(BlacKkKlansman, Legendary Entertainment 2018)

One of the more pertinent questions of social science is what constitutes the relation between structure and agency. Its pertinence is reflected in the fact that this relationship, placed at the center of a social theory, can account for how social change occurs within society. Agency denotes the ability of a person to make decisions and choices within a social setting. Structure, for our purposes, denotes an institution like a school or a church, within which there are relations constituted in accordance to the function of an institution (to teach, to educate, to serve and protect, etc).

Spike Lee’s new film BlacKkKlansman touches on many relevant aspects of race and radicalism, focusing on an investigation of a local Colorado chapter of the Ku Klux Klan by a black undercover detective in the 1970s. What I found most interesting was the way the film presented a theory of social change, where the investigation of various social movements flowers into an (abortive) investigation of a social institution, namely the Police Department itself. Constituted on multiple levels of structuration, the intersection of allegiances held by its various characters towards different social roles, as individuals (detectives, klansman, radicals), members of social movements (Black Liberation, White Power) and social institutions (the Police), eventually drives social change within an assorted social formation. Examining this intersection can reveal the interesting questions posed by the film in relation to combating racism, as well as the potential limitations of its tacit theory.

To not give too much away about the film, BlacKkKlansman follows Ron Stallworth, a Colorado Springs police clerk-turned-detective who brazenly commits an investigation of an upstart Ku Klux Klan chapter. Therein, the film focuses on the efforts of the department’s first black detective and the various layers of the investigation as it proceeds up the ladder of the Ku Klux Klan with the aide of a Jewish American detective, Phillip Zimmerman, who has to stand-in as Ron at Klan meetings and events.

The film is a testament to Spike Lee’s knowledge of both the history of racism and the history of filmmaking. The film’s narrative is overdetermined by an entire library of the discourse on race in America on which it draws its themes. Callbacks to the role of film in perpetuating a culture of racism (Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind), the historic relationship between the African American and the Jewish communities in American pop culture (the inverted relationship of the buddy detectives), as well as the role of women in radical movements on both the Left and the Right; all are given time on screen and constitute elements of its character’s social interactions. Some themes the film touches on better than others, but that it finds time to incorporate all of them within its narrative structure without being dragged down by yet another didactic vision which would moralize its thematic narrative in order to tie it all together in a neat little bow at the end is a feat of filmmaking in and of itself.

The first layer of the film’s narrative structure is constituted on the relationship between individuals and social movements/institutions. Ron Stallworth’s investigation of the Ku Klux Klan begins after with his brief involvement in investigating the Colorado College offshoots of the Black Liberation movement, led by a Black student union. As such, the film depicts black power and white power as two parallel social movements. In committing the investigation, Ron proves his own allegiance to the policing institution he has become a member of (packed as it is with its assorted ‘ride together, die together’ motifs). Yet the social movements at the center of the film also define the agency of its members. To take two examples, the leader of the Black Student Union Patrice and the wife of arch-racist Felix Kendrickson Connie are both eager to fulfill their obligations to their respective movements. Connie can’t wait to please her husband’s penchant for racial violence, while Patricia can’t allow herself to be in a committed relationship to ‘pig’ Ron Stallworth without undermining the very truth she holds dear as part of the Black Liberation movement (pigs are repressors). Their agency is defined by the limitations of their roles, having to sustain these movements as legitimate (and their place within it as legitimizing) without compromising the effectiveness of the movements in achieving their goals.

It is important to note that the social movements in the film, which are not quite groups of individuals and not quite legally enforced institutions in the formal sense, act almost as sites of mediation between the two. This role of mediating presents its own broader limitations, most of which the film does not explore further. The leader of the Ku Klux Klan’s David Duke, who rose as a ‘cleaned up’ spokesperson of the Klan in order to appeal to the predominant white “silent majority” (note the Nixon poster in Ku Klux Klan initiation scene) of the 1960s and 1970s, with his message of racial segregation in the name of White Christian American, also has to deal with the underbelly of its members proclivity towards violence. He proclaims a non-violent organization, and it’s local chapters are brimming with men and woman whose ultimate goal is either to incite or to withstand a race war they saw (and see) as inevitable. While it is outside the bounds of this article to examine how these movements try (and many times fail) to act as sites of mediation that can unify people’s interests within a single organizing principle, the film nevertheless presents this dislocation for further consideration.

Once we ascend to the next layer of the film’s narrative structure, from the relationship of individuals and social movements to the relationship between movements and institutions, the film’s complexity grows to compose a silent theory of social change. The police investigation evolves as a result of infiltrating social movements “from within”, by playing the racists, by shooting guns together with the explicit purpose of training for a race war, by entertaining the racist discourse in order for the racists to speak themselves into a confrontation with the authorities. Similarly, the film parallels (although in an unsatisfactory fashion) the discourse of Black Liberation as involving its own narratives and ideas of combating not so much racism, but the problem of race and how to “arm yourself” accordingly in order to overcome it. As a result of the investigation, the Colorado Springs Police department eventually places an arrest on one of its own police officers, a serial racial profiler Andy Landers. As movements are investigated from within, so institutions are changed from within. Thus, Ron Stallworth’s investigation creates the incentive for the policing institution to police itself, to de-normalize racial profiling and its power to abuse innocents. This theory of social change aims to show how the relationship between movements and institutions ultimately causes contradictions to be revealed within their respective policies, thereby facilitating social change to occur and reverberate from within.

I praise a film for attempting to show a theory of social change, whether implicitly or explicitly, as opposed to many other films which shy away from presenting any such social complexity in order to leave space for moralizing or some message on the perseverance of the individual in the face of obstacles. As such, this film already attempts to do more than the average. Nevertheless, the film leaves certain things ambiguous to the detriment of it’s thematic approach. The police department’s investigation into the Ku Klux Klan ends almost as quickly as it begins, and the files on it are ordered to be burned. The institution wants to erase it from its memory and wants its impact to grow no wider and go no further. What does the main character do? He is allowed a game: call David Duke himself and show him how much of a fool his accented theory of racial hierarchy is, by revealing Ron Stallworth’s true identity as a black man. This did not convert me. The objective truth of the policing institution as a repressive state apparatus is ignored and the subjective truth of Ron Stallworth’s role as a police officer within it is compensated with playtime with the enemy. What is given to us as credit for his (and our) good intentions leaves a theoretical absence in its wake. Therein is the two-fold truth of his labor; what we see as the sociological viewer is obscured even to us by the space an officer is provided to “say what we really meant all this time to the racists”.

The thing is, who would make the process of institutional change a constant occurrence on a national level? Ron’s individual capacity to influence his department is already limited, and not everyone is a Ron Stallworth. Asking everyone to “do their part” is naive and unrealistic because their part is of a contradictory multiplicity: women, men, citizens, voters, policeman, black, white etc. So in essence, the film doesn’t moralize, but if you focus on social structure, it’s best to paint in grey rather than black and white. I’m reminded of one of the lost treasures of modern cinema which depicts the cost of social change, Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s 1971 masterpiece The Working Class Goes To Heaven.

Set in the context of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’ in which mass strikes and Leftist terrorism became a part of daily life, it is undoubtedly the soberest film about what Marx called “the gap between mental and manual labor”. Lulu, having lost a finger during a day working at a stamping plant, gradually loses his sanity in trying to take the class struggle into the factory. An obsessive and stressed worker who scolded others for not being eager enough to eat shit from the bosses and work, the injury makes him exploitable to those same unionized workers he scolded, who seek to insight reform to their benefit in alliance with ineffectual students. Student unions, trade unions, managerial authorities; all mediate their respective members into unsatisfactory dead-ends of accommodation and defeat at the hands of political necessity.

The frantic floating cinematography, combatant dialogue, and fantastic acting all work together to reflect on how the class struggle affords no guarantee of success. The inability of an individual is highlighted and the necessity for broader mass action becomes unavoidable. Yet there too, the very real political ambiguity of the 1970s relates to the one painted by the BlacKkKlansman. Just as no one has the best way of fighting class oppression, so too can no one lay a claim to the best way of fighting racial oppression. But the fight continues and cinema can play a role in showing us how that fight changes, with each finger and each person that is lost to it.