“This Is What's Real”: The Pathology of Black Addiction in the Hood Films of the 1990s
2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19346018.74.1.2.03
ISSN1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
Resumothree decades ago, a group of black-directed films began to appear in theaters, addressing issues of over-policing and social justice. These "hood films," as they came to be called, were directed almost exclusively by young African American men and challenged media discourses about black lives, the inner city, and the causes of poverty and violence. From 1991 to 1995, over twenty films were released as part of the hood-film cycle. The genre focuses on the lived experiences of African Americans in the inner city and emphasizes aspects of black culture. Keith M. Harris grounds the genre as part of a larger shift in black aesthetics, arguing that the films "recode the existing coding of blackness, informing the symbolic with the social and culture sensibilities of black culture, Afrocentrism and the everyday experiences of black people" (94).Despite crafting nuanced narratives that pushed back against stereotypes in dominant culture, hood films surprisingly replicated rhetoric around one of the most enduring vilifications of black neighborhoods: drug addiction. In the hood films addiction is treated as both symptom and cause of crime and poverty. Blame is conferred on the addicts themselves and street-level dealers, with the films mostly hiding the architecture and hierarchy of criminal enterprises that reach beyond the confines of the inner city.Cultural critics have long maintained that films and other media play a role in constructing popular concepts of minority groups. Robin R. Coleman, for instance, argues, "African Americans and Blackness have, in part, become defined within the symbolic media culture and hence are a product of American mass media" (3). Scholars argue that the representation of groups within the media impacts public perception of those groups. The media create a shared concept of minorities through the "transmission and maintenance of cultural identity," which is then reinforced and identified as "truth" (Ross xix). Such critics rightly contend that these representations must be examined and deconstructed to identify the political and social ideology they contain. In fact, one of the main qualities attributed to the hood genre was realism. The films attempted to function almost as ethnographies. The tagline for the film Menace II Society sums up this impulse: "This is the truth. This is what's real." Through textual and discursive analysis, this present study analyzes how key hood films show "what's real" when it comes to the representation of black addiction.1For the purposes of this study, I address four films from the hood genre that prominently feature addicts and addiction: Boyz n the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), Menace II Society (1993), and Clockers (1995). The first three films met with significant box office success and, as a result, can be presumed to have had a greater effect on constructing popular perception. The film Jungle Fever (1991) appeared the same year the hood cycle began and is also covered, as I argue it informs and influences the genre. Neither Clockers nor Jungle Fever was considered especially successful at the box office, but they both were directed by Spike Lee, who was certainly the best-known mainstream black director at the time, imbuing the films with a certain level of cultural capital and critical attention. Within these narratives, addicts are presented as abject, with black street dealers shouldering all the blame for America's drug problems. Addiction is neither a disease nor a result of institutional factors in these films; male addiction is presented as a personal choice, while for women addiction is linked to sexual promiscuity and the destruction of family. In this article these representations will be linked to the ideology and rhetoric of contemporary political policies and social movements at the time, such as the war on drugs and right-wing politics.The demonization of black addiction in the 1980s and '90s resulted in new, aggressive policies of over-policing communities of color and an increased militarization of police—structures America still has in place. The high-profile killing of George Floyd and many other black Americans by police in 2020 ignited social justice protests and rallies around Black Lives Matter and police brutality. Protestors demanded changes to policies that are a direct legacy of the war on drugs and a legal framework meant to control and survey people of color, issues the hood films directly engaged.An understanding of the societal and political landscape at the time of a feature's production often leads to a better understanding of representational decisions made by filmmakers. This is especially true given the increasingly hostile rhetoric linking the black community to America's supposed drug problem in the 1980s, which posited incarceration as the only answer. As a genre, the hood films attempted to critique and make sense of this demonization of America's urban communities; however, it also reinforced dominant notions of black addiction.Addiction in American film often has been associated with ethnic stereotypes (Hersey, "Substance Abuse" 44; Starks 13–15). Educational and exploitation films in the first half of the twentieth century featured tales of the pure, young white person led to drugs by the threatening "other." In popular media of all kinds, including books, newspapers, and magazines, "the figure of the drug addict rested on constructions of a foreign other demonically seeking to weaken the nation" (Redfield and Brodie 7). Illegal drugs continued to be associated with minorities into the 1970s via blaxploitation, a film genre closely linked in multiple ways to the cycle of hood films, which featured drugs as "an active ingredient, a motivational force that set all sorts of other things—including plots—into motion" (Stevenson 68).2 Blaxploitation films popularly linked black neighborhoods to the drug trade and convinced audiences that "the drug problem almost always has a black face" (Lyne 53).Politics in the 1980s reinforced the idea that the threat of drugs was primarily (if not exclusively) to be found in black, urban communities. The election of Ronald Reagan and the formation of conservative organizations with political influence, such as the Moral Majority, can be viewed as precipitating factors in this rhetorical shift (Elwood 11; Reeves and Campbell 90). Reagan's policies and the rhetoric of the New Right ushered in what has been called "the new racism." Robert M. Entman describes the new racism as a backlash against the gains of civil rights organizations, a hostility against African Americans and their political demands, and a denial that discrimination still existed and inhibited black success (333)—rhetoric familiar from the politics and tweets of the former Trump administration. Drugs were a tailor-made issue for the Reagan White House, which argued that drug use reflected not only a breakdown in respect for the laws of government but also the moral decline of America. Reagan's war on drugs was to become a major policy initiative that would be waged both as a public relations campaign and as a war of incarceration, primarily against young black men.3 The result was legislation aimed and executed disproportionately against black youth, many of whom remain incarcerated, with "the pathology of delinquency . . . literally inscribed on the body of the young, urban, poor, black male whose very life was a punishable offense requiring disciplinary modes of exclusion" (Reeves and Campbell 41).Public policy also was affected by the fixation of lawmakers and the press on crack cocaine. Despite the low rate of crack use compared to use of other drugs, coverage of crack exploded in 1986 and quickly became labeled an "epidemic." Unlike powder cocaine, crack became associated with urban, poor African Americans, who were dehumanized in news coverage and labeled "crazed, out-of-control killers" (Belenko 155). Congressional hearings on the "crack problem" resulted in a 1990 report by the government called The Enemy Within: Crack Cocaine and America's Families. As noted by Reeves and Campbell, the general message from this report and the political rhetoric of the time was that blacks, both as users and as sellers of crack, were the enemy within (91–92).The hood genre was heavily influenced by the social and political rhetoric surrounding the war on drugs. Even films questioning social and economic conditions in the inner city still reproduced these stereotypes of addiction. The war on drugs and the discourse surrounding it so dominated discourses of drug abuse that filmmakers seemed to find it difficult to imagine addiction outside of this metanarrative.Drug addicts in hood films are identified through their on-screen usage and/or by their consumer relationship to dealers, although the addict and dealer represent a continuum of addiction in these films, blurring specific boundaries between the two. Clockers, Menace II Society, and New Jack City each include named addicted characters, all of whom are male. This parallels the hood genre's almost exclusive focus on black men, a much-discussed aspect of the genre. Keith M. Harris notes how the films provided a more complex image than traditional Hollywood stereotypes and that "[a]t the core of these films' complexities are the problematics and paradoxes of black masculinity and images of black men and masculinity" (84).4In depicting an internal conflict such as drug addiction, physical appearance is a prime representational tactic to inform audiences. The bodies of the addicts in these movies bear the indexical signs of crack addiction. Pookie (Chris Rock), a small-time dealer/addict in New Jack City, spirals into his addiction and is forced by police to infiltrate the rising drug empire of Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes). Within a year of using crack, Pookie physically deteriorates from a healthy-looking young man to a gaunt, dirty figure with unkempt hair, cast-off clothes, and damaged teeth. Similarly, the crack addict Gator (Samuel L. Jackson) in Jungle Fever is filthy and thin, his hair tangled, and he wears dirty secondhand clothes in layers. Addicts in hood films quickly deteriorate, losing their health and the visual signifiers of civilization, a stark contrast to white addicts in films of the same time (Hersey, "Script(ing) Treatment" 478).The character of Gator is a personification of America's framing of drugs in the black community as personal choice, a narrative directly linked to the rhetoric of the war on drugs. Gator is resigned to his fate; he tells his brother, "I like getting high. Why do you think I got a room here at the Taj Mahal [a location where people use crack]? I'm a junkie . . . just tell Mom her oldest son is a crackhead." From one point of view, the dialogue could be seen as a touch of comic relief to play against the high drama; however, the dialogue suggests Gator chooses to be a crackhead. Addiction as choice is a common theme in these films.Pookie in New Jack City is similarly presented as choosing addiction. After a cop catches him, Pookie says, "It's that crack shit . . . it's got me, man. I ain't got no control over it, man." The cop places Pookie in a treatment program, and a montage follows, showing Pookie detoxing. The scenes are lit high-key for a sense of seriousness and use plenty of gels for emotional effect. The clips move from detox to "graduation" in a twelve-step meeting with all the subtlety of a sports training montage. Pookie is recruited as an informant but relapses and is killed. The police are presented as a benevolent force trying to help Pookie, but the narrative tells us he is beyond help because of the choices he makes.Menace II Society and Clockers, both released later in the hood cycle, steer clear of the humor and melodrama utilized in the characters of Pookie and Gator. Each film highlights one particular male addict, but neither is a main character. In Menace II Society an addict known only as Basehead (Dwayne Barnes) appears in two scenes where he tries to buy drugs from O-Dog (Larenz Tate). O-Dog and his friend Caine (Tyrin Turner), the film's two main characters, are dealing drugs as they try to navigate growing up in a dangerous world. Basehead is gaunt and disheveled and has damaged teeth. In both scenes, he is in the throes of desperation while looking for a fix from O-Dog, but he receives barely any screen time. In the first scene, the camera focuses several times upon his torso and hands and briefly scans over his face. In the second scene Basehead is framed in a two-shot with O-Dog before the camera cuts to a brief medium shot of him. As his name suggests, the addict is not afforded any real pity or significance—even from the camera.In Clockers, Errol (Tom Byrd) is an addict who has contracted AIDS from needles and is the right-hand man of the film's crime boss. Errol appears several times in the film, but only his first scene contains extended dialogue, when he stops Strike (Mekhi Phifer), a low-level street dealer, late at night to shake him down for money. Errol is thin with wild, staring eyes. He accuses Strike of thinking he is gay because he has AIDS and then pulls up his sleeve to reveal track marks. Errol reaffirms the dominant ideology of individual responsibility through his dialogue: "I'm a smart motherfucker. I know I shoulda let that shit alone. One time I was studying to be an accountant. Now this shit is fuckin' my body up . . . a goddamn death sentence."In his study of stereotypes of addiction in motion pictures, G. S. Cape identifies four types of addicts commonly depicted in film: tragic hero, rebellious free spirit, demonized addict/homicidal maniac, and humorous/comedic user. The 1980s and '90s films about white addicts present their protagonists as tragic heroes with a fatal flaw (Hersey, "Script(ing) Treatment" 473). By contrast, virtually all of the addicts in hood films fit into the demonized addict/homicidal maniac mold. They either are "intoxicated on both substances and anger" or are "stereotyped losers, wasters, fools, etc." (Cape 168). White addicts in mainstream films should be pitied, while black addicts are to be feared and condemned.One of the overarching themes of male addiction within the hood cinema is the "feminization" of the addict. In his analysis of New Jack City, Richard A. Rogers notes that "users of crack are portrayed as passive, undisciplined and out of control (ie, addicted): a catalog of classic patriarchal definitions of femininity" (74). This equation of male addiction with sexist signifiers of femininity is not limited to New Jack City, though—it runs throughout the entire hood genre. Perhaps the most obvious example in these films is the physical act of smoking crack. In New Jack City, Gee Money (Allen Payne), Nino's second-in-command, is confronted about his increasing sloppiness. Nino asks, "Was it this glass dick you been suckin' on?" The metaphor conflating the crack pipe with a penis is both consciously and unconsciously suggested through such direct dialogue, as well as by the mood established through production techniques and narratives. Two teenagers, a male and female, buy crack from one of Strike's crew in Clockers during a montage depicting the street sale of drugs. The film cuts to the pair taking hits off of a pipe in an alleyway. The male/female positioning and the obsessive suckling of the pipe/phallus encourage a sexual reading of the scene. The wanton, sexual nature of drug use also informs a scene in Jungle Fever, when Flipper walks through the Taj Mahal and observes throngs of addicts sharing pipes and huddling together in a metaphorical orgy of using.The most overt visual phallic reference occurs in New Jack City, when Gee Money first decides to try crack. The scene is shot through a glass aquarium, with only his face visible at first. "What Gee Money has joined together, let no men put asunder. I now pronounce us man and wife." He then flicks a lighter and says, "You may kiss the bride." The camera position shifts to reveal Gee Money hitting a crack pipe. Given the bride/groom scenario and the obvious phallic nature of the pipe, Gee Money might logically be assigned the role of bride in the scene (Rogers 74).Such scenes and dialogue underscore the tension that suggestions of homosexuality create in the hood genre. Rogers argues that many black males connect the power wielded through patriarchy with liberation and thus recoil from feminine identity (73). Menace II Society taps into this metaphor literally when Basehead, desperate for a fix, stops O-Dog on the street. The hood genre's homophobic subtext becomes explicit through their exchange: basehead: [pleading] Man, I'll suck your dick.o-dog: What the fuck did you just say [racial insult]?basehead: I said I'll suck your dick.o-dog: [shooting him in the stomach] Suck on that, you bitch-ass trick.Not only is Basehead feminized through the encounter, but by voicing his willingness to engage in a same-sex act, he also assaults O-Dog's masculinity in the process. Such an affront, O-Dog must (according to the logic of the film) answer through violence. Homosexuality and femininity are conflated in this scene. To be one is to be the other, and to be either is to be hated within these diegetic worlds. Hood films continue a trope from blaxploitation, where LGBTQ+ characters are "portrayed as abusive, blatantly offensive or humorous" and come to violent ends (A. Harris 220). Through the feminizing of addicted male characters, identification might be cut off for some viewers, especially the black male target audience.The portrait of male addicts in the hood cinema is unflattering and reductive; however, at least they are given some significance within the plots. By contrast, female addicts suffer from the double indignity of misogyny and inconsequentiality. The women who abuse drugs in these films are presented in narrowly defined roles prescribed by traditional patriarchy and racism and informed by the crack cocaine rhetoric and Reagan policies of the 1980s. The hood films have been widely criticized for the way they represent African American women in general as either "doped-up, career-obsessed or irrelevant to the man's work of raising a son in an American war zone" (Corliss 66). Although they are given only minor parts in these films, women are marked as the source of disaster, often bringing the male characters to ruin (Farred 487). The female addict, however, receives especially harsh treatment as an overly sexualized, transgressive figure.Numerous scenes in the subject films depict encounters between dealers and female addicts. These women have few lines of dialogue, and except for Gator's girlfriend Viv (Halle Berry), they remain nameless. Characteristics of the women's physical appearance in each movie bear resemblance to their male counterparts' appearance: hair is matted and sticking up, and clothes are either shabby or ultra-sexualized, form-fitting and revealing.In her book Using Women, Nancy Campbell explores how social policy unequally affects female addicts and finds that crack-using women are "represented [in public discourse] as sexual compulsives, bad mothers, and willing prostitutes who lack even the capacity for remorse that might redeem them" (3). Her description also holds true for the female addicts portrayed in hood films. The metaphor of the crack pipe is realized in several scenes where women offer sex in exchange for drugs. As Gator's brother, Flipper (Wesley Snipes), walks his daughter to school in Jungle Fever, Viv stumbles up to him and says, "I'll suck your dick good for $5." Later in the film, Flipper calls her a "crack ho." In Boyz n the Hood, the main character, Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), is walking home when a female neighbor approaches him and asks, "You got some blow? You got some rock? I'll suck your dick." New Jack City alludes to the equation of drug use and prostitution when a dealer brags about receiving oral sex every day for crack. In these films feminine addiction is virtually synonymous with sexual subservience.The scenes where women offer sex for drugs seem intended to shock the audience and, therefore, to increase viewer identification with the similarly shocked Tre and Flipper. The women become the subject of outrage. The selling of the female body is presented as a natural choice for these addicts, rather than a desperate attempt to feed their craving for drugs. This viewpoint is given voice by the drug kingpin Rodney (Delroy Lindo) in Clockers when a woman with all the stereotypical markings of an addict approaches his car with the obvious intention of acquiring drugs: "That shit is like truth serum. It will truly expose who you are . . . I mean, you happen to be a low-life rat bastard motherfucker who would sell off his newborn for a suck off that glass dick . . . crack will bring you right on in the light." The dialogue implies that substance abuse reveals someone's true character, rather than changing their character—the blame is individual.While addicts as a whole are often marginalized in American culture, Campbell argues that because women are assigned the task of social reproduction, they "bear the social and economic costs of illicit drug use and the material effects of drug policy to a greater degree than drug-using men do" (4). Their matriarchal role as mothers and keepers of the domestic realm means they are assigned blame for both their own drug-induced destruction and their families'. The crack baby was a dominant signifier used by politicians and the media to represent the evils of urban drug use during the 1980s and '90s. Some states even passed laws that further criminalized the use of crack by expectant mothers. The tendency to portray female drug addicts as mothers coincided with a shift by news agencies: from featuring mostly white women in news reports on drug-using mothers to predominantly focusing on black women in the same types of articles from 1986 to 1988 (Reeves and Campbell 209). It was during these years, when African American mothers received the most media attention, that the birth of crack babies was labeled an "epidemic."Three of the subject films include characters identifiable as "crack mothers." As Tre walks back to his house in Boyz n the Hood, he stops a car and scoops up a toddler standing in the middle of the road. Tre carries the child up to a house across the street and bangs on the door. A thin, disheveled woman opens the door as a baby cries and a dog barks in the background. After she offers him oral sex for crack, Tre says, "Just keep the baby out of the street . . . and change her diaper . . . they almost smell as bad as you." In New Jack City the camera glides through the inside of the Carter Apartments, where Nino has established his drug trade, and shows customers using crack. As the camera drifts across the room, it pauses and lingers on a pale woman sitting in front of a crack pipe with her daughter (perhaps five years old) next to her. The child looks up at her mother and then shamefully lowers her gaze as her mother begins to reach for the pipe. By including children in these scenes, the films make the female addicts' actions even more transgressive.The montage depicting Pookie's detox in New Jack City includes scenes from twelve-step meetings that also refer to children and addiction. In the first scene a white man framed in a medium shot shares vague information about how his feelings led him to use drugs, and in the last scene Pookie shares about how much better he feels as the camera zooms out from a close-up to a medium shot. These testimonials bookend two women of color talking about the horrors of addiction in close-up shots. The first woman tells of how she sold her baby's diapers for drugs. The second says her child is a crack baby and was born blind. Poor parenting defines the female addicts in this scene, while the males share essentially neutral information. During the montage of drug deals in Clockers, one of the dealers sells drugs to a pair of women. He asks, "Aren't y'all pregnant?" and then warns them not to come back because they have to take care of the child. The hood films have been criticized for attempting to connect with and empower black men at the expense of their female characters. In these films it takes a man, even a drug dealer, to watch out for the children.Although hood films often include addicts as major characters and as part of their mise-en-scène, dealers usually take center stage within the narratives. Both dealer and addict are exploited by the global drug trade. As Sharon E. Moore points out, "because of their psychological and physical dependency upon the drug, both are in a subordinate position and will subject themselves and allow themselves to be subjected to subhuman conditions" (108). In the hood films, the streets become an equalizer that oppresses both predator and prey.This nihilistic outlook on dealers and addicts runs throughout these films. New Jack City director Mario Van Peebles summed up the message of his film as "anybody who takes crack dies, anybody who deals crack dies" (Leland 49). Most hood films, though, present dealers as human beings possessing both kindness and brutality, capable of inspiring outrage and pity. New Jack City stands alone in its excessive treatment of drug kingpin Nino Brown and his cartel, firmly supporting a "war on drugs" mentality. His violence, vanity, excess, and ego make Nino a one-dimensional character with no connection to the audience. Andrew T. Burt equates Nino with the archetypal "bad man" because the character rejects the needs of his community in favor of wealth and influence (933). The cold power of the Nino character is offset by his colorful clothing, his excessive jewelry, and his cowardice, especially the use of a child as a human shield. The film co-opts hip-hop attitudes (and artists, in the person of Ice-T) to facilitate connection with law enforcement. This approach led some critics to write the film off as "pure dominant cinema" (Guerrero 187).By contrast, Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society both add elements of humanity to their dealer characters and treat them much more evenhandedly. Ice Cube's Doughboy from Boyz n the Hood is often referred to as the most interesting and conflicted character in the film. Although Doughboy is a drug dealer, the filmmakers do not visually dwell on his chosen profession. There are highly moralistic speeches from characters regarding black dealers and the destruction of their communities; however, the film tempers this indictment by providing a backstory for Doughboy and also giving him an active voice in this debate. Doughboy and Ricky are brothers from different fathers. Ricky is beloved by his mother, while Doughboy is chastised and belittled by her constant verbal assaults: "You ain't shit . . . you never gonna amount to shit." His manifestation of masculinity is defined by his dual need to "represent" through violence, guns, and sexism and to seek the love and attention of his friends and mother (Boylorn 153). As a child, Doughboy is sent to jail for theft.At the end of the movie, Doughboy is sitting on a stoop with Tre after Ricky's murder. He says he watched the television news and saw all the violence happening in the rest of the world, but nothing about his brother's death or the violence in their community. "They either don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's goin' on in the hood." By allowing Doughboy to address larger issues of social and economic inequity, the film makes his smaller role in the decay of the community less defining.Caine in Menace II Society is also a more complex character than Nino. If Doughboy serves as the point of identification in Boyz n the Hood and Nino prevents such identification, then Caine occupies the middle ground by both drawing in and pushing away the viewer. Throughout the film Menace II Society features voice-overs by Caine addressed directly to the audience. This direct address gives Caine "a prioritized voice and privileged position" in relation to the viewer (Watkins 203). Through voice-over we learn about his childhood: how his mother was an addict who overdosed and his father a dealer who was murdered. The viewer also becomes privy to the conflicting emotions and insecurities Caine harbors. These points of identification conflict with the aversion elicited by Caine's violent tendencies and ill-treatment of others in the film and "problematize conventional narrative identification by refusing to give the audience a sympathetic protagonist" (Massood 92).A montage of Caine preparing crack reflects Menace II Society's approach to the character and is worth further elaboration. The camera frames close-ups of him purchasing, cooking, and cutting the drug. Through the elaborate depiction, his expertise in the process is acknowledged. The montage is accompanied by nondiegetic music—the song "Dopeman" by N.W.A. Audience members familiar with hip-hop culture might be aware that the song is a critique of dealers, rather than a shout-out. As the song recedes into the background, Caine's voice-over describes how preparing drugs was the only thing he learned from his father. The visuals seem to fetishize Caine's talent, and the audio critiques his methods, until the voice-over takes prominence and provides deeper insight into the character.Strike from Clockers is also a conflicted and conflicting figure. The film emphasizes Strike's innocence while also acknowledging that he is a hardened drug dealer. Other characters constantly comment on Strike's fondness for Moo Hoo, a chocolate milk drink, and his toy train set (Antonio 108). Both the drink and the train are associated with childhood, and indeed, his only true friend seems to be Tyrone (Peewee Love), a neighborhood child who looks up to Strike. The
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