The Klansman is an uncomfortable viewing experience. From the outset it is clear that director Young intends to take to task the Christian authority with which such racism is so easily propagated yet despite his obvious relish at exposing such hypocrisy he seems almost indifferent to craftsmanship. As a result, the film does indeed explore many of the underlying issues of racial oppression but talks about them in clumsy dialogue and dramatizes them only in the manner of pandering exploitation. This balance of highly-charged politically discursive dialogue and gleeful violence is finally similar to, though more explicit than, the Billy Jack films then popular. Yet it is a film of reaction, obsessed with how white men in the South attempt to deal with the social, cultural and racial changes of the Civil Rights movement. It appropriates the violent conventions and politics of blaxploitation but is forever drawn to contextualize this within a “white” frame of reference. The finale becomes a symbolic battle between the more progressive South (Burton, Marvin and his son) and the old, bad South (the Klan) for the right to determine the future of race relations. Despite the efforts of black activists and militants (the lone gunman Simpson) it is essentially a matter of white responsibility to determine the black revolution: the film is torn about this as when the responsible Marvin finally cannot kill Simpson, Marvin himself must die for this choice.
Although Young is intent to reveal the pettiness of racial resentment he also suggests an underlying socio-economic rationale to the ways in which Southern society benefits from the continued oppression and scapegoating of the black man. The perpetrators of racial violence are ignorant, semi-literate oafs wholly ingrained with the sense of their innate racial superiority as their only means of empowerment. Their hatred is thus easily manipulated and goaded into awful action out of the perceived threat to their precarious sense of “power” in their social order. That this oppression is accompanied by Christian sanction is the greatest irony. Yet Young is so full of contempt for these people that he neglects to dramatize their social reality beyond dialogue inferences and token scenes and they remain barely characterized morons. His attention instead rests on those in positions of social leadership, particularly Marvin as the man with a responsibility to the values of the community that elected him but with a greater ethical awareness of social justice and human rights. Responsibility is the issue here. Young holds those in intermediary positions of petty power (Mitchell) as the most dangerous and that their violence is inherently a means of keeping a social underclass in their presumed place – the fear of racial equality. The film holds that purgative violence within white authority for the regulation of black empowerment is the inevitable outcome. read more