Movie: Boyz n the Hood (John Singleton, 1991)
When a film takes its name from a NWA song, references NWA lyrics in its dialogue, and casts Ice Cube in a key role you expect brazen unfiltered showmanship. Singleton shows an affinity for that by getting Laurence Fishburne to play a guy named 'Furious Styles', yet much of the film plays like a Parental Advisory warning label come alive, with multiple scenes existing solely to remind young men to wear condoms. Singleton wanted Doughboy's (Ice Cube) aimless, shit-talking hangabout friends to be played by the other NWA members. They rejected the offer, because of a prior dispute with Ice Cube, but you also wonder how they would have felt about the film's perspective. Their namesake song forces you to delight in the vulgarity, violence and posturing of its subjects, while Singleton looks at this life from a (psychological) distance and with a moralising attitude. It's a great example or Roger Ebert's famous notion that what a film is about is less important than how it's about it. For all the horrors Singleton depicts, his earnest de-escalatory approach is the biggest testament to the bleak state of black American neighborhoods. A 24-year old first-time filmmaker only makes a film like this if he is thoroughly devastated by all the shootings, drug use, broken families and general hopelessness he sees around him.
I think Singleton's approach is valuable, but there are better ways to do this. The majority of the scenes pretty much follow the same pattern where we see people act in certain ways, only for them to be explicitly corrected when they step outside the norm. Perhaps this is more obvious now than it was in 1991. The film formed the breakthrough of many black actors like Morris Chestnut, Nia Long, Regina King, Cuba Gooding Jr, and Ice Cube who have helped define and change American popular culture in the past few decades, probably much more than Singleton ever expected. Their irreverent slang and attitude, both extremely confident and playfully derisive of both themselves and of white America, have in certain cultural contexts (both in and outside of America) become the mainstream, bringing with it an often self-effacing lighthearted approach to serious subjects that is more sophisticated than it appears (and shares a kindred spirit in Balkan humor!). This has led to a lot of racist talk decrying the downfall and unserious frivolity of western civilisation, ironically pointing to some of the same things (though obviously for much different reasons) as John Singleton It's fun to see Regina King here in a much less dignified role than in If Beale Street Could Talk. Like everyone else, she has a field day with her graphic dialogue, but you often get the feeling that Singleton has writen a lot of it purely to admonish it.
Singleton's need to neuter any potential volatilty he sets up, and to force a mature responsibility on his characters turns them all more into symbols than actual human beings, perhaps most ridiculously so when Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding Jr,) and Brandi (Nia Long) lose their virginity. The scene is filmed with such an adult perspective on sex and romanticism, showcasing how people should ideally behave when preparing for, and engaging in, sex, rather than how two teens who barely know shit about it would act. A visit from a college adminstrator who is interested in offering Ricky (Morris Chestnut), an NFL prospect and the great hope of the neighborhood, a scholarship is filmed with a similar wide-eyed sincerity. The respect for that particular moment is so overblown by Singleton you almost start fearing that he is setting it all up to pull the rug under poor Ricky's feet, or to make a satiric point, but he is too enamored by civil, correct formality (and too invested in contrasting it with the 'crass' attitudes surrounding it) to do any of that. What makes that scene even odder is that the film points out several times that the Army is just another way for white people to kill and exploit black people, while the most vile character is a black (with much darker skin than most characters in the film) policeman who seizes every opportunity to harrass and hate with outrageously evil facial expressions. You'd expect that someone with such a negative view towards these institutions would be a little more skeptical towards college football, even (or especially) when a kindly black recruiter makes a case for it.
Finally, we get to Furious Styles, who is somehow both the film's preachy paragon of virtue and the most interesting, intelligently conceived character. Furious will stop entire scenes in their track to talk about sexual education, personal responsibility and the evils of gentrification, in the process raising his son Tre into a 'real man', and an example for the community. Furious became a dad at 17, and both Singleton's characterisation and Fishburne's great performance highlight how his moralism is not entirely selfless. You get the sense that Furious never really got the chance to define himself as an adult as oridinary 17-year olds would, so now his persona as the neighbourhood's moral conscience is as much a performance for himself as it is an act of good parenting. He is called out for that by Tre's mother (Angela Bassett) in the film's sharpest scene that highlights what Singleton is capable of when he allows a little bit of knottiness. Even better examples of that are Four Brothers and his 2000 remake of Shaft.
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