Clockers
With Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, Delroy Lindo, Mekhi Phifer.
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There’s no dialogue in the opening sequence, but rather a montage of music and movement so fluidly choreographed, so seamlessly cut, it recalls silent cinema. We see a drug deal in which the characters communicate from a distance, using a vast network of runners and lookouts; we’re in its midst, yet to get any closer might imperil our anonymity. Lee utilizes a grab bag of cinematic techniques and musical styles to reinvigorate the gangster movie: interrogation scenes are shot with silvery overhead lighting, blanketing figures like gossamer; flashbacks have the cheap gaudiness of a brutal exploitation movie; some daylight scenes look like they were filmed during a solar eclipse; characters appear frozen in surreal environments through the simultaneous tracking and zooming effect Hitchcock used in Vertigo; television commercials are blown up to fill the entire screen, emphasizing their garish stupidity; and video games prefigure actual events. Clockers is part romantic noir, part blaxploitation, part documentary, and part cultural critique.
Like Scorsese’s GoodFellas, Clockers gives us a privileged look at a world most of us don’t know. Unlike GoodFellas, Clockers is the film of a didact (Rosa Parks’s name even pops up during a beating!). In GoodFellas, the concept of morality has vanished, and the film ends with Ray Liotta bemoaning the fact that he can no longer hang with killers–he’s just a poor, powerless schmuck like the rest of humanity. By contrast, Spike Lee has always been moralistic, and most of his films play like R-rated Afterschool Specials. Even the critically acclaimed Malcolm X was as heavy-handed and mediocre as Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi: watching it makes you feel like you’re on a seventh-grade field trip. But in Clockers Lee wittily subverts his own pedantic conventions by making nearly every character a preacher or teacher. Rodney’s drug-addicted assassin Errol warns Strike about the evils of heroin and tells a fatherless boy, “I’m your daddy now. Your mama know you’re out here?” A crack dealer tells a pregnant woman, “You gotta maintain that. This is the last I’m sellin’ ’cause I gotta protect that little ‘fro.” Strike tells a young protege, “I catch you playin’ hooky, I’ll bust a cap in yo ass.” He’s actually wielding a pistol as he delivers this admonition. Then Strike asks him a math question. “Martin wants to cut his half-pound of heroin to make 20 percent more profit. How many ounces of cut will he need?” (That question, remarkably similar to the one in the movie, is actually from a test administered in a Chicago Public School last year.) Rodney, a father figure and mentor to the neighborhood children, cuts hair and dispenses advice. In one exchange Rodney has the youngsters sit in a circle and extend their hands in solidarity. “What you all see?” he asks. “Black,” they answer. “Well,” says Rodney, “you’re supposed to be seein’ green.”
