Lee film ready to show biased, simpleton Katrina picture

One of my special interests is politics in the cinema, having taught a course on it for nearly 15 years and publishing in the area. One of the films covered in the class is Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989) which displays both Lee’s skill as a filmmaker and his dishonesty in doing so. Early indications are we can expect the same from his film about Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans, “When the Levees Broke.”

I didn’t get invited to see its premiere (imagine that), but New Orleans Times-Picayune television critic David Walker saw it prior to that and, while he avers that he will leave analyzing the politics of the films to others, he can’t avoid pointing out some himself, for Lee is a relentlessly political filmmaker who makes his opinion clear, to varying degrees of subtlety, regardless of whether the facts support his views. This has marked his entire film career.

“Do the Right Thing” was Lee’s first excursion into politics, The film recounts events, loosely based on some real-life occurrences, of a day leading to a race riot in an imaginary neighborhood in Brooklyn, a work Lee expressly made to try to influence the 1989 New York City mayor’s election to oust Ed Koch and put David Dinkins, the city’s first black in the office. Whether by his film, that’s what happened, leading the city into a decline requiring the rescue of Rudy Giuliani.

In this film, Lee shows some nuance in illustrating the events leading up to some residents of a black neighborhood destroying the only restaurant willing to operate there, owned by a guy of Italian descent. The grievances that mount on both sides appear legitimate even as they place emotion ahead of reason. But just because he shows both sides doesn’t mean he doesn’t present one as the legitimate one – the riot was understandable because, he argues, the non-white community was tired of being subjugated and had a right to “defend” itself against its oppressors.

He does a great artistic job but, in the end, it is a fraud. Lee wants to make audiences think he is dispassionately presenting the arguments of which the superior validity lies with “black self-defense” side. Instead, the film is rigged with biased, if not absolutely false information, about the larger issue of race relations in America. There are numerous examples in the film, but to name perhaps the most notorious of them, at one point graffiti is shown proclaiming “Tawana told the truth.” Presented as such, without context or further explication, signals that Lee considers this to be unimpeachable.

The phrase refers to the sensational charges made by a young black woman, Tawana Brawley, who a couple of years earlier claimed she was kidnapped and abused by white law enforcement men. Professional activists like Al Sharpton (who appears in this latest film) immediately took her side and used the claim as evidence of continued white suppression of blacks. But it quickly came out that Brawley had manufactured the entire story to escape parental discipline from being out too late. Even after that, Sharpton and others continued to insist that “Tawana told the truth” (and were successfully sued for defamation as a result). Lee knew she had lied when he made the film.

For this reason, we can expect nothing less from Lee with this film; specifically, Lee will try to throw more blame on white and/or conservative America than on the storm itself. His lineup of commentators interviewed in the film shows no hint of any balance to what Lee calls a “documentary:” Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Harry Belafonte, Sean Penn, and Kanye West among others, all vocal critics of Pres. George W. Bush and the Republican majority in America, if not of Bush’s response to the aftermath of the storm. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin seems the best he’s willing to do to provide any mediocre balance to this biased presentation.

Lee, of course, is an avowed hater of Bush and even more of Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice (clips framed unflatteringly of both of them appear in the film) and who has not repudiated the ridiculous, absolutely unsubstantiated myth that the levees in New Orleans were not intentionally breached to wreak havoc on blacks. Perhaps the imagery of tragedy will be moving, but any value it has gets cancelled by its simplistic, sophomoric screed. This is why we cannot expect an honest look at the tragedy from this waste of celluloid – especially from an activist who has the audacity to claim he presents things honestly.