Spike Lee :: essays papers

Spike Lee In 1995 I considered Spike Lees gritty CLOCKERS matchless of the years best films recently I spotted its video in a clearance bin and picked it up. Upon re-viewing, I am struck again by its complexity. It is the first urban bid to depict inner-city race relations with the intricacy such a pervasive cultural issue demands. On the surface it resembles a whodunit, but its main(prenominal) concern is how drugs and violence contaminate entire communities, dramatized in the collapse of one African-American youths life. (He chokes up blood the way some of us sweat.) This touch on is observed by a predominantly discolor police fierceness that makes hollow attempts to keep order, and refuses to intervene with the communitys gradual decline. Instead of characters with overt prejudices and stripped racial allegiances-characters that be sterile symbols of bigotry rather than credible populace guilty of it-Lee gives us characters of casual racism. Most representative o f this is Harvey Keitels Rocco Klein, a white detective who cannot understand the culture surrounding him, which is a culture of narcotics, violence, and black-on-black crime. On his beat, drugs are less a problem than a lifestyle, murder resolves the tiniest of disagreements, and unfledged mothers valiantly but vainly battle the influence young dealers befuddle on their sons. Klein views the inner-city with contempt, but deep down he knows all the whores and dealers are human beings, too. Klein is introduced at the scene of a homicide, where the police handle the dour death with a clinical sense of detachment, cracking bad jokes and enquire the bloodied corpse questions. Is it just a job, or is it racism?