American Refugees

23 August 2006



Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” is Documentary Genius

Spike Lee is one of the film world’s more interesting directors. As a film-maker, he finds ways to place cameras and move them around to enhance the scene being played. He doesn’t shy away from race relations in a nation still plagued by the legacy of slavery. And now, with “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” he proves he can make documentaries as well as anyone else in the business.

The film premiered on HBO, for two hours on Monday and another two last night. And a four-hour documentary in one sitting is not something the American public can handle. Nonetheless, one gets the feeling that all at once would have been far more emotionally worthwhile. A major American city was lost last year – unlike the World Trade Center murders in Manhattan, which left a city functioning but damaged.

However, were that the whole story, the film could have been finished within 120-minutes. A storm comes, a city takes a beating, lights up, good-night. What Mr. Lee captured after that was the failure of America’s “leaders.” Volunteer Marisha Williams, from Seattle, said on camera, “You can’t rely on your government,” and sadly, she was right. Yet, what is the point of a res publica in that case? Unlike a great many, this journal believes the city is dead, like Troy, Carthage, and Tenochtitlan. Some urban thing will arise nearby, and may even take the name, but New Orleans died in 2005.

Mr. Lee doesn’t seem to agree, but he does clearly think that the disaster of New Orleans was a man-made mess. He told HBO in a promotional interview, “What many people say in this film is that what happened in New Orleans is unprecedented. Never before in the history of the United States has the federal government turned its back on its own citizens in the manner that they did, with the slow response to people who needed help.”

Interestingly, the British Sunday Times ran a piece on September 4, 2005, called “When the levees broke, the waters rose and Bush’s credibility sank with New Orleans.” In part it read, “The seeming inability of the federal or city authorities to act swiftly or effectively to rescue survivors or maintain order posed fundamental questions about the competence of the Bush administration and local authorities. One begins to wonder: almost four years after 9/11, are evacuation plans for cities this haphazard? Five days after a hurricane, there were still barely any troops imposing order in a huge city in America. How on earth did this happen? And what will come of it?” It is too late to save New Orleans, but it is not too late to discuss what the death of that city means to the American polity. Mr. Lee’s contribution is to keep alive the indignation and shame every patriotic American felt a year ago.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.


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