Journal: Regina Taylor's Defiance in “Clockers”

Clockers is a movie that arrests and engrosses scene by scene, building tension with surly direction while preaching with creative narrative choices. It is amongst the most sermon oriented of Lee’s films, (which is saying a lot) and that is where its weaknesses lie, but its strengths are many, chief amongst them the emotionally rich quality of the performances. In a movie where Lee’s tendency towards pontification can feel heavy-handed and oppressive, Lee’s performers give a masterclass in how to tell a story subtly, while still being able to compliment Lee’s more inflated sensibilities. One thing about a Spike Lee film is you cannot afford to be a small actor in them, and this is the arguably the biggest I've seen any troupe in his films. I’ll be damned if many times during this revisit I didn’t inadvertently blurt out “This is the best acted Spike Lee film we have. There are a great deal of performances in to choose from in this film, but three in particular are central to this; Regina Taylor (Iris Jeeter) Harvey Keitel (Rocco Klein) and Delroy Lindo (Rodney Litle). My focus here is Regina.

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“Clockers Like all great noir films is very character oriented, the one stock character missing is the well chronicled “Femme Fatale, but the detective(s), the gangsters, are here, our anti hero or “Patsy” in Mekhi Pfifer’s “Strike”, and though its not the exact model of Femme Fatale elements of what makes the femme fatale such an iconic character trope in films history is here too in Iris Jeeter. In discussing the great dames of film noir film critic Christina Newland has this to say about the quality of these women; “ Their power may lay in their feminine wiles, but they frequently challenge male domination, the traditional family structure, and prove as strong counterpoints to the complacent women of many other male-oriented genres.” While the movie doesn’t give much in the way of an inner life beyond protecting her son to Iris, actress Regina Taylor imbues her character with as much as she can of one so that her rage is not caricature but fully lived in and conceptualized rage. It's in her walk and both of the scenes that she appears in which resembles to me in its purity of energy and it's ferocity in its intentional focus to resemble the way the Ultimate Warrior would enter the ring in wrestling. It's also in the way she puts her finger in strikes chest as she says “I know your mother..Gloria” which carries with it the very history she speaks of as we are immediately transported to a time where she saw these boys as much more than “death dealing scum” which provides the actual power of the scene as compared to the message that most readily flies out from under the verbiage used. Where the quality of the figure Newland discusses first becomes crystallized though is in her second appearance. Even more physical than the first, (having already warned Strike) the feeling-out period is over and she now launches at strike with such fury that it almost fools one into believing it is a radical defiance of the very socialized idea of womanhood even as it plays upon the borders of the “angry black woman trope”. Taylor’s physicality is an explicit challenge of male domination, she almost dares any of them to do anything about it especially Mekhi’s strife. Bathed in the confidence of knowing she is not to be played with despite the very real likelihood that if she flinches even a little, there is no guarantee one of these men would be against hitting her, she steps into these men's circle with the exact amount of masculine energy she has seen these men perform time and time again, only it is a far more truthful one. It is the purity of her anger, the righteousness of it and the ownership of it that keeps all at bay and at least a few of them genuinely scared. It's a performance that is rooted in truth and not just that of the performance, but of many a real life black woman in hoods and projects just like this one in anywhere USA. Her size is the linchpin to to the degree of authenticity. If she couldn't be big enough, bold enough in her performance to back that intensity, it falls flat and less you focused on the “performing” aspect. Taylor's commitment is plain and it is visceral. In her eyes, in her mouth especially as she leaves, and in her movement, concise and precise as they are. This commitment assists and serves the story in all kinds of ways not the least of which is it takes the focus off of the murkiness of message and whether it's good or not to view drug dealers who are themselves victims of the same system as “scum” on onto the authenticity of the feeling, the emotion behind it and the justification behind it in the woman and in her basic desire to protect her child. It's a performance that I think deserves much more of a light than what it has gotten and I wanted to make sure I had documentation of my own that I saw it.