Pop Culture Corner: Art Imitates Life
In case you haven’t noticed, police brutality is having a moment in film right now. People tend to make movies that reflect the times we live in, and this is a perfect example.
I noticed it when I sat in the theater waiting for Spike Lee’s BlackkKlansman to begin, when the trailer for The Hate U Give was immediately followed by the trailer for Monsters and Men. These three movies, alongside Blindspotting and 2017’s Detroit, tackle the subject of police brutality-- albeit in different ways. (Mild spoilers ahead!)
While police violence is not the main focus of BlackkKlansman, it does feature prominently. John David Washington fantastically plays Ron Stallworth, the Colorado Springs Police Department’s first black cop, who as a result of his position is made to grapple with his identity in the black community and as a police officer. The movie also highlights the often-casual racism present in the police department that until then had been either tolerated or swept aside.
There is a scene in the movie where the perpetrator of most of that bigotry pulls over and harasses a car full of unarmed black college students following a rally led by a leader of the Black Panther party.
Police brutality does not begin and end in the past five years; it has been around much longer, as this movie and Detroit go to show.
Detroit focuses on the brutal execution of three unarmed young black men at the hands of the Detroit Police Department during the Detroit Riots of 1967.
Blindspotting, The Hate U Give, and Monsters and Men (where Washington plays another conflicted cop) all deal with the fallout surrounding different police shootings.
While these are certainly not the first movies to touch on the systemic prejudice that black Americans face from police officers, they are the result of a country that is still struggling to deal with its consequences.
And based on the way things are going, they will certainly not be the last.
