Pros: Intensity, mystery, drama, realism, and a variety of smart and well-meaning characters drawn into conflict.
Cons: Weak first 12 minutes. Lots of swearing.
The Bottom Line: Brilliant, sympathetic, and educational, but not the dull "educational" that tells you what to think: it's the interesting kind that asks you, listens, responds, then asks again.
Spike Lee is not known for being subtle or understated. He should be, however. To the degree that his rep is his fault, I blame the openings to his movies: Clockers, which will rank high if I ever make a Favorite Movies list, would rank even higher with the first 12 minutes re-done. It starts by meandering its way through a credits sequence where, under dull soul music, we read a bunch of condemning news headlines about children and guns. “I’m betting this movie might have something to do with children and guns”, I predicted to Cindy, who refused to bet the other side.
The first scene of the movie ain’t much either, even if you can hear it over Public Enemy’s classic “She Watch Channel Zero”. Cindy recommends using the DVD's Closed Captioning for the Accent Impaired, but you'd only read a teenage debate over "hard" versus "positive" rappers. Chuck D is a sissy positive thinker, apparently - did "Burn, Hollywood, Burn" give it away, I wonder, or was it "Welcome to the Terrordome"? It’s a feeble discussion. It is also the only scene in the entire movie that I found even slightly simple-minded or dull.
Clockers’s biggest strength, to me, is the intelligence with which its story – a drama with mystery and thriller elements – enacts the dilemmas of inner-city life and respects all perspectives. The most admirable male in Clockers may have murdered someone he didn’t know, early in the movie, based on a rumor that his brother, also admirable, may have invented. Or perhaps the most admirable is a trash-talking white policeman who coaches his “yos” and “Nubians” into inventing testimony; or you could nominate the head of the local drug ring, or maybe the 12-year-old gangsta-in-training. The most despicable character, Errol, is a well-known psychopath, far more murderous than the drug trade’s business truly calls for; but it’s he who gives Ronnie the most powerful anti-drug speechlet of the movie.
People in Clockers are complicated, not because of some vague artistic notion that movie characters should be complicated, but because the inner cities today are complicated places to live. Clockers is a movie about trying to live right, when the right choices are neither clear nor easy. If it seems like melodrama, you should read more non-fiction (Stephen O’Connor’s Will My Name Be Shouted Out? makes a great starting point). Or do a teaching practicum in the inner city someday: Rodney the drug-ring chief reminds me intensely of my practicum supervisor Mr. Clemons, and I mean that as praise. You can even read the statistics, and think about what they mean: yes, every black in an inner-city classroom really does have a family member who’s been to jail, though maybe only a cousin. Everyone does know who can get them drugs.
Clockers has the moral imagination to give us this simple task – to root for the people trying to be good – and to show us how frustrating it is.
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Ronnie Dunham (Mekhi Pfifer), a.k.a. “Strike”, is the movie's center. He’s a “clocker”, or drug dealer (I don't know the term’s origin, though it might refer to how a dealer often meets a customer at an extremely precise time). He hangs out with other clockers, and while many of them seem as group-thinkingly destructive and amoral as Arthur Andersen accountants, Ronnie has his own values to nurture. They play basketball; he plays with model trains. They drink liquor; he drinks milk, a symbol of that which “does a body good”, and keeps drinking it even though his mild lactose intolerance is starting to give him ulcers. Yet he isn’t the good son: that’s his brother Vic’s role, and he’s on distant terms with Vic. When a murder happens, it’s the content of Ronnie’s life that makes him a suspect, and it’s his self-image that makes him automatically lie to the police.
Victor Dunham shouldn’t be a murderer. He works two jobs and he’s never late, struggling to save enough money to move his children – whom he hardly ever sees (“Have you ever been so tired that you hate the sound of your own children’s crying?”) – out of the projects. Isaiah Washington plays him as dignified, principled, and so upright that no one ponders how exhausted it must make him to be angelic all the time. We suspect that he _is_ the killer. Indeed, he confesses right away, although he’s either lying about being the killer or lying when he claims self-defense.
Our justice system assumes that the crimes you commit are all we need to know about you: that if you murder a stranger, what you did with the other 167.8 hours in your week is irrelevant. Clockers makes that damning assumption hard to swallow – although of course, for the victim, those 167.8 other hours are already down the drain.
Which doesn’t, generally, worry the police. We first see the police patting down Ronnie and his friends for drugs, stripping them to see if they’re carrying anything under their ball sacs. Cops re-appear repeatedly, a constant menace: in a country where illegal drug use is a statistical constant across all races and classes (a repeated poll finding that I certainly believe from the people I’ve known), this is how black people are convicted of drug offenses at ten times white rates. An occasional cop might give notice that a narco raid is coming down from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.: “You look out for me, and I look out for you”, he says to Ronnie, who says “Allright”. “No no, you look out for me, and I look out for me”, the cop repeats, and Ronnie sizes him up and says “You look like about $500”. But the usual corruption is more hostile.
The jokes, meanwhile, take no sides. When Darryl Adams’s dead body is found, we hear everything from “This must be his golfing jacket, cuz it has 18 holes” to (on discovering a head exit wound) “The kid had brains!”.
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Harvey Keitel plays Detective Rocco Klein, who doesn’t look like an exception. Keitel is amazing: his Klein wears a hard-edged take-no-guff swagger he surely learned from a childhood of cop shows, he tosses racial epiphets, and when he calls it like he sees it, he calls a lot more black people “scum” than I do when I’m calling what _I_ see. Yet he, unlike the other cops, really doesn’t like a system where a Vic Dunham can be tossed in jail.
He divides the world into Good People and Bad People, and sees it as his job to arrest the Bad and save the Good. One response he gets to this during Clockers is “Jeez! You don’t believe a black person when he says he’s innocent, and when he says he’s guilty you still don’t believe him!”. Another, though – as accurate, and more profound – is “How come you care?”.
Mind you, the danger rate really is high for the white cops, who have every reason not to enjoy clocker company. Black cop Andre, who periodically reminds his “niigger”-yelling cops “I’m in the room here too”, is a native of these streets, and has known Ronnie and the gang as long as they’ve lived: he’s disappointed with ‘em too, and tries to give moral guidance. If moral guidance involves passing up an arrest so that Ronnie can be blackmailed into donating for Andre’s charity, hey, it’s a real charity. Deals are the American way.
My practicum supervisor Mr. Clemons, who made less money teaching than through real-estate, agrees about deals. As a teacher, he urged his students to learn hard and get ahead, to become skilled enough to trade their work for a good life. So does Rodney Little, played by Delroy Lindo with exactly Mr. Clemons’s mix of Jesse Jackson charisma and intense, grey-bearded, pragmatic solidity. Mr. Clemons teaches history; Rodney teaches math, and marketing, and motivation. He doesn’t want his drug-selling charges being “zero niiggers”, who spend all their money and have zero money at days’ end: “How many pairs of shoes do you own?”, he asks a young recruit, followed by “How many feet do you have?”. He doesn’t like being stuck: “You love trains, but all you’ve ever ridden is the subway!”, he exclaims to Ronnie.
Rodney doesn’t smoke crack, and doesn’t let his charges smoke crack: if you start buying it, you don’t easily stop. But he knows why: smoking crack feels gooood. “I’m never going out of business”, he promises, “because I have the best damn product in the world”.
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He sells a destructive product; sure, fine, how rare is that? You may celebrate the glory of free speech in a hundred articles: but when 12-year-old Tyrone, grade-A student, sits at the front door rapping along to a typical gangsta warrior brag, Spike Lee doesn’t _need_ to editorialize. The chill is just those words, and enthusiasm, coming out of Tyrone’s mouth.
Lee lets us see snippets of black television. For all that the Onion had the NAACP suing for less minority representation on UPN programming (which was funny, and which Boondocks’s black cartoonist clearly agrees with), MTV was broadcasting worse. He lets us watch the first-person Nintendo game Gangsta from the shooter’s-eye view: it doesn’t look so much different from Tomb Raider in concept, except that you’ve just seen the city streets that so resemble Gangsta.
We act as if entertainment is just entertainment, even though we can see, all around us, the evidence of old “the night belongs to Michelob” campaigns, of Friends’s wardrobe designers, of SUV ads that created from nothing the best-selling variety of automobile. We live to find our chosen crowd of people and fit with them, then we pretend that those poor folks, off in the ghetto somewhere, can easily be brave individualists.
Of _course_ it’s easy to study hard and work hard and immerse yourself in an alien grammar, we say, even if everyone around you is mocking you for it. Just like it’s easy for a middle-class white person to advocate Nazism or Communism or pedophilia, or to paint his house purple and turn its lawn into a lemur farm, or to speak Ebonics and dress like a pimp on the job. No one’s gonna beat the crap out of you, and if they do, maybe they won’t tomorrow, and if they do, you’re doing the right thing, which you know because those white cops patting you down for drugs would think so (if they weren’t busy pre-judging you by your skin color). It’s that easy.
And practically? Yes, in practical terms, Victor doesn’t need two jobs: I’m sure he could make a down payment on a house in Nebraska right now. Ronnie could hop a train, a real train, to Poughkeepsie, and see if any of Vassar’s cafes need a busboy. But no one else is doing it, so realistically, neither will they.
Clockers is a tale of young men dreaming American dreams as best they know how. It has a death count. It has extreme violations of police procedure. It has a smart and enraged mother of a 12-year-old, and her dedicated, helpless charisma. What it doesn’t have is judgments. More accurately, it has dozens of judgments, all sensible, many of them in complete contradiction. From a white director, ain’t nobody would doubt how impressive that is.
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