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“Mean old Levee taught me to weep and moan.” – old Blues song.
If you want to get on the emotional inside of the experience of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – and hence to feel the depth of America’s racial and economic segregation – then you would do well to watch Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke. The focus of the four-hour documentary is the personal experience of dozens of people from the Gulf Coast, mainly blacks in New Orleans. It is not factual or dispassionate, and you will not understand the technical problems, hydrology, meteorology, government, or culture of New Orleans better as a result of watching the movie. But you will understand the emotions of the city better. Hence you will hear blacks talking about how the levees were intentionally blown, and whites saying that the people in the Superdome were “not niggers but animals.” Countless times you have to watch people cry, or describe the deaths of people nearest them, or see with your own eyes the horrible, impersonal deaths that potentially await people in this country who, as a natural result of a corrupt “meritocracy”, no one cares about: bloated bodies floating for days in the muck, half-eaten by fish and dogs.
There are problems, as you might imagine with a Spike Lee film. It’s not clear why Al Sharpton and Harry Belafonte need to get so much time – Belafonte’s plug for Hugo Chavez and the footage of Chavez with Belafonte and Danny Glover seem especially irrelevant. Spike Lee’s treatment of Sean Penn, who gets a lot of interview time, is justifiable (celebrity is a part of American culture and New Orleans culture, and Penn used his to achieve things others could not) but unctuous. The documentary is four hours long and not organized at all – neither by chronology nor by themes – and the last two hours are extremely repetitive. (My recommendation is to watch the first two hours or “acts.”) Nor is there a real message to the movie, beyond the emotive outpouring of grief and anger. This is significant in itself, as the answer to the question “What then must we do?” concerning America’s problems continues to elude us.
And the Hurricane’s major value is that it exposed the preexistent problems and held up a mirror to American society. For so long everyone acknowledged that New Orleans was a strange and horrible city, but its magic and mystery served as ample justification for letting it continue as it was. But Katrina changed that. Situations which seemed acceptable no longer felt that way to people. Interestingly, whereas New Orleans had for years ranked as the happiest city in America – the largest percentage of people “very satisfied” with their lives – it now ranks among the very worst. There is an openness to change there, and Spike Lee has documented part of it.
The movie is also deepened by composer Terrence Blanchard’s excellent score, which now for me serves as a kind of soundtrack for the truly unfathomable mystery of suffering. The movie is worth watching just to hear Blanchard’s atmospheric and somber melodies.
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