Fight Club

SPOILER ALERT! The plot of the movie will be discussed.

I know that this 1999 film directed by David Fincher, based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel, can alienate the female population with its emphasis on the male role in modern American society, and the depiction of brutality associated with boxing. But, although gory, there are actually not that many fight sequences in the movie. The editing and cinematography provide a sense of motion to a film that is actually quite wordy. The story deals with existential issues, and the theme explored in recent posts on this blog (A Face in the Crowd, Bigger Than Life) about how the plight of the individual can clash with the needs of society.

The story begins at the end and then plays catch-up. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) has secured the Narrator (Edward Norton), who I will call Jack (he uses the Reader’s Digest health title series to describe himself, such as “I am Jack’s Colon”), to a chair at the top of a city building, and threatens Jack with a gun, as an earth-shattering event is about to take place. The opening titles display over a depiction of the neurological impulses traveling between Jack’s brain and his mouth, where Tyler has placed the gun. Jack’s mental processes are thus emphasized from the start. He says that he has had insomnia for six months, which makes him feel like he has become “a copy of a copy” of himself, and, like subsequent paper reproductions, his self-image has become faded, his identity not as distinguishable. Added to the lack of sleep is the fact that he travels for his job, and wakes up in strange places, in various time zones. All of these factors contribute to mental disorientation, and the need to psychologically compensate to function. Jack poses the question that if you wake up at different times in different places, can you wake up as a different person? The movie is laying down the foundation for psychological fracturing, and the emergence of a dissociative personality disorder. Jack starts to address himself in the second person, and this substitution of “you” for “I” shows how he is beginning to construct another part of himself as a separate entity. The style of the film reflects the free association of the mind, as Jack then provides the audience, not exactly sequentially, with the back story.

Jack works for a prominent automobile company to determine if recalls are worth initiating following catastrophic accidents. If a recall will cost the company too much money, it will not be initiated. Palahniuk said that one of the themes he wanted to explore was how people have reduced their degree of connecting with others on a personal level. In the movie, the insensitive comments by accident investigators talking about how a victim’s body fat melted onto the polyester of the car seat, producing “modern art,” mirrors the lack of emotional involvement in a consumer-driven world. In a commercialized society, the things one owns are more important than other people, or even personal safety. So, Jack’s condo becomes his “life,” and Fincher provides us with a view of Jack’s home as if displayed in an IKEA catalog. He wonders “What kind of dining set defines me as a person.” In existential terms, this is the state where an individual denies freedom by identifying with external definitions. That is, I am not a multi-faceted person, but I’m an accountant, or, even worse, in this case, a grouping of furniture. Jack echoes the loneliness of modern existence by describing the “single-serving” meals and condiments on plane rides. The film often provides lists to detail its point. Jack talks of: single serving sugar; single serving cream; single pat of butter; “the microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit.” The people he meets on the flights are “single-serving” friends, who one meets for a short time and then disposes of them, like the food portions. 

Because of his disconnected, sleep-deprived state, Jack asks his doctor for sleeping pills. When the physician doesn’t want to encourage an addiction, Jack says he is in pain. The doctor says if Jack wants to see real pain, he should go to a testicular cancer support group. It is here that the movie offers up a complexity of symbolism. Jack goes to the group and meets Robert “Bob” Paulsen (the rock star Meat Loaf). Bob was a body builder, and took steroids. Because of his subsequent testicular cancer, he has gone from an image of extreme masculinity to one of an emasculated male. His transformation is even more pronounced, because he has developed huge breasts due to treatment. So, he has in a sense been feminized. On one level, Bob can represent how modern American society has castrated, and transgendered males into women. Later Tyler echoes this argument when he says, “We’re a generation of men raised by women,” and he wonders if the seeking of another woman as a partner is “really the answer we need.” Tyler sees his generation’s boys as being without male role models, with fathers who have either physically or spiritually abandoned them. But, in this group, men, by getting in touch with their feminine side, are able to show genuine emotion, hugging other men, and crying. As Jack says, in this group, pretending to be inflicted with testicular cancer, there is no pressure for him to pursue the “pleasure principle.” Here, Jack “loses all hope,” and he doesn’t have to live up to any expectations for the future, which gives him a sense of freedom. In a way, by hugging Bob, his face mashed up against the man’s large breasts, he is able to draw emotional nourishment, and that night, he says that babies don’t sleep as well as he did.

But, instead of using the one experience to change his life, Jack, instead, goes to numerous groups, pretending to have each one’s afflictions, and admits that he is an addict, unable to be emotionally independent without his fixes. In these groups, Jack feels that during the day, when he is actually disease free, his inauthentic life is a sort of death, but when in the groups, identifying with the dying, he feels resurrected, in touch with real emotions and other people, stripped of any need to put on social façades. In one group, the leader teaches meditation techniques, where one envisions entering a cave, escaping from the reality of the pain and suffering of the illness. Jack sees his “power animal” in the cave as being a penguin who tells him to “slide.” This utterance does not make sense at this point, but later, we see that it is the Tyler part of Jack saying to let all things that truly don’t matter slide away, including expectations and superficial material needs. For Tyler, this meditation is harmful, because escape from disease and dying is being in denial of the human condition.

Jack starts to see a woman at, of all things, the testicular support group, so he knows she, like himself, is a fake. Her name is Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). She is brash and trashy, and her presence undermines him because she reminds him of his fakery, which doesn’t allow him to immerse himself in the genuine suffering going on. Jack is unable to sleep again. She is a fitting woman for Jack and Tyler because she is trying to reach, as Tyler says, “rock bottom.” Jack says “Marla’s philosophy of life is that she might die at any moment. The tragedy, she said, was that she didn’t.” She doesn’t own much, taking other people’s clothes out of laundromat dryers. She stays at a dump of a hotel. She walks out into streets as if she doesn’t care if she is hit by a car. But, they share a bond by going to these groups. As Jack says, “When people think you’re dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just …” and Marla finishes his thought by saying, “instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.” Even though Jack doesn’t want to share time with Marla, and considers her an intrusion, they find a connection, actual communication with these dying people. It is quite comic the way they decide to divide up the groups, the different kinds of cancers and blood parasites, as if they are setting up a car pool. 

With his sleep cycle again interrupted, Jack isn’t even sure when he is awake or sleeping as he travels from one city to another for his job. He has fantasies that his meaningless non-group existence will end in a mid-air plane crash. At this low point, significantly, Tyler pops up in the seat next to Jack on an airplane. Tyler sees through pretense, not allowing for the denial of the harshness of life. He points out that the placards showing what to do in case of a plane emergency show illustrations of placated, anesthetized people who are high on the oxygen from the masks. He doesn’t even allow Jack the complacency of his cleverness about “single-serving” friends, and questions his superficial conversation when asking Tyler’s occupation.  

When Jack loses his luggage at the airport, it’s as if he is ridding himself of life’s psychological baggage. It is significant that he returns to find that his condo has had a gas leak explosion, and now he has shed himself of all his material ties to his object-dependent existence. It is interesting that Jack describes his condo building as a huge filing cabinet. This Kafka metaphor shows how people are reduced to identical pieces of paper, filed away in the drawer-like rooms. Tyler gave him his phone number and Jack calls him. Tyler says he can live at his place, which serves as a good example for the purging of commercial living. It is a dilapidated dump, in an almost abandoned area of the city, reflecting Jack’s alienation. Jack has to go through object withdrawal, but realizes after a month there, he no longer misses watching television.

As they have some beers, Jack is going through the pangs of transition from being a consumer to shedding materialism, Tyler tells him there is no need to be perfect, or complete. One should evolve by letting “the chips fall where they may.” It is then, outside, that Tyler tells Jack to hit him as hard as he can. Tyler says that he’s never been in a fight, just like Jack, and that they shouldn’t die without having sustained some scars. This is how their fight clubs are born. It doesn’t matter who wins a fight, it is the experience of feeling pain that makes you feel real. It’s sort of like that line from the Goo Goo Dolls’ song, “Yeah you bleed just to know you’re alive.” Jack says that the volume of everyday meaningless existence is turned down – he can’t even hear the words of his boss – because the intensity of fighting drowns out the hum-drum existence elsewhere. Tyler sets up rules as more and more people show up for the fights, which seems to contradict the first and second rules, which say you do not talk about fight club. Tyler annunciates their manifesto. This young male generation has “no purpose or place. No Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual one. Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television that we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” This disillusionment with the fake advertisement for their lives is what fuels their revolt. Tyler preaches that the things one owns begin to own the purchaser. This worshiping of things is just another form of enslavement. 

Tyler makes soap, which uses fat. He gets his fat from liposuction clinics. He and Jack break into these places to steal the disgusting, gooey substance. By making soap from “fat” women’s lard, he is making an anti-commercialism statement by selling women consumers their own affluent waste. It’s sort of his version of divine justice. (But, like other elements of the film, there is a bit of a misogynist feel here.) Conversely, the men who show up at fight club are like “cookie dough,” but eventually appear “carved out of wood.” They go from living off the fat of the land to being almost like a work of primitive art. Tyler shows his subversion of the American escapism into self-amusement by taking jobs at a local movie theater and inserting pornographic images into children’s films. As a waiter, he deposits bodily fluids into food at an upscale restaurant. He’s sort of a modern-day Jonathan Swift, reminding others of their baser natures so they can’t deny the lowliness of their true nature.

Tyler emphasizes that “It’s only after we lose everything that we’re free to do anything.” That liberation can only occur once we realize that we are dying moment by moment. Tyler won’t even let people take solace in the lives of their pets, because we see that one of his follower’s cars has a sticker which reads “Recycle Your Pets,” reminding us in a dark way that everything dies. The feeling that death is imminent frees one of any worry about consequences. Tyler has a gun and pulls a convenience store clerk named Raymond (Joon Kim) outside, forcing him to kneel down, and points the gun at him. He tells the man that he is going to die. He sees in his wallet that he went to school, and gets Raymond to admit he wanted to be a veterinarian. Tyler takes his driver’s license and says unless he starts working toward that goal, he knows where Raymond lives, and he will kill him. The gun is not actually loaded. After Raymond goes running off, Tyler says that tomorrow, Raymond’s breakfast will taste better than anything they have ever eaten, and he will be on his way to a heightened life, alert to the fact that death can strike him down at any time. Tyler does not see any purpose to turning to the promises of a future reward from a God who has abandoned them. He says we should not seek spiritual redemption or worry about damnation. Tyler at one point inflicts a chemical burn on Jack’s hand to make him realize life’s immediate painful presence. Tyler says that self-improvement is “masturbation.” He advocates “self-destruction,” by which he means breaking ourselves down to basic building blocks, stripping everything down to our essential selves. You don’t do “self-improvement” on a bad foundation. Another time, Tyler is driving a car and persuades Jack to let the wheel go, letting everything truly “slide.” Tyler asks the other men in the car what do they wish they could have done if they weren’t about to die. They know immediately: one wishes he could build a house; the other would have painted a self-portrait. If you don’t look for future fulfillment that may never come, then you must concentrate on the here and now. For Tyler, carpe diem is not enough – it should be carpe each moment.

This attitude, of course, can be destructive not only to the self and others who agree with it, but what happens when it is forced on others? That enforcement of the individual’s will onto the population at large occurs when Tyler turns the fight clubs into his personal war, which he calls “Project Mayhem.” He recruits an army of combatants that freely relinquish their freedom and individuality for what Tyler calls “the greater good.” But, as Jack says, their new motto is “In Tyler we trust,” the leader now becoming the replacement for God. They all submit to the chemical burn on the hand, and chant Bob’s name together in robotic unison after the police kill him following a mission. The real problem occurs when Tyler commands his men to set a building fire, destroy gentrified coffee shop, wreck cars, befoul public fountains, contaminate restaurant food, etc. After Bob’s death, Tyler’s attitude is that you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. In order for revolutions to succeed, however, the majority of the population has to be behind you; otherwise, it is just terrorism.

There are many clues along the way that indicate that Tyler is not a real person, but instead is a projection of that part of Jack’s personality that wants to revolt against the status quo. When he first sees Tyler on the plane, Jack notes they have the same type of briefcase. When he tells off his boss, Jack says, “Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth.” Another time he says, “Sometimes Tyler spoke for me.” When he extorts his boss out of money, office equipment, and most importantly, travel vouchers, he beats himself up, putting the blame on his superior. But, as he is hitting himself, he says that it reminded him of the first time he and Tyler fought. Tyler’s residence is on “Paper Street,” implying that his existence is akin to a phony business entity, established only “on paper.” There are many other hints. But, in a way, all of the men joining the fight clubs are living out different versions of themselves, being domesticated during the day, and battling as wild beasts in combat at night. Jack’s alter ego tries to prevent him from finding out about his imaginary friend. But, Marla is a problem, because she tries to make that human connection, reaching out to Jack during a “cry for help” suicide attempt. Jack thinks she becomes involved with Tyler, so he keeps dismissing her after sexual bouts that he thinks involve Tyler. His dissociative behavior is obvious to her, as she calls him “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass,” (a nice play on the fake name “Jack”). She, therefore, is a threat to “Project Mayhem” in Tyler’s eyes, and tells Jack not to ever mention him to Marla.

Jack wakes up one day to find Tyler missing. His men are building bombs. He finds Tyler’s air ticket stubs, and travels to the places listed on them. He says it is like déjà vu, because, as Tyler, he has already been to the destinations. He says that going after Tyler was like “following an invisible man,” which is an accurate description because Tyler doesn’t really exist separately. Jack seems to be on the verge of self-understanding when he says, “Is Tyler my bad dream? Or am I Tyler’s?”  He finally gets someone to break the rule that one does not talk about Project Mayhem. The man calls Jack Mr. Durden. Jack calls Marla who also calls him Tyler. (Why no one said anything to him about how he was talking to himself before, or why he didn’t hear anybody call him Tyler, seems impossible. But, maybe Jack just shifted between personalities before, and now he was ready for the truth). Tyler appears in Jack’s hotel room, and admits to all of it being a self-delusion, and that Jack blew up his own condo to free himself from his enslavement to things. He tells Jack that he wanted to change his life, and Tyler allowed him to be free in all the ways that Jack was not.

Jack comes to realize that bombs have been placed in buildings at night, when they are empty, all over the world, concentrating on places that house debt records. The idea is to destroy all evidence of indebtedness, lifting the crushing burden of consumerism (does this story sound familiar, Mr. Robot fans?) After Tyler beats Jack in a fight (on security cameras we see Jack just hitting himself), we return to the first scene, where Tyler has Jack bound. But, Jack knows he can be in control now, mentally transfers the gun into his own hand, and shoots himself in the mouth. This trauma translates to Tyler’s head being blown apart. Men from Tyler’s army bring Marla to Jack, who dismisses them. The two hold hands, as buildings are leveled.

Are Jack and Tyler now integrated into one personality? Will the socially conscious Jack be able to temper the self-obsessed drives of that part of his self that is Tyler? Even more importantly, when is the freedom of the individual a threat to society, and vice versa?

The next film is To Have and Have Not.

American History X

SPOILER ALERT! The plot of the movie will be discussed.

This 1998 film pulls no punches, in its violence, its political incorrectness, and in its language, which I will be quoting, despite my aversion for the “f” and “n” words, because the movie’s R-rated script fits the ferociousness of this story. It is a tale, primarily, about the influence of fathers, and father figures, on young, impressionable minds, and how that impact has the power to sway future generations toward anger and hate or peace and acceptance.

The plot here is not linear as there are times that the film, such as in the narrations of both Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) and his brother Danny (Edward Furlong), provides backstory to throw light on how past experiences molded future attitudes and behavior. The first image we see is that of the ocean’s waves breaking on the beach. It presents the location, which is Venice, California, but it also implies that there is ebb and flow in life, that there is change, in nature, and which can also occur in humans as they add new experiences onto old ones. Derek’s last name is “Vinyard,” which can imply that there is the possibility of growth, but that the right seeds must be planted to reap a good harvest.

The first scene we witness is in the past, and is a pivotal one in the life of Derek. He is having sex with his girlfriend, Stacey (Fairuza Balk), when Danny interrupts them because some African American youths are breaking into his brother’s truck while carrying guns. The sex scene allows the audience to see Derek’s naked chest, which sports a Nazi swastika tattoo. This image reveals his aversion for black people, and thus, we expect violence from him toward those outside. Because we don’t know the whole story, we can only suspect why the black youths target him. That is the point of the film. If a person only has incomplete information, and is not willing to hear the whole story, one acts out of ignorance. Derek has a gun and shoots one of the intruders to death and wounds another. Some may say he should have called the police, but others may argue that he had a right to defend his home and property, and if he delayed, the young men may have escaped. But, he then forces the wounded man to place his mouth on the curb, and then stomps down on his head, breaking the neck, and thus, killing his victim. This action is no longer self-defense, it is murder, but, because Danny does not testify to what has happened, Derek goes to jail for manslaughter, and does not receive a life sentence for murder. His incarceration affects his family, and causes him, as he later tells Danny, to change his outlook on life.

We later have a flashback which indicates one reason why Derek became a Neo-Nazi. When he was younger, his father, a firefighter, was shot to death by an African American junkie while he was on the job. Shortly after the death, he rants to a TV reporter, saying, “this country is becoming a haven for criminals so what do you expect? You know, decent, hard-working Americans like my dad are getting rubbed out by social parasites.” And he elaborates by saying those “parasites” consist of people with black, brown, and yellow skin. He is not only indicting African Americans who were born here, but also non-white immigrants. His selective reasoning, which ignores any crimes committed by white people, in only blaming certain ethnic groups for problems, shows when he says that his father’s death was race related: “Every problem in this country is race related, not just crime. It’s like immigration, AIDS, welfare, those are problems in them.” He goes on to say that, “They’re not white problems.” He dismisses the argument that these non-white people are victims of their environment. He says that minorities have come here to “exploit” this country, not to “embrace,” a slap to all those hard-working individuals who journeyed to America and love and serve it. He says that white Europeans flourished within a generation, and that hasn’t happened with black people, who continually blame their past. One character, a failed father figure, Murray (Elliott Gould), says that Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years, and it doesn’t mean they should forget about that part of their history. Of course, Derek doesn’t take into account that blacks didn’t come here of their own accord, as did European immigrants, but that white men kidnapped them so that they and their offspring would serve as slaves, He fails to mention that black people were also persecuted after the Civil War, and that those of color, because they appear different than whites, can easily be the recipients of bigotry continuously, as opposed to those white Europeans, who blended into the mainstream. But, the truck those black youths were breaking into that night belonged to Derek’s father who was killed by a drug dealing African American, and that individual horror drives his anger toward a generalized blaming of all blacks.

His attitudes are shared by others, then and now, and sometimes understandable given the parameters of certain experiences. Derek talks about how Venice was once a safe, respectable community. But, ethnic gangs arrived, and white kids became victims of violence. The film reveals how a white audience can identify with Derek and his white supremacist friends when they beat black youths on the basketball court, winning a bet that means that the blacks must now never return to that piece of turf. The music, the depiction of athletic moves, have us, ironically, routing for the white boys. Then the guilt kicks in, realizing we wanted these Neo-Nazis to win. This scene also fleshes out the bigger picture shown in the first scene, which without context, looks like some random black boys attacked white people. Those young men turn out to be the losers in the basketball game who were deluged with racial slurs and humiliated by the bigots on the court, and who, then, unfortunately, seek illegal reprisal.

The first scene depicted in the present shows a controversy over a paper that Danny has written for Murray’s English class. The teacher assigned the topic of writing about a civil rights activist. Danny wrote about Hitler and Mein Kompf. Murray is outraged, but Principal Dr. Sweeney (Avery Brooks), an African American, and an exemplary father figure, sees beyond what Murray is unable to do, that the boy is bright like his brother, who Sweeney taught and considered a brilliant English Honors student. He says Danny learned hatred, so he can “unlearn it.” He also objectively points out that the teacher gave the students free reign to write on the topic, so he shouldn’t shut it down once he established the rules. While Danny is waiting outside as the two men talk, he picks up a tiny American flag sitting on the receptionist’s desk, and waves it. The symbol here signifies the American right of freedom of speech, and, thus, freedom of thought, but it also illustrates how, with that freedom, comes responsibility, and how that freedom can be exploited to propagate fear.

Sweeney tells Danny that he will be his English teacher in an independent study format, and says their course will not deal with the past, but with current events. He calls the class “American History X,” which reminds one of what Black Muslims, such as Malcolm X, used to show how white men stripped their background from them, and they needed to reconstruct their heritage. Sweeney wants Danny to explore his past by assigning him a paper that he must complete by the next morning on his brother Derek, and how his life has affected his family. The principal at this point knows that the older brother, who became Danny’s primary father figure after the death of their dad, has gone through changes, and he hopes that Danny will discover what his brother has learned, and will do likewise.

Because this film is not a one-sided argument, it presents a scene where a group of black boys intimidate a timid white student in the school bathroom. Danny happens to be in the stall, and comes out staring down the leader of the bullies, blowing cigarette smoke into his face. But, the two exchange hostile looks later at a playing field, and someone tells the black student about Danny’s white supremacist ties. That, together with the earlier scene, sets up the final confrontation of the movie. Sweeney, who does outreach work in the community, meets with the local police because he knows that Derek is being released this same day, and he briefs them on a man named Cameron Alexander (Stacy Keach), who preys on vulnerable kids looking for direction, and turns them into Neo-Nazis. He lets his recruits do all the overt activity, which insulates him from legal prosecution.

Derek comes home from prison with his hair grown out. He is concerned about his mother’s health, and doesn’t want Danny going to a fascist rally that evening. He gets a call from Sweeney who tells him of Danny’s controversial English paper, so we know he has been in contact with his ex-teacher, and we see that he is a different person from the one in the earlier flashback scenes. He tells Danny that Sweeney is a good teacher and should complete his assignments. Then there is a visitor in the huge form of Seth (Ethan Suplee). He wears an insect exterminator uniform. His profession mirrors his desire to treat non-white Protestant Americans the same way he deals with bugs. In the previously mentioned basketball game, he wears the number “88,” the eighth letter of the alphabet being “H,” and doubled here means “Heil Hitler” (thank you IMDB). His obesity here is placed in a context that shows him to be a creature who will devour anything in his self-centered path, oblivious to the needs or viewpoints of others. His size makes him appear threatening. He is a demonic father figure, as he interrupts Danny’s legitimate studying, and goads him to spout fascist anger as he films him (later Cameron talks about the beginning power of the Internet, and Seth’s video is probably headed there to influence those beyond the local neighborhood). He says to the boy he wants to know “what you have learned,” echoing Sweeney’s words about learning Nazi propaganda as a student. (Derek says to the black youth just before he kills him, “I’m gonna’ teach you a real lesson now,” showing how learning can have a demonic side if infested with hate). When Danny says that some ethnic types make be okay, Seth shuts him down, going to the extreme by saying they are all bad. He says that Cameron says that they don’t want to know “others,” as if it will pollute their way of thinking by associating with anyone who is not like them. His way of reinforcing compliance with his teaching is with the threat that Danny will be “pistol-whipped” if he doesn’t cooperate. While being recorded, Danny says about the possibly naïve belief that everyone should get along, “Save the rhetorical bullshit, Hillary Rodham Clinton, ‘cause it ain’t gonna fuckin’ happen.” Some may say that this line is a foretelling of the recent election.

Danny begins his paper by saying, “People look at me and see my brother.” This sentence shows the influence of older generations on the nurturing younger ones. He then recounts Cameron sending Derek out on a mission to rouse up the neighborhood malcontents. The young man’s speech warns against past, and as it turns out, current fears about letting unscreened illegal aliens into the United States who may cause citizens to lose their jobs, draw benefits from taxpayers, and possibly be a threat to national security. He tells the listeners that there are millions of illegal aliens in California, and that they receive billions of dollars in aid to which they have no legal right. He also says that the government spends millions locking up immigrant criminals that they should have screened out in the first place. He says instead of caring about “the tired, poor, and hungry” (which are noted on the Statue of Liberty) of other countries, we should concentrate on American citizens coming under those categories. But, he does not say vote, get elected, or demonstrate to change the system. Instead, he incites them to attack a grocery store run by Koreans who hired Mexicans, and which caused a couple of the youths to lose their jobs. They beat, vandalize, and terrorize those in the store. The youths undermine their own beliefs when they cover one Hispanic female with milk, saying sarcastically if they turn her white, she might be able to move up in life and get a better job. Ironically, this actually reveals that discrimination because of the color of her skin alone prevents her from becoming accepted and successful.

Danny relates a scene at a dinner with his family and the teacher, Murray, who at the time briefly dated their mother, Doris (Beverly D’Angelo). Derek makes an argument against the riots that occurred after the police incident in Los Angeles with African American Rodney King. He argues that the looting that took place was not politically or economically motivated, just an excuse to steal, and that the police had the right to do what they did because King acted criminally. But, again he pushes his arguments to extremes, shutting down all counter arguments raised by his sister, Davina (Jennifer Lien), telling her to “shut up” and knocking her around. He uses racial slurs against Murray, saying there is no way the teacher is going to have sex with his mother, and threatens him by saying he will cut off his “Shylock nose.” Murray doesn’t get what’s really going on with Derek, and thus isn’t able to reach him or later his brother. Doris sums it up by saying, “He’s just a boy. Without a father.” And, he has such anger because of how his dad died violently at a young age that he feels he needs to blame someone for that loss, and he is fertile ground for someone to exploit that hostility and point it toward someone to blame.

Back in current time, Derek finds Danny at the white supremacist rally, and hears Cameron continuing his indoctrination of his brother. He sends Danny out of the room and confronts Cameron, saying he is out of the movement, warns Cameron to leave his family alone, and that he is on to his lies. But Cameron says Danny will come to him, he won’t have to pursue him, because, he tells Derek, “I’m more important to him than you’ll ever be.” Again, Cameron is a negative father figure who children will seek out for guidance in the absence of other authority figures. Derek is so angry at Cameron trying to take over the parental role that he beats him up. He is able to escape Seth and the others. Danny confronts him, loudly banging his brother against a metal garage door which echoes the clash of loyalties he is experiencing.

Here is where Derek tells his brother of his imprisonment. Because his skinhead look and tattoos showed him to be a Nazi sympathizer, he was a target for the imprisoned blacks. He sought protection among the Neo-Nazis in jail. But he found friendship with a black inmate named Lamont (Guy Torry), who clowned around with him. Derek saw what it is like to be the minority person in prison. As Lamont told him, “You better watch your ass ‘cause you’re in the joint. You the nigger, not me.” When he is gets to know an individual, instead of a stereotype, an intelligent person such as Derek can open his mind to perceiving people differently. Lamont was serving six years for assault of a police officer because after stealing a TV, he accidentally dropped it on a policeman’s foot. Derek now realizes that there may be two kinds of justice for white people and non-whites. He had a shorter term for killing people than the black man for unarmed theft. He also sees his fellow Nazi inmates making drug deals with non-white convicts, and he questions their hypocrisy in their beliefs. His antagonism brings retribution. The skinheads rape and bang his head against the tie in the showers. He says to Danny that he thought he was unprotected, but he realized that Lamont told his black brothers to lay off. When he left, he said to Lamont he owed him, so he decides to cooperate with the police in a possible suicide mission to try and convince Cameron’s followers to end their ways. 

After Danny hears his brother’s story, they go back to their home and strip off the Nazi posters on the bedroom walls. It is like trying to “unlearn” the past and start new. This feeling is reflected in Derek’s taking a shower, trying to wash away in a baptismal act the sins he has committed. He looks in the mirror at his new self, and covers the swastika printed on his chest, trying to block out his past mistakes. He takes a legless teddy bear and gives it to his little sister while tucking her in at night, and then takes the leg and puts it under her pillow, symbolic of his wanting to restore the ripped apart pieces of his family. Danny says in his paper that the seeds of hate were planted before their father’s death. He relates a dinner conversation where their dad, legitimately upset about Affirmative Action causing the hiring of two black men who didn’t score as well as white ones, generalizes his anger against the Ph.D. educated Sweeney, saying he should be assigning “black” books instead of great traditional ones, assuming that neglected works by African American writers can’t be great.  He tells his son to watch out for “nigger bullshit.” It is here that Danny realizes that even the father you love can poison your future with hate.

 But, despite Derek’s current efforts, sometimes what people set in motion cannot be stopped. Derek leaves Danny off at school and he goes into that same bathroom where he confronted the young black boy. He is the one who comes out of the stall this time and commits an excremental act, shooting Danny dead. The sins of the fathers, and would-be parents, do often visit the children, and here the violence of an older generation is perpetuated by the younger ones.

While Derek is in prison, Sweeney visits him after his attack and tells Derek that he used to blame everybody else for his problems. He hated God, society, white people, but his hate gave him no answers to his problems. He was asking the wrong question, he says, and asks Derek “Has anything you’ve done made your life better?” Derek tearfully shakes his head and says “No.” Danny at the end of his paper says he has learned that “Hate is baggage. Life is too short to be pissed off all the time.” He says that Derek said to him to end a paper with a quote because there was always somebody who said something better in the past. So, I’ll end with Danny’s last quotation which is from Abraham Lincoln:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely as they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

The next film is The Hospital, after a two-week holiday break.