I saw AMERICAN HISTORY X last night, and wow what a conversation I had afterwards. Talk about a provocation of thoughtful conversation. This film lit a bomb of exciting conversation. The conversation lasted from 5am to 10:30am. And only ended by the sheer level of exhaustion that caused Quint to fade away and Joad to collapse of exhaustion. Now only I am awake, it’s 11:17am... 6 hours after I saw the film. I’m wide awake and I have to talk about it.
This has always been the way I’ve treated the site, it’s my friend, the person I talk with when all the others are asleep, when they are at work. You people become the voices I converse with. Albeit for something like this you are just a listener, well until I receive your emails. This review may touch off a few. The film deals with a powder keg of controversy.
I’m gonna say right up front that some of this might be offensive, not in a ‘cussing’ sort of way, but in the moral or beliefs side of things. I might be completely offbase with your experience, but what I’m going to lay out is my interpretation... from my point of view, the only vantage point with which I could have a viewpoint, this is the way things happened to our society and to me. Not to you, but to me.
That’s what this is about, about how we see the races, how the problems occur, how hate is borne, and how the paths are cleared for us. It’s about the moments of temptation and the roads back to redemption. I found the film to be very powerful. Others may find it contrived, heavy handed or simply a story the feel the never needed to see. To me the film was simply essential.
The story is basically about the descent into the world of white supremacy, living in that world of hate, of statistics and facts and how they are wielded for the maximum in subverting the opinions of the young in order to steer the disenfranchised into a world of anger, a world of pain, and as Private Pyle so eloquently put it... a world of shit.
The film stars Edward Norton in another awesome role that just goes to reinforce all those beliefs that he’s the most dynamic, amazing young actor working in the biz. He’s a Hoffman, Pacino, DeNiro in their seventies mode. But to delve into performances (they are all great) would be a distraction with what the true result of this film should be and that’s the analyzation of the society that we live in that could produce these stories, these beliefs and these conflicts.
As a child the race situation was really really simple. there was no differences, the first time I really remember being aware of the concept of ‘black’ people was about the time of the Atlanta Child Murders, before then I just saw people, but so much of what was going on was focused on the racial nature of those slayings. I remember being quite afraid of being killed by the person that was killing all those people in Atlanta, but then someone, another kid I think said, “Oh, it’s alright, they’re killing niggers only!” I can remember it still. The instant thought was of relief, oh... I’m spared.... cool. But as days peeled away I began thinking of how wrong that sentence was, about the word ‘nigger’ which I hadn’t even heard until that moment. I looked it up in a dictionary and could only find the country Niger and the word niggard, so I figured it was a made up word.
I grew up with Uncle Remus, who was a role model of mine. I wanted to grow up to be the guy that made kids smile, that made people laugh, that healed with a chuckle. The thought of inferiority never came to mind.
In my Elementary school I was never aware of racial division, all the kids played together, except for those nasty girly things, there was the thought that there were a few cool ones to play dodge ball with.
Then in Junior High, I discovered modern music, before I was weaned on Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong with a fair dose of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. But when I discovered the radio sitting in my room I remember falling completely in love with the music of Michael Jackson, Lionel Ritchie, Diana Ross etc.. My friends were a hodge podge of races, and my parents’ friends were all types.
Then the move to Seymour, Texas took place. It was a very very white town. Not very diverse, that’s when I noticed. My group of friends there were 3 afro-americans, 1 hispanic and 1 lebanese... we were the mini U.N., as we called ourselves. Why did I hang with that group? Because I didn’t fit in with the country twang of the normals. Edward and Bobby and Devlin and Paul and Robert were all outsiders, all cool and all the very best of friends. Like I said earlier, my parents were very very in tune with all types, this was until Seymour. After the divorce my mother was on a never-ending search to replace my father. At one point it was the leader of the Klan in Seymour.
I began getting pressure to not associate with ‘them niggers, spics and sand niggers’. I told the P.O.S. to go fuck himself. I plotted constantly to remove this tumor from my life. My bond with my friends grew tighter, then Robert died, he was the hispanic one. It killed me, he and I were as close as any platonic relationship could ever be. His mother and father were my second parents, I went to his catholic church (in all spanish), I spent hours discussing my life with his parents. They were part of the glue that made me me.
Then in my Senior year Rap music was borne, and Do The Right Thing came out. Rap was cool, I mean we had the Fat Boys, The Beastie Boys and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. The rap was fun, it was cool, I liked it, and so did most everyone I knew. A Nightmare..On My Street and Parents Just Don’t Understand were anthems for me. There was no devisive nature to the music. When DO THE RIGHT THING opened Edward, Bobby and Devlin all went to see it. Afterwards, I didn’t see Edward for a week, he was my closest friend, he was ducking me. When I finally caught up to him he didn’t want to look at me. He said, “I feel guilty for being your friend, like I betrayed who I am, where I come from and my people”, and how he was so glad I wasn’t there when the three of them saw the film. This was shocking to me, so I looked at him and said why? He looked at me, he had tears in his eyes and he said, “I don’t want to hurt you.” I responded with nothing you can say can hurt me, “No,” he said, “I didn’t feel like saying anything, I just wanted to beat someone who was white.”
This stuck with me, a film experience made a best friend want to hurt me and everyone that shared my contrast of skin. Of course after deep retro-Harry therapy he realized what a load of crap that was, but still it had affected him.
After High School I dropped out of the music scene delving into college, concentrating on that. I didn’t notice any racial differences in our society till my sister began High School 3 and a half years ago. Everything had changed.
No longer was it large groups of multi-racial factions, but the groups I saw standing around in groups were the worst stereotypes imaginable. There were large bands of single race groups, it seemed that they never inter-related. Dannie, who grew up completely in a mix, was now allowed basic access to one racial group... her own. The kids from other backgrounds just didn’t seem to mix, and even within her ‘own’ culture it was subdivided into yuppies, kickers, crackers and gothics.
There was a period in which my sister dove into the world of hate. She hated ‘Crackers, the blacks, the mexicans’ all but her own niche.. the goths. This is where things got weird, one of her friends was raped by a group of kickers, Dannie didn’t want anything other than to kill all kickers. Then the ‘Vatos’ the hispanic group with the front of their shirts tucked in, the back hanging out, the pants low around their hips, the bandanna around their heads and that Cheech step... well they began yelling phrases at cars driving by, hurling anger, then some of the black groups started slamming my sister and her group in the hallways as if this posturing was somehow significant, and there became no interest at all in inter-relating. Now sure there were people that stayed out of the groups, but visually, and culturally to my sister, these people didn’t exist. She had gone from love to hate in merely two years.
Then one day she awoke finding herself in a world of shit, and she found love, a place in life not within ‘her’ group, but with this really cool mexican, from Guadalajara, LOBO. As cool and loving as they come. He straightened her out, got her to care again, and now hate is behind her. But still it rages at her school and her generation... why?
This is a question a lot of people are asking, some are declaring that integration is a dead concept, that separation is the way to go. I can’t believe that... why? Well... because my friends in high school were not friends because of the way their skin caught the light, but rather because we were the same... up here.. in our heads and in here with our hearts. But now it seems there are some strong cultural differences that seem to have people lined up along visual lines.
What’s different? Well I can’t begin to name all the differences not for this review (if you could call it that, and I don’t think you can), when I was in school things like MTV were all music all the time. The music was all mixed up, all types interspersed. Now it’s in program blocks. Why? Well I believe in a way, it’s to serve the advertisers that are wanting to target certain market areas, certain groups. Well this has been going on... all the time, but now it’s set up for the other groups to tune out, and they do.
In an integrated society, the music and the shows must be similarly integrated. Otherwise the races have an important lack of commonalties. By programming for specific groups only, by making divisions, you create divisions, at least that’s what I think, perhaps I’m wrong, but I do know my life, my experiences and I do know when I almost walked the dark path.
In college, I started out at Austin Community College, a local junior college place (it’s a long story) but when it came time to go to U.T. My best friend and I went to transfer together. We knew both our GPA’s were assuring us entry. Mine was a 3.8 his was a 3.4. We had all the same classes. He got in, I didn’t. There was one difference besides our grades on the forms. His race was C) Hispanic.
This is the point where I could have gone down the path to hypocrisy. If I had had Stacy Keach’s character standing over my shoulder whispering in my ear and shaving off wedges of that damn apple of misinformation... well you could know my name for entirely different reasons. But instead I wished my friend the best, and I went back to work.
AMERICAN X is about another’s story within the world of races and anger. It’s compelling, disturbing and provoking. Some may very well hate it, I don’t, I endure the film for the perspective and the questions it raises. Enjoying it isn’t the traditional term with which one should explain the sensory experience you may have with this flick. It is ‘endure’. But endure it you should, if only to evaluate where you are in the stance of beliefs.
Is it a great film? I don’t think so, but it sure does bring about some very personal evaluations, at least for me it did.
