Spike Lee set France ablaze with a firestorm of controversy at this year’s Cannes film festival by criticizing the lack of Black characters in Clint Eastwood’s two critically-acclaimed World War II films, Flags of our Fathers and Notes from Iwo Jima. Lee was at Cannes to promote his upcoming film, Miracle at St. Anna, which focuses on an African-American division that fought in Italy during the war.
“Many veterans, African-Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood,” Lee said. “In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version.”
Eastwood was also at Cannes promoting a new motion picture, “Changeling,” a drama starring Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich. After hearing about Lee’s critical comments, Eastwood reportedly told him to just “shut his face,” which didn’t sit well with Lee, who responded by calling Eastwood “an angry old man” and reminding “Dirty Harry” that the two of them aren’t “on a plantation” in the antebellum South (with all the obvious racial implications).
“There’s not one black in either film,” Lee reiterated. “And because I know my history, that’s why I made that observation.”
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about motion pictures lately, and I do think that this seemingly frivolous spat between millionaire filmmakers is telling. Eastwood feels like he has depicted two important stories in American history that just so happened not to entail any substantive African-American involvement. That’s the history, he says. Not racism. Lee sees two canonical and award-winning filmic representations of a watershed moment in American history, and voices anger at the fact that Hollywood conveniently tells a version of things that doesn’t include a more diverse group of American fighters.
This is a quintessential example of our collective impasse vis-a-vis racial politics in contemporary America. The sides are starkly drawn. Both sets of heels are deeply dug in. It is the perfect example of what our “conversations about race” tend to look like. But what manner of dialogue is it when nobody can concede any portion of the other side’s point? Why talk this kind of talk at all? Could there possibly be any upside?
