Spike Lee :: essays papers

auricle Lee In 1995 I considered Spike Lees gritty CLOCKERS one of the years best films recently I spotted its idiot box in a clearance bin and picked it up. Upon re-viewing, I am afflicted again by its complexity. It is the first urban drama to depict inner-city step on it relations with the intricacy such a pervasive cultural inconvenience demands. On the surface it resembles a whodunit, precisely its main concern is how drugs and emphasis contaminate entire communities, dramatized in the collapse of one African-American youths life. (He chokes up blood the way some of us sweat.) This process is observed by a predominantly white police force that makes hollow attempts to move order, and refuses to intervene with the communitys gradual decline. Instead of characters with overt prejudices and plain racial allegiances-characters that ar sterile symbols of bigotry rather than credible humans guilty of it-Lee gives us characters of casual racism. Most representative of this is Harvey Keitels Rocco Klein, a white detective who cannot learn the culture surrounding him, which is a culture of narcotics, violence, and black-on-black crime. On his beat, drugs are slight a problem than a lifestyle, murder resolves the tiniest of disagreements, and young mothers valiantly proficient now vainly battle the influence young dealers have 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 gruesome death with a clinical sense of detachment, cracking bad jokes and asking the bloodied corpse questions. Is it just a job, or is it racism?