with conviction in somebodies mind. Yet as soon as we see these are people who are formulating that opinion and living by such agendas we are shocked, and cannot stand it. But arguably even more importantly than this switch is the context we are in, after all we see footage like this almost daily in the news be it on TV or online. Here we aren’t allowed to change channels or scroll past when it gets too much, we much endure and watch the car plow down the protestors again and again. And such an image speaks for itself, provided you have seen it I need say no more on this point.
Ultimately the context in which I viewed Blackkklansmanhelped me to understand the society from which the film was produced—one that will openly laugh at replicated racism, go silent and cry at the real thing but ultimately one that will leave the theatre to say “that was powerful…do you want to grab something to eat?”
(Yes, I heard that exiting the theatre.)
Blackkklansman (2018)
3/3/1(TBC)
6/11
Final note:
The film’s low score reflects the mediocrity of its majority. However its ending is both extremely powerful, thought provoking and innovative which begs the question, can a good ending redeem a mediocre film?
Let us know what you think!
~Leo