Visually Masterful American History X
In American History X (AHX), Tony Kaye has made an ambitious
film that that uses an individual story to paint a broad picture
of the history and ongoing challenges that the relationship
between black and white Americans face. The director achieves
this in a number of ways. This review will focus particularly on
the visual dialogue of the film because it is stunning. A
visually coherent film helps not only with continuity but to
imbed a series of signs throughout that often tells a whole new
narrative not contained or barely alluded to in the dialogure.
In the case of AHX, the pre-eminent sign is the US flag. We see
the flag on the desk of the principals office and we see Danny
Vinyard, played by Edward Furlong, swinging a toothpick flag (a
really imaginatively shot piece). Outside the Vinyard residence
drapes an American flag and the colours red white and blue
permeate the screen. We see them in the principal's office, when
Danny runs across a street (in fact, he passes a white then red
then blue car), in Seth's Trident shirt, in the café the
brothers go to, culminating in the shocking conclusion to the
film where Danny's blood is strewn across the white urinals while
his brother in a blue shirt holds him (the cubicle walls are also
blue). It is a powerful visual personification of the flag that
also serves as a metaphor - America has had a history of
bloodiness - it was formed on blood, it has killed its own, and
continues to do so within localised and personalized systems of
hate and resentment.
The American Flag (and the colours of them) feature constantly throughout the film
The plot also examines the possibility of redemption from
historical and present day wrongs (racism, neo-nazism). In
Amistad, Spielberg uses religion as a divisive element but goes
on to turn the resurrection story into a unifying theme. In AHX,
Tony Kaye uses Basketball in much the same way. At the beginning
of the film, basketball is used to eject the blacks off the local
neighbourhood basketball courts. While in jail however, Derek
talks about basketball in the laundry with the African American
man that later becomes his friend and protector. The laundry
scene acts as a double visual narrative device - Derek's
character is undergoing a purification (laundry) while finding
the common thread (basketball) of humanity that allows him to see
the fault in his racism. Derek's ideology is gradually challenged
in prison and this culminates in the shower scene, where he is
raped and thrown to the ground in imagery that is similar to a
lynching and thus fulfilling his friends' prophecy in the spoken
narrative: "you the nigger here." The irony of this
violent purification is not lost on the audience.
The imaginative filming has allowed a visual design that is rich
of meaning in a political and narrative context. It urges the
audience to look at the effects that history have had on current
race relations, of whether the United States has really been
about freedom or whether its unifying language has always been
blood.
The Personal and Political Significance
Kaye has addressed an issue here that is important in the history
of racism. And it is the whole issue of the personal impacting on
the political. This may be a feminist theme, but Catherine
Lumby's Bad Girls indicates very lucidly that the personal and
political are finally being blurred in the mainstream press. Kaye
implies that history has never had a division between personal
and political - the personal has always affected the way we judge
others - and it festers in the family and expands into the
political. The Vineyard family, represents the
"average" suburban household with the American flag at
the front of the house. Danny notes in the narrative that Derek's
racism didn't spontaneously occur after the death of his father.
It was because of his father that racism was instilled in him. In
a flashback, we see that Derek mentions that he has an assignment
on a novel written by an African American. The father begins a
spiel on "affirmative blacktion" and how it is all
"bull shit". This scene also addresses the
dis-enfranchisement of white working class males who are bitter
at having to face a sometimes unequal playing field after years
of superiority and discrimination against African Americans.
It is clear that Derek is indoctrinated by his father - and when
his father dies, a new father figure takes his place - the nazi
Cameron, which amplifies the hatred into a dangerously coherent
political message. Danny is also on the verge to neo-nazism
because of the way he sees his brother as a father figure. Again,
father figures and inter-generational links are being made as
part of a grander (universal) narrative imputation. The American
family unit has for so long been the locus of discrimination
& race hatred and this has reverberated into the political
throughout history. It is passed on from generation to generation
- from father to son. In this film, whenn Derek finds his own
redemption and finally instills in Danny the need for tolerance
(telling Danny his story on a basketball court!) and breaking the
generation to generation racism, Danny is killed. As we have seen
in so many conflicts around the world, these vicious circles
almost have a momentum of their own and one wonders when if ever,
the madness will end.
24 September 1999