Over at Bill Simmons' Grantland magazine's web site, a fascinating review of Luke Greenfield's ill-timed comedy Let's Be Cops by Wesley Morris, one that doesn't say much about the film itself -- probably a wise thing, given how awful it appears to be -- but does an impressive job of looking at the discourse of law and order and race around which the film attempts to deliver its slapstick humor.
It's not especially easy to have a comedy out there about fake cops when there is so much uproar in this country about real ones.
Morris hits many of the current spots, notably of course the shooting death by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri and its aftermath. (Some of the violence that has taken place in Ferguson since Brown's death has occurred since Morris's review was first posted.) Other recent incidents of black men being shot by police are also mentioned. But Morris also goes back to the 2009 arrest of noted Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates to point out that once again, our first Black president has had to deliver a statement on race relations in America.
The Gates incident goes to the heart of the matter, as Morris knows, that America still sees blackness as a threat. As George Zimmerman shows us, such a matter is not just about cops. (Frankly, the practice of policing, the choices made as to where to bust, help bring out the racially charged incidents more so that the individual racist cop, though it's easy enough to find the latter, like Justin Volpe, who shoved a broom handle into the rectum of Hatian immigrant Abner Louima while Louima was in police custody.) It's about the easy equation pigmentally challenged Americans make about men of color and their presence in public spaces.
I find it interesting to read Morris's essay as it moves from the realm of the fictional to the realm of the real. In a way, it makes perfect sense in our postmodern world, where a jury in L.A. could accept the argument that Rodney King beat himself up rather than draw the obvious conclusion from the infamous videotape that the cops used excessive force to restrain him. I'm surprised Morris didn't mention the ill timing of The Watch, which was supposed to be titled Neighborhood Watch, but in the wake of Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon Martin, the filmmakers had to change the title to avoid the negative connotation. (It didn't help.)
Morris does go back, however, 25 years, to Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee's most important fiction film, focusing as he does on the death of Radio Raheem, which leads to a riot in Bed-Stuy. The film was eerily prophetic in its expression of racial tension and violence that led to numerous incidents like the shooting death of Yusef Hawkins in an Italian American neighborhood in Brooklyn just weeks after Lee's film premiered. (I wish he'd mentioned the fact that Radio Raheem's big rings marked "LOVE" and "HATE" were Lee's homage to the Charles Laughton-directed, James Agee-scripted classic The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum as the deranged preacher who has those words tattooed across the knuckles of his hands.)
In writing a review of a fiction film about idiots who decide to pretend to be cops, Morris shifts back and forth, almost like a Chinese puzzle box, to reveal layers of the real beneath the fantastic. The disturbing thing is that the more things change, the more they stay the same: a black man's life is of great significance, but only as it must be defined by those who hold the real power: politicians and pundits even above law enforcement. Once again, the Black man is merely a cipher on which white Americans write what they want, on all sides of the political spectrum.
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