Why the best “timely” art is often anything but

The final moments of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, one of my favorite movies of the year, manage a trick few other pieces of pop culture have been able to pull off since November 2016. They’re about President Donald Trump, but they’re also not about President Donald Trump. They show you not just the immediate, but the big picture, everything that led to the man in the Oval Office.

Before those final moments, the movie has already been a didactic sermon from the never-subtle Lee, pointing with red, neon arrows at all of the ways America’s racist past informed and predicted America’s racist present. It’s all a bit much, too much for some critics (including Vox’s own Alissa Wilkinson).

But I’ve always been a sucker for Lee’s combination of audacious filmmaking, rambunctious storytelling, and occasional descents into cinematically adventurous PowerPoint presentations. (I’m one of a handful of people who honestly count Bamboozled, his raucous 2000 meditation on the history of blackface in American pop culture, as among my favorites of his films.) So I loved BlacKkKlansman pretty much the whole way through, all the while knowing that for many other directors, I’d be frustrated with the film’s inability to let the audience put two and two together for itself.

The film narrowly escapes this fate by allowing its message to exist in a messy middle ground somewhere between the “well, look how enlightened we are now!” audience flattery of too many period pieces dealing with American race relations of the past, and the “have things gotten worse?” horror of this present moment.

But what I especially love is how the movie refuses to offer up any pat or easy answers. Its main character — a black cop who goes undercover in the Ku Klux Klan — isn’t allowed to escape the tension between being a black man and being part of an organization that has historically been a major part of oppression of black men, not even in the final scene where those two sides of his identity are almost literally stacked against each other.

And Lee doesn’t offer his audience an easy out, either, with a sequence cross-cutting between Klan members watching D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation (a movie that had seismic impact when it comes to how films are made — but was also almost unfathomably racist) and an old man (played by Harry Belafonte) telling a group of black students about the horrors of racial violence he lived through when he was young.

This sequence — which marinates in how difficult it is to make any movie that doesn’t end up inadvertently glorifying its subject, and in how much well-meaning white Americans want to escape the country’s racist past, and in how impossible it is to do just that — is almost better than the movie that contains it, more of a free-floating essay than a storytelling mechanism. But it also points forward to that final sequence, when the movie interrupts whatever tiny moments of peace its characters achieve with real footage shot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when Heather Heyer was killed and the president praised “very fine people” on both sides of the conflict.

So why does BlacKkKlansman’s final scene work, when so much of the pop culture that tries to talk about America right now fails? The answer lies partly in Lee’s mastery of his craft, yes, but also in how effectively the movie decouples you from thinking about America right now in anything but the abstract.

It is a movie about what America has always been that sidles its way into being a movie about what America is right now, and that canny shuffle makes all the difference.

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman was conceived of, written, and made in a world where Donald Trump was president. It is, on some level, as much a response to this particular moment in history as, say, Steven Spielberg’s The Post, another movie that was pilloried in some corners for being too obvious in its anti-Trump messaging.

But the book Black Klansman (which the movie is based on) was published in 2014. The events it depicts took place in the ’70s. (The film is only loosely based on the true story, though it keeps the broad strokes.) Similarly, the script for The Post was written before the 2016 election, to capture a particular moment in the life of Washington Post publisher Kay Graham, not to comment on the freedom of the press directly.

And it’s easy enough to point to numerous other examples of film and TV projects that are constantly pointed to as “timely” but have their roots in other eras. The Handmaid’s Tale TV series was largely dreamed up before Trump became president (though its second season was made in the Trump era), and it is, after all, based on a novel from the 1980s.

The wildly funny Sorry to Bother You has been read as a commentary on Trump-era capitalism, but writer-director Boots Riley has pointed out that he wrote the script in the Obama era. And plenty of TV comedies that take on social issues are often described as being “about the Trump era,” when they’re often about larger problems that existed long before the current presidency and will exist long after.

This is not to say that art responding to a specific moment in history can’t be potent or even necessary. It just rarely has much of a shelf life beyond that moment. I’ve been watching a lot of Murphy Brown, the CBS sitcom that ran from 1988 to 1998, in preparation for the show’s revival this fall, and the episodes, many of which felt bracing in their era, now feel slightly baffling, with their references to long-forgotten political figures and squabbles. The cast is generally full of capable performers, but any given episode feels like it could ultimately descend into “Dan Quayle!” used as an all-purpose punchline for everything.

Does that make Murphy a bad TV show? No. It just makes it one that’s not particularly timeless. It’s explicitly commenting on an era that we’ve left behind, primarily of interest to researchers and others who want to see how pop culture commented on the late ’80s and most of the ’90s. But it also means that somebody who’s not watching the series for research purposes probably isn’t going to get much out of it.

This is the great danger of praising a work of art for being “timely”: You’re left wondering if the only quality that boosts it is the way in which it talks about the current moment. And in an age when lots and lots of people seem to view Trump not just as a bad president but as an abhorrent aberration of the American ideal, there are a lot of viewers who are primarily interested in a work of art if it depicts What Is Bad About Trump, even if it’s not particularly successful at doing anything other than that.

And certainly there are plenty of pieces of pop culture that really should exist only to poke at the foibles of the Trump era. I’m not sure that The Good Fight, the terrific CBS All Access spinoff of The Good Wife, will have any real long-lasting footprint beyond the Trump era, but there’s something immensely satisfying about watching how its characters, rich and privileged all, feel terrified by the way the world has spun off-kilter, made them feel uncomfortable for one of the few times in their lives. Somewhere inside of it is a wickedly funny social realism.

But I often find myself asking, “Did I like that? Or did I like what it was trying to say?” And too often, when I answer this question, I feel a little pandered to, like a movie or TV show is trying to slide something by me by not forgetting to hashtag all of its Resistances. To me, art is best when it uses some small slice of one story to pull back a curtain and reveal how that story is indicative of something much, much larger going on elsewhere.

Or, put another way, something like BlacKkKlansman or The Handmaid’s Tale or Sorry to Bother You or even maybe The Good Fight works because it uses “timely” elements to point out how these stories are always timely. The US has always been a white supremacist nation. Patriarchal structures have always been waiting to grind women down into dust. Capitalism has always tried to kill its workers (both literally and spiritually). Rich, comfortable people are always terrified at the prospect of sudden adversity.

Trump is an aberration in some ways, but he’s representative of something deeply embedded in this country and in too many others. The best artistic responses to him keep him in their peripheral vision, but always make sure to check their rear-view mirrors before keeping both eyes on the road.