Review of "BlacKKKlansman"

In current news, the Atlantic Monthly just gave Jordan Peterson -- who is for "the Bell Curve" -- the thumbs-up. If you want to know what giving room for regressive attitudes to grow is about, Spike Lee's film is exhibit A: stay focused on your opponents as idiots (the Black Panthers have the leader who is dangerous for being intrinsically persuasive; the Right only has -- with its best; its most advanced "prototype" -- someone who is only tactically not an idiot), so that you don't have to notice that you've become someone who if you witness one who is intelligent, encounter their poise and reasoning, you'll find yourself actually interested... to the psychic discombobulation that'll currently incur for you with that. With all the homophobia that the left is showing it increasing is obviously actually FOR, without -- via the displacement of their own anxieties over it, of homosexuality ostensibly about rendered offensively femininized, onto the characterization of the Trump-Putin relationship -- yet being forced to consciously reckon with this change in themselves, it seems more and more to me that we paint our opponents simple, ridiculous, stupid, not because they only are that, but because we can't trust ourselves, what's happening to our own selves, at the current moment to encounter them in any other form. Are we -- that is, the liberal intelligent -- as intrinsically non-homophobic as we were even a year ago? Are we as race-equality as we were a year ago? In my judgment, since Jordan Peterson takes us eventually entirely TO that, to IQ valuations of whole peoples, and here he is with not the National Review’s but the Atlantic's praise... do we dare now ourselves read Charles Murray, or Princeton's Alan Bloom, or Harvard's Christopher Lasch, or even the founder of homosexual-conversion movement, the renown, liberal, Harvard-educated, top-tier 1970s New York psychiatrist, Charles Socarides, people we would have been unflinched in encountering even a short while ago? What if we too are loosing faith and are finding ourselves seemingly in pre-1960s form, getting ready to battle, amongst our foes, the people who remain what we just were?

Some of the left were never only concerned about Trump; they knew there was something about as troubling emerging in parts of America that equally hated Trump -- amongst the Bernie Bros., for instance. So expressed Trump-hate/deep concern in a film wouldn't necessarily be a marker for them of a film that would spread good consciousness. They'd probably assume that a film that decries against discriminaton against Black Americans would be safe for that purpose, but I think they'd be wrong on that matter too. No regressive movement gains any momentum if it can be shut down via it seemingly transparently evil; and whereas in the 1930s a movement could be anti-Black Americans and not incur that, it couldn't be so now -- not REALLY popular; the kind of popular it would have to be to be of any powerful concern. Moreover, if what people want is to make American great again, to go back to some mythic America where it was ostensibly resolved into a best form, one that defined it and made it great, it strikes me now that the most popular sense of that amongst most already heavily regressed Americans and those currently regressing, would be of it as union of both the South and the North, of both Black and White -- the sense of it has changed so that it now includes Blacks, and SOME Latinos, actually, whom it will actually never quite forsake (there is a sense that Kanye is actually right) -- or at least in the manner we are expecting, however much much of the left prefers not to notice it. So more Abraham Lincoln-style, and not actually so much Founding Fathers. Currently, amongst the regressed, the Founding Fathers-conception would be held as great, but flawed; still at sin. Not absolutely perfect from the start -- the 1700s, were how many years ago? -- but on the right path, and could resolve to be great, perfect, once the very real racism crack in the mold had been recognized and worked on. The America they would want to see purged is that ostensibly changed out of that that, quote-unquote, liberals, in a spirit alien to the character of the nation, invited onto the nation in the 1960s, quite intentionally to dis-orient it, to ostensibly actually stop its focusing on the American Black and White fissure, the inner city problem, the prison problem, to work, not on solving a problem it knows it needs to attend to but instead on completely re-tooling and broadening its consciousness, its moving purpose, in more of a international sense, so to being again from scratch, and require, so to become re-orientated and forward-moving again, even if onto mal-form, their expertise and mastery, for it being intrinsically alien to everyone else.

More than we would guess, Spike Lee's film could theoretically be appreciated by people who will eventually support Trump, if there isn't something else in it they would find doesn't cooperate with their current spirit, is what I'm arguing. It wouldn't have been so, in my judgment, if the film had been about racism against people who have immigrated into America since the '60s -- the, quote-unquote, "Browns," who were ostensibly told as soon as they got here, by a liberal professional class that brought them in, that it was okay to hate the country that brought them in, and to adjust only to the mores the professional class were usuring in and not to those traditionally American, for they hated that America too, and were in fact using them as troopers in an effort to completely dismantle it. Many people who will vote for Trump will want films that show hatred of the KKK, that ridicule that David Dukes, for that, too, to them, is America gone awry. So whether or not Spike Lee's film helps or hinders our attempt to keep America as sane as it can be, depends on something different, something that can be hidden, might prefer to be hidden, in adopted ostensibly safely progressive sensibilities on racism.

What should we be looking for? A nation that is regressing is one that fears it has become “bad,” and so is in dire need of cultural products to help it along in justifying splitting off characteristics of themselves that would leave them with only with the good -- which is what the phenomena of racism fundamentally is about, by the by. Even though the plot involves a splitting of one person into two, even though it HIGHLIGHTS splitting as a phenomena, associated with accomplishing a significant purpose, this film still shouldn't be encouraging this particular form, as it makes fun of "Birth of a Nation" -- we see the footage of the grotesque stereotyping in the film -- for showing the Confederates as pure and "blacks" as abject horrors, but, to me, it yet does do so: the Americans it shows going to the Black Power meetings are young, intelligent, good-looking… prepared for a forthright encounter with the world that'll have to register them, their great, impressive power. They are BEST, absolutely fit, whereas the KKK-members are almost conspicuously "holders" of aspects of ourselves we couldn't have in us to feel pure -- sloth (Ivanhoe); stupidity (Ivanhoe); seathing, uncontrolled, paranoid anger (Felix); gullibility and weakness in command (Ryan).

Concerning splitting, we should not be looking out for the splitting off of aspects of ourselves, but as well that in key featured women, who'd represent in our consciousness "the mother," for regression means our purging ourselves of unwanted aspects... SO THAT we could imagine our mothers, our original homes, wanting to welcome us back again, and that mother, we’ll have to insist on seeing gets done, will only be allowed to know that we see them in the proudest of forms. Patrice isn’t literally a mother, nor is Felix’s wife, Connie, but they are the only women we affix sustained attention on in the film -- indeed, were there even others? -- and both carry properties we’d expect in such splitting: Patrice is a slim, fit, a righteous warrior, someone who vigilantly helps and protects us and who could lead us; Connie is obese, and introduced as someone prone to making unwanted invasions, as an enveloping threat -- we first focus on her as someone who invades an all-male Klan meeting… already precarious in its “seriousness” in taking place in a living room, assembled top-to-bottom, by mug-rat human beings. The “bad” mom at the end is sent out to murder the “good” one, thereby heightening our sense that these two should be compared to one-another, like the two adjacent panels of "us" vs "them," war-recruitment poster encourage us to do. The “bad” one is the one who ends up almost killed in her assassination attempt, and the man who was greatly agitated at her invasion into the living room, her husband, Felix, is the one who sent her out -- an act that is never not felt as emboldened by a not-quite-secure sense of control over her; as a murderous act of revenge. Felix gets to “carry” our own anger, our own desires to murder the “bad mother”; Ron Stallworth, our desire to protect the good one. That Felix dies is what we prefer to happen to “poison containers” who carry the most dreaded part of ourselves, which holding onto would make hopeless any attempt to redeemed as those who've returned to be good sons.

A regressing age is one that tends to imagine an actually quite-well, functioning society as somehow fallen, without meaning, and powerfully emasculating. Arguably, with the film not endorsing cop-hatred, this film should stand outside consideration as one giving substance to these illusions. But we can feel that the reason Stallworth doesn’t do a Mookie in a film and join up with a gang intent to bring violence upon the established order, doesn’t mean that the film shores up our ability to withstand being assessed as those who’ve become emasculated, even if we actually haven’t. We watch this film knowing there is no way we’d ever let ourselves be akin to Officer Clay Mulaney and Seargant Trapp, cops we participate in pretending to like and not-repudiate because we feel it co-operates with the mood THAT we like them for not being racists, who gain pleasure when their awareness of Black culture, their highlighting of certain Black figures for praise, actually ends up passing as a fine salute, by the formidable judge in this instant, Stallworth, currently literally raised in officer's rank. This is a minion’s pleasure, not one from self-command. Similarily, their spitting out there coffee and guffawing at Stallworth’s staged humiliations of the Klansmen, had me superimposing the image of Django Unchained’s black butler, Stephen, onto them, when he was in craven hospitable mode, laughing at all his master’s jokes, based not on their actually being funny but because it communicates a sense of mastery over him for his master to actually mostly appreciate and enjoy. If you can exist within the establishment, if society can co-operate with making you feel like that -- like a king enthroned -- the film argues, then there’s no need to go populist and tear things down, for you're no Mookie. But if it can’t -- and who actually is in a job where they can manifestly expect this sort of performance from others? who is in a job where it looks to everyone else that that’s what you have, that kind of ruler's/judge's power? -- it leaves... entirely open --certainly neither of the two protagonist heroes are like that -- in a way it wouldn’t of if for example it showed these two cops in the same manner as the most mundane of the “Spotlight” team was, in the way Matt Carroll was, in that movie -- that is, as someone of clear independent volition and validity.

And actually it doesn’t quite leave open that if you can seem a modern, identityless “drone” you shouldn’t change up to suit an ostensibly more masculine reformulation of yourself, for the Jewish cop, Flip Zimmerman, is shown rejecting the stance associated with an ostensibly souless culture, where one is not interested in one’s distinctive roots in any way deep enough that it could aggravate the particular place you hold in society, where one is mostly an interchangeable citizen, a bourgeois, for a discovery of why ostensibly his roots have always in fact mattered, why they have always defined him. What happens with this reinvigoration isn't explored, but we know it means he'll go at his tasks with more skin in the game -- he complained at first that there was nothing in it for him to take profound risks, risks that could get him killed, while doing his job -- rather than as he did before, which was the less personally involved manner normally expected for a civil society to endure, involving moderated risk-taking and, ostensibly, in some eyes, moderated life-rewards.