With Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq just released on Amazon Prime and Dope just released on Netflix, we take a look back to its closest analogue, John Singleton’s classic Boyz N The Hood. Chi-Raq, released in December, is a truly outlandish movie screaming at an all-too-complacent audience about gun violence affecting black communities in South Chicago. Spike engages in Brechtian tendencies – situating broad-as-hell satire next to earnest preachiness, breaking the fourth wall, enhancing with musical numbers – to express his outrage at the devastation enacted in the black community and that nobody seems to be doing much about it. The end result is a messy mess that raises red flags, presses all the alarms, but still manages to steamroll the situation.
Dope, set in a neighborhood known as The Bottoms in Inglewood, California, is a far more uplifting sort of film. With a critic-friendly Sundance style that plays with retro callbacks in a genre-friendly way, Dope follows a street-wise black geek as he navigates his way around competing expectations – gangs on one side, school officials on the other, and a bag of drugs to boot – just to make his way to college. Possessing elements of both the white coming of age 80s high school movie (Risky Business) and the black coming of age high school (Boyz N The Hood), Dope‘s message is in the way it pointedly straddles the line while acknowledging that both worlds do exist for these students.
Nearly 25 years earlier, John Singleton tackled the subject of inner city gang violence in a far more intimate manner. Also set in Inglewood, California, Boyz N The Hood is Tre’s (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) coming of age story as he finishes high school while his group of friends fall into gang life as they’re inundated with messages of authoritative dominance through police and marketing. Tre’s father Furious (Laurence Fishburne) is the moral center of Boyz, trying to steer his son through the wilds of the neighborhood without falling into any of the pitfalls and also educating him (and the audience) on society’s constructions and how they contribute to the bad situation at hand.
Boyz was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay (losing to Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise, respectively), causing John Singleton to be the first African-American and the youngest person nominated for Best Director. At the time, Singleton was addressing inner city issues that were steadily gaining attention, in no small part thanks to the rising popularity of rap*. But, Boyz was more than that. Boyz was a hard critical look, best exemplified by Furious taking the boys to a billboard in the middle of a neighborhood, and giving a straight up treatise on how that billboard was emblematic of the institutional oppression the African-American community faced on a daily basis. More nuanced than Chi-Raq, and more direct than Dope, Boyz provides a look back at an earlier version of inner city life and trying to rise above the situation.
Boyz N The Hood airs at 3:15pm on Encore Black. Dope streams with subscription on Netflix. Chi-Raq streams on Amazon with an Amazon Prime subscription.
*Doughboy, Tre’s friend who joined the Crips, was even portrayed by Ice Cube, who gained prominence in N.W.A, whose rise to fame was portrayed in last year’s Straight Outta Compton (not yet available for free streaming).
