Revisiting the Canon: Boyz N the Hood.

It’s hard to overstate the impact John Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz n’ the Hood had on black cinema. It helped launch the careers of a slew of prominent actors: Laurence Fishburne, Angela Bassett, Cuba Gooding, Jr., (who would all go on to be Oscar nominees on other films), as well as Nia Long, Morris Chestnut, and Ice Cube. (Regina King, who remains the most criminally underemployed actress in Hollywood, has a bit part, as well.) It garnered lots of critical praise two Academy Award nominations, bestowing upon it broader cultural legitimacy. And it created a template for “authenticity” that other films aimed at black audiences tried to emulate, and did, for the rest of the 1990’s, with varying degrees of success.*

It’s a shame, then, that it’s such a crappy movie. [Spoilers.]

This shortcoming is due in part to the movie’s own success. It was a gut-punch when it debuted, but it’s impossible to watch it now without having any familiarity with all the tropes it spawned.

But let’s rewind. Boyz is a coming-of-age tale about a smart but undisciplined kid named Tré Styles (not a hype man for a hip-hop group, despite the name) who is sent by his mother to live with his father, Furious in order to ‘learn how to be a man.’ Furious is a real estate broker who is trying to get in on the South Central housing market before it gentrifies. He doesn’t eat pork. He tightens up high-top fades. He drops knowledge (and to underscore that knowledge is indeed being dropped, he points to his head when he does so). He seems to be the only father in a neighborhood rife with gangs and violence. This prompts a question: Is a place where masculinity and violence are so tightly tethered the kind of place where you’d want your kid to learn about manhood? Later we see Bassett’s character in a well-appointed spot somewhere else, calling to check in on Tré, who clearly would be better served by living with her, life lessons about ‘manhood’ be damned. She offers him the choice to move in with her. His father says Tré wants to say and the decision should be his. (Really, fam? ‘Cuz them drive-bys say different.)

Tré on the other hand, has a seemingly inexhaustible amount of free time. His closest friends are Doughboy (Ice Cube)** and Ricky (Chestnut), two half-brothers who are on different paths. Ricky loves football as a kid, and later we see him as a standout high school athlete being recruited by USC. He and his girlfriend have a son. Doughboy is the lesser-loved of the pair, and as an adult we see him fresh out of jail, flirting with returning to a life of crime. Their mother seems to think Tré can be a good influence on the two of them. Tré is dating Brandi (Nia Long), who doesn’t really matter at all in the film except that they eventually have sex after Tré comes crying to her after he is emasculated by a black cop who hates black people. Yeah. Problematic.

Seanathan

Menace II Society was better
Kjen

“It’s a shame, then, that it’s such a crappy movie.”

I was all set to automatically defend the movie until I really tried to remember it. And as much as it was a tale of the struggle to get out of the hood, all I really could remember was the violence.

But I think it still has a special place because it was the contemporary portrayl of a Black community (it’s mandatory that you include violence and poverty for realism’s sake, you see) that had a at least one “positive Black man” in it.

I wonder what this generation’s contemporary Black (male) movie will be? Will it still be set in the hood, the rap game or has society progressed to recognize another background/setting as “real” for Black people yet?
Aisha

Having grown up in the area they are portraying (the alley where Ricky was shot was the alley behind my house, he peed on our gate , lol) it will never feel crappy to me. To this day the story is pretty right on for what Singleton was trying to get across. The movie may felt too focused on violence but the I grew up with helicopters flying by every night so the violence was always a threat during the mid 80’s to early 90’s. I’m steal dealing with how I internalized stereotypes from that era.

On the whole woman thing, yes the woman are a sidebar. You’d have to make a whole other movie to really capture hood life for the women. I think in the places where the women and men intersect it’s pretty much what you see in the movie…women as conquest. However, when the women are together on their own, there is an entirely different script that is followed. I don’t think that was something that could have been effectively covered in this movie.

Revisiting the Canon: Boyz N the Hood.

G.D.

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