Racial Representation in American History X

The following article was written as an assignment for the The History and Significance of Race in America class.

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A movie American History X (1988) deals with white supremacy and racism. We can see a variety of racial representation in this movie. We're now going to see implicit racial associations and racist stereotypes seen in this film first with the framework of John Russell's discussion in his research "Race as Ricorso: Blackface(s), Racial Representation, and the Transnational Apologetics of Historical Amnesia in the United States and Japan," examine the background and arguments on race in the movie, and finally see the editorial point of view of the film maker.

There are so many symbols that representing race in American History X. Two young white brothers are featured in the story. The older brother Derek had been a white supremacist. He killed two black youths and had been in prison for three years for voluntary manslaughter. He has many icons of white supremacy on his look including skinhead and swastika tattoo on his chest. However, after he gets out of the prison, he has his mild hair-style and does not shows his tattoo to other people any more (he only sees it in the mirror after taking a shower, which reminds him of his old regretful past). His younger brother Danny has been inspired greatly by Derek and now becomes a member of a white supremacist group. He also shaves his head and has a collection of Nazi posters in his room. Their looks show a typical young white supremacist today. While in prison, Derek changed his racist ideology. Not only because he was raped brutally by one of his white inmates, but also because he saw the reality of racial conflicts and disillusioned.

There are a variety of racial symbols depicted in the prison. The prison guards say racial words to Derek. Macho black, white, and Hispanic groups are clearly divided in there. The main concern in this part of the movie is whether Derek would be raped by blacks or not. It turned out that they did not, but the notion of "being raped by blacks in prison" is shared not only with Derek but also with the audience of the movie. This notion probably comes from what Russell calls "the sexual body images of black males" (Russell, 2011, p.132). Derek has no communication with any members of these macho black guys. In the movie, they are just depicted as "beasts that may sexually offend others"(Russell). Since the possible victim is a white, it also indicates that the rape would be a kind of interracial pornography (There is almost no description of black females in the movie. The only exception is a black shop-keeper who was insulted by Derek and his racist members). The other symbolic icon of blackness can be found in the characteristic of Lamont, who is a black inmate and becomes a good friend of Derek in the laundry room in the prison. He talks and makes jokes a lot, which also characterizes him as a typical young black male who has a big mouth. Another representation of black character is Dr. Sweeny. He is a high school principal who holds Ph.D. and tries to help both Derek and Danny. He is seen as a well-educated black role-model. He is also seen as the person who has gone through the Civil Right Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a man of dignity and plays a "good guy" in this movie. During these events, some flashbacks of past events are inserted occasionally. One of them is a basketball match with a young black group at a park. Here Derek finally won the match with them against the expectation that blacks play basketball better than whites. One of the black guys, who is killed by Derek later in the movie because of stealing his car, is depicted as a bad guy who physically offended Derek during the game. All of the black characters in this movie are split into good and bad guys. This is what Russell calls "a series of binary extremes" (Russell, 2011, p.128). All of them bear strong black icons. Even Dr. Sweeny, who is relatively more depicted than other black characters, is seen as a typical wise and elderly black-male.

The background of the movie also plays an important role in representing race and racial issues. The racial situation is actually discussed by the characters themselves in the movie. The story unfolds in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, California, where different races exist in the same area. The topic that is referred to in the film is the Los Angeles Riot occurred in 1992. This racial-motivated event has huge impacts on Derek and Danny since the Riot is exemplified by Derek to support his claim to justify the beating of Rodney King. A hard dispute over racism is carried out at the dinner table at Derek's house with their mother Doris's Jewish boyfriend Murray (who is a Danny's school teacher) and Derek's girlfriend Stacey. Here Doris and Murray talk about the Rodney King incident from relatively a liberal point of views, whereas Derek criticizes Rodney with harshly racial words. In the end, Derek shows his hostility to Murray by showing his swastika tattoo.

Another interesting aspect of this movie is that it also shows racial discriminatory views of working-class American people. For example, Derek and Danny's father Dennis, who was a firefighter shot and killed while fighting a fire, talks about affirmative action critically to Derek. He probably does not call himself a white supremacist, but criticizes the racially "unfair" system. He uses hateful words such as "affirmative blacksion," "niggers," and "shit," which clearly show his racial discrimination against blacks. It shows that these prejudiced notions may easily be passed down to the next generation in an ordinary working-class family. Another racial episode that is likely to happen in Los Angeles is that attacking a glossary store owned by a Korean. The main reason why Derek attacks the store with his racial-group members is that the owner hires non-white employees. The movie reflects the political and social situations in the 1990s in Los Angeles on their life-style basis. For Derek and Danny, their enemies are real. The enemies are the people whom they see every day in their lives such as their neighbors, co-workers, classmates, and shop owners. The brothers hate them because they are non-white. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler and Nazis ideology seems to play a relatively small in their lives. Swastika and other Nazism icons seem to attract them only as a fashion, not as philosophy. They don't look like Nazism ideologues at all (Both brothers do not use particular racial words such as "Aryans." Derek uses the word "Jewish" only once while disputing with his mother's Jewish boyfriend). There is no description of them praising Hitler or his ideology in the film. That is probably why Danny can change his mind and throw away all the Nazism posters and stickers immediately at the end of the film.

The message of American History X is very clear. White supremacist ideology is not focused much in this film. Instead, hatred and violence seem to be put more emphasized as the reasons and causes of racism. For example, Dr. Sweeny asks Derek in prison, "Has anything you've done made your life better?" Derek actually changes his mind with this question. At the end of the film, Danny writes as a conclusion of his essay assigned by Dr. Sweeny saying that "Hate is baggage. It's not worth it." Both examples point out that the brothers' problems are not on race, but on hatred. What they have to do now is to see themselves objectively and find out whether the hatred has its own legitimate basis. Although rest of the characters are distinctly divided into good and bad guys and described stereotypically with racial symbols, it successfully shows how a circle of hate violence continues.

However, there is criticism that the movie sends the wrong message that hate crimes are committed by people who shave their heads and wear swastikas, and if a viewer knows that he does not do this, he can rest assured that he is not a racist (Finley, 2003, p.82). This is probably because the story relies more on the racial stereotypes, whereas a similar movie such as Crash uses the racial stereotypes in ordinary people more efficiently to show the conflicts between them so that they are more likely to happen in their real life. Overall, the movie shows how racial hatred is reproduced over generations very well.

Movie Review: Fargo and Blood Simple

The following article was written as an assignment for the Introduction to Film and Video Analysis class.

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The Coen brothers often make films that are categorized into crime movies. The genre includes the elements such as crimes, guns, murders, police, fights, violence, "good guys," and "bad guys." Miller's Crossing (1990), The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), No Country for Old Men (2007), and some other Coen's films have a lot of these elements. Strong influences by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler are seen in their films. Among them, Fargo (1996) received two Academy Awards (best actress and writing original screenplay) and a Cannes Film Festival Award (best director) and is considered one of their best movies. It has very unique characteristics, among which may even change the notion of the categorized genre as a crime movie. By comparing their first film Blood Simple (1984), its uniqueness becomes much clearer. Fargo seems to follow the rules of crime movies on the surface, but its motif and composition are quite out of them that allow this movie to be seen as an anti-crime movie in some points.

There are many similar points in both Blood Simple and Fargo regarding their plots, scenes, characters, and motifs. For example, one of the main male characters in both movies makes an initial crime plan involving his own wife and asks other person(s) with money to carry it out (A man asks a private detective to kill his wife in Blood Simple, whereas a man asks two thugs to kidnap his wife in Fargo). In both films, The original plans do not go well as planned, and the stories unfold unexpectedly. The husbands get in trouble and the other people around them also get involved. At last many of them are killed. All the events also happen within a few days in both movies. There are many similar scenes as well. They both have many long shots of a long road to the horizon on the plain field. Both first scenes are the long-distance shot of a long, empty road. Important negotiations are held in a bar. The couples in both movies find themselves safe when they are in bed with their partners. Sex scenes appear quite early in parts of both movies. Female characters try to escape to the bathroom at their houses and the attacker(s) breaks in there. While one of the characters is moving a dead (or dying) body in the middle of a street to the roadside at night, a car is approaching them. All the characters in both movies move to different locations by car and also many important conversations are held in there. In both films, female characters play quite a tough role such as shooting villain(s) and managing to survive. Same kinds of props including telephones and guns are also often used as an important tool. Strong similarity is also found in both characters. For example, the main characters in both movies are all middle-aged. The murderers are motivated by money to carry out the plans and end up dead (In Fargo, one of the criminals is arrested alive while the other one is killed). Most of all, both movies have very similar motifs. The intention and desire of each character causes unexpected results by accidents and leads the story to an unintended direction. These unexpected plot twists are one of the strong characteristics of the Coen brothers' films. This failing-crime plot is often seen in their other movies including Raising Arizona (1987), The Big Lebowski (1998), and Burn After Reading (2008). All the similarities mentioned above suggest that they are apparently pretty much the same kind of crime movies.

However, Blood Simple and Fargo still have different characteristics as well in characters, scenes, and plots. Blood Simple focuses only on the characters who actually get involved in the plan, whereas Fargo focuses not only on the characters got involved in the plan, but also on a police officer and her colleagues and family in the same town. Blood Simple follows the basic rules of film noir (guns, murders, money, femme fatale, and dark night), whereas Fargo is not restricted by these rules. It actually deviates from them and has very opposite characteristics to them: The police officer is not a macho or cool man but a middle-aged, cheerful pregnant woman. There is no femme fatale and no one is driven to commit a crime by sexual desire.  Blood Simple has many thrilling scenes. For example,  a camera only shows a female character hiding in the bathroom and does not reveal to the audience who the approaching attacker is in the living room. The sounds of the attacker's footsteps and the heartbeats of the female character also emphasize the thrilling mood. In contrast, Fargo has very few such scenes. Instead, it rather provides a comical touch to the violent scenes. For example, a female character fall off from the stairs blinding herself with a shower curtain and faints. This is one of the reasons why this movie is seen as dark comedy. Blood Simple consists of only a crime story, whereas Fargo consists of both a crime story and the ordinary-life story of a local police chief, Marge. There are many contrasting scenes as well. While darkness is very much emphasized in Blood Simple, the whiteness of snow in a day time is put much emphasis in Fargo. The climates in both movies are also opposite. Sweat on the character's face and flies flying around him show that the event happens in very hot summer in Blood Simple. On the other hand, white breaths from the mouths and heavy clothes with thick gloves show that the temperature is extremely low in cold winter in Fargo. Although one character wears a cowboy hat and another cowboy boots, the movie does not seem to represent the taste of Texas much in Blood Simple (The characters do not speak in heavy Texas accents), whereas strong Minnesota accents and the repeated dialects such as "yah" spoken in almost every character in a small local town Brainerd show the strong locality of Minnesota in Fargo. All the protagonists are desperate to find their ways out and do not morally reflect on what they are doing in Blood Simple, whereas the police chief Marge gives simple but strong moral questions at the end of the film to one of the arrested criminals Gaear regarding what he has done in Fargo. ("There's more to life than money, you know … Don't you know that?")

The ways the characters are depicted are also very different in both movies. All the characters are depicted quite seriously, and some are even depressed in Blood Simple. However, they are not heavily characterized with repeated actions or phrases. Especially the two main characters, Abby and Ray, are depicted as plain characters so that the viewers are easy to relate with them and imagine how they feel. In fact, there are many close-up scenes of them without saying anything, which may force the audience to guess what they are thinking. In Fargo, all the characters, including the very minor ones, seem a little comical to the audience even though they act seriously in the film. One of the main reasons for this is that each character bears caricatured traits which leave the viewers the strong impression of them and make the viewers easy to expect what the character will do and say next time when he or she appears on the screen. The characters' characteristic signs repeatedly occur again and again to the same characters throughout the movie in the forms of the actions, phrases, and facial expressions and form his or her unique characteristics. In other words, the characters are dominated by their own characteristics and do not act or say anything against their characterized images any more. The characters act and say as they are expected, which may lead the viewers to see them as a stereotypes with no complex human emotion.

The other reason for the comical aspect is that all the characters in Brainerd speak in very heavy regional accents and say colloquial dialects quite often as mentioned above. This also helps the viewers regard them as "characterized others" instead of seeing them as "ordinary people like us" just like the viewers themselves. This regional characteristic plays another important role in forming the perception of the characters. The viewers would notice that these Minnesotans act and say things quite politely. This politeness of the people in Minnesota is known as "Minnesota Nice." They also act politely even when they are in the middle of dangerous or desperate situations, which make the scenes funny even though they are quite serious. These contrasting points in both films make the very different impressions. Blood Simple keeps the thrilling tension, while Fargo has a relaxed, little comical atmosphere even though the events are very dreadful. Some other Coens' movies such as Big Libowski and Burn After Reading also have the same kind of comical atmosphere.

One of the most different points of Blood Simple and Fargo is the composition of their story lines. There are two on-going stories in Fargo, whereas only a single story line going on in Blood Simple. Fargo is not only about the story of criminals but also about that of ordinary people. These two stories are clearly contrasted as a whole to make a good balance of the movie tone not to become too criminally oriented. Marge's business and private lives are depicted in detail (they are actually mixed). By contrasting with the routine work and boring life in countryside, the movie successfully reveals the craziness of the other on-going kidnapping and its relevant events without much centering and dramatizing the violent event itself. Fargo finishes with the scene that Marge's husband Norm tells her that his picture was selected as the design for a postage stamp. It suggests that even right after a very dramatic and violent event such as shooting and arresting a murderer, a very personal event which looks very minor for many people becomes very important and exciting for a couple like them. For Marge, fighting with "bad guys" is not the exciting main event as the viewers expect. For her, it is just a routine work that should be done as usual as a part of her job. In other words, this movie rejects the core characteristic of crime movies such as "Who wins at last?" Instead, it suggests that there are many important things than beating bad guys. It gives an alternative value to the viewers at the end. In this sense, Fargo can be seen as an anti-crime movie. What Marge says in the police car to Gaear ("… and it's a beautiful day.") at the end of the movie shows that she is now back to her ordinary life again. The same composition and motif are also seen in No Country for Old Men that has parallel (criminals and police) story lines going on at the same time and makes a similar tone at the end of the movie.

Though there are many similar points in Fargo and Blood Simple, Fargo is more complex in composition and leaves the viewers a different impression at last from what it is expected as a crime movie. In a word, Blood Simple shows only the chain of violence, whereas Fargo shows how the violence and crimes look ridiculous and comical when it is compared with the peacefulness of caricatured ordinary people.

Movie Review: Stranger Than Paradise

The following article was written as an assignment for the Introduction to Film and Video Analysis class.

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Jim Jarmusch's second movie Stranger Than Paradise (1984) is often seen as a "deadpan comedy" or "wry humor" mainly because all the characters do not talk much. Even if they talk, they often fail to communicate with each other. On the other hand, the movie is also considered as "Downtown Cool" or "streetwise naturalism." These humor and coolness come mainly from the cinematography and the character's settings in the film. Overall the film clearly creates the "deadpan" atmosphere and shows the isolated situation of each character by breaking one of the conventional rules of general movies.

Stranger Than Paradise intends to create a boring atmosphere by showing communication failures between the characters. The film does not have any twisted story-line or exciting events. It consists of three acts. In the first act "The New World," Willie and his friend Eddie meet Willie's cousin Eva ,who just came from Budapest, in a desolate apartment in New York. She spends ten days there with them. In the second act "One Year Later," Willie and Eddie visit Eva in Cleveland, Ohio in the middle of cold winter. In the last act "Paradise," three of them go to Florida for a vacation. The only big event happens at the end of the film when Eva happens to receive a huge amount of money by accident. Except for that event, Jarmusch mainly describes their awkward interactions with each other. He focuses more on their communication failures. For example, Willie refuses to speak or listen to Hungarian that his aunt Lotte and Eva speak. Willie fails to tell a joke to Eva because he totally forgets the punch line. Jarmusch also shows the fact that there is not much to talk about when the characters meet each other. Willie does not ask Eva anything about her first trip to New York or her home country Hungary when they first meet. Willie and Eddie have nothing to talk with aunt Lotte when they visit her house in Cleveland. Instead, Jarmusch inserts the silence before and after the characters'short conversation quite often in order to reveal the boring and uncomfortable situations that they have to bear. To fill the emptiness of being together in the same place, they often smoke cigarettes and drink beer. Also, their conversations are often one-way. (e.g. Aunt Lotte speaks Hungarian to everybody even if nobody is listening to her. A drug dealer approaches to Eva and complains to her without confirming her identity.) All these malfunctions of the communication leave the impression to the audience that each character is isolated even though he or she would like to communicate to each other.

Jarmusch also uses cinematography to amplify the character's isolated standings. Unlike the popular images that each city has, the locations where Willie and Eddie go including New York, Cleveland, and Florida are depicted only with the desolated images. Abandoned cars and ruined buildings are shown in New York. Whole the city is covered with snow in Cleveland, and only the deserted motel and beach with no other people is shown in Florida. The film's black-and-white images make the scenes more devastated. Usually in a film, a close-up shot with the character's facial expression is used to show the character's intention or feeling more directly to the audience so that they are more likely to overlap themselves with the character subjectively. In this film, Jarmusch doesn't use a close-up shot at all. Instead, he employs many middle and long shots, which often include several characters in the same frame and leave the impression to the audience that they objectively observe the interaction between the characters from a distant point. Few-second blackouts are also inserted between the scenes. They play quite an important role here. They interrupt the sequence of story each time the scene changes. The audience is forced to stop following the story-line each time and is given the break to appreciate the meaning of the event that they just saw or think other things. The blackouts prevent the audience from getting into the movie's world. These techniques are used quite efficiently in this film to produce the weary and deadpan atmosphere.

The other point that looks the characters more isolated in the film is that they cannot feel that they are supposed to be together to achieve something as a goal in the movie, which is often the case seen in other movies. Willie and Eddie say to each other that they do not know what to do and where to go. Even if they go to other locations hoping for changing their current boring situation, they still feel the same there. After they arrive in Cleveland, Eddie says to Willie, "You know, it's kind of funny. You're some place new, and everything looks just the same." As a result, the audience is also at a loss with them in the story. From that point, the audience wanders with them without any possible goals of the movie.

Stranger Than Paradise changed one of the premises of movies that the characters surely communicate with each other and the story follows a certain story archetype in a genre which have a typical ending or goal predictable for the audience. The film successfully displays an uninteresting and tiresome atmosphere and communication failures that often occur in a real life. It is still quite unconventional and unique among other films today.

Movie Review: Rashomon

The following article was written as an assignment for the Introduction to Film and Video Analysis class.

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A classic film still gives the audience today the strong senses of originality and sharpness it has even if it is black-and-white and was made a few decades ago. Rashomon (1950) directed by Akira Kurosama is one of them that had a huge impact on the audience and filmmakers all around the world after it received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards in 1952. Today the film is considered as a classic not only by its content, but also by its composition of the story line (The story is based on the two short stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, but it is changed a little). Avove all, the film always makes the viewer to think what a story line is every time one watches it.

At the beginning of the film, a woodcutter and a priest started to tell a mysterious story that they heard at the courthouse to a vulgar man who happened to drop by at the gate of an abandoned temple called Rashomon with them under heavy rain. According to the woodcutter and priest, there was a murder in a forest three days ago. A samurai was killed and the suspect was arrested. After that, the woodcutter, the priest, the suspect, the samurai's wife, and even the dead samurai testified (through the medium) at the courthouse. However, their stories are conflicted each other. The woodcutter also gives his "true story" to the other members at the temple which he had not told at the court, but it also conflicted to the others. They get so confused that they cannot trust what people say any more. At the end of the film, they find a baby abandoned behind them. The vulgar man robs the clothes of the baby, whereas the woodcutter, who also allegedly stole a dagger from the dead body, decides to take the baby and bring it up as his own children. The priest finds humanity in his decision and tells him that he can keep his faith in human beings.

The most unique point of this film is its composition of narrative and point of view. The same incident is viewed and told differently by different people who were at the scene at least four times. All the characters have their own motivations to make up their own story. The narrative of each character is often inserted from the beginning of his or her story through the end so that it looks more favorable to the character. As a result, the audience cannot tell exactly which the real truth is. In other words, the audience would face the situation that what they watch might not be what actually happened in the real world in the movie. What they can believe is only the scenes at the temple and that of the courthouse. Some of the audience may notice that there is another character in the courthouse, an unseen investigator. It is hard to characterize him since he is out of the camera frame and does not say a word even though the other characters seem to have conversation with him. The audience knows he is there at the scene only because all the characters testify to him looking toward the direction of the audience (which is toward the camera). It makes the audience feel as they were the investigator or judge. His figure is unseen and his voice unheard in order to have this setting effect. This means that the fairness and objectivity of an investigator and judge is deliberately excluded from the film although the role itself is played in there. The judgment or sentencing of the trial is not referred either from any of the characters. Instead, the audience is the one who has to play that role. They have to judge by themselves whether each person's story is true or not. Toward the end of the story, not only do all the characters get confused but also does the audience.

Now what the audience can believe in the movie is only in the scene at the temple. Here the abandoned baby plays an important role. Throughout the movie, the priest keeps saying that he might lose his faith in men, but at the end when he knows that the woodcutter offers to become a foster father of the baby, he can finally believe human beings again. At the same time, the audience may receive another message from the movie that this humanistic happy-ending is reliable because it is not some one's story or point of view but a God's point of view. This viewpoint in the ending part is well-contrasted with the narratives and viewpoints of human beings in the earlier parts, which makes the last message clearer and stronger.

There are many weak points in this movie. For example, the characters explain the movie's motif too much by their own words. They also overact without adopting the actual ways of talking at the time in Edo period. Moreover, the treatment and motive of the female character does not seem socially acceptable or understandable for many viewers today. Even so, the film still gives the audience a fresh impression every time they watch it.