Boyz n the Hood (1991)

The west coast tract house yin to Do the Right Thing​’s east coast brown­stone yang, John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood remains a right­eous­ly angry and depress­ing­ly pre­scient study of how vio­lence ger­mi­nates on the streets. Where Lee’s film revealed its bugged-out fury in the very open­ing frames with Rosie Perez speed krump­ing on a stoop, Singleton’s is coloured by a wist­ful melan­cho­lia, of the idea that we’re not ner­vous­ly watch­ing a spark trav­el down the fuse, but the bomb has already explod­ed and this is the fallout.

Vio­lence is pre­sent­ed as an unstop­pable inevitabil­i­ty, hard-wired into its chest-bump­ing, teeth-kiss­ing expo­nents. It’s peo­ple act­ing on a pri­mor­dial instinct, unable to com­pre­hend how their actions might affect oth­er, inno­cent peo­ple. The vic­tims are the uncar­ed for new­borns crawl­ing into the traf­fic, the proud moth­ers forced to make pre­ma­ture funer­al arrange­ments for their fall­en sons, the fathers teach­ing truth to pow­er in an attempt to edu­cate the gang-bangers into see­ing the real ene­my, or the kids play­ing catch and hap­pen­ing across a bul­let-rid­dled corpse.

Its basic struc­ture cleaves to a fair­ly con­ven­tion­al melo­dra­mat­ic tem­plate, and the plot is rife with bla­tant sign­posts as to ensu­ing may­hem. But where the film excels is in the fine detail. And this isn’t just well-researched man­ner­isms and speech inflec­tions, but its clever digres­sions and the unhys­ter­i­cal way in which it’s edit­ed. Sin­gle­ton sel­dom resorts to emp­ty cam­era trick­ery. He sub­tly states his pres­ence as a silent, if very angry observ­er. The use of slow cross-fades is par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive, fram­ing the sto­ry as dream of progress that grad­u­al­ly descends into a bloody night­mare of dashed hope and ran­dom carnage.

There are two ele­ments of the film that shine the bright­est. The first is the com­plex rela­tion­ship between the con­sci­en­tious Tre (Cuba Good­ing Jr) and his fire­brand father (Lau­rence Fish­burne). It’s not just a gen­er­a­tional trans­fer of com­mon-sense teach­ing, there’s a sense that knowl­edge flows two ways. Per­haps the dra­mat­ic high­light of the film is the sequence in which the son regales his father with details of a sex­u­al tryst which, along with the tit-for-tat gun­play, acts as anoth­er, sweet­er exam­ple of mis-chan­nelled machismo.

The sec­ond ele­ment of real note is the beau­ti­ful­ly dialled back per­for­mance by Ice Cube as the pow­der keg ex-con who wiles away his days sat on the porch, suck­ing back cheap beer and sur­vey­ing his crum­bling king­dom. Hard­ened by jail time and adamant to reassert his fear­some rep­u­ta­tion on neigh­bour­hood foes, he talks and acts vio­lent­ly, but in a man­ner that’s entire­ly non­cha­lant. Force­ful aggres­sion is so ingrained with­in him that basic civil­i­ty now seems quaint. When he refers to women as ​“bitch­es” and ​“hoes”, it’s not because he wants to, but because he has to.