Directrospective: BABY BOY (2001)

Notes on the films of American director John Singleton.

BOYZ N THE HOOD will probably always be John Singleton’s most prominent film, and with good reason. There’s a vitality and an urgency to its subject matter, a remarkable economy to its storytelling, and half of its cast went on to be movie stars. While he made some other great films, it’s a shame that he never topped his very first in terms of cultural impact. Singleton himself said that since BOYZ was shot in sequence, you can literally watch him getting better as a director with each scene.

John Singleton’s last film work as a writer-director, BABY BOY, is in no way a remake of BOYZ, but it does represent another look at young Black masculinity in South Central Los Angeles from an artist who at that point had five feature films under his belt. Where BOYZ is a brilliantly felt work by a 23-year-old film school graduate bursting with things to say, BABY BOY is the accomplished work of an experienced 33-year-old Hollywood filmmaker looking back on the things he’s learned about adulthood.

You can tell from the first frame that you’re in the hands of a confident, fully formed film artist. The nude body of full-grown Jody (Tyrese Gibson) floating in a huge practical womb is the most striking image Singleton ever shot, and by far the most surreal. Every theme to be explored in the next two hours and ten minutes is present: Jody’s arrested development and complicated relationship with his mother, obviously, but also the disconnect between his sexual and emotional maturities and the way that socioeconomic circumstances can thrust adulthood on Black children far too early. That this film came after the disappointing, underconsidered SHAFT was surprising only until I learned that Singleton had Tupac Shakur in mind for the lead before his death in 1996, which means BABY BOY had been in development at least in some form when he was still making his more thoughtful earlier films like POETIC JUSTICE and HIGHER LEARNING. Without question this is the work of that Singleton, and would sadly be the last. The three films he made after BABY BOY were all written by other people and take place in very different worlds.

(I haven’t seen any of Snowfall, the FX series about crack cocaine in 1983 L.A. that he co-created and of which he co-wrote two episodes and directed two others, but I plan to, and I’m very glad he returned to L.A. stories before he died. It’s a damn shame he didn’t get the chance to make more movies like BOYZ and POETIC JUSTICE and BABY BOY, if that’s something he wanted to do.)

Gibson’s Jody is a 20-year-old father of two children by two different mothers. Neither of them live with him, nor do his children; he still lives with his mother, Juanita (Adrienne-Joi Johnson), in the house where he grew up. His girlfriend Yvette (Taraji P. Henson) lives with their son Jojo in her own apartment, while his daughter lives with her mother, Peanut, at Peanut’s mother’s house. Jody fixes bikes for kids in the neighborhood, but he doesn’t have a real job, nor does he have a car - though he borrows Yvette’s so much that he often forgets it’s hers. Everybody has lost their patience waiting for Jody to grow up. Juanita wants Jody to get a job and move out of her goddamned house, as does her new boyfriend Melvin (ROSEWOOD’s Ving Rhames, who’s outstanding here), an ex-con trying to start a new life with Juanita and not at all interested in living with her adult son. He’s also particularly concerned about Jody turning to crime, partly because he doesn’t want Jody to make the same mistakes he did and partly because he thinks Jody’s too soft. Yvette wants Jody to take more responsibility for their child and stop constantly cheating on her, which Jody is maybe most hesitant to do. He takes full advantage of the fact that he looks like Tyrese Gibson. At the same time, he also halfway wants to grow up himself, at the very least so everyone will get off his back about it. Little steps here and there - a new job using his charm to buy wholesale women’s clothing cheap and resell it out of Yvette’s trunk, a decision to do the right thing only slightly after he’s begun cheating on Yvette with her coworker - show that he’s trying to change. He’s just really bad at it.

After a fight, Yvette and Jody break up. Then Melvin punches Jody in an argument, and Jody leaves his mother’s house to stay with his friend Sweetpea (Omar Gooding). When Yvette’s gangster ex Rodney (Snoop Dogg) is released from jail, he moves back in to Yvette’s place without asking. Yvette realizes she still wants to be with Jody, but he doesn’t believe that she isn’t back together with Rodney until he finds out Rodney nearly raped her in front of their son. After Rodney fails to kill Jody in a drive-by, Jody and his gangster friend Sweetpea head out to get revenge. Jody’s never shot anyone before, and while he shoots Rodney in the legs, he can’t bring himself to kill the man when the moment comes. Sweetpea finishes Rodney off. Melvin finds Jody in his bedroom with the gun still in his hand, thinking about whether to use it on himself, and gently takes it from him. Jody moves out of his mom’s house for good and in with Yvette, with whom he gets married.

Jody is Singleton’s most (intentionally) unlikable protagonist. He’s selfish, he’s arrogant, he’s stubborn, he’s dishonest, he’s inconsiderate. He’s like Tre, Doughboy, and Ricky in BOYZ and Lucky in POETIC JUSTICE, Jody has to learn that being a man is more about responsibility than about making sure everyone knows you’re tough. Unlike those characters, though, he takes his sweet time doing it, and he makes the same mistakes over and over again. There’s a repetition to the film that can make for a frustrating watch, but I think that’s part of the idea. We’re supposed to be just as fed up with Jody’s bullshit as everyone else is. He’s beautiful and he can project plenty of street-wise toughness whether or not he actually possesses much, but he’s as shitty a role model as he is an alluring fantasy of carefree young manhood. The hot-shit act is well past embarrassing.

Unplanned pregnancy is a theme Singleton keeps coming back to in his hood dramas, as it’s a useful illustration of the kind of irresponsible behavior he sees as endemic to young Black men in South L.A. One thoughtless act of teenage abandon can turn into a pretty lasting obligation, one from which men like Jody still walk away much more often than Singleton thinks they should. I don’t think these films are as moralizing as they might seem - in BOYZ, Laurence Fishburne’s Furious Styles became a father at 17 and is shown to have very quickly gotten his act together and arguably become one of cinema’s best dads, and while 17-year-old Ricky’s not as hands-on with his own toddling son as he could be, he at least lives in the same house and shows some interest in making something of himself; from the beginning of POETIC JUSTICE, Lucky holds down a very stable job, and frustrated enough with his daughter’s mother’s irresponsible parenting that by the end he’s begun to make a safe and loving home for her. For their part, Yvette and Juanita, who was 16 when Jody was born, have been shown the fuck up for their kids. The only obstacle Singleton presents to young Black women behaving responsibly is drug addiction, and that’s not much of a choice. For young men in these films, though, it’s just selfishness and willful immaturity.

It’s important to note the general absence of poverty in any of Singleton’s hood films. Black filmmakers are under no obligation to make films about any particular kind of Black experience (or about Black experience at all) and certainly there are plenty of Black families with enough or more than enough money. I don’t think it’s irrelevant to the conversation that children of any ethnic background who end up going to film school tend to come from comfortable financial situations. So while it’s not Singleton’s job to write about anything in particular, I think having chosen to write and direct three films that deal with gang culture in Black urban communities, which is heavily influenced by economic factors, and never including a substantial depiction of economic struggle in any of them points to a conscious choice on his part. Capital is the driving force behind everything that happens in these films - the segregation of cities, racist policing, drugs, gang violence, the prison-industrial complex, etc. - and economic opportunity is clearly limited, but characters are never explicitly pushed by financial necessity to make the mistakes they make in these films. Everyone in BOYZ lives in a modest but comfortable home, and none of them want for food or clothes or school supplies. POETIC JUSTICE mostly doesn’t take place in the city, but the parts that do show gainfully employed people whose problems are largely emotional. Here, Jody’s mom’s house is, frankly, lovely, and the vegetable garden she grows over the course of the film is truly the stuff of dreams. She wants Jody to move out not because she can’t afford him living there but because she wants to live her own life now. There’s no sense that Yvette or Peanut need Jody’s help financially, but they would sure appreciate not having to do everything themselves when he’s perfectly capable of helping out. Even while Doughboy and Rodney get out of prison and right back into gang life, they don’t mention being unable to find a job because of their criminal records, and ex-con Melvin has his own landscaping business. Singleton locates the source of all his young men’s missteps in their character alone. It’s their own fault that they aren’t succeeding, as HIGHER LEARNING’s Professor Maurice Phipps would be happy to point out.

With his frequent casting of rappers and hood settings, Singleton clearly isn’t trying to put forward a B*ll C*sby-style condemnation of hip-hop culture and kids these days with their sagging pants and that filth they call “music.” He does, however, point out a problematic way that images of masculinity in hip-hop often focus on violence and power as the most important signifiers of manliness and ignore less cool things like thinking about how one’s actions might affect other people. There’s danger in relying on a filmmaker’s biography to interpret their work, but here I can’t help but wonder if Singleton, whose real estate agent father and pharmaceutical sales exec mother raised him in Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles that has its rough parts but is nowhere near the South Central of the early 1990s, saw something of himself in Jody. The film’s tendency toward a didactic dressing-down of young Black men would be much more understandable to me if Singleton were critiquing his own choices as a young person. His decision, perhaps, as a young person of relative financial stability, to emulate the riskier behavior of his poorer peers not because of the same economic need that might have driven them to, say, sell drugs, but because that behavior seemed more authentic and masculine to him. This sort of thing definitely happens, and it’s a form of appropriation not far off that of white suburban kids who want to be Snoop Dogg themselves. Ultimately, it’s what Jody is doing, too.

It’s no coincidence that Singleton’s last great film is also his last film with a realistic depiction of gun violence and its consequences. While SHAFT is a nightmare of justified police murders and DIRTY HARRY extralegal “justice,” BABY BOY is haunted by the loss of its would-be star to a drive-by shooting. Jody has a large painted mural of Tupac on his bedroom wall, and Tupac’s music appears on the soundtrack. Rodney, the man Jody shoots but can’t bring himself to kill, is played by Tupac’s friend and frequent collaborator Snoop Dogg. Singleton even shows us Jody’s brutal, bloody death as Rodney drives by before revealing that it was all imaginary. He makes us reckon with the possibility. In the bulk of the film, when Jody is acting his toughest, he’s had the least experience with actual violence. When he enlists Sweetpea to help him get back at the kids who jumped him, he doesn’t even know how to throw a punch properly. It’s after he’s actually seen and felt the reality of gang life, learned how it feels to shoot a man, that he starts to give up the immature bullshit and become more aware of the consequences of his behavior for other people. Fittingly, as Melvin approaches Jody to take the gun out of his hand, Singleton frames the shot so that Tupac’s face hangs between them. One could read the moment as one generation, robbed of its humanity by circumstance, working to stop a younger generation with a better chance from doing the same regrettable things.

It’s a powerful moment, and one that I wish Singleton would have lived up to with his next film. Instead, he made 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS. More on that tomorrow.