Not Coming to a Theater Near You
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
I’ve been meaning to write a post about Spike Lee’s two-part HBO doc on post-Katrina New Orleans for a long time, and thanks to inspiration from Tom’s post a few days ago and the two year anniversary of the Katrina disaster, I’m finally getting around to it now.
The film blew me away both times I saw it. I love how Lee’s movie is a broken levee of a documentary in and of itself, with all the talking heads and disparate points-of-view being almost too much to take over the film’s massive four hour running time. I also love that Spike Lee essentially made an anti-Michael Moore activist documentary. Don’t get me wrong, I like Moore’s films for the most part, but Moore is such an obnoxious and ubiquitous provocateur, other filmmakers need to directly react to Moore’s style of filmmaking and point out to viewers that “gittin’ interview subjects good” isn’t the only way to raise awareness. Instead, Lee allows his subjects’ anger rather than his own anger drive the film, and as a result you have a box of puzzle pieces that don’t come together a lot of time, with the overall message being that this is still one big f***ing mess of misunderstanding and conflict.
I also really like how Lee divided the documentary over the two nights when it originally aired, with parts 1 and 2 on the first night providing a general feel of pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans one year later, as well as recollections of what the pre-Katrina warnings, the actual Hurricane, and the immediate aftermath were like for residents in the eye of the storm. Night two (part 4 and especially part 3) focused on the idiosyncratic stories which came out of Katrina, from the medical doctor who twice told Dick Cheney to “go f**k himself” to his face, to Barbara Bush’s idiotic comments while touring the Superdome.
As my wife pointed out, this is also a rare movie in which Black figures from different classes, backgrounds, upbringings, outlooks, and genders are equally represented, and so there’s no need for the “token Black stereotype” anywhere in the film. In the same way that the Katrina/New Orleans situation is complicated through all that emerges over four hours, Blackness itself is complicated as not meaning just one thing or another.
Levees… is also a perfect bookend to Do the Right Thing, the film that put Spike Lee on the map as a hell-raiser in 1989. I’m not exactly sure how, but the movies are like mirror reflections of one another, with Do the Right Thing featuring subtle racial tension that builds beyond subtly throughout the film, ending with a series of outright disasters. When the Levees Broke begins where Do the Right Thing left off, with a race-based, avoidable disaster turning an isolated, idiosyncratic region (albeit the entirety of New Orleans and several areas beyond, versus a single neighborhood in Bed Stuy Brooklyn) into a reflection of much larger, American societal race tensions.
Finally, the brief but chilling section of Lee’s film, in which several residents of New Orleans swear that they heard explosions during the hurricane, is incredible. Combined with archival footage of levees being intentionally exploded (not from Katrina), and the historical fact that levees have been intentionally blown up during past New Orleans’ floods, possibly to relieve flood pressures from affluent neighbours while wiping out poorer neighbourhoods, is one of the most memorable segments of the entire doc, despite occurring very early in part 1.
by Jason Woloski | Source: DVD
02 Sep 2007 6:17 PM | Submit Comment
