Mark Reviews Movies: MLK/FBI

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 14, 2021

The FBI followed, recorded, wiretapped, and attempted to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. There is no denying it anymore, if anyone even tried to deny it before now. Director Sam Pollard's incisive and, through no fault of the filmmaker, incomplete documentary MLK/FBI quickly posits an important ethical question about the film's own existence: Is it right to even consider these documents in relation to telling King's story? The surveillance, after all, was obtained by means of government overreach, motivated by paranoid fear of communists and hateful prejudice against the civil rights movement in the United States.

Pollard more or less dismisses the question, as one of the film's many and mostly unseen interview subjects/narrators decides that, from a historical perspective, the information obtained by the FBI is important to help us understand the person of King, beyond the activism and the speeches and his political maneuvers. The film dives into that rationale, portraying King as a vitally important figure (obviously) and a complicated man.

To compensate for how much potentially condemning material the FBI actually obtained on King, the documentary also makes it clear that the feds had an irrational, hateful, and potentially homicidal vendetta against a man they saw as a threat to the established social order—as irrational and hateful as that order was at the time. They may not have killed him, but if their falsified letter from a "fan" suggesting that King kill himself is any indication, they definitely wanted him out of the way.

Do we need to know what the FBI learned about King? Do we need to know that he was a philanderer, as the film pretty unquestionably asserts, and friends with a man whose ties to communism are left an unanswered question? Does it change anything? Is it worthwhile speculating whether or not King was present during an alleged rape, as recently released documents from the FBI present? We could have this discussion, as well as the ones that would result from either the veracity or falseness of various allegations raised by the FBI surveillance. One day, when the actual recordings are released, we likely will have those conversations.

In the meantime, we and the filmmakers here only have an incomplete picture of King, as presented by federal agents who did have a pretty clear motive to undermine and destroy the character of a man whom they feared for reasons that had little to do with law and justice. Pollard's film, as insightful as it is about the extent and cruelty of the FBI's baseless investigation into King's personal life, is caught up in an unfortunate paradox. You can't criticize what the government did to King—and, in the most explosive allegation, didn't do for him at a Memphis motel, even though they were keeping close watch—without detailing what they uncovered about the man.

That brings us back to the film's central, unanswered, and mostly ignored question: Is it worth talking about this material at all? In case it isn't clear yet, that question is too difficult to answer, especially when any kind of ethical concern comes into conflict with the historical importance of the man himself and the documentation of obvious governmental overreach.

What can be said, though, is that Pollard valiantly tries to cover as many bases as possible. His film is constructed using only archival footage and, to make the point of the power dynamics of the time, popular depictions of the FBI in movies and on television. It's depressingly fascinating to consider that, if the FBI had released all of the documentation and recordings on King while he was alive or within a certain amount time after his 1968 murder, the general public might have sided with them in terms of what they did and what they found.

J. Edgar Hoover, the man who led the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972 and who personally approved surveillance on King, was a good salesman for the organization. He had his own skeletons in a closet or two, as well, which Pollard and his interview subjects raise but upon which they politely defer from commenting. They take the high road for a man who plodded along the low one for a long time.

The film covers some of Hoover's trek along the path of injustice, described by former FBI Director James Comey as "the darkest period in the bureau's history." Other interviewees include Andrew Young, an aide to King who tried to warn him about the likelihood of government surveillance (King, perhaps naïvely, assumed the FBI would have more important matters with which to concern themselves), and some historians, who do a fine job putting King's life and career into assorted contexts. Pollard avoids a straightforward biography here—not only because the story is as much about FBI as it is about King, but also because so much of this is about what was happening behind the scenes of King's public life, without a clear notion of any real specifics.

Without that clear picture (At the moment, the filmmakers and the public only have documentation of recordings, with some of the details handwritten, made by people who were trying to destroy a man's reputation and life), Pollard's film remains a somewhat questionable endeavor. MLK/FBI, though, is made with thoughtfulness about King's personal indiscretions and conviction about the government's various wrongdoings. In 2027, when surviving records are currently scheduled to be released, one hopes Pollard or someone else will finish a fuller account of this story.

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