BlacKkKlansman

Abstract

Though set in 1970s Colorado, Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman trains a lens on the broad sweep of American history. Its cinematic bookends span the film version of Gone with the Wind (1939) and footage of contemporary white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Birth of a Nation (1915), the film that sparked and styled the real-life reformation of the Ku Klux Klan (Kkk), features prominently as well, juxtaposed with Harry Belafonte's searing recounting of a Texas lynching the year after its release. Alec Baldwin's opening cameo as the fictional midcentury demagogue Kennebrew Beauregard incorporates a pastiche of racist tropes—“Jewish-controlled puppets on the Supreme Court,” “army of Commies,” “mongrels,” “super-predators”—that span generations of racist ideology. This broad arc provides a rich palette for Lee to present a much smaller tale writ large. As the opening credits inform audiences, this film is based on “some fo' real, fo' real sh∗t.” Source material, which serves more as a device here, comes from the black police officer Ron Stallworth's memoir of his 1978 infiltration of the Colorado Kkk, Black Klansman. Stallworth's unlikely ruse begins when, while on duty and seemingly on a whim, he answers a Kkk recruitment advertisement in the local newspaper. Posing on the phone as an interested prospective recruit who hates anyone who “doesn't have pure white Aryan blood running through their veins,” he piques the interest of a local Kkk officer. He subsequently infiltrates the group with the help of a white officer who poses as “Ron Stallworth” at a variety of in-person meetings while the real Stallworth continues his telephonic contact. The operation unfolds over six months, ending abruptly with a (thankfully unheeded) order from the police chief to destroy all evidence of its existence.