Clockers

    365 Films

Entry #68

Clockers (1995)

Directed by Spike Lee

One of my favorite “Fuck Yeah, Spike” moments comes from the Do The Right Thing Criterion DVD extras  Some obnoxious stooge masquerading as a journalist asks Mr. Lee why he chose not to portray the rampant crack epidemic that “obviously” would have ravaged the Bed-Stuy neighborhood from his film.  He answers the question with a question, (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Did you ask the people who made Working Girl why there is no cocaine in their film?”  A critic (I think it was Glenn Kenny’s review of 25^th Hour) once wrote that if Spike Lee ever made a “perfect” film then it wouldn’t be worth watching.  There is a line of reasoning in that assessment that is less apologizing for Lee’s frequent indulgences and more asking us to give Mr. Lee the respect of at least trying to figure out why he makes a particular choice in his films.  In my opinion, he deserves that at least.  This is the thought that buzzed through my mind as I was re-watching Clockers, his 1995 adaptation of the Richard Price novel.  I vividly remember seeing this in the theaters when I was eleven but the only characteristic that lodged in my mind was the murder-mystery-police procedural aspect of it.  What I had clearly forgotten was what a great hang out movie Spike Lee had concocted.  I’m not sure of the exact definition of a hang out movie but to my mind, it best describes a piece where the pleasure of enjoying a group of people sitting around and shooting the shit is worth the price of admission alone.  I don’t mean to simplify my description of Clockers as some sort of light hearted romp, the film has plenty of grim observations on its mind, but there is a gentle humanity running through the way Lee and Price depict the ordinary lives of their characters.  Mekhi Phifer’s Strike for instance is perhaps the only drug dealer in movie history most aptly described as a distant relative of Charlie Brown.  In fact, most of the film’s humor comes from the dismayed and “good grief” type reactions splashed across Strike’s face as his various conflicts begin to pile on top of one another.  There are few other filmmakers working right now and back then who would have made such a bold choice with a character who could have very easily slipped into the void of hackneyed cliché.  This is also one of the very few Spike Lee movies (and nothing against those that practice this particular technique), where the film does not stop dead in its tracks for a character to deliver a politically charged soliloquy that sounds like an Op-Ed piece written by Mr. Lee.  Like his best films, the critiques on the prejudices and horrifying institutional indifference of this country towards young Black men are told more from an observant point of view.  Strike is definitely the victim of his circumstances but in a lot of ways he’s also the perpetrator.  His anguished pleas for “Mommy” at the end of the film when he gets the beat down that had been promised to him since the very beginning are at once pathetic and subtly moving.  Lee has always been fascinated by the way people operate within and without their particular ancestral groups, and there isn’t a city on this planet where this happens with more urgency and velocity than in New York.  Yet so often these portraits are saddled with simplified descriptive terms that reduce them bullet points through which people may argue their own opinions with Mr. Lee.  Clockers is a deeply rich and full bodied retort to the blatant cynicism on display from the homicide detectives when handling one of the many corpses that comes across their path.  Mr. Lee asks us to look past the flat chalk outline and see the genuine human being it once was.