The reason why Boots Riley criticised Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman’
Due to the explosive nature of his work and the importance of the sociopolitical frameworks of his films, Spike Lee is often cited as one of the most important directors of his generation. For Boots Riley, the director of Sorry to Bother You, Spike Lee will always be the cinematic hero who inspired him to take up filmmaking. However, Lee’s 2018 crime comedy BlackKkKlansman didn’t impress Riley, who publicly criticised the movie.
Starring John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, the police officer who successfully infiltrated the hyper-racist organisational ranks of the Ku Klux Klan, BlacKkKlansman is an interesting examination of American structural racism. Although the film ended up garnering many prestigious accolades, including six Oscar nominations, Riley took to Twitter to criticise Lee for glorifying the police department and making a “cop a protagonist in the fight against racist oppression”.
In his lengthy statement about the historical inaccuracies and the dramatised fabrications, Riley claimed that Lee’s portrayal of the police in his film actually detracted from the efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement. He noted: “For Spike to come out with a movie where story points are fabricated in order to make Black cop and his counterparts look like allies in the fight against racism is really disappointing, to put it very mildly.”
When asked about it later on, Riley told The Guardian that he felt it was important to speak out against the film’s underlying message. He said: “I felt it was important. Spike Lee is a hero of mine, the person who compelled me to go to film school. But this film was putting out a certain idea of history in the time of Black Lives Matter and the rise of a new white supremacist movement, when the police are actually working with these white supremacist groups.”
As expected, this disagreement led to a public dispute between the two when they met at the Independent Spirit Awards. According to Riley, Lee actually shouted at him. The filmmaker recalled: “He [Lee] yelled at me as he walked away, saying, ‘I’m Miles Davis, you’re Chet Baker!'” While that’s just an objectively hilarious response from Lee, the two apparently resolved their differences later on, even though Lee maintained his stance.
During a conversation with The Times, Lee insisted that he was not against the police institution as a whole. He explained: “Look at my films: they’ve been very critical of the police, but on the other hand, I’m never going to say all police are corrupt, that all police hate people of colour. I’m not going to say that. I mean, we need police. Unfortunately, police, in a lot of instances, have not upheld the law; they have broken the law.”
