Review: The Spook Who Sat By the Door

I came out of BAM’s opening night showing of The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1973) in a real mood. Jubilant, that is. The film is a fictional account of the first black CIA agent, who is reluctantly allowed into the organization, trained in guerilla warfare, and promptly stashed in the copy room. He goes on to quit the agency, ostensibly to take up a social work position in his hometown of Chicago. In reality, he takes the guerilla warfare skills he learned in the CIA and turns a street gang into a black liberation underground. I’ve never been so goddamn hype in my life!

Like most good films, Spook is funny, often sly. A black humor, in both senses. The immediate cut scene from the graduation ceremony where he’s told he will have an important role in the CIA to him making photocopies in a windowless back room. There’s a bougie Jack-and-Jill type who insists she’s not like all these other n—s! There’s a bank robbery where all the light skinned gang members disguise themselves as white men. 

Spook is also fantastically inspiring. The film was almost immediately blacklisted from theaters because some were worried it would be a little too incendiary. Director Ivan Dixon had to shoot the film in Gary, Indiana; Chicago mayor Richard Daley blocked the production. For a mayor who ordered brutal beatdowns of black people in protest, there’s danger in art that provides alternative visions of how things could have gone or, to the dread of those cracking down on protests everywhere, how things might go in the future. Step 1 – learn how to make a molotov cocktail. 

It’s an apt time for the film to resurface. We are in an era of repression so totalizing, it drove me into a stupor of depression this summer. Genocide, cop cities, environmental disaster, and thousands of protesters failing to wrestle any concessions from our government. What resistance can we make? This film tells us what might be possible, and it makes it look fun to boot. Spook ends in the midst of a street war; the black rebels are shooting at the National Guard and there’s no indication they intend to stop. The revolutionary must fight, even when that fight is possibly doomed. But, it’s not always doomed. As the main character says, held at gunpoint by a friend turned cop, “even on the wrong end of your gun, I’m a lot freer than you are.”––Cheryl Rivera