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Movie Reviews
Women in Prison
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American History X (1998) |
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| Pre-Skinhead Derek |
Let's start with Derek. Through flashbacks (presented in black and white) we see Derek pre-shaved head, and frankly he's sort of a sad sight. He stammers, he's unsure of his opinions, he looks wimpy with a mane of stringy hair and in one scene a cheesy baseball cap on his head. Then consider Derek the skinhead. First of all, he's buff. I'd love to be able to afford Ed Norton's personal trainer. He apparently put on 30 lbs for this movie, and unlike De Niro in Raging Bull, this is 30 lbs of muscle. Second, he's confident. He has become a leader. He speaks eloquently (if hatefully). Finally, he's popular. People look up to him. He's got a girlfriend who's willing to do anything for him. So to repeat: pre-Nazi Derek is wimpy and lacks confidence; skinhead-Derek, by contrast, is popular and built. Hmmmm.
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| Skinhead Derek |
Well, then, what about Derek's behavior? I mean, you'd think a movie that's trying to make the point that hatred and racism are evil would go out of its way to demonstrate the heinousness of its practitioners. Is Derek's behavior heinous? Well, he did kill a man in cold blood.... but, in fairness, the guy was part of an armed group and was trying to break into Derek's car. Then there's the scene where the skinheads attack a local market. I found two things weird about this scene. First of all, their violence in the market is nasty, but controlled. They break a lot of stuff and generally make a mess, and they terrorize some of the employees, but they don't kill, maim, or rape anyone. Secondly, their grievance with the market isn't really that extreme. Derek and his buddies seem to believe that when an immigrant family took over the market, they fired all the American employees and hired illegal immigrants instead. Interestingly, the movie never actually challenges this claim in any way, so we have no necessary reason to doubt Derek on that score. Now, think about that... I mean, think about if Toyota bought up a GM plant in Michigan, fired all the American workers, and hired illegal immigrants in their place. What would happen? Well, after the UAW burned the plant down and rioted, the police would come in and arrest the Toyota managers for violating immigration laws.
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| Derek returns home from prison to find the family sharing one bedroom |
Well, what about what Derek says? He's got to at least be saying outrageous things, right? Well, sort of. Derek's political view are to the right of Pat Buchanan's, but not by much. He talks a lot about immigrants taking American jobs and the crime rates of African-Americans, but he is distinctly disdainful of the ignorant ravings of Klansmen. David Duke is more outrageous, frankly, and he's a public figure of sorts. I think, actually, part of the point the filmmakers were trying to develop is that racism and hatred are actually much closer to the mainstream of political dialogue than we care to admit. At what point does stating statistics about crime go from being raw data to being political advocacy? The problem in this movie is not that Derek particularly comes across as convincing or thoughtful, but alarmingly, he comes across as relatively better educated than most of his verbal sparring partners. His mother tries to reason with him, but she is mostly just tired. His sister (Jennifer Lien) responds to his verbal tirades with tired, mealy-mouthed liberal rhetoric, and the school teacher (Elliott Gould) who comes to his house to check on Derek and to woo his mother ends up being more tongue-tied than Yalie at a pig calling contest. Even the school principle (Bob Sweeney), a black man more chagrined than angered by Derek's antics, doesn't actually challenge him directly -- his approach is more to try to make Derek and later Danny look within themselves. The result, as Roger Ebert cogently argued, "There is no effective spokesman for what we might still hopefully describe as American ideals."
And what about the prison experience? I know that is what you, my soon to be faithful readers are most interested in; how does the prison experience fit into Derek's transformation? The prison is your garden-variety, high security lock-up. The usual prison yard complete with b-ball court and weights; the cafeteria where seating decisions signal gang affiliations; and the prison laundry where prisoners work and talk largely without supervision. We do get a glimpse of a brutal and/or corrupt guard who walks away when he realizes Derek is about to be assaulted. Is he getting a payoff to do that? Or does he just want to avoid trouble?
Well, anyway, the prison time is Derek's transformation. His assault is presented as evidence of the hypocrisy of the skinhead rhetoric, although in a perverse way, it actually bears out what Derek has been saying all along, which is that whites don't stand together enough. I mean, his contempt for the white prisoner who sell drugs to his own group is quite understandable in a way. I think the filmmakers confused the problems of hate groups with the problem that hate groups are often run by hypocrites more interested in power and profit than their ideology. But for my money, the problem isn't white-power hypocrites, but rather white-power true believers. They're the ones who are really dangerous.
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| Derek discovers the unity of mankind over a pile of sheets |
Then there is Derek's relationship with a black prisoner, Lamont (played by Guy Torrey), who works with him the laundry. The movie tries to show us that by working with this man, Derek gradually begins to understand that we are all, black and white alike, human beings, who share the same ambitions, fears, hopes, and dreams. This transform is frankly awkward, and the key turning point occurs when Lamont tells a story about missing his woman on the outside. Yeah, I guess. But frankly, it all comes off too pat. Derek is an angry, troubled, young man. His abuse in prison would seem to me to be more likely to turn him into a loner rather than suddenly grasping the unity of mankind.
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| The bathroom scene |
Finally, there is the issue of Danny, Derek's younger brother. Again the subtext seems at odds with the movie's ostensible message. There's a scene where Danny protects another white student in the school bathroom when the latter is being picked on by three black kids for ratting one of them out for cheating. Danny in this scene is confident and strong, although ultimately his actions here get him killed later. But what is the message? That Danny would have been better off allowing his classmate to be roughed up? How could this confrontation have been avoided? It seems to me that the only way would have been for the other student to ignore the cheating in the first place. But isn't that a pretty twisted message?
When you think about it, American History X almost seems like what a very clever, very subtle white supremacist might produce. It seems like it is a riff on the problems of racism, but under the surface, the movie carries a slightly different message. Now, of course, that isn't what happened. What happened is just that we have an ill-conceived movie, something Hollywood is quite adept at generating without having any conspiracy behind it. But, in some ways, American History X is really a warning about the danger of having evil characters at the center of a serious movie. Obviously, the villain is always most interesting player in the piece, and here, Edward Norton plays skinhead Derek as a menacing, powerful, mesmerizing figure. It is no surprise that the other characters (or even Norton when he's playing the more mellow post-prison Derek) don't stand a chance. In the end, because the filmmakers weren't willing to delve deeper into the brutality of Derek's deeds or the banality of his thought, the movie undercuts its own message.
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