Directrospective: BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991)
Notes on the films of American director John Singleton.
Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding Jr.) navigates a violent world of adolescent masculinity in South Central Los Angeles.
Today we begin a new Directrospective series on the films of American director John Singleton. When Singleton died unexpectedly in April 2019 at the age of 51, I had only seen one of his films. It was 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS. The enormous outpouring of grief and public appreciation that followed his death thus took me a little by surprise, because I had foolishly put off watching any of his most acclaimed work. Under COVID lockdown, I have taken the time to go through Singleton’s entire feature filmography and see what I’d been missing. As it turns out: quite a bit. I’m stupid!
Singleton’s first film is still the one for which he is best remembered, and with good reason. Expanded from a treatment he had included in his application to USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Singleton was 23 years old and barely out of film school when BOYZ N THE HOOD premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1991 Cannes Film Festival to rapturous reviews. It helped to launch the acting careers of Cuba Gooding, Jr., Angela Bassett, Ice Cube, Morris Chestnut, and Nia Long, and its commercial success and cultural impact spawned a new wave of hip-hop-saturated hood films exploring, and sometimes exploiting, stories of urban Black America.
At once specific and universal, BOYZ N THE HOOD owes almost as much to films about white kids coming of age in suburbs and small towns like Rob Reiner’s STAND BY ME and George Lucas’s AMERICAN GRAFFITI as it does to earlier films about Black Los Angeles like Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP or hip-hop inflected urban fables like Spike Lee’s DO THE RIGHT THING. This is a film about innocence lost and adolescence interrupted, specifically for young people who believe themselves to be ready for the adult world when they really, really aren’t. In this way it’s relatable to anyone who has ever grown up anywhere.
At the same time, it’s distinctly about life for young Black men in South Central Los Angeles at the beginning of the 1990s. Over the film’s title we hear the sounds of a gang shooting, and cards onscreen tell us that one in 21 Black American males “will be murdered in their lifetime,” “most…at the hands of another Black male.” The characters we follow first as ten-year-olds in 1984 and then as 17-year-olds in 1991 are barely young men at all. At every point in the film, Tre and his friends are children. But as the film continually reminds us - it’s right there in the name - the violence of the world Tre and his friends have grown up in makes it as hard to be a boy as it is to be a man. The four white boys in STAND BY ME have to hike through the woods for two days to find the dead body they’re looking for. Tre and his friends find their dead body behind an apartment building.
After a fight at school, ten-year-old Tre Styles (Desi Arnez Hines II) is sent by his mother Reva (Angela Bassett) to live with his father, “Furious” Styles (Laurence Fishburne). Reva explicitly says that Furious is the only one who can teach Tre to be a man; as his mother, a woman, she’s not capable of that. Brothers Doughboy (Baha Jackson) and Ricky (Donovan McCrary), who live across the street from Tre’s father’s house, soon become Tre’s friends, but it’s clear that their mother Brenda (Tyra Ferrell) isn’t having any more success raising boys into men than Reva did. If you ask them, Doughboy, Ricky, and their friend Chris (Kenneth A. Brown) are all fully grown men, and they perform this masculinity constantly, bragging about having had sex with the girl across the street and trying to out-street-smart each other at every turn. They aren’t wrong to try. There’s no place for childish naïveté in their neighborhood. When trusting Ricky throws his football to a young man who says he’ll give it right back, he’s punished for assuming there’s anyone who isn’t trying to trick or hurt him. Even the more sensitive of the football thief’s friends, who feels bad and gives Ricky back his ball, addresses him not as “kid,” but as “little man.”
The film’s first half hour follows young Tre as he settles in to life with his dad, whose strict rules come with equal warmth and fatherly wisdom. Fishburne is always great, but he’s particularly wonderful here. Everything Furious does is intended to teach his son responsibility, which to Furious is synonymous with manhood. One of the film’s best moments comes when Tre and his dad are fishing together off a breakwater. Furious explains that the moment he realized he needed to take responsibility for his actions was when he became a father to Tre at 17. In a very real way, Tre taught him how to be a man. The 1984 segment comes to a close as Furious and Tre come home from their fishing trip to watch Doughboy and Chris being walked out of the house in child-sized handcuffs, while from the car stereo the Five Stairsteps cruelly insist that “things are gonna get easier.”
Seven years later, we catch up to 17-year-old Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) at a backyard barbecue to welcome Doughboy (Ice Cube) home from jail. Their friend Chris (Redge Green) now uses a wheelchair after being paralyzed in a shooting, while Ricky (Morris Chestnut) is a very promising high school football player. He’s also already a father, and his girlfriend Shanice (Alysia Rogers) and their son live with Brenda and Doughboy in the same house across the street from Furious. They all look like men and want to be seen as men, but they’re still boys inside.
For Singleton, this uncomfortable in-between state is both a symptom of and a contributor to the conditions they live in. Fear of the violence around them taught the boys to act tough at such an early age that they barely got to be children at all, so their level of emotional maturity is all over the place. Doughboy’s friend Dooky (Dedrick D. Gobert) plays cards and brags about all the sex he’s been having, all while holding a pacifier in his mouth as an ironic tough-guy affectation. Brenda complains about how much she’s taking care of Ricky’s baby and then asks Tre to give her other son a fatherly talking-to about cleaning up his act. It’s only thanks to his own father’s constant reminders about responsibility that Tre plans to go to college rather than kill time with Doughboy all day. Ricky’s skill as an athlete is the thing that’s kept him away from that life and given him a shot at higher education, but he’s barely even thought about what his major might be. The boys still perform an exaggerated masculinity like they did at ten, but now that guns are involved it means people - often other children - can get killed. Doughboy puts it plain as day. “That’s why fools be getting shot all the time,” he says. “Trying to show how hard they is.”
The film’s best scene is the one in which Singleton has Furious lay out the economic underpinnings to this cycle of violence. He takes Tre and Ricky to see a cash-for-homes billboard in Compton - as boys from Crenshaw, they’re antsy about entering foreign gang territory - and explains the process by which gentrification lowers property values in Black areas so that non-Black investors can buy up the land and sell it to non-Black people at a profit. It’s not the young people’s fault that property values drop when gang violence and drug use flare up, as one old man from the neighborhood argues. Furious points out that the planes bringing drugs into the country aren’t owned by Black people, so the machine powering the addiction and death is not from their own community. He proposes a locally-owned Black economic enclave as the solution to all the killing and dealing. Watching the local kids in their gang colors standing comfortably beside Ricky and Tre and the old man as they listen to Furious’s call for solidarity, it’s not impossible to believe him.
He’s not loud enough that everyone in Black Los Angeles can hear him, however. When brothers Ricky and Doughboy get into a scuffle on the front lawn over some disrespectful words, it’s just as childish and senseless as the drive-by shootings to come. (Pointedly, Furious refers to every Black man he speaks to as “my brother.”) Following a verbal altercation at a street racing meetup the night prior, a group of young men in a car chase Ricky and Tre into an alley where they shoot Ricky dead in broad daylight. Tre decides the straight and narrow has given up on him and goes to get his father’s handgun with which to avenge his friend. It takes physical intervention by Furious to get the gun away from Tre, but he gets it. Though Tre sneaks out a window to meet up with Doughboy and find Ricky’s killer, he decides to head home again before the violence starts. Doughboy finds the guys who shot Ricky, eating fast food together and bullshitting like all kids do, and shoots them dead too. Text onscreen tells us that Doughboy is killed a few weeks later, while Tre and his girlfriend end up attending Morehouse and Spelman together. The title comes back, this time atop the words “INCREASE THE PEACE.”
As will become something of an uncomfortable pattern throughout Singleton’s filmography, women do not come out of BOYZ N THE HOOD looking terrific. Tre has to save a baby from the middle of the street because her mother was too busy being addicted to crack to watch her, and as thanks the mother offers him sex in exchange for crack money; Ricky and Doughboy are pretty explicitly doomed by their fatherlessness from the beginning; when Reva suggests to Furious that Tre might come back to live with her now that she’s earning more money, it’s at a snooty restaurant full of white people where she has ordered café au lait (very subtle, John), and I think we’re pretty clearly supposed to agree with Furious when he turns her down. Brandi (Nia Long), Tre’s girlfriend, insists they get married before she’ll have sex with him and he whines about it; when she eventually agrees to sleep with him anyway, it’s framed as a righteous victory for Tre.
But something Doughboy says about women and violence - how God must be male because a female God wouldn’t create such a violent world - suggests that Singleton might have a higher opinion of women, or at least of behavior coded as feminine, than these female characters would indicate. Faced with the ceaseless intra-community violence and police racism around them, the people in Singleton’s South Central react in one of two ways: with more violence, or with tears. Provoked at the street race, Ricky’s killer fires a submachine gun into the air. Held at gunpoint by a black police officer who just wants to see him squirm, Tre runs home and first punches at the air before he bursts into tears. Brenda and Shanice stand over Ricky’s bloody body and weep uncontrollably while Doughboy jumps in his car to get even. When Furious takes the gun from Tre’s hand, tears roll down the unarmed boy’s face. The morning after Ricky is killed, Tre and Doughboy have a beautiful, heartfelt conversation about grief and regret on Tre’s porch (Ice Cube can play vulnerable, even if he doesn’t seem to pick roles that require it), but as soon as the mother with the crack addiction stops by and Doughboy feels the need to assert his toughness, the tenderness has passed.
Complicating this is, Furious, the most morally infallible character in the film, who neither cries nor commits any violence (outside of two unsuccessful, “justified” shots at a home invader). His is a superhuman manly stoicism that I think Singleton prizes above “womanly” emotional expression. Still, the film would argue that screaming and crying is at least a better way to increase the peace than bottling it all up until you want to kill somebody.
I’ll keep coming back to the relationship between masculinity and violence over the course of this series on the films of John Singleton. It’s going to get vexed.