Doing for ourselves

...Boyz N the Hood is not content to offer violent thrills or therapeutic rantings...

...You don't want me to provide for my family...

...Black women are almost uniformly level-headed in all these movies...

...On the tenement roof with the Statue of Liberty beckoning in the distance, Dennis elaborates on his robbery scheme and what the money would mean...

...By stepping on the black man...

...But in Boyz N the Hood sexual responsibility is never an isolated moral act...

...Indeed, the anguish evident in these films---especially in the startling scream at the end of Jungle Fever--seems to derive from an exasperation over the emergence of parallel and manifestly unequal black realities...

...This film is about two people who are attracted to each other because of sexual mythology," Lee has said...

...As the series that ran for three years in the mid-sixties...

...But now, at the beginning of my third season with Commonweal, I figure it's time to cut to the bone...

...There is plenty of frank talk about condoms and sexually transmitted disease, but Tre's faithful girlfriend is heroically chaste out of religious conviction...

...We got to stand by him...

...Like Boyz N the Hood, Straight Out of Brooklyn concludes with a plaintive written exhortation...

...Walking with his girlfriend along the promenade in Brooklyn Heights, Dennis gestures toward the meretricious towers of Manhattan...

...Admittedly, the black middle class is not as secure as the white...

...They're generally a more artsy-schmartsy lot than mystery writers, and most of them express unqualified contempt for "Trek," especially the original series...

...Those are the regnant ideas of the original series...

...According to the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 1991), blacks and whites actually agree to a remarkable extent on the nature of the problem...

...The elder Styles is enormously attractive in his protective attitude toward his son...

...But you've got to earn it...

...Economic and social enfranchisement are now finally possible for African-Americans like Flipper, who have the necessary skills...

...652: Commonweal...

...An aerial shot of a high-rise housing project in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn opens the film...

...But each, obliquely or implicitly, assumes that African-Americans are in fact moving on...

...How did they do it...

...Reckless and possessed of volatile courage, he had grown to be a tough guy, hired as a slugger and strikebreaker, employed in the taxicab wars...

...But a legitimate compassion for the destitute can take our eyes off the homely but necessary path upon which social mobility is built...

...That's the American dream...so we don't have to live like animals...

...Of course the catastrophic consequences of Dennis's decision are meant as a rebuke of the politicized morality with which he tries to justify his actions...

...This past August saw some of the most bitter and violent conflict in years, when black rioters took to the streets of Brooklyn's Crown Heights in the aftermath of a traffic accident that killed a seven-year-old black boy...

...It's not that simple, apparently...

...In these columns I've tried to talk about TV and politics, the Gulf War ("War" used as a courtesy to George Bush, whose prevarications I'm getting too tired to point out), the national psyche, the information-explosion, American mythology, and all that...

...Under the inspiration of the incendiary Reverend A1 Sharpton and others on the fringe of New York's black politics, retributive violence was condoned and an overt anti-Semitism soon emerged...

...With his taciturn courage, he's a kind of urban Shane, a man who rises regretfully to every challenge...

...Only a real man can raise his children," Styles announces to his son...

...Lee dedicated the film to Yusuf Hawkins, the young black man who was killed in 1989 by a white mob in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn...

...uch vaguely conservative sentiments are given substantial space, if never explicit approval, in each of these movies...

...Harlan Ellison, who is one of the best writers I know and who contributed the two best scripts to the original show, used habitually to refer to it as "Star Dreck...

...Moral accountability and social cohesion go hand-in-hand...

...Dennis had always had before him the example of the local hoodlums, and in his small-boy manner he had emulated them, leading his gang in expeditions to roll drunks, and in fights against neighborhood gangs of Jews and wops," novelist Farrell wrote of Dennis McDermott, a brutal Irish-American thug in his short story "The Scoop...

...only the names of the victims and the objects of dispute have changed...

...Gunshots punctuate the night, and children are as likely to stumble over a bullet-ridden corpse as a tricycle...

...And it's subversive, corny, sentimental stuff: like the regnant themes of any religion worth following...

...Money, that's what it's about...

...But these films testify to that progress both by the very fact that they've been made and in the aspirations for material well-being, spiritual dignity, and social participation attested to in the lives of the characters...

...At the same time, that promised land is perhaps farther away than ever for the poorest...

...Intriguingly, Styles's strength of character can be attributed to an equally fierce belief in an omnipresent white conspiracy...

...Everybody's always saying how they're going to get out of Red Hook," the woman shakes her head...

...In many ways, however, this film is as much about class as about racial stereotyping, although it does not succeed completely with either subject...

...And that's what "Star Trek" was/is...

...202)-687-6340 GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS 8 November 1991:651 and what these films suggest, is that despite the significant historical differences between black and white American experience, the road to middle-class security taken by both groups looks remarkably the same...

...There is no wrong way out of here," he argues...

...This year African-American filmmakers, often taking their storylines from the headlines, have brought out movies of unprecedented power, among them, Jungle Fever, Boyz N the Hood, and Straight Out of Brooklyn...

...Gator's addiction confronts his already troubled parents with an insoluble dilemma: showing ordinary compassion for their son only exacerbates his condition...

...And yet...

...Imagine being a literate fourteenth-century person asked the question, "But sir (or milady)--what is Arthurian romance...

...For only a community cohesive enough to impose severe moral and social sanctions on aberrant behavior can curtail the kind of violence and social pathology afflicting the urban poor...

...Singleton is a moralistic moviemaker, and he has much to say about the black family, economic self-sufficiency, and racial solidarity...

...Adolescent sexuality, a topic of so much learned dispute these days, is dealt with in an equally didactic way...

...None of these facts absolves American society of its racist history or from responsibility to redress the effect of historical inequities...

...Now that's what a real mythology is...

...But whatever the source of the problems, the 648: Commonweal solution remains the same: individual responsibility for one's actions and group solidarity...

...I'm sorry man," says one...

...Dennis dreamed that ill-gotten goods would take him and his loved ones "straight out of Brooklyn...

...As a result of the civil rights movement and the antipoverty and affirmative action programs of the last twenty-five years, a significant black middle class has taken shape...

...We need to change...

...Flipper, a successful professional from Harlem, beds his temporary secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), a sensitive, Italian working-class daughter of Bensonhurst...

...But they do challenge the arid political radicalism that too eagerly assigns the black underclass (10 percent of the black population) center stage...

...Blacks do not want a 'gilded ghetto,'" Lipset observes in looking at the statistics on black employment and social mobility...

...This is a frontier of sorts, one where a homeowner has to guard his property with a gun and strengthen his children against the wayward example of their friends...

...Chores are assigned, homework done, one's room cleaned, gratifications postponed...

...I understand how he feels," Dennis's mother reassures his sister...

...A liberal politics that continues to dismiss the traditional claims for personal accountability and social conformity dramatized by these films will find itself as irrelevant to the lives of the next generation of middle- and working-class African-Americans as liberalism is to the white ethnic middle class today, v3 MEDIA "LIVE LONG & PROSPER" THE 'TREK' GOES ON kay, okay...

...For a quarter century--God, that's half my life--this story, this situation, this myth, this thing has been entwining with, feeding, and feeding upon the national selfimagination, to the degree that by now I don't see how a serious attempt to describe the late twentieth-century American spirit--such as it is----van afford to ignore "Star Trek" as crucial to the equation...

...None exonerates white America...

...Continence is a sign of self-reliance and respect...

...There's no fight way...

...It is that gap between those blacks who have been left behind and those who must move forward that gives these movies such deep social resonance...

...Dennis's father, who pumps gas for a white service station owner, is a bitter and seriously flawed man, but not, the film suggests, fundamentally immoral...

...rather, it is tied to a whole system of values that work as a bulwark of sanity in a very dangerous world...

...And though "Trek" never confronted that wasteland directly, its themes--and I've seen every episode at least thrice--seem uncannily responsive to the uncertainties and panics we all felt back then: The Enemy may not really be an enemy...

...Rhetorically, Rich is eager to blame white society for the conditions of poor blacks...

...And it's still worth your academic reputation (what a concept...

...Jackson delivers a mesmerizing performance as a lost soul, and his scenes with his parents, played by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, are the most harrowing in the movie...

...Tellingly, so does his son...

...Flipper's relationship with his crack-addict brother, Gator, played brilliantly by Samuel L. Jackson, is more plausibly complex...

...But what Lipset argues, "For theologians, canonists, and historians, this publication is an event of major importance...

...We don't spend enough time with the emblematic couple, and the logic and intensity of the interracial romance are never developed...

...The driver of the car that killed the child was a Hasidic Jew from Crown Heights...

...This may seem like an anachronistic sentiment in an age where sexual abstinence is considered a species of repression...

...Singleton gives his exemplary patriarch a number of woodenly ideological speeches in which the plague of drugs, alcohol, and economic decay destroying the black community is blamed on white ambitions...

...You must remember this: the original "Trek" was being made, under the auspices of that brave fellow, Gene Roddenberry, during probably the most shattering time most of the people reading this can remember...

...Some hint of the emotional authority of cinrma vrrit6 gives the movie a good deal of raw, seemingly unrehearsed power...

...In a drunken soliloquy before the bathroom mirror, he screams, "Hey white man, remember me?...I'm the man you destroyed...

...That doesn't mean, of course, that it's "art"--a word that, as Amiri Baraka says, Americans always pronounce with simultaneous awe and contempt...

...Not a Joseph Campbell/Bill Moyers discourse for the brie-and-chablis set about the proper pronunciation of "Krishna," but a set of concepts, stories, names, and jokes to fit, and fit us into, the helter-skelter of the quotidian...

...A haunting and shattering scream of despair over the utter moral depravity drugs force upon the African-American community brings the movie to an end...

...All take us into the everyday lives of African-Americans, and into the bewildering labyrinth of racism and black anguish, in ways rarely done before...

...And when Roseanne Barr--remember when she was funny?--said "My first marriage was a mixed marriage...

...Or as "Star Trek: The Next Generation," the series now beginning its fifth season, with a completely different cast from the original, and the hottest item in syndication...

...I hang out sometimes with sciencefiction writers...

...When David Dinkins, New York's black mayor, tried to calm the situation he was besieged by a black mob...

...That's "Vietnam," which is itself a mythic name for the dismantling of every psychic edifice of cold-war American triumphalism...

...And much of that road is paved with the same mundane moral strategies and social values...

...Lipset notes that a 1988 ABC News~Washington Post poll found that 60 percent of blacks and whites agreed that: "If blacks would try harder, they could be just as well off as whites...

...The father's determination to instill discipline and loyalty in his son enables Tre to overcome the most dangerous moral crisis of his youth, and thus escape to college--a traditionally black college, of course--and implicitly to a better future...

...We got to understand how that [racism] feels...

...Indeed, in urging his audience to "increase the peace," Dinkins was borrowing a line from the coda of Boyz N the Hood, a story of gang violence in Los Angeles...

...Having failed to tie these two people together either emotionally or as predatory sexual partners, Jungle Fever's tearing them apart carries no larger resonance...

...Two-volume set: $210.00 To order call or write: Georgetown University Press Room 111, Intercultural Center Washington, D.C, 20057.1079 Phone: (202)-687-6063 FAX...

...As all of the above and more...

...With a sense of natural retribution that might have come out of Macbeth, Straight Out of Brooklyn chronicles the bloody consequences...

...Indeed, one emerges from Boyz N the Hood--and from Straight Out of Brooklyn--struck by how similar the historical plight of the urban underclass, regardless of race or ethnicity, has remained...

...I could have been a lawyer or a doctor...

...There is, however--and presumably more by accident than design--a disarming marriage of style and subject...

...Because the fact is, even if the Democrats won't deal with the race issue, it will continue to deal with them...

...The acting is stilted almost to the point of caricature, and the narrative fragmented and stagey...

...The t'tim's most disturbing character is a sadistic, self-hating black policeman who torments other blacks and whom Singleton clearly sees as the most morally degraded and spiritually depraved of men...

...If anybody's seen all my films, I put most of the blame on our shoulders and say, 'Look, we're gonna have to do for ourselves...

...we may be better in our shared vulnerability than in our corporate self-assurance (ever notice how often things just break down on the Enterprise...

...Angie, as played by Ms...

...Racial antagonism sells, both on the front page and in front of the cameras...

...And we do...

...Let's talk about "Star Trek...

...While an indictment of white racism, Straight Out of Brooklyn does not turn away from individual responsibility, or from the illusion that white racism is the only obstacle to black dignity...

...Boyz N the Hood was written and directed by twenty-threePAUL BAUMANN is the associate editor of Commonweal...

...Indeed, in his explicit moral code and fierce sense of earned virtue----even in his quirky ethnic paranoia and pride--Tre Styles's father is not so very different from the fathers and grandfathers of most white Americans...

...Dreams are the stories that get us through the night, but myths are the stories that get us through the day...

...Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding, Jr...

...to appear at a high-powered s-f conference and discuss the show seriously in terms of the genre (what a concept...

...Inside one of the small, beggarly furnished flats, Dennis, the film's misguided adolescent hero, cowers as his father rages on in a drunken stupor, breaking furniture and beating his wife...

...n part, Spike Lee's Jungle Fever is about AfricanAmericans who have moved on...

...At the tumultuous funeral for the child, the crowd outside the church shouted "No justice, no peace," while inside, Dinkins pleaded with the congregation to "increase the peace...

...In the glare of the mass media's craving for news and the entertainment industry's insatiable demand for "product," art and reality are notoriously promiscuous partners...

...DOING FOR OURSELVES BLACK DIRECTORS RECAST THE AMERICAN STORY PAUL BAUMANN he steamy ideological hothouse of New York City is never short on ethnic and racial strife...

...Despite being clothed in the rhetoric of black chauvinism, his moral values are thoroughly traditional: neatness counts, responsibility must be taken for one's actions, especially sexual acts...

...Jungle Fever is more explicitly about sex, even if the sexual "problem" is taken from newspaper headlines...

...All we do is walk around the projects all day," Dennis complains to his buddies...

...Rich puts what is in some ways the film's harshest judgment in the mouth of the black owner of a small restaurant...

...Singleton is intent on documenting this reality, and his earnest attention to the temptations our materialistic culture presents the poor is reminiscent of the novels of Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell...

...Having accomplished the theft, Dennis's buddies get cold feet contemplating the implacable revenge of the drug lord...

...You don't want me to be a man...

...Respect for one's elders is demanded: "You're the prince, I'm the king," his father tells Tre...

...First things learned are the hardest to forget...

...Yes, the crisis of the urban underclass is acute, complex, and all too often defeating...

...A party of fiercely self-identified minorities has become the minority party, at least where presidential politics is concemed, because the whole of its ferocious factions is far less then the sum of their narrowly liberal and particularist parts...

...As a parent he is positively archaic...

...Consequently, what is most striking about these stories goes beyond the misery and injustice to which they testify...

...I'm going to teach you how to be responsible...

...I was an Earthling, he was a Klingon," she brought the house down, no footnotes needed...

...Directed by nineteenyear-old Matty Rich, Straight Out of Brooklyn is the bleakest of these pictures, its destructive action closest to the unredeemed world of Farrell's Irish-Catholic Chicago...

...The shape and trajectory of his journey are as familiar as any Horatio Alger story...

...I feel we really have to address our financial base as a people...

...Conservatives who had few objections when the quota for blacks was zero have successfully cloaked themselves in the mantle of a single standard of justice even as they, in fact, play their own cynical version of separatism...

...English Editor and Giuseppe Alberigo Original Language Editor A monumental two-volume work offering for the first time, in both the original languages and in a new English translation, the complete decrees of all the ecumenical councils...

...It is also the most theatrically maladroit...

...Moreover, "the same survey found 52 percent of blacks and 56 percent of whites believing that 'Discrimination has unfairly held down blacks, but many of the problems blacks in this country have today are brought on by blacks themselves.'" Assessing blame is only useful if it contributes to solving a problem, not just berating the victims...

...Little of that mythology gets on the screen, however...

...Wesley Snipes, who plays the film's black hero Flipper, is an architect with a very upper-middle-class life...

...Hawkins was mistaken for another black thought to be dating a local girl...

...Within hours a gang of black youths had stabbed a Hasidic man, who died later at the hospital...

...Oppressed by a largely unseen 8 November 1991:647 world of white indifference and racism, this is a community most immediately savaged by its own...

...Spike Lee's moral realism is shared by many American blacks...

...As each of these movies documents, African-Americans, like most Americans, believe in the necessity and efficacy of such moral sanctions...

...I ' m not kidding here...

...the threatening alien may have his/her/its own pain which, once understood, makes it human...

...As the lead-pipe-cinch movie product that will continue this Christmas with the release of Star Trek VI, the "very last"--hardy har har--Trek film...

...Driven by his father's abuse of the family, Dennis plots a robbery that he hopes will enable the family to flee the projects...

...As the phenomenon that picked up an infinitely wider audience in seventies' and eighties' reruns than it had ever garnered when it was "live...

...As a start, they need to forthrightly acknowledge what they have suppressed since the Moynihan report: The problems of poverty are both structural and behavioral...

...the film's appealing protagonist, triumphs over a broken home, a dangerous neighborhood, and the usual sexual and generational conflicts...

...I believed that shit...

...I just can't kill myself that easy...

...he called it Star Wars, surely a play on the name of our puzzling and lovely monster...

...How do you codify the grammar of the way you speak...

...Any number of characters in Boyz N the Hood fit this description...

...And when George Lucas made the most-successful-till-then film in history--remember when we judged films by their quality and not their first-week gross...

...The Democrats' path to power, as I noted many times in Commonweal, especially during the 1988 elections, lies across a territory that they are politically and intellectually afraid to cross...

...The Democrats, by contrast, once the universalist party of merit and equal opportunity, are now known as the party of minority favoritism...

...Theological Studies Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils FROM NICAEA I TO VATICAN H Norman P. Tanner, S.J...

...How do you map the forest you're in the middle of...

...The resurrection of the black family, and by extension the reclamation of the black male as a figure of moral authority, are high on Singleton's list of necessities...

...I think we've done more to hold ourselves back than anybody," Spike Lee, no neoconservative, told Pete Hamill (Esquire, August 1991...

...I can't be part of it," his level-headed girlfriend warns...

...They want to get out of the ghetto...

...like] their predecessors in the ethnic immigrant slums...

...Jungle Fever, like Boyz N the Hood, eschews 650: Commonweal political sloganeering to focus on the tragic mystery of what was once called evil or sin...

...Styles's father is the dramatic and spiritual focus of these concerns...

...When NASA unveiled its prototype Space Shuttle--remember the space program?--it was named the Enterprise, and the Marine Band played the "Trek" theme...

...Just like you destroyed my father, and his father...

...Sciorra, isn't looking for a demonstration of black virility from Flipper but for a refuge from the meager emotional and psychological resources of her violent and patriarchal family...

...year-old film school graduate John Singleton, and is in many ways a very conventional coming-of-age story...

...Boyz N the Hood is a grim tale in which economic marginalization and spiritual impoverishment breed a culture of mayhem and violence...

...The action is set in a working-class neighborhood where the residents try to eke out a modest existence while drug dealers and other predators prowl the streets and police helicopters circle forever overhead...

...In the first week of September, "Star Trek" celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary as--what...

...They want us to kill ourselves," Styles's charismatic father (Larry Fishburne) warns the idle and belligerent young men in the neighborhood...