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.
Once you have seen it
Watch the cross-cut between the Klan screening and Turner's account. (cutting)
The Klan cheers The Birth of a Nation in a living room while Harry Belafonte's Jerome Turner describes the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington. Barry Alexander Brown holds both long rather than cutting fast.
Payoff: Lee runs Griffith's own invention against Griffith's film, so the technique itself carries the argument. In the reading: organic/American montage (convergent parallel montage). Parallel montage, built by Griffith to make a heroic Klan, is turned back on itself here to carry the opposite claim.
Watch the picture quality change in the closing footage. (structure)
Warm 35mm period grain gives way to compressed smartphone and news video from Charlottesville in August 2017. Terence Blanchard's score stops and the ambient noise of the real recording takes over.
Payoff: The film drops its fiction and speaks directly, cancelling the resolution the period story had just finished offering you. In the reading: free-indirect-discourse (political). An author speaking through the material with no character left to hide behind is what the reading calls political free indirect discourse.
Listen for Ron's voice coming out of Flip's body. (sound)
One name, two men. The Klan hears one person and looks at another, and Lee keeps both in front of you at once. Nobody in those rooms ever catches the seam.
Payoff: Race is being performed across a gap between voice and body, and it holds because the listeners want to believe it.
Look at the film set in the opening scene. (staging)
Alec Baldwin's Beauregard spits Confederate rhetoric into a camera and flubs his takes. Lee shows racist imagery being manufactured before he shows anybody consuming it.
Payoff: The film announces at the start that its subject is the making of pictures, not only the beliefs behind them.
Carry this in: Listen to the voices. The whole con runs on which voice a person is willing to believe.