Lucas Versantvoort / November 13, 2014
I remember watching this film in school when I was about 15 or so. Needless
to say, it was an impactful experience. American History X is without a doubt an emotionally charged experience, but
the way it’s all handled is also ironically where I feel things go a bit wrong.
It’s nighttime. Danny (Edward
Furlong) is trying to sleep, but his older brother Derek (Edward Norton) having
loud sex with his girlfriend is keeping him up. Suddenly, he notices a few
black men trying to steal Derek’s car. He alerts Derek who, armed with nothing
but his boxers and a handgun, kills one of the men, shoots another one and
tries to shoot at the remaining one driving away, but to no avail. Danny, seeing
what his brother wrought, looks at Derek while he walks angrily toward the
black man he wounded earlier. The film then cuts to the present, shot in color
(as opposed to the B/W flashbacks), as Danny meets with the principal due to
him writing a paper on Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The principal (Avery Brooks), who
also used to be Derek’s teacher, tries to explain to Danny that it’s Derek, now
serving a prison sentence, who made him this way, but he doesn’t get through to
him. Instead, he gives him a new assignment: to write a paper on his brother.
The film then crosscuts between flashbacks to how Derek became a neo-Nazi
skinhead, how he got incarcerated, etc. and the present, showing Danny and
Derek, who has changed his ways while in prison, trying to make it in their day-to-day
lives.
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| Did somebody call for a classic performance? |
It’s to director Tony
Kaye’s credit that the film is the emotional journey it is. He makes extensive
use of dramatic orchestral and choral music (courtesy of Anne Dudley),
slow-motion and black-and-white photography to enhance the drama and he mostly
succeeds. Also great are Norton and Furlong’s performances who not only excel
in their individual scenes, but exhibit a chemistry in their scenes together, a
sense that these are indeed two brothers
who’ve lived together.
I do have a few issues
with the film however. It has an unhealthy tendency to give a lot of screen time
to neo-Nazi ideology. We of course know that the filmmakers are not proponents
of this ideology through the existence of characters like the benevolent principal
Sweeney, the black inmate Lamont and the evil skinhead leader Cameron, the
subplot of how Derek became a neo-Nazi (he was fueled more by anger than ideology
and was subsequently easily manipulated by Cameron), the fact that principal Sweeney
came to visit Derek in prison after Derek was raped by skinheads because he
befriended Lamont and tells him that he cannot run away, thus ensuring the
safety of his family, but that he has to stay with them and try to make amends.
Make no mistake, the film doesn’t in any way portray neo-Nazis as good, but the
incessant focus on discussions with Derek spouting racist ideology are strange
in that you realize the film actually seems to spend more time there than
providing a balanced view and social context. I know it’s an unfair comparison,
but remember The Wire? That series
spent countless hours (which a film doesn’t have obviously) explaining the
complex cyclical relationship between the police and criminals. It gave insight
into the hopeless prospects of many poor blacks and showed how sometimes
joining a gang is the only viable option. Despite the fact that American History X isn’t fundamentally racist, it doesn't give us enough
social context to get rid of that nagging feeling that things could’ve been
more balanced.
Also relevant is that apparently the
film’s ending is an alternate one. Instead of hearing the dead Danny quote
Lincoln’s 1861 Inaugural Address, we would see Derek unable to deal with Danny’s
death and shaving his head, thus becoming a skinhead again. This would then tie
the whole plot together and show how the film’s really about ‘the endless cycle
of violence’. But, at least according to Imdb’s trivia page, this was altered
after Norton objected. I can see why as that would’ve been an even more
hopeless ending, but I wonder if the original ending wouldn’t have been better.
As it is, we see Derek and Danny truly bonding after which Danny is shot by the
same black boy he insulted earlier. The film thus ends with blacks being the
aggressors which results in the white characters we’ve come to know and
understand either being dead or emotionally traumatized. We can’t really look
at it from the boy’s point of view either, because the film doesn’t grant us
context about his way of life, save for a shocked close-up of his face as he
realizes what he’s done. Again, like the film’s excessive focus on racist
ideology, this ending leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth, despite Danny’s quote
about how ‘hate is baggage’, etc. At least Derek going skinhead again would
have softened the racist angle and strengthened the ‘cycle of violence’ point
of view.
All in all, it’s hard to summarize my
feelings toward American History X. I
appreciate all the potent melodrama director Kaye and screenwriter McKenna create, I like Derek’s
character development, principal Sweeney, Lamont, etc., but I can’t help but
feel the film should have provided a more balanced social context à la The Wire.
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