When the Levees Broke



Probably the greatest sin of Spike Lee's masterful documentary is too often mistaking provocation for enlightenment. Kanye West's seemingly bold proclamation that "George Bush doesn't care about black people" may well be a daring political statement, especially considering it was delivered in a typically bland "we care about you" bullshitathon from Hollywood, but it collapses under the weight of the importance assigned to it. The fact is it merely repeats the same personalization of racial inequality that manages to obscure the real institutional, social, economic, and cultural factors that really contribute to the problem. It may even be true that George Bush doesn't care about black people, but that wouldn't tell us much about why or how Katrina (and the real issue: the desperate poverty in New Orleans) really happened. With these sorts of spokesmen, and the demagogic use to which they put the rage that they whip up at ineffectual targets, we're merely left celebrating the acquittal of O.J. Simpson as if it struck a blow for racial equality.

With that issue put aside, what's remarkable about the film in political terms is how little it resorts to the tactics described above. In one memorable section, Lee entertains and then debunks a conspiracy theory, only to provide a historical context that only raises the question yet again. The suggestion, it seems to me, is not so much the endorsement of "George Bush doesn't care about black people" or the theory that the government blew up the dam to protect the rich white neighborhoods of New Orleans, but instead the discouraging fact that these feelings still linger, that our past sins tend to revisit us. The seemingly wild conspiracy theories don't seem so wild (though still far-fetched) when we are forced to face our past transgressions. Suspicion is the lingering weight of the sin that we carry in this country.

Beyond all this, the film is most remarkable as a work of art, an ode to New Orleans, the South, Music, and African American culture. It's also a eulogy for the Utopian aspirations of that city, and a document to the legacy of Reconstruction in the South. It's a sad testament to meaningless mass death, made more ignoble by the anonymity of poverty. So many bodies left unattended, face down in the water. An army of nameless dead.

It's an angry film. It's a "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" for our time. A sermon which posits Hurricane Katrina not as cleansing baptismal waters but as a deluge come to wash away the false veneers we maintain about our culture. Fittingly, Lee seems to see Katrina as a critical moment for us to examine ourselves and see that the sins in the past of this country will not wash away so easily. No, it will take work.