The Current Debate: “MLK/FBI” and the Ethics of Examining the Past

Sam Pollard’s startling documentary sheds new light on the war the FBI waged against the Civil Rights leader.
Leonardo Goi

From the March on Washington in August 1963 until his murder in April 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was subject to an asphyxiating surveillance and smearing campaign waged by the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. Worried that the rise of “a black messiah” would upset the segregated status-quo, Hoover sought to weaponize ill-obtained information on King’s private life, such as his extramarital affairs, to discredit his public persona. Drawing from long-secret documents, and anticipating the release of others stored in the National Archives, Sam Pollard’s incendiary, deeply unnerving MLK/FBI chronicles the long and restless history of the bureau’s harassment. As Simran Hans notes at The Observer, the portrait Pollard paints of King is that of “a complicated and fallible man rather than an untouchable icon,” while the film itself raises some crucial, and often disturbing, questions about the ethics of examining the past. But for all the uncomfortable details about King’s personal life and the FBI’s lurid tactics it reveals, is MLK/FBI a little too reticent on its contentious subject matter?

Over at The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw suggests as much, taking issue with one of the tapes’ most damning and bizarre allegations, that King may have looked on during a rape—“a question the film does not fully address,” and for which it provides no proof or names. It is a worry echoed by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, who contends that “in many ways, (…) the movie presents us with a limited version of more.”

You won’t hear a moment of what’s on those tapes; in 1977, a federal court order placed them in a vault in the National Archives, where they’ll remain under seal until February 2027. And the film, which is based on the book “The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From ‘Solo’ to Memphis,” offers little in the way of speculation as to how the knowledge of what’s on those tapes changes our perception of King as a leader and as a human being. (The only comments about that come during the closing credits.) That subject could use a full-on discussion — and, it fact, demands one. The documentary that looks at Martin Luther King Jr. in his warts-and-all complexity has yet to be made.

Still, I cannot help but think that these responses say less about the film’s alleged failings than of our own voyeurism toward the man at its center. Early into MLK/FBI, historian Donna Murch advances a provocative thesis: “When you construct a man as a great man, there’s nothing almost more satisfying than seeing him represented as the opposite.” As Justin Chang astutely remarks over at the L.A. Times,

[Murch] isn’t merely pinpointing the prurient impulse at the heart of the Hoover probe; she’s also expressing something about human nature, about our need to build our leaders into heroes and then tear those heroes down. But “MLK/FBI” never gives in to that satisfaction: It weaves an intimate sidelong portrait of King without questioning or violating his right to privacy. It also sees no contradiction in the idea that King could have been a great leader and a flawed human being, an unfaithful husband and a man of deep moral conviction and insight.

Pollard is obviously aware of just how startling some of the film’s revelations are, but they are essential to his overall project: to ask why we should demand perfection from our icons, and our Black icons especially. As Robert Daniels reminds us at The Playlist, underpinning MLK/FBI is a concern with “how the deification of heroes in itself undermines the hero.” And the film’s ability to problematize King’s hagiography—all while appreciating his fallibility as a man—accounts for its subversive quality. “At a time when King’s legacy seems irrevocably sanitized by the white establishments that he died fighting against,” Jourdain Searles writes at The Hollywood Reporter,

…any work that digs deeper into his life is an act of rebellion. Director Ava DuVernay began reframing King in 2014, with the thoughtful and devastating Selma, a film that effectively strips away the prevalent white gaze that has plagued Civil Rights Movement dramatizations. This is perhaps why the film—especially its depiction of former President Lyndon B. Johnson—was so deeply contested, earning pointed snubs in most categories at the Academy Awards the following year. MLK/FBI goes even further than Selma, implicating the entire white political establishment for being threatened by King as a political leader and a man.

To that end, MLK/FBI offers two crucial insights. On the one hand, it debunks the heroic and reductive language surrounding King’s persona as an anachronism, warning us that, at the time of his death, King was anything but universally admired. His struggles for justice and equality for all Americans were far more radical than what today’s discourse may lead us to believe, and that, to borrow again from Justin Chang at the L.A. Times, “is a point that bears repeating, given how often King’s legacy is invoked nowadays as a corrective and a weapon, aimed at diminishing and even silencing present-day Black protest.”

On the other hand, MLK/FBI also makes a compelling case against the popular myth that the FBI was a rogue agency under Hoover, arguing that the director’s efforts to eradicate all threats to the white male capitalist hegemony were very much aligned with the US power structures of the era. In the words of The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday,

Pollard makes a far more complex and damning case that Hoover’s obsession wasn't aberrant, but an expression of shame and ambivalence around his own sexuality, as well as the embodiment of messages America had long been steeped in, fusing African American political aspirations with sexual threat. And, as historian David Garrow observes, trenchantly, the hounding of King was business as usual at the FBI, which was “fundamentally a part of the existing mainstream political order.”

You may argue, as Eric Kohn does at Indiewire, that with all its seesawing between King, Hoover, and the bureau’s propaganda machine, MLK/FBI “sometimes struggles to gather its disparate ingredients into a unified whole, pivoting from King to the FBI and back again with a slippery grasp of forward momentum.” 

But the journey into which Pollard invites us is non-linear by design: a far cry from a conventional biopic, MLK/FBI is just as interested in tracing an intimate portrait of King’s last years as it is in underscoring the FBI’s efforts to tighten its control over society and the public discourse of the time. Peppered with footage from such copaganda films as I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) and The FBI Story (1959), the film denounces, as Carlos Aguilar contends at the A.V. Club, “the role of popular culture (movies and television) in lionizing law enforcement, namely FBI agents, as saviors of a white, Christian, conservative American identity”.

Which brings us back to the tapes, and the ethical dilemmas the documentary wrestles with. That MLK/FBI can handle its explosive subject with intelligence and restraint is the film’s greatest merit; that it can be “fair to all parties without being neutral or timid,” A. O. Scott remarks at The New York Times, is what makes it “an exemplary historical documentary—unafraid of moral judgment but also attentive to the fine grain of ambiguity that clings to the facts.” 

But should the FBI tapes—including and especially those containing the most startling details of King’s private life—ever be made public? “If one anticipates the reports’ declassification,” Bedatri D. Choudhury wonders at Reverse Shot, “are we then complicit in the invasion of King’s privacy and the attempts to racially stereotype him?” It is a question MLK/FBI leaves deliberately unanswered, and in so doing, as Choudhury perceptively observes, the film underscores its overarching lesson: it is not the tapes’ content we should focus on, but the motivations behind them:

Pollard’s film insists that what the FBI did to King is emblematic of what this country does when it fears those who might undermine its entrenched hierarchies. No matter the contents of the files, an engagement with them will bring forth a reckoning with the violence that lies under America’s past and present. MLK/FBI doesn’t leave the audience with answers but compels them to ask harder questions. Pollard foretells the dirtiness of the politics that will surround the files’ declassification and warns us, in advance, to not get caught up in the text of the files, but rather to question their intent.

The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation.

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