President Bush declined to mention Hurricane Katrina in his State of the Union address last week. On the one hand, duh. Blogs, newspapers, Sunday-morning talk shows, protesters, people in bars, radio call-in shows, presidential candidates, Academy Award nomineesâeveryone is consumed with the war in Iraq, and if Bush didn't follow suit, he'd look even further out of touch than he is. Imagine, though, if Bush had been able to offer proof that the federal government was on its way to repairing the damage and compensating for its incompetence in the wake of Katrina. Rebuilding a city should be a piece of cake, compared to snuffing out a civil war.
Except. When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee's massive and gripping four-act documentary on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, makes it clear that this was no straightforward storm. Katrina didn't drown New Orleans; the flooding of the city was a product of faulty levee design by the Army Corps of Engineers. Less freely acknowledged is the fact that the levees are themselves a monumental act of human arrogance, keeping a below-sea-level bowl of human dwellings only intermittently dry throughout the city's history. But even this arrogance can't compare with the criminal disinterest and neglect displayed by the federal government following the storm.
When the Levees Broke has plenty of time for reporting the soul-crushing facts about Hurricane Katrina. It's a chronological compilation of seemingly every second of footage shot during the storm, the subsequent flooding, and the excruciating stasis while stranded people baked on their roofs or in the Superdome or on a highway to nowhere, waiting on FEMA. Lee interviews the surprisingly timid Governor Kathleen Blanco, the heartfelt but slimy Mayor Ray Nagin, the loose-cannon police chief who spread unfounded rumors about raped babiesâbut for emotional impact, he relies on the testimony of ordinary New Orleanians like angry, vivacious Phyllis Montana LeBlanc of the Lower Ninth Ward, whose experience and opinions form the movie's spine. (There's also one pointless interview with Sean Penn.) Two white interviewees were among the pedestrians who tried to walk out of New Orleans over the Crescent City Connection, only to be halted by armed policemen. Everyone's story is equally shocking.
But what's even more fascinating is the evenhanded way the documentary deals with the long cultural memories the storm dredged up. The way families are recklessly split in the rush to get people out of the city reminds some of the way slave families were separated at the auction block. The sound of the levees bursting recalls for others the deliberate dynamiting of the levees in 1927 to flood some neighborhoods and save the city center. Lee doesn't elaborate on these analogies, allowing them to idle heavily like unexploded dynamite at the center of the film. Viewers may receive these scenes however they prefer: as charged metaphors or plain examples of history repeating itself.
