In its opening credits, Spike Lee’s Clockers features photos of dead young black men sliding across the frame. These images of lifelessness are paired with a somber ballad with lyrics pondering a place of solace and understanding, a place inaccessible to the black male despite compliance or revolt. The viewer is confronted by this slideshow of bloodied black bodies for nearly three minutes. There are cuts to crowds at crimes scenes. People stand, talking or looking on in silence, seemingly desensitized to the spectacle of a dead youth, separated only by the yellow tape which commands them not to cross. The front cover of a newspaper appears on the screen, “TOY GUN, REAL TRAGEDY”-- a young boy killed in a case of misunderstanding. This evidence of a robbed childhood establishes the reality of the community depicted in the film. A community stricken by poverty the fear of imminent violence, it is home to main character Strike, and many other young men who are yet still boys. Clockers stands with other independent films in their allegiance to what critic Manthia Diawara terms “New Black Realism” (594). These films aim to translate authentic interpretations of black life, many …show more content…
As Phillip Bailey’s “Children of the Ghetto” plays, Lee takes the viewer into a typical drug exchange in a “concrete jungle/ filled with misery” (Bailey) which ends up being an undercover operation. As the police officers arrive, Strike and his partners remain in the center of the scene, although the frame is now congested. While they are humiliated and harassed, Lee cuts to Strike’s mother, stoic as she looks down on the scene from her tenement window. His father figure and boss, Rodney, drives by the spectacle but does nothing to stop it. Lee uses this scene to show how the broken home has resulted in Strike’s conflicting views of responsibility and
One of the most important elements of this story is the setting. Taking place in the drug-plagued, poverty-stricken, and frustrated streets of Harlem in the 1950s, the setting
In conclusion, A Time to Kill has many examples of how conflict between characters reveals society's dominant racist attitudes. These attitudes are presented to be negative throughout the film by representation of social groups, characterisation of Jake Brigance and the perspective from Carl Hailey. Together these conventions allow the viewer to understand the character Carl Hailey, and see how the film presents the dominant racist attitudes
The Murder of Emmett Till is an incredible documentary about the harsh reality of life for African Americans in the U.S. in the 1950’s. The documentary does an amazing job of shedding light onto this terrible period of American history by showing it’s audience a very graphic example of this time period’s prejudice against African-America. The Murder of Emmett Till focuses on a case in 1955 in which a 14-year-old African American boy was ruthlessly murdered for supposedly flirting with a white woman. The intention of this magnificent documentary are made fairly clear to its audience as the video progresses; its intentions were to inform the audience about this gruesome case, the time period in which it occurred along with suggestions on how
Spike Lee and John Singleton write their films about inner-city violence and black youth. Although they grew up in different parts of the United States (John Singleton in Los Angeles and Spike Lee in New York) they have something to say to society. They both strive to expose the realities faced by African-Americans, especially those in inner-city ghettos. With Spike Lee starring as Mookie and John Singleton embodying Tre, both directors showcase their perspective on American society via their characters.
John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood is an American teen drama film released in 1991 that focuses on three black teens who live in the dangerous neighbourhood of Crenshaw, Los Angeles. The main characters Doughboy, his half-brother Ricky, and their friend Tre grow up together but meet drastically different fates as young adults. As Swanson (2011) points out, it is important to understand the tension within black communities in Los Angeles at the time of the film’s release; the Rodney King beating had taken place only months before and LA’s gang wars were reaching a peak. As a Los Angeles native, Singleton’s goal with the film was to alert people about the situation around them, as he said: “I couldn’t rhyme. I wasn’t a rapper. So I made this movie” (Swanson 2011). To reflect the environment as accurately as possible, the film was shot on the streets of South Los Angeles, so the crew was just as on edge as their characters would be; there were even threats of gun violence from local gang members.
The movie Boyz N the Hood is an illustration of how a group of early adolescents’ lives was affected negatively due to the environment they lived in. These adolescents lived in an environment where drugs, gangs, and shootings were the center of their community. Living in a predominantly African American community these adolescents were faced with many misfortunes. Ricky one of the adolescent characters I have decided to evaluate for this particular paper was faced with adversity.
Many tragic events happen in this short story that allows the reader to create an assumption for an underlying theme of racism. John Baldwin has a way of telling the story of Sonny’s drug problem as a tragic reality of the African American experience. The reader has to depict textual evidence to prove how the lifestyle and Harlem has affected almost everything. The narrator describes Harlem as “... some place I didn’t want to go. I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt. It filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality” (Baldwin 60). Another key part in this story is when the narrator and Sonny’s mother is telling the story of a deceased uncle. The mother explains how dad’s brother was drunk crossing the road and got hit by a car full of drunk white men. Baldwin specifically puts emphasis on the word “white” to describe the men for a comparison to the culture of dad and his brother.
In America, racism as well as race relations are generally extremely sensitive subjects that are often brushed underneath the rug. Earlier this year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out graced the big screen, and left audiences with a great deal to digest. Peele’s first cinematic debut touched on the delicate topics of racism and the continuous devaluing of African American culture by “liberal” Caucasians in American suburbs. In this essay, one will explore the ways in which works written by modern political thinkers such as Nietzsche and Marx effortlessly add perspective through various theories on the difficulties brought to light in the motion picture, Get Out.
“The Humans Project” is an article that reviews the works of both 28 Days Later and Children of Men; it specifically examines the roles of the black heroes in the films that go through contemporary disasters. Brown summarizes both stories and examines them in-depth. He explains to us that both films are examples of compelling dystopian literature that became famous after the 1990’s, due to the effects of neoliberal free market capitalism. Brown informs us that after the cold war and nuclear age zombie stories from our era of globalization and ecological destruction. Both films show America and Britain generated with insecure nationalism from the geopolitical shifts, which the despair in this time showed the difference from what she calls, ‘us’
In the book, Gang Leader for a Day, a rogue sociologist passionately dives into the lives of one of Chicago’s toughest housing projects in an attempt to develop an insight as to how the urban impoverished lived. Throughout the text it becomes clear that a conflict paradigm is being reflected. A conflict society is based on social inequality, in which some individuals benefit and thrive more than others, which tends to lead to conflict and thus change. This is evident both in the housing projects where a gang known as the “Black Kings” take over and also in the surrounding neighborhoods where the more elite citizens, including persons from the authors university, shy away from associating with the nearby poor black nearby public, thus
life in the mid to late twentieth century and the strains of society on African Americans. Set in a small neighborhood of a big city, this play holds much conflict between a father, Troy Maxson, and his two sons, Lyons and Cory. By analyzing the sources of this conflict, one can better appreciate and understand the way the conflict contributes to the meaning of the work.
The film 8 Mile, directed by Curtis Hanson, is the typical American story of struggle and the eventual overcoming of obstacles and evil. Upon closer look, the film is arguably a socioeconomic and racial discourse. It focuses on the ascension of Marshall Mathers into the rap industry, previously dominated by African-American males. Rabbit’s race, gender, and class, all contribute to his identity and the meaning of the film, as well as contributing to Eminem’s image. Several themes are defined through the movie’s underlying discourse of race and class: the commodification of black culture, racial opposition, “passing”, cross-cultural bonding, white heroism and white masculinity, the reversal of white privilege into a disadvantage, and
The film, A Time to Kill, directed by Joel Schumacher is a crime drama film adaptation of the novel ‘A Time to Kill’ by John Grisham. This film is set in the fictional town of Canton, Mississippi in the early 1980’s, and follows the eventful life of a young Southern white Lawyer, Jake Brigance and his quest to defend and free African American father Carl Lee Hailey after he took the law into his own hands, killing the two culprits that brutally raped his 10 year old daughter, Tonya. A Time to Kill centres on the issues of racial discrimination, judiciary faults and the rightful course of justice. As I am a ‘white’ teen female living in the 21st century, the issues that are centred in the film have challenged particular attitudes that I hold,
The metonymic adage, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, is well demonstrated by Haper Lee, the author of the classic novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and Joel Schumacher, the director of ‘A time to kill’ as both make comments on society. They both effectively use different stylistic devices, language and film techniques combined with a intriguing story line to inform an audience of some of the racist base of today’s society and philosophy on the definition of courage and justice whilst possibly defining what these should be. The written and theatrical portrayal of events related to racism, justice and courage in this case, results in people’s values and attitudes being challenged and questioned, contributing to changes in the viewpoint
Continually the director uses the subplots- the stories within the story-to show the hierarchy of oppression and privilege in America to show how people think of others in a particular way in which they take people’s dignity. The way people treat and look to others is really off and they go with their thoughts to really far places and they imagine things that may not happen, in which they oppress another person.another scene “-come on man keep driving i said i'm not laughing at you ...fine you want me to show you i will show you ,do you want to see what's in my hands i will show you” In the scene, it shows how the cop mistreats the boy just because he is black. This scene is related to the message because the cop kills a person who did not do anything to him, he just thinks that he has gun but he is not sure about it, then