When Spike Lee is mad about something, he’ll usually let you know.
Spike Lee is mad about Hurricane Katrina and the pathetic response that resulted in the nearly complete devastation of New Orleans and the gulf states.
But in his new four-hour HBO documentary, “When the Levees Broke,” Lee isn’t in your face. The veteran filmmaker, in fact, isn’t on screen at all and lets the people whose lives were directly affected tell the story.
“When the Levees Broke” debuts in a pair of two-hour parts at 9 p.m. Monday and Tuesday on HBO.
The apparent challenge for Lee, documenting an event that marks its first anniversary on Aug. 29, was to take something that most viewers already think they know about and make interesting and compelling.
But, for Lee, the opposite is true.
“That’s the key,” Lee said last month at the TV Critics Association press tour. “People think they know, but they don’t know. So … we’re able to address the many issues that came out of Hurricane Katrina. And it’s an epic.”
Lee allows the victims of the ravaged parts of New Orleans to talk about the experience in their own words. He doesn’t take steps to further enrage the viewer by overly dramatizing the events.
They speak for themselves.
The requisite politicians and celebrities are there, including Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and rapper Kanye West. They’re joined by activists such as the Rev. Al Sharpton and singer Harry Belafonte.
But it’s when the residents tell it for themselves that you begin to realize the helplessness they must have felt as they waited hours, then days for some kind of relief.
An estimated 1.5 million people in New Orleans were displaced from their homes, despite calls for a mandatory evacuation in the day or two leading up to Katrina’s arrival.
Many of them believed they’d seen it all. They had survived Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the first hurricane in the United States to do more than $1 billion in damage, so how much worse could this be?
But many, sadly, didn’t have the means to leave the city even if they wanted to. They became refugees, a term Lee said many residents hated, in their own country, and the area’s extreme poverty was finally put on display.
“If you don’t want to see the poverty in this country, you don’t have to,” Lee said. “You can put blinders on. You don’t have to go to New Orleans to see poverty. You can see it … in L.A. or New York City. So what America does a very good job of is disguising poverty, hiding it.”
But, ultimately, Katrina’s lasting impact stretches even beyond race and poverty. It highlighted the government’s inability to react when it was needed most.
“Volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods. It’s not just New Orleans,” Lee said. “And we should be scared because if FEMA – you saw what they did. Pray to God you don’t have to depend on FEMA. So this stuff affects all Americans. This is not just – this is not just New Orleans.”
Victor Balta’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays on the A&E page. Reach him at 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
For more TV and pop culture scoop, check out Victor’s blog at heraldnet.com/blogpopculture.
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