Thursday, December 16, 2010

You can take the boy out of the hood

I caught a few moments of Boyz in the Hood (1991).



Superficially, the outstandingly attractive Morris Chestnut and the both attractive and talented Cuba Gooding, among others, have gone on to long careers in films and TV. I never got the appeal of Ice Cube. Cuba Gooding should have become a bigger star than he is. He should be Will Smith.

More tragically, when I first saw this film I had just moved to California. Being rather tribally East Coast prior to that, I had assumed that all the nastiness and self-destruction of ghetto life --Puerto Rican in New York, but mostly Black-- had something essentially to do with the environment: the vast blocks of tall concrete housing projects, cold, hard, impersonal, dehumanizing, in the alternately freezing and sweltering weather of New York or Chicago or Boston. I was really surprised by Boyz because you had all the same bad behaviors in a totally different and pretty friendly environment: sunshine all the time, and blocks of actual houses, separate one-story cottages... with lawns, on streets. Basically a working class suburb.

That's when I had the transgressive thought, it's not the hood that makes the boyz, it's the boyz that make the hood. No matter where you put them, they do the same thing.

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