Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch BlacKkKlansman
2018 · Spike Lee · BlacKkKlansman on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen to Ron's voice change when he phones the Klan. (sound)
John David Washington switches register with no visible effort. He keeps his own manner in the squad room, puts on another one for the call, and drops it the moment he hangs up.
Payoff: He is not uncovering something the Klan is hiding. He is manufacturing a man they will agree to believe in. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). A character who becomes credible by counterfeiting rather than by uncovering is what the reading calls a forger.
Look at where the Klan meetings actually take place. (staging)
Living rooms, kitchens, a potluck table, a backyard. Lee stages them in the grammar of suburban American normalcy and refuses to make these men look strange or foreign.
Payoff: Nothing on screen lets you file them as exotic, so you have to place them inside ordinary American life.
Watch how differently the station and the BSU rooms are lit. (light)
Chayse Irvin gives the police department hard institutional fluorescents and gives the Black Student Union warmth and depth on 35mm. Kwame Ture's speech holds the listening faces as long as the speaker.
Payoff: The lighting sorts the film's two worlds before the script argues about them, so you feel the difference in the room.
Watch Ron and Patrice glide without seeming to walk. (camera)
Lee's floating tracking shot carries them at the BSU meeting, a device he has used since Do the Right Thing. The ordinary procedural physics of the rest of the film stops applying to them.
Payoff: The shot lifts the scene out of the surrounding world, so you can see exactly where the film puts its feeling.
Watch Adam Driver's face while Flip is being tested. (performance)
Driver plays a man who had stopped counting himself as vulnerable. Under the Klan's antisemitism he keeps working the cover while something shifts underneath, and he never announces the shift.
Payoff: The role turns an abstraction into a threat in the room, and Driver keeps the whole change internal.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Listen to the voices. The whole con runs on which voice a person is willing to believe.