Spike Lee Is A Fucking Hack: Clockers

Subtle.

Spike Lee’s “Clockers” is an adaptation of author and “The Wire” collaborator Richard Price’s novel of the same name. I read “Clockers” around the age of 12 and it made a profound impression on me. For the first time I saw the street and drug trade represented as something more along the lines I recognized it as in my community. It’s a novel filled with interesting, intelligent characters dealing with difficult situations that suggest no easy answers. A long overdue, fair minded representation. The jacket of my worn old paper back is fashioned after bestselling Michael Crichton and Steven King works of page turning fantasy. The publisher seemingly saw “Clockers” as a genre piece, a “Whodunnit” beach read. They didn’t understand what they had. “Clockers” is a wonderfully accomplished work of modern fiction. It’s not without its genre conceits; misdirection, red herrings, miracles of circumstance and a few bad, out of character decisions by the two protagonists to propel the narrative but ultimately this novel lives between the lines. Behind the counter in chaotic fast food restaurants, in abandoned old hospitals overlooking the Statue of Liberty where junkies congregate while AIDS devours them, in shoddy project apartments where mythical teenage enforcers sleep on Star Wars mattresses, in regrets and misunderstandings between two cultures at odds but trying hard. Price took the skeleton of a crime novel and brought it to life. Spike Lee’s film manages to suck all the conflicted humanity out of Price’s story, leaving the lifeless, cliché-ridden, dangerously simplified dead end we’ve seen a million times before in its wake. Price isn’t blameless for the massacring of his work, he co-wrote the abortion of a treatment with Spike, but there is no doubt that Lee’s special brand of ambiguity eschewing, agenda pushing, rhetoric mongering is unleashed here in all its awful glory.

Ostensibly, “Clockers” is about a drug murder. Drug dealer Ronnie “Strike” Dunham is asked by his boss Rodney Little to murder a hustler higher up on the food chain for stealing from Rodney. The hustler, Darryl Adams is killed and shortly afterwards Ronnie’s brother Victor confesses to the murder complete with the gun he supposedly used to kill Adams. Rocco Klein, the homicide detective assigned to the case is convinced that Victor, a hard working family man is innocent and standing in for his dope dealing brother Ronald. At the conclusion we discover the killer was in fact Victor, fueled by drink and a dreary life of monotonous hopelessness. These are the plot essentials but what unfolds is an incredible novel full of sad and beautiful scenes, funny and touching moments. Price knows and loves his characters without being sentimental. They are studied and painstakingly realized. Most importantly, Price gives them room. They make mistakes, question choices, fill with doubt and self loathing. We’re along for the ride as they suffer tiny defeats and achieve small victories. It’s how he earns our investment in his characters, we see ourselves in the cops and criminals. It’s a shade of gray Spike Lee seems incapable of registering.

Considering the things Lee opts to include from the novel and exclude from his film are instructive in determining his intent. First and foremost is the setting itself. The hamlet of Dempsey New Jersey, vital for its small hood environment in proximity to the biggest city in the world is traded in for the Nelson Mandela houses in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn for absolutely no reason. Then there’s the issue of voice, particularly tragic because coming into “Clockers” Price was already an accomplished screen writer as well as an author renowned for his ear. There are missteps here and there throughout the novel but in general the conversation is wonderfully naturalistic. The film on the other hand opens with a conversation no one would ever have between the kids on the benches arguing the merits of Chuck D’s politicized rap (=good) versus violent gangsta rap (=bad). To quote a young Sticky Fingaz: “How this nigga gonna say Chuck D the hardest rapper? The nigga ain’t never shot nobody!” And it goes downhill from there.

The character who finds himself most often in error of judgment throughout Price’s novel is the homicide detective, Rocco Klein. His crusade to replace Victor with Strike is the catalyst for much of the novel’s action between the murder and the conclusion. We’ve seen the misguided detective figure before in Robert Altman’s “Long Kiss Goodbye”. Altman tweaked a Raymond Chandler novel to present Phillip Marlowe as an anachronism. In his desire to heed to a moral code, to believe in things and trust people he is adrift in a mad, amoral world. His faulty assumptions are a device meant to relate his purity, his hopeful naivety. We follow Rocco scheming and strategizing for how to go about nailing Strike because he clings to his belief that Victor, the decent working man, could never be capable of such a vicious and senseless act. That act could only be attributed to Victor’s Kane, a low, drug dealing shit bag. The sum of Rocco’s experience, his “20 years on the job” his “guts” tell him Strike has to be the culprit, because if Victor could be driven to murder than Klein’s logic and reason no longer apply to his reality. He believes Victor is innocent and misguided, unaware that his ploy to save his guilty brother will fail. In the film this pursuit of the truth is reduced to an offense of sensibilities. Keitel’s Klein is enraged that these common “yos” would have the gall to insult his intelligence by trying to pull one over on him. Klein is suddenly racially insensitive for no reason while in the novel he chastises other cops for insensitivity and berates himself for letting an epitaph slide in a heated interrogation. Harvey Keitel is generally unbearable here. Condescending, filled with hate, petty and vindictive (presumably by direction in his defense). I’ve never disliked a character I was supposed to like (or again to be fair, grudgingly respect) so intensely. Price’s Klein is a flawed character but ultimately genuine.

But it’s Strike that receives the worst abuse at Lee’s hands. In the novel he’s clearly the star, a truly unique character I would go so far as to say we’ve never seen before in literature. He’s a conflicted, joyless old soul. A considerate but still somewhat weak and often misguided drug dealer with a crippling stutter and a perforated ulcer who sees his life as a series of walls closing in on him. In the film, Strike is a stripped of his stutter and a fascination with trains is clumsily tacked on as an afterthought, intended as a stand in for his humanity. He’s at once without the warmth and the hard edge that provokes the reader to invest in Price’s protagonist. Mekhi Phifer, miserable in his professional debut, is a hapless, ignorant villain stumbling lifelessly through the film and motivated by nothing but personal interest. In the book, Price doesn’t shy from drawing parallels between the brothers, upstanding Victor and troubled Strike in mannerism, mentality, even in appearance. Both Victor and Strike approach their respective hustles with a quiet dignity, discipline and sense of purpose. Both are deeply troubled and doing their best to rise above the encroaching barbarism of others. To me, the entire point of the novel is the thin lines that separate the working man from the criminal in desperate positions. This applies to Victor and Strike as well as Rocco. Predictably, these overlaps are scrubbed from the film. Isaiah Washington’s Victor is dull and without pathos, particularly awful is one of the story’s all important scenes in which Strike and Victor discuss the impending murder. In the novel it’s full of nuance and layers of subtlety, while in the film it’s completely mishandled by the ham fisted actors and apparently misread by Lee. But that’s splitting hairs. You could literally go through this movie scene by scene and tear it apart should you be inclined.

The film is littered with what had been compelling peripheral characters rendered singular personalities totally and completely inert from start to finish. Errol Barnes is a faded, ghostly specter spookily hovering over and around the action in the novel. In the film, Spike Lee tries to prop him up sympathetically as everyone who’s ever shot horse or caught the monster. In what has to be the worst scene in the movie, a truly difficult distinction to win, Strike randomly comes across Barnes who runs his pockets and without provocation delivers his tragic life story over an acoustic rendition of “Crazy” by Seal. (!) Tyrone Jeter, Strike’s young protégé, is detached and impossible to read throughout the novel, in the film not so much. He’s an every youth: loud, mindless and lost in an absurd virtual reality game called “Gangsta”. This is the perfect example of how destructive Spike’s meddling is to the story. Towards the conclusion as Barnes hunts Strike for Rodney, Tyrone kills Barnes for reasons Strike is both directly tied to and powerless to control. Barnes’ murder is one of the more enigmatic moments of the book. Here it’s insultingly linked to a child unable to differentiate between video games and reality alongside contrived jibberish spouted by Spike Lee (a.k.a. Harvey Keitel staring DIRECTLY INTO THE CAMERA).

“Clockers” plays like a series of non-sequiturs, bereft of the slightest attempt to transition from scene to scene. The entire enterprise feels botched and rushed. Lee uses Price’s plot as a Mapquest print-out, turning, stopping and going at all the appropriate landmarks without being able or willing to consider the story’s value lies in its journey. What’s sad is Lee’s technical skill is evident. He employs some interesting camera work, visually engaging sets and film shuttling between grainy and vibrant. In “Inside Man” (as well as his riveting but still horrifically manipulated documentaries) he showed how competent he can be with someone else’s script. He sabotages himself in his own material with his need to say everything explicitly, to offer a definitive final statement on whatever topic he’s set his sights on. In addition, this particular content is only obscured by his loud artistic vision, but Lee has never exhibited the restraint or awareness to recognize this quality in any of his subjects and scale back appropriately. “The Wire” for instance, takes pains to remove all concept of a hand shaping narrative, it strives for documentary style and you can argue Price’s novel attempts the same level of unobstructed honesty (Though he is guilty of the occasional rhapsodic moment). Here the score is schmaltzy and often laugh inducing for its painful obviousness. Colors are bright and eye catching (See: the persistent neon green) but only contribute to the surreal crack sermon Spike is writing in all caps.

People in search of a life - Marc Dorsey

The novel suffers from a final act full of unnecessary fireworks and theme hammering. Predictably, where the novel falters, the film bombs. By the time we reach the busy climax Spike only has room for events, which accumulate with little to no context and barely matter because he hasn’t spent the time explaining his characters. We lose the continuity between the actions of Tyrone and Victor, the pretext for Rodney’s issues with Strike coming to a head, the personal frustrations motivating Klein down a reckless, destructive path. While Strike provides closure, opening up to Klein at the novel’s conclusion the film ends on a soap opera-ish miraculous entrance by the boys’ mother who willingly spills the beans. There is no moment of rapport between Strike and Klein. This illustrates the film’s conscious removal of the congenial relationship between cops and crooks which is so vital to the novel. The viewer gets the impression that drawing the distinction between upstanding citizens and dope dealing parasites is important to Lee. Strike is universally received with animosity from every member of the community (except for Tyrone, the impressionable youth on whom he preys), his mother included, an indictment absent from the novel that goes against the actual story.

Spike Lee’s “Clockers” is a procedural without the patience for details. A Baldwinian race play that insults its source material as well as its subject. It contains a quality present in every movie Lee ever made, including his most famous: “Do The Right Thing”. In that film, and my other favorite “Bamboozled”, pretenses are dropped completely. The characters are basically stripped of their human qualities and blatantly stand-in as symbols, mouth pieces for their author. When trying to realistically tackle a subject as large and vital as this one, it should come as no surprise that he fails spectacularly. A reader may conclude this screed is a longwinded way to claim “The book is better than the movie”, but it goes beyond that. I concede that obvious pragmatic decisions have to be made in adapting book to film, but this film could have been great and Lee’s sins here are consistent with a pattern that he established early on in his career and continues to haunt his work. “Sucker Free City”, a made for Showtime film from 2004 returned to the street and gang violence, somehow unique for including Chinese immigrants in the conversation. San Francisco is in dire need of a race and class minded indictment but this paint by the numbers retread wasn’t it, and it was wrong for all the same reasons. Spike has always been quick to call racism whenever he feels his community is being insulted or misrepresented on film. Ironically, his insult is the greatest, refusing to respect his audience’s ability to take anything from his films that isn’t explicitly stated. With his rare position of power and influence within the industry he contents himself making whiny, self righteous pieces of shit people stopped caring about a long time ago. Ultimately, this weakness sabotages his art and his message.