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Summary Of Spike Lee's Clockers: New Black Realism

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In its opening credits, Spike Lee’s Clockers features photos of dead young black men sliding across the frame. These images of lifelessness are paired with a somber ballad with lyrics pondering a place of solace and understanding, a place inaccessible to the black male despite compliance or revolt. The viewer is confronted by this slideshow of bloodied black bodies for nearly three minutes. There are cuts to crowds at crimes scenes. People stand, talking or looking on in silence, seemingly desensitized to the spectacle of a dead youth, separated only by the yellow tape which commands them not to cross. The front cover of a newspaper appears on the screen, “TOY GUN, REAL TRAGEDY”-- a young boy killed in a case of misunderstanding. This evidence of a robbed childhood establishes the reality of the community depicted in the film. A community stricken by poverty the fear of imminent violence, it is home to main character Strike, and many other young men who are yet still boys. Clockers stands with other independent films in their allegiance to what critic Manthia Diawara terms “New Black Realism” (594). These films aim to translate authentic interpretations of black life, many …show more content…

As Phillip Bailey’s “Children of the Ghetto” plays, Lee takes the viewer into a typical drug exchange in a “concrete jungle/ filled with misery” (Bailey) which ends up being an undercover operation. As the police officers arrive, Strike and his partners remain in the center of the scene, although the frame is now congested. While they are humiliated and harassed, Lee cuts to Strike’s mother, stoic as she looks down on the scene from her tenement window. His father figure and boss, Rodney, drives by the spectacle but does nothing to stop it. Lee uses this scene to show how the broken home has resulted in Strike’s conflicting views of responsibility and

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