FILM
“MLK/FBI” Brings Spying to Light
Sam Pollard’s documentary recalls FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr.
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s life tells a much
larger story about
American attitudes
towards race, sex, and celebrity,
even if most of this was hidden
at the time. That’s one of the major
takeaways from Sam Pollard’s
documentary “MLK/FBI.”
Unfortunately, King’s pacifi sm
and relative moderation compared to
Malcolm X and the Black Panthers
made him easier to sanitize posthumously.
He’s been reduced to the “I
have a dream” speech and seen as
a symbol of respectability politics by
people who’ve never known he identifi
ed as a democratic socialist and
spent his last years advocating economic
justice and fi ghting the Vietnam
War. In 2027, the FBI will release
its original surveillance tapes
of King, which it used in the ’60s to
Martin Luther King in Sam Pollard’s “MLK/FBI”
attempt to blackmail him and even
try to convince him to kill himself
over his adultery. “MLK/FBI” ends
by wondering what might happen to
his legacy then.
Pollard built his fi lm’s visuals
almost entirely around archival
IFC FILMS
footage. Pollard talked to authors
Beverly Gage, David J. Garrow
(whose King biography inspired
by the fi lm), and Donna Murch;
politician Andrew Young; King’s
former speechwriter and advisor
Clarence Jones; and former FBI
director James Comey. But “MLK/
FBI” never shows their faces until
its fi nal 10 minutes.
Although their names appear
on screen, the present never dominates
the past. Instead, the two interact
in provocative ways.
Pollard briefl y mentions King’s
gay friend and fellow activist Bayard
Rustin. He never explicitly
brings up J. Edgar Hoover’s closeted
sexuality, but the fi lm alludes
to it constantly and coyly,
in its choice of images and words
from Gage and Murch. Like Roy
Cohn, Hoover looks like a real-life
version of the repressed gay fascist
in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The
Conformist.”
But when one commentator describes
the image of the ideal Gman,
as promoted by Hollywood
and enacted in real life — six-foot
tall conservative white men, with
an athletic fraternity background
— one wonders if this had any
connection to Hoover’s libido. This
speculation seems relevant because
his beef with King was remarkably
personal, even sexual. “MLK/FBI”
points out how the FBI’s obsession
with King’s adultery played
into America’s long-standing fear of
Black men as hyper-sexual beasts.
Hoover and FBI intelligence director
William Sullivan claimed to be
outraged that a man with a “deviant”
sex life of adultery was respected.
But the fi lm suggests he
also envied that sex life.
“MLK/FBI” winds up dominated
by its soundtrack. It frequently appears
to be editing together B-roll
as accompaniment to a far more
compelling voice-over. The recurring
image of a spinning reel-to-reel tape
recorder loses impact. The use of TV
and movies glorifying the FBI, which
it blames for giving Americans an
unrealistically positive image of the
agency, has a greater impact. A movie
title like “I Was a Communist for
the FBI” is funny now, but it led to
McCarthyist smears by which King
was dogged. “MLK/FBI” suggests
that the anti-communism rhetoric
espoused by pop culture copaganda
was grounded in a fear of Black people
as recruits challenging America’s
supposedly begnin history.
Near the end, “MLK/FBI” brings
up a 1968 FBI report which suggests
King observed a rape by a
Baltimore minister in a hotel room
and stood by laughing. It offers
plenty of good reason to doubt its
truth; beyond the fact that the FBI
was desperate to destroy his reputation,
this was handwritten in an
otherwise typed memo and supposedly
came from eavesdropping
rather than direct sight. But the
fi lm nevertheless treats this like a
bombshell, opening up doors and
possibly reinforcing stereotypes
that it doesn’t entirely seem comfortable
dealing with. At the end,
its subjects disagree about whether
the surveillance tapes should be
released, but most think King’s status
is secure no matter what they
contain. The fact that this question
would even have to be asked at the
end of the presidency of a white
man who publicly screwed his
way through Studio 54 and porn
sets, allegedly with little respect for
women’s consent, shows America’s
double standards.
MLK/FBI | Directed by Sam Pollard
| IFC Films | Starts streaming
through Film at Lincoln Center Jan.
15
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