{"id":10087,"date":"2018-08-23T14:50:21","date_gmt":"2018-08-23T18:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=10087"},"modified":"2019-05-10T19:54:50","modified_gmt":"2019-05-11T02:54:50","slug":"spike-and-quentin-feud-but-their-movies-overlap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/spike-and-quentin-feud-but-their-movies-overlap\/","title":{"rendered":"Spike and Quentin Feud, But Their Movies Overlap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sorry to Bother You<\/em>\u00a0writer-director Boots Riley recently took to social media<\/span><\/a> to criticize Spike Lee\u2019s new movie\u00a0BlacKkKlansman<\/em> \u2014 based on the true story of a black Colorado Springs police detective\u2019s undercover infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s \u2014 for what he perceived as the film\u2019s pro-police message and altering of the historical record. Putting aside for the moment the validity of Riley\u2019s complaints, it is fitting that iconoclast-turned-icon Lee should find himself being challenged by a filmmaker he helped inspire, considering his own history of publicly calling out his fellow directors.<\/p>\n

Lee has made headlines for his spats with Clint Eastwood (over the lack of black representation in his war dramas) and Tyler Perry (for what he called the \u201ccoonery and buffoonery\u201d in his films). In both cases\u00a0<\/span>he provoked<\/span><\/a> angry personal responses<\/span>, with Eastwood telling him to \u201cshut his face,\u201d and Perry saying he \u201ccan go straight to hell.\u201d (Perry and Lee subsequently buried the hatchet.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, when it comes to Lee\u2019s history of public feuding, nothing compares to his most well-known beef: The war of words he\u2019s exchanged with Quentin Tarantino for 20 years now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like many rivals (Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton; Jean-Luc Godard and Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut),\u00a0 Tarantino and Lee started out as mutual admirers, possibly even friends, as evidenced by Lee\u2019s casting of Tarantino in a cameo role for his 1996 drama\u00a0Girl 6<\/i>. Things changed less than two years later, when Lee took umbrage with the use of the N-word throughout Tarantino\u2019s script for\u00a0Jackie Brown<\/i>, saying<\/span><\/a>, \u201cQuentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want, to be made an honorary black man?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tarantino responded by asserting his artistic license to write whatever characters and dialog he feels his story demands, accusing Lee of being the racist for attempting to deny him that privilege based on his skin color. Samuel L. Jackson, a regular collaborator of both men at that point, took Tarantino\u2019s side in the argument, saying<\/a> of\u00a0Jackie Brown,<\/i>\u00a0\u201cThis is a good film. And Spike hasn\u2019t made one of those in a few years.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This issue came to the fore again when Lee accused Tarantino of exploiting the trauma of slavery with his 2012 Western\u00a0Django Unchained<\/i>. (Django<\/i>\u00a0co-star Jackson, who was working with Lee for the first time since 1998 when he made the comments, once again took Tarantino\u2019s side.) Tarantino didn\u2019t respond at the time, but when asked three years later while promoting\u00a0The Hateful Eight<\/i>\u00a0if he\u2019d ever consider working with Lee again,\u00a0he answered<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0\u201cNever! I have two more films to direct and I will not spend any of them working with that son of a bitch.\u00a0He\u00a0would be very happy the day I accept to work with him. But it will not happen.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This entire feud could be easily dismissed as the petty squabbling of two fiercely opinionated egoists (Tarantino has never shied away from\u00a0publicly criticizing<\/span><\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0work of his peers<\/span><\/a>, while Lee\u2019s confrontational nature\u00a0<\/span>is not limited<\/span><\/a> to the silver screen)<\/span><\/a><\/span>, but for the irony that, as storytellers, they are on the same page.<\/span><\/p>\n

Loath as either man would probably be to admit it,\u00a0BlacKkKlansman<\/i><\/strong>\u00a0would make a hell of a double feature with any of Tarantino\u2019s last three films, but especially his 2009 World War II revenge drama,\u00a0Inglourious Basterds<\/i><\/strong>.\u00a0Beyond the surface-level similarities of their creatively spelled titles and their plots \u2014 both are period pieces centered on the infiltration of white nationalist organizations (German Nazis and the American Klan) by members of the races they oppose (including, in each case, Jews) \u2014 they are also both feature-length essays on the history of cinema.<\/span><\/p>\n

Basterds<\/i> sets much of its action around the premiere of the latest propaganda film from Joseph Goebbels. Throughout the course of the story, Tarantino finds several ingenious ways to look at the role of movies as propaganda during war-time, all leading to the apocalyptic finale, in which film is literally used as a weapon. We cheer the wanton slaughter of the Third Reich, only moments after having seen them cheer other slaughters. Tarantino isn\u2019t trying to make us feel guilty over our bloodlust, nor is he attempting to elicit sympathy for the Nazis being massacred. He\u2019s forcing us to recognize the universally transformative power of film, one that is no less powerful when wielded for malevolent purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n

BlacKkKlansman<\/i>\u00a0focuses much of its attention on the part American movies have played shaping anti-black hatred and internalized racism throughout the 20th century. The examples it calls upon are numerous \u2014 from the\u00a0Tarzan<\/i>\u00a0serials of the 1920s, to the preeminent epic of Hollywood\u2019s Golden Age,\u00a0Gone with the Wind<\/i>, to the more complicated case of \u201870s Blaxploitation staples such as\u00a0Shaft<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Super Fly <\/i>\u2014 but there is one film in particular it seeks to interrogate: D.W. Griffith\u2019s groundbreaking\u00a0The Birth of a Nation<\/i>\u00a0(1915).<\/span><\/p>\n

Griffith\u2019s film is, from a technical standpoint, the most important ever made. It ushered in the era of\u00a0feature-length films and displayed a level of artistic sophistication not previously associated with the medium. It was the first blockbuster and, by way of its depiction of masked avengers delivering extrajudicial justice unto evil-doers, arguably the first superhero movie. Of course, in Griffith\u2019s narrative, those evildoers are black Americans living in the Reconstruction-era South, and the masked avengers are the KKK.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In one of its major set pieces,\u00a0BlacKkKlansman<\/i>\u00a0hits pause on its story-in-progress to have an aged civil rights activist (played by real-life civil rights icon Harry Belafonte) deliver a disturbing lecture to an assembly of young demonstrators about the time he witnessed a white mob, newly inspired by\u00a0Birth<\/i>, lynch a black man. Lee cuts between this harrowing first-person account to the film being screened for an audience of active Klan members, all of them hooting and hollering like the Nazis during the climax of\u00a0Inglourious Basterds<\/i>\u00a0(in both cases, members of the audience will shortly meet their grisly ends in fiery explosions). The scene concludes with Belafonte quoting President Woodrow Wilson\u2019s stunned (probably apocryphal<\/span><\/a>) summation of Griffith\u2019s epic: \u201clike writing history with lightning.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Whereas at the end of\u00a0Inglourious Basterds<\/i>\u00a0Tarantino completely changes the factual record and hurls us headlong into alternate reality, Lee uses the final moments of\u00a0BlacKkKlansman<\/i>\u00a0to drag us back to our present-day reality. But while the thematic motivation behind each may seem at cross purposes, the intent is the same: Both filmmakers break the fourth wall to present us with their own corrective to the historical record.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the start, the filmographies of Tarantino and Lee have been chock-full of cinematic homage and reference (and even outright theft), and neither\u00a0Inglourious Basterds<\/i>\u00a0nor\u00a0BlacKkKlansman<\/i>\u00a0are their only treaties on the subject of movies. But with these films, each man is able to express the full weight of his reverence for cinema, a reverence that includes fear of the medium\u2019s destructive potential as much as love of its transcendent qualities.<\/span><\/p>\n

It really is too bad that Lee and Tarantino can\u2019t get over their shared animus. Imagine what cinematic insights they might be able to discover if they worked together. Imagine what kind of history they could write by calling upon their combined store of lightning.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sorry to Bother You\u00a0writer-director Boots Riley recently took to social media to criticize Spike Lee\u2019s new movie\u00a0BlacKkKlansman \u2014 based on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":10088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1400],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-on-the-marquee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}